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Chapter 89: Victory Celebration (Part 1)

In previous years, the end of the Months of the Demons had meant one more month of waiting in Longsong Stronghold’s slums.

The townspeople would stay until the snow melted far enough to make the road safe, then walk home to find their houses occupied or collapsed. The demonic beasts used the empty buildings as shelter and lair; every winter left behind bite-marked furniture, rotting food in the corners, the smell of animal den worked into the walls and the cloth. A week of repair and cleaning before anything resembling normal life could resume. This was the procedure, and everyone in Border Town had known the procedure since childhood.

This year, Border Town was clean and whole.

The militia had cleared the streets. The houses were intact — the stone wall had kept the demonic beasts outside the perimeter, so there was no territory inside to be reclaimed. The snow had been swept from the main square. And at each family’s door: a colored banner, Roland’s distribution, red and green and white against grey stone, so that from any distance the formerly drab and battered town looked something like festive, like a scatter of flowers across old ground.

The announcement from the castle was simple. On the first day after the Months of the Demons, the Prince would hold a celebration in the town square. Everyone was invited. No entrance fee. Free food.

Carter had expressed his concerns in the tone he used when he had already catalogued his objections but felt professionally obligated to voice them anyway.

“Your Highness. There will be no band. No trained dancers. Without those, who controls the pace? Who sets the form?” He was remembering, Roland could tell, some marquis’s birthday ball he had attended as a young man — the string music, the drum passages, the careful social choreography. “The citizens will simply — mill about.”

“Iron Axe and the militia will lead,” Roland said, directing men to remove the stone sculptures and the gallows from the square and stack timber at the center.

“The sandman?” Carter stared at him. He caught himself. Iron Axe had earned the knight’s respect over the winter in ways that had nothing to do with etiquette; the description came out reflex rather than contempt, which was still progress. “He doesn’t know court ceremony. He doesn’t know the forms.”

“Because I’m the one organizing this, it won’t use the forms,” Roland said. “You’ll understand when you see it.”

He was not planning a ball. He was planning a bonfire.

He had thought about this for a long time — not the specific event but the problem underneath it. The townspeople’s allegiance was to their property and their immediate families, not to any territory or lord or idea of community. That was how it worked when life was marginal and unstable: you protected what was immediately yours and did not invest in abstractions. It was rational, at that level of survival. It was also the thing that would prevent Border Town from becoming anything other than a slightly better-supplied refuge.

Building identity took time and repetition. You needed events that people remembered, that became reference points for we, for ours, for here. The Months of the Demons ended every year. A celebration of its ending, repeated every year, would eventually become the kind of tradition that outlasted the person who created it — a story the town told itself about itself.

Victory Day. That was the name he had chosen. One day every year, from now on, belonging to everyone in the territory.

He had them pile the timber high. The stone tables for the food were set around it. The militia cordoned the perimeter so the fire could be lit safely. By late morning the square was already crowded — Roland estimated half the town’s population, perhaps more, a thousand people and then some packed into the square and spilling into the surrounding streets, children on rooftops for a better view.

He climbed to the speaking position and looked out at them.

The last time he had addressed them here, he had stood before a crowd that was afraid and unconvinced, waiting to see whether this prince was merely the next version of the previous lord. That speech had been an argument. This one was different.

“My people,” he said. The greeting was the same as before. What followed it was not.

He hadn’t finished the first sentence when the cheering started.

Not arranged. Not prompted. The militia were responding first, because they had been on the wall, because they knew exactly what had been held and at what cost, and when their voices rose, the townspeople followed. Long live the Prince. Long live His Highness. Specific, personal, a gratitude aimed at something real rather than at a title.

Roland stood in it for a moment. He was not embarrassed by it. He let it run.

When it settled: “The Months of the Demons is over. The militia fought for every meter of that wall, and the demonic beasts did not cross it once. We paid a small price this year — smaller than any year in recent memory. Not because the attacks were less severe. Because we became something the attacks couldn’t find a way through.” He paused. “They tried to starve us first. They failed. They tried the wall. They failed. Today’s victory is proof that Border Town does not need Longsong Stronghold to survive. We never needed them. We needed each other.”

The cheering came back louder.

“I am declaring the first day after the end of the Months of the Demons Victory Day — a public holiday, for every person living under my governance. This day, every year.” He looked out at the crowd, at the faces, at the children on the rooftops. “Now. Let the celebration begin.”

The torch went into the timber.

The fire caught immediately, roaring up into the pale winter sky, throwing light across a thousand upturned faces, and the square erupted.

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