Inside Kaltbach.
Mara watched the white flag approach through the rain.
Fourteen people walked beneath it.
They came with no shields up and no weapons drawn. Iron Cross insignia showed beneath their soaked coats. Swords hung at their hips. One carried a greatsword broad enough to split a horse.
The man at their head carried the flag.
White hair clung to his face and neck. He was larger than the newspaper sketches had made him appear. The papers still showed a thin Academy student.
Mara's wings tightened against her back.
She had served six years in the Regular Army. Long enough to earn two medals, three broken wing-bones, and a permanent understanding of how little a mutant's blood was worth once it soaked into Imperial soil.
During those years, she had heard stories about the Iron Cross.
Every Regular Army camp had them.
A Knight holding a breached fort after the Magical Army pulled out. Another still fighting after a spell opened his gut.
Knights were lunatics who gave up the Circle path for steel and blood.
The lupine boy who had first spotted them crouched beside the parapet.
"Fourteen," he reported. "No others behind them. Nothing moving in the trees."
"Can you smell anyone circling the wall?"
He shook his head.
"They came straight from the army camp."
"And the army?"
"Leaving. Wagons are already on the east road."
Mara looked past the approaching group.
The field beyond Kaltbach was emptying.
Only an hour ago, a thousand soldiers had stood in formation outside the town. Now tents sagged as men stripped their supports.
"Mara?"
She looked down at the boy.
"Bring every child off the streets," she said. "Schoolhouse basement first. Brewery cellar if it fills."
"And the families?"
"Inside. Shutters closed. Nobody crowds the square to watch."
He nodded.
"Tell the northern barricade to stay manned. This could be a diversion."
"Yes."
The boy turned.
Mara caught his shoulder before he could run.
"Tell your archers no one fires unless I give the signal. No one."
The boy swallowed.
"What's the signal?"
Mara extended her left wing slightly.
"If I spread both wings and drop low, fire."
"At which one?"
"All of them."
I stopped at the gate and turned to face my people.
"Listen carefully."
Henrik's hand rested on his sword pommel. Dorn's jaw was set. Lena had her fingers near the rapier beneath her coat.
"Nobody draws a weapon."
I looked at each of them in turn.
"Mana Blood is fine. Use it. Keep your senses sharp. If arrows come, dodge or absorb. But no one attacks without my direct order."
Henrik's mouth compressed into a hard line. Dorn shifted his weight but said nothing.
Every instinct these people possessed had been trained to answer threats with steel.
"Stay close. Stay calm. Follow my lead."
I turned toward the open gate.
The gap was narrow. Wide enough for two people side by side.
Beyond the gate, the street was empty.
We entered Kaltbach.
The town had barricaded itself from the inside. Overturned carts blocked the side streets. Furniture had been stacked against alley mouths. Barrels filled with dirt and stone formed crude walls at every junction.
Shuttered windows lined the buildings above us. Behind half of them, I could feel movement.
Archers stood on the rooftops. Four that I could count.
We walked slowly.
Boot heels on wet stone. The drip of water from eaves. The creak of a shutter adjusting as someone inside tracked our movement.
No one spoke.
The streets narrowed as we moved toward the center.
Soon we reached the square. Market stalls stood empty along the eastern edge, their awnings torn or folded.
Dark stains spread across the cobbles. A blackened crater pocked the ground where a spell had struck.
Three people stood waiting at the square's center. The woman in the middle drew my attention first.
She was past thirty. Hard to tell by how much. Brown-black wings swept from her shoulder blades to just above her calves, the outer feathers ragged from old breaks that had healed without proper setting. A pale scar crossed the bridge of her nose. Her dark wool coat had been cut and resewn to accommodate the wings, the tailoring rough but functional.
Two medals from the Regular Army hung from her breast.
To her left stood an older man. He wore a heavy coat patched at both elbows. To her right stood a woman of similar age. Gray-streaked hair pulled back from a lined face. She wore a clean wool dress. A pair of reading spectacles hung from a cord around her neck. No mutation on either of them.
Behind the three of them, other figures occupied the square's edges. Harpies with folded wings. A broad man with tusks. A woman whose forearms were covered in pale gray scales. They stood in doorways, beneath awnings, at the mouths of barricaded streets.
I stopped five paces from the three, planted the flag in the mud between us, and extended my hand.
"Kaspar," I said. "I came to help."
The older man moved first.
He stepped forward, took my hand.
"Bertram," he said. His voice was low and rough. "Oldest farm still running south of the river bend."
He studied my face.
"I know you," he said. "We get a newspaper now and then, when the traders bother carrying one this far north." His eyes moved to my white hair.
He released my hand. His expression was careful.
The older woman stepped forward next. Her handshake was briefer.
"Hilde Brenner," she said. "I run the school."
Then the Harpy. She didn't extend her hand. Her eyes measured me from the boots upward.
"Mara," she said. "Hunter."
"I appreciate what you've done here."
"I didn't do it for you."
Her gaze cut past me toward the Iron Cross Knights standing in a loose group near the square's entrance.
"Why are you here?"
"To end this peacefully."
"You didn't answer my question. Why are you here? You have no authority over taxes. You have no control over the garrison. You can't stop the recruiters from coming back next season and taking our youngest to die on the southern front."
"I can now."
Mara's head tilted.
"I am the Baron of Kaltbach."
Nobody spoke.
Bertram's hands, which had been hanging at his sides, went very still. Hilde's fingers found the spectacles cord at her neck and held it.
Mara's expression didn't change.
"Baron," she repeated.
"Appointed by the Crown. The title is provisional; formal investiture takes weeks." I let that settle. "From today, Kaltbach has a lord. Someone who answers for this place."
Bertram exhaled slowly through his nose.
"A lord," he said. "We've never had one."
"And what does that mean?" Mara asked. "For us. Today. Not in some document filed in the capital."
"It means four things immediately. First. I'm leaving three Iron Cross Knights to garrison this town."
"Second. The rest of my people, ten Knights and myself, will spend the next week clearing the surrounding territory. Iron-tusk boars, wolf packs, whatever has been coming down from the forests. I know the monsters have been a problem. I brought enough fighters to address it. If your hunters can guide us to the worst concentrations, we'll move faster."
"Third. No one from this town will be conscripted for the southern front while I hold title."
"Fourth. My convoy carried supplies. Food and medical stores. Enough to sustain this town while it recovers from what happened here."
Bertram looked at Hilde. Hilde looked at Mara.
"Three Knights," she said. "How will that help us?"
"One well-trained Knight is worth five mages in the field."
"In the field. What about at the walls? What about at night, when the boars come through the northern tree line and there's no one between them and the livestock pens?"
"At the walls, at night, close in. These three can hold ground that thirty Regular Army soldiers would abandon."
Mara's medals clinked.
"For how long?"
"Until I can hire permanent defenders. Which I intend to do as soon as the funding reaches the territory."
Hilde spoke for the first time since her introduction.
"Funding from where?"
"From my own operations. I have manufacturing interests in the capital. The revenue will reach Kaltbach directly."
Bertram scratched his jaw.
"You're telling us you'll pay for our defense out of your own pocket."
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Because I need Kaltbach," I said. "And what it will become in the future."
Mara's mouth flattened.
"What it will become?"
"An industrial city," I said. "I need land and a workforce that knows how to build. I need people who are strong enough to raise walls, haul iron, and work with materials that would require expensive spellcraft anywhere else."
I looked at Mara.
"Your people are that workforce. Your town is that location. The distance from the capital will be hard. What I build here will employ hundreds. It will bring wages and defenses Kaltbach has never had."
Bertram's enormous hands opened and closed.
"And what do you build?"
"Weapons, and the cooling gear to move them. Things the Empire needs and cannot produce fast enough inside the capital."
Hilde adjusted her spectacles cord.
"You want to turn a frontier settlement into a factory."
Mara had not moved. Her arms remained crossed.
"You talk well," she said. "Every officer I served under talked well."
She uncrossed her arms.
"Why should I believe you're different? We've never been worth defending."
Her eyes hardened.
"Especially not a city full of mutants."
"You're right," I said. "The Empire has failed this town. Wolkenmark would fail it the same way, for the same reasons. You would trade one master who ignores you for another who finds you useful for exactly as long as you embarrass the first one."
Mara's teeth showed.
"Then why should we trust you?"
"Every mutant in this town has strength that baseline humans cannot match without years of training and expensive magical augmentation. That is an advantage. And I intend to use it."
Mara studied me. "I don't trust you."
She looked toward the barricaded streets, toward the rooftops where her Harpies crouched with bows still drawn. Her jaw worked slowly, as though she were chewing on something that refused to go down.
The voice came from behind Mara.
"Well... I do trust him."
Mara turned.
Bertram looked over his shoulder.
Hilde stepped aside.
A figure emerged from the doorway of a house at the square's edge.
She stepped into the rain.
Dark brown-black feathers swept from her shoulder blades to her hips. They were longer than the last time I had seen them.
She was lean. Wiry. Sharp features beneath amber eyes that caught the gray light and held it.
She'd put on an inch, maybe.
She wore a patched coat over a leather vest. A hunting lance rested against the wall behind her.
"Lyra?"