Rewrite That Witch
CH087 · Rewrite
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Chapter 87: Winter Twilight (Part 1)

“Ready — strike!”

Van’er drove the pike forward with both hands and felt it connect solidly with the wolf’s skull. The wolf was enormous — red-copper eyes, each fang the size of his thumb, fur heavy with the cold and matted at the edges with dried black blood — and the pike bowed under the impact. The wolf’s claw came up and he felt the displaced air on his cheek.

Time did something strange then. It stretched. He watched the pike bend toward its breaking point, watched the claw beginning its arc toward his face, watched the wolf’s jaw open and the snow on its snout scatter. His hands kept going. His body was running a sequence he had drilled until it stopped requiring thought.

The pike snapped.

Time collapsed back to normal. The wolf fell. Its claws raked the stone cap of the wall and left three clean furrows before the momentum died. Half of Van’er’s pike landed beside him.

“Loading complete!”

“Fire at will!”

Two gun barrels extended past his shoulders — he had already stepped back the half-pace, already turned his face, already closed his eyes against the smoke. He could not close his ears. The shots hit his hearing like hammer blows and left a ringing that persisted after the smoke cleared and he stepped forward again to find the wolf lying among the other bodies at the wall’s base.

His bunkmate grinned at him from the adjacent position.

Van’er gave the grin one glance and looked away. One week to learn that gun. Nothing to be proud about. Back to the wall’s edge. Back to watching the treeline.

“Your pike’s broken.” Cat’s Claw appeared at his elbow with a replacement. “Are these beasts actually crazy? This is the third hour.”

“Fourth.” Van’er took the pike and settled into position. “What time is it?”

“Almost noon.” Cat’s Claw looked sidelong at the next group along the wall. “What do you know about Jop and the Rodney brothers?”

“Don’t look for them. Watch the field.” Van’er kept his eyes forward. “They’re on the other walls. Third or fourth group.”

“I came up as a replacement.” Cat’s Claw grinned. “Last wave, one of the old-timers took a claw to the ribs — now it’s my turn.”

“Make ready.”

The hunter’s voice ended the conversation. Van’er looked down the wall and counted: a dozen coming. Two wolves in the group, the rest boar and fox and bear — nuisance species, not serious threats to the fortifications. Standard formation would handle them.

“Pierce.”

The unified thrust. His hit air — the wolves had angled wide and the hunters had already stepped between the strike team to take the cleaner shots. Van’er recovered his pike and watched the wolves drop to the clean reports of the flintlocks. Good. Consistent. They had been running this cycle since before dawn, attack after attack with short rotations for eating and rest, and the pattern had settled into something almost mechanical.

He was calmer than he’d expected to be. That surprised him, the first time he’d noticed it, somewhere around the second hour. The pike drills and the attack sequences were muscle memory now — he moved through them without deciding to, his body doing what it had practiced while his mind occupied itself with the wider field.

This is what training does.

He had understood it intellectually before. He understood it differently now.

The man who had called himself a militia soldier four months ago and meant nothing much by it was standing on a wall at the end of the Months of the Demons, and the demonic beasts were on the outside of the wall, and none of that was an accident. Beside him were men who had been gangsters and layabouts and laborers and one man — Fermi, big-headed, slow, perpetually mocked by the old district — who had taken to the pike with a ferocity that had left him at the top of every training ranking. If the inflexible bird wants to fly with the agile ones, it must do more, Roland had said, and Fermi had taken that as a literal instruction and had not stopped since.

Van’er did not know what word to use for what they had become. Roland’s phrase kept coming back to him: a team like none before.

He had thought it was a speech. He thought differently now.

His eyes found the prince’s position on the wall.

Roland had been there since the first horn before dawn. He had not stepped down. He had eaten on the wall — Carter had brought the food personally — and he had remained at the center of the fortifications for the whole sustained engagement, watching everything, visible to everyone on every section of the wall. Not fighting, in the sense of holding a weapon. But present, which was its own kind of weight.

Van’er thought of the old lord’s departure — the boat loaded before the first Months of the Demons assault, the nobility following, then the wealthy, then anyone with enough coin for passage to Longsong Stronghold. He thought of the militia from Longsong Stronghold that had occupied Border Town before Roland, their particular casual brutality, the way they’d taxed the market stalls and ignored complaints.

These men and those men are not the same kind of thing.

He was still holding that thought when the two short horn blasts came.

Mixed species. He looked to the treeline and found it: winged, lion-headed, the kind of creature that had broken through once before and killed men who’d had no idea what it was. Today was a different situation.

He looked along the wall to the prince’s position. Floating beside Roland, her blond hair barely contained by the wind, was Lightning — twelve years old, explorer’s daughter, currently the single most dangerous thing between that creature and the town.

Van’er settled his grip on his pike and waited.

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