Chapter 938: The First Shot
Dawn light moved over the city walls and poured into the inner city, and everywhere it fell it found people.
The City of Glow had never seen a day quite like this one.
Other spectacles — the great auction exhibitions, the merchant carnivals — were events for the rich. This was different. Every person in the city had a stake in what was about to be settled. They might have no say in it, and they might end the day exactly where they had started, but the thing itself was happening in their streets and they were going to watch. Following Earl Quinn’s column as it moved through the market and onto the Rising Sun Avenue, they fell in behind it — the curious, the frightened, the ones who simply wanted to see — until the column was surrounded by a crowd large enough to give it the weight of something more than a march.
Few people were calling it treason now. “Fighting for the throne” had taken hold instead.
“It seems your reputation is stronger than I’d estimated,” said Hill Fawkes, riding level with the earl. “I expected public opinion to hold out until you took the Castle District.”
“Half a lifetime organizing the patrol teams and running the kingdom’s domestic affairs.” Horford looked straight ahead. “You notice things like that, if you’re looking. Is that the kind of intelligence you gathered running acrobatics troupes?”
A small smile. “The wishes of the common people are worth attending to, my lord. The great nobles call them grains of sand, or taxable lambs. But sometimes the sand buries people. And lambs can ruin a herdsman.” He paused. “In Neverwinter, if any sign of revolt appeared, the people would have reported the rebels to the City Hall before His Majesty needed to act at all.”
Earl Tokat, riding on the other side, leaned in. “Is that so? How does he manage that?”
“By making the people feel the city belongs to them,” Hill said. “As for your immediate concern—” He glanced at Oro Tokat, Otto’s old friend, who had been watching the rear of the column for the last several minutes.
“Sir Hill,” Oro said carefully, “the Rats following us — did you arrange that?”
“I happen to know their chief.” Frank and easy. “You disapprove?”
The Rats at the rear of the column wore leather armor that Black Money had supplied; a thousand of them, roughly, moving with enough cohesion to look like a credible force. Horford knew better — the Rats were useful primarily as bodies and noise. Forty God’s Punishment Witches were the actual sword. But the armor made them look like more, and appearance mattered today.
Still: marching beside the Rats on Black Street, as a great noble, was not without its discomforts.
“They’re known for betrayal,” Oro said bluntly. “What’s to stop them from switching sides when it’s useful?”
“What they can get,” Hill said. “I promised them freeman status in the earl’s name. If His Lordship becomes King of Dawn, they’ll stop being Rats and become citizens of the City of Glow.” He turned to Horford. “I hope that’s acceptable.”
The earl frowned. “Offering a new identity without changing the conditions that made them Rats in the first place doesn’t accomplish much. Poverty and hunger are what drove them to that life — not recognition alone. A new name won’t save someone who’s still hungry.”
“You’re right that it won’t be enough on its own.” Hill’s tone was mild. “But consider: the ones willing to take this risk for an identity aren’t stupid or lazy. They saw an opportunity and they took it. When His Majesty’s messengers arrive, they’ll find more job openings than they can fill. These people will feed themselves — once they have something to reach for.”
The crowd followed them through the market. The Rising Sun Avenue opened ahead, and at its end, the stone wall of the Castle District rose against the pale morning sky. Behind that wall, the palace — the High Tower — the place the Moya family had held for generations.
Horford looked at it and felt something he hadn’t expected. Not fear, exactly. Something like the sensation of standing at the edge of a field before the first step in.
He had served two kings in that palace. He had drafted the laws that kept this city from turning on itself. He had outlasted storms and compromises and the quiet despairs of long administration. And now he was riding toward the front gates with an army at his back because his daughter had stepped through his study door at midnight and told him it was time.
Even if the real king will be Roland Wimbledon, and even if I’m only a king in name — the Quinn family will become royalty. He had disobeyed what his ancestors would have advised. He was also bringing the family to a height it had never reached.
The mood was complicated. He had no word for it.
“One more thing,” he said quietly to Hill. “Is it truly all right — letting Andrea fight?”
“She’s not the girl who couldn’t take a step without your protection.” Hill’s voice held something that was not quite pride, but close. “She’s now one of the most capable combat witches I know. She’ll fire the first shot of the siege.” He nodded toward the belfry visible above the roofline. “Prepare your speech before the final push. Not to the God’s Punishment Witches or the Rats — to the people who followed us here. Tell them the new age of the Kingdom of Dawn has arrived.”
Andrea stood on the belfry’s top floor, six hundred meters from the Castle District’s stone wall, and watched the palace in the wind.
From here, she could see the whole structure — the towers, the wall’s breadth, the tiny shapes of armored men moving along the battlements. At this distance the palace looked like something she could hold in a closed hand. The people defending it were points of dark metal.
For the Castle District, six hundred meters was a completely safe distance. No catapult could cover it. No crossbow bolt came close.
Which was why, standing at it, she would open the gap.
A red signal flare climbed above the Rising Sun Avenue — the sign she’d been waiting for.
She raised the bolt rifle that Anna had made for her specifically. Loaded the ten-bullet clip. Unfolded the aiming lens and brought the wall into focus.
A knight in full armor, commanding the crossbow crews — directing them to position, adjusting their arc. Eight crossbow machines along the segment of wall that faced the avenue directly. In any normal engagement they would be decisive: the effective shooting range was a hundred and twenty meters, and at thirty meters the iron bolts would go through a large shield and the armor behind it without pausing.
She centered the knight in the lens.
A breath in. A breath out. The magic power in her body responded to her will — she thought of it sometimes as a second pair of hands, gentle and precise, settling around her arms, her elbows, her fingers. In that held state she became two things at once: as solid as stone, as light as the air moving across the belfry. The gun stopped moving. She became part of its stillness.
The trigger broke.
The recoil came, and the heat, and the high whine of the spinning bullet as it crossed six hundred meters of air.
She was already moving to the next target.
It was less like shooting than like a performance she had rehearsed until it had no seams left. The adjustment of the barrel, the shift of her weight, the breath — all of it integrated, unhurried. She changed to a new clip with the smoothness of a dancer changing formations. The magic in her body kept pace.
It was not so easy for the people on the wall.
Death arrived from nowhere, at intervals, from a direction they could not locate. The commanding knight went first: a muffled sound, and then he was on his back with his chest sunken. The warning went up — “Someone is attacking!” — but the swords they drew had nothing to cut. The second shot came. The third. The bodies accumulated and the enemy did not appear.
For soldiers who had lived by their skill, this was a specific kind of horror. They had faced death before. They had not faced death that gave no chance to respond. A clumsy servant and an experienced knight fell the same way, with the same expression, and no one could explain why they’d been chosen.
Less than a minute. More than twenty down. The moaning of the wounded reaching everyone who remained standing.
“Cover — there’s a witch! Get behind the battlements!”
The chief knight — golden-lined armor, commanding from the wall’s center — pulled the survivors into the blind zones, distributed them behind logs and stonework, and began directing suppressive fire outward at angles. Random cover, without a target, but enough to force the witch’s hand. If you can’t move freely, you can’t clear the wall.
Andrea noted the movement.
The chief knight had positioned himself in a dead angle from the belfry. She could see his arm, extended beyond the battlement edge. A fragment of his helmet. The rest of him was stone.
Under normal circumstances, that shot didn’t exist.
She had watched the First Army’s cannon demonstrations. She had thought about trajectory — how a projectile thrown high enough will lose some speed at the apex and gain it again on the way down, arriving at a different angle than it departed.
She drew the magic into her arms and began to raise the barrel. Slowly, past horizontal, until the gun was aimed at the open sky above the wall. The familiar sensation of harmony settled.
She fired.
Immediately after, she lowered the barrel, aimed at the exposed helmet edge, and fired again — this second bullet arriving first, striking the battlement face and fragmenting into a spinning deformed mass that clipped the helmet’s upper rim with enough force to knock it sideways and drag the chief knight forward, off-balance, his soft neck exposed above the stone edge.
The first bullet arrived.
It had traveled a longer arc. It struck from above, at an angle, and fractured the cervical vertebra cleanly. The chief knight heard — she imagined — a muffled sound behind his head. Felt — she imagined — the cold. Then nothing.
The magic went out in Andrea like a lamp turned down hard. Dizziness came on like a wave. Her hands shook. She barely kept hold of the rifle.
But the wall was broken.
The chief knight fell, and the mercenaries dissolved. No formation, no order — they ran for the stairs, abandoning the crossbow machines, the logs, the barrels of hot oil. They left everything behind as they went.
The horn sounded below.
Elena reached the foot of the wall first. She carried her usual tools plus a bundle of hemp rope with a square iron hook at its end. She swung it once and let it go — it caught, and held — and then other ropes followed from the other God’s Punishment Witches, until the wall had a half-dozen hemp ladders hanging from its rim.
Five meters of stone. For the witches, a fence.
Elena went up without pausing, hand over hand, and found chaos on the other side. The wall guards running, the Castle District’s supervisory teams uncertain, and — in the middle of it — the guards of Earl Luoxi turning their swords against the Kingdom of Dawn’s own men. Three panicked forces in a space too small for any of them.
She pulled the great sword from her back. She cleared a path through the crowd by herself.
As the God’s Punishment Witches followed her over the wall, the situation on the other side began, finally, to belong to Earl Quinn.