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Chapter 872: The Last Charge

The huge rock cannons never fired again.

Wilion had built six elevated platforms inside the walls — tall enough that the cannon barrels could clear the parapets and sweep the field in all directions. The reasoning had been sound: command the height, command the range, turn every approach into a killing floor. With a high enough platform, nothing within five hundred paces could move safely.

Against Roland’s army, those platforms became markers.

For fifteen minutes the bombardment did not pause. Each reload from the field battery took thirty seconds; each shot found a different target, working methodically along the top of the wall and then down into the platforms themselves. When Wilion’s men finally managed to load the first rock cannon — the powder measured out, the ball rammed, the fuse set — the enemy placed a round directly on the adjacent platform.

It was as if a small sun had unfolded on the stonework.

The bronze barrel went up in the center of the blast, lifting and tumbling, a twisting shape against the smoke. It came down on the next platform’s stone wall and bounced once before rolling through a work crew carrying stone, and the men who had not been struck directly by the metal were caught in what it left behind. Those who had only limbs taken were still making sounds when the smoke thinned enough to see the ground.

Wilion did not look away. He had learned, over a long military life, to make himself look at things.

But he could not do anything about what happened to the nobles.

The lookout tower was visible from the field — had always been visible from the field, a deliberate architectural choice meant to project authority and survey. Under this bombardment, it projected only a target. After the first barrage turned the wall top into a continuous fire, the gathered viscounts and lords stopped watching and began moving toward the stairs. The wisest thing they could do. Wilion did not blame them. The enemy was reloading in thirty seconds and the shot placement was tightening with each pass — every subsequent round hitting closer to the prior impact, the crews adjusting, finding the range.

He stood at the railing a moment longer, watching the city.

The fireballs came in from the field at a shallow arc and landed along the wall and then inside it. The tall platforms, so proudly built, absorbed round after round until the masonry began to fracture and the wooden scaffolding caught. The gate came apart under a concentrated barrage, the heavy timber crossbraces splintering and the iron hinges failing. The air inside the city walls was no longer air — it was smoke, grit, the sharp chemical smell of spent powder, and underneath everything, the particular sweetness that Wilion had learned long ago not to name.

By the time the firing stopped, the six platforms were rubble.

The gate was open.

His men — those capable of movement — had abandoned the walls entirely, and the civilians who had been pressed into service were simply gone. In their panic they had not run toward the inner city but away from the sound, which meant away from the gate, which meant the blocking positions and the iron barriers had no one to operate them. The plan had called for those barriers to drop the moment the gate fell. The plan required men who had not just watched fire descend from the sky for fifteen minutes straight.

What has Roland been doing for two years?

The thought came and went. He had no adequate answer.

Around him the remaining nobles were speaking. Surrender. Ransom. The King couldn’t blame him. He had done everything possible. The enemy was simply too strong.

Wilion let them talk. He looked at Galina.

Two black streaks ran down her face where the burning debris had fouled the air during their retreat from the tower. A section of her hair on the left side had been singed when she’d blocked a falling beam — blocked it with her own body, instinctively, the way she did everything: without thinking, without hesitation, as though his safety were a reflex older than thought. Her eyes were the same as they had always been. Clear and steady and entirely without shame.

“I’m at your command, my lord,” she said.

He breathed in.

“All of you,” he said, “should surrender.”

“My lord — and you?”

“I did not spend two years on this to end it with a bow.” He turned to look down at what remained of the street below, the smoke still drifting through the intersection. “I want Roland to understand that his army cannot buy everything. I want Timothy’s feudatories to be remembered as something other than men who folded when the odds turned against them.” He looked back at Galina. “Where are my knights?”

“Waiting in the second ambush point,” she said.

“Bring them to the gate. There’s no point in the ambush now.” He raised his voice to the circle of nobles. “Viscount Ariburke — clear all the traps from the main street.”

Ariburke blinked. “Clear them? Why would we—”

“Because a handful of pit snares and trip-wires won’t slow them for thirty seconds, and I won’t have my last charge tripped up by my own preparations.” He heard, faintly, how calm his own voice sounded. He had not expected this — the particular clarity that comes when a decision is finally made and cannot be unmade. “Whatever happens next will be recorded. I want it recorded correctly. Stand clear.”

Half an hour later Roland’s vanguard appeared at the breached gate.

A small clearing team entered first, working the rubble efficiently, pushing burned timber aside and taking up positions on both flanks of the entrance. When the main body moved in, it organized itself in the street with the same methodical competence as everything else Wilion had seen today — a rough perimeter established within minutes, two unusual firearms positioned at the head of the column, facing down the long avenue toward the castle.

Wilion did not watch them long.

He flicked the reins and brought his horse around the corner, his knights forming up behind him across the full width of the street. Seven knights. Fifteen squires. Twenty-two men, in the end, who had chosen to stand with him when standing was still a choice.

He had thought there would be more. He had believed, when he gave the order, that his feudal household would hold together for this last thing even if it held together for nothing else. The sight of the assembled twenty-two men was — he would not say it was a disappointment. These were the men who mattered. The ones who had the courage to be here at all.

He lowered his visor. Raised his spear. Held his breath.

“We may have lost today,” he said, his voice carrying down the line, “but history will remember. Our names will be set down and sung. Hold your courage. Fight until there is nothing left. Knights of House Berger — forward.”

“To victory!”

He put the destrier into a gallop.

The smoke lay in long horizontal bands across the street, lit orange from the fires still burning at either side. The cobblestones were uneven, treacherous, but his horse knew its work and found its footing. He reached the midpoint of the street before he realized the sound was wrong. The deep percussive drum of hooves that should have been rising behind him — the mass of twenty riders at full charge — was not there.

He looked back.

Galina. Only Galina, three lengths behind, riding hard, her eyes forward.

The street intersected with a dozen smaller roads and alleys. In the moment of the charge, in the smoke and the noise and the choice between dying and not dying, his knights had found the exits. He could not blame them. He had known, somewhere beneath the speech, that this was what speeches of that kind were for — not to compel, but to give men a memory of having been present, of having heard the words, so they could carry something with them into the rest of their lives.

He looked at Galina.

Her eyes met his for an instant, open and certain, full of something he had never allowed himself to name and would not name now. He turned back to face the line of soldiers ahead of him.

An end like this was not so bad.

“At least I have you,” he said, and did not know if she heard it.

He leveled his spear and drove forward into the hailstorm of fire.

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