Almost two years. The last time I had seen Lyra, she had been sixteen.
Her feathers were longer. Darker at the roots where new growth had pushed through. She carried a hunting lance.
Her eyes found mine.
Lyra crossed the square in six fast strides.
She stopped a pace short and looked up at me. Her head barely reached my collarbone.
"You got tall," she said.
"You grew your feathers out."
Her mouth compressed. The hard mask she wore slipped.
"You idiot," she whispered. "Why the hell are you still with the Iron Cross?"
"I hear that a lot."
Her fist struck my chest.
Lyra walked back to Mara's side.
"Mom," Lyra said. "I'd like you to meet the person who saved my life in the capital."
She pointed at me.
The square went still.
Mara's expression shifted. The hard distrust that had held her face in place since I'd walked through the gate cracked. Confusion first.
Her eyes went to Lyra, then to me, then back to Lyra. She was trying to map me onto whatever story Lyra had told her about a cellmate.
"What are you doing out here, Lyra?" Mara's voice dropped. A mother's tone beneath the commander's authority. "I told you to stay inside until—"
"Mom. Listen to me. It was him."
Mara's gaze snapped back to me.
"Wait." Her wings shifted involuntarily. "Him? The one from the arena?"
"Yes."
Mara stared at me. Her mouth opened. Closed.
"She told me," Mara said. Her voice had changed. "She told me there was someone. In the cells. Who saved her and got her free." She shook her head slowly. "I assumed she was exaggerating."
"I wasn't," Lyra said.
Mara's eyes stayed on mine. Then her jaw hardened again.
She gestured toward us.
"You come with me," she said. "All of you. Whether I trust you or not, only the strong survive in the north."
I left three Knights in the square.
Dorn and two others. Enough to hold the central buildings if anything happened while we were gone. Also, enough to start unpacking the convoy's supplies.
Lena stayed behind to manage it.
Henrik, myself, and eight other Knights followed Mara north.
Lyra came with us. She walked beside me as we left through the northern gate.
We didn't speak for a while.
The terrain north of Kaltbach rose through farmland that had been picked clean by frost. Stone walls divided empty pastures. A few livestock pens stood open, their fences broken.
Beyond the farms, the land climbed toward a river.
The river was shallow and fast, swollen from the rain. We crossed where the water barely reached our knees.
On the far side, the terrain changed.
The farmland ended. The tree line began. Pine and bare birch. Thin trunks. Wide spacing.
Mara moved ahead of the group without looking back.
After twenty minutes, the trees opened into a shallow valley.
I stopped at the edge.
Below us, the valley floor stretched for perhaps half a kilometer. A stream cut through its center, bordered by patches of dead grass and broken stone.
The valley was full.
Herds moved across the open ground in loose clusters. Dozens of animals. Different species. Some grazed on whatever sparse vegetation survived the season. Others circled each other with the deliberate wariness of creatures that did not share territory by choice.
Nearest to us, two-headed deer picked through the brush.
Beyond the deer, a pack of mana-wolves had claimed a stretch of rocky ground near the stream. Six that I could count. Their fur was dark, almost black, and their shoulders stood higher than a man's waist. One turned its head toward us. Its eyes were a flat, luminous yellow.
And in the valley's center, in the widest clearing where nothing else dared to stand, the iron-tusk boars had gathered.
There were dozens of them.
Shoulder-height at minimum. Some larger. Their hides were a mottled gray-brown, thick as leather armor, scarred from years of fighting everything around them. Two curved horns swept forward from each skull, gray as gunmetal. Their eyes were small and red. Their hooves left divots in the ground that looked like siege-engine impacts.
The nearest boar raised its head.
Six hundred pounds of muscle and horn pivoted toward the tree line. Its nostrils flared.
The herd responded. Heads came up across the clearing. Red eyes turned outward.
Lyra shifted her grip on her lance.
"Those are the ones that keep coming through the tree line," she said. "They hit the livestock pens every few weeks. The hunters can kill one if the whole group works together. Sometimes two." She looked at the herd below. "But there are always more."
Mara crossed her arms. Her eyes moved from the valley to me.
I looked at my Knights.
Henrik had drawn his greatsword and rested it against one shoulder. He studied the valley floor.
The other Knights stood in a loose arc. Eight fighters. Every one of them circulating Mana Blood at combat-ready levels. The veins along their necks and forearms pulsed faintly beneath their skin.
"Here's the plan," I said. "I go in first. I'll take the center and push the herds outward. Anything that goes past me, you catch at the valley's edges."
Lyra frowned.
"There are entire herds down there," she said. "You should separate them first. Pick off the ones at the edges. Draw small groups away from the main body and—"
Henrik laughed. It was a short sound.
"Just watch," he said.
Lyra looked between us.
I drew my sword.
"Tonight," I said, "we eat iron-tusk."
Mana Breath filled my lungs. The world became slower. The raindrops fell at a pace I could almost track individually.
I stepped off the ridgeline.
My boot hit the valley floor hard enough to crack the frozen earth beneath the mud. A shockwave rippled outward through the shallow water pooled in the grass. The two-headed deer snapped both sets of eyes toward me and bolted as a single unit.
The mana-wolves were slower to react. The largest one snarled and lowered its head. Then its packmates read something in the air and the snarl died in its throat. The pack turned and ran.
I'm not here for them.
The iron-tusks stood their ground.
The nearest boar faced me head-on. Its breath steamed in twin jets from nostrils wide enough to fit my fist inside. The red eyes fixed on me with the flat, incurious hatred of an animal that had never encountered a predator it couldn't gore.
It charged.
The distance between us closed in three of the boar's strides. Its horns dropped. The ground shook. Every pound of its mass converged behind two points of horn aimed at my center of gravity.
I didn't move sideways.
I punched it.
My fist struck the broad plate of bone between the boar's eyes.
The horn structure compressed inward. The skull deformed. The boar's body folded around the impact.
It left the ground.
The carcass tumbled backward through the air, hit the earth fifteen meters away, bounced once, and rolled to a stop against a boulder.
It didn't get up.
The herd went still.
Thirty-odd iron-tusks stared at the crumpled shape of their leader. Their red eyes shifted from the body to me.
I'm not wasting ammunition on livestock.
The second boar hit me from the right.
I stepped into its line, turned my hips, and brought the sword down in a diagonal arc that began above my left shoulder and ended below my right knee.
The blade met neck and shoulder. It passed through hide, muscle, and the first vertebra without slowing. The boar's head separated from its body and tumbled forward through the mud. The body ran three more steps before the legs understood they were carrying a corpse.
The herd charged. A stampede triggered by the scent of blood.
They came from every direction.
The first boar arrived low. I sidestepped, drove the pommel of my sword into the top of its skull hard enough to splinter bone, then completed the rotation with a horizontal cut that opened the next animal from shoulder to haunch.
Two more from the left. I planted my back foot, swung through the first at chest height, then reversed the blade and caught the second under the jaw. The edge found the soft tissue beneath the horn plate and went through it. The boar's momentum carried it past me. It fell in two uneven pieces.
Another charged my back.
I dropped my shoulder, turned, and met the charge with a straight thrust that entered the boar's open mouth and exited through the base of its skull. The impact drove me back half a step. Then the body went limp and slid off the blade.
Faster.
I stopped thinking.
Cut. Step. Turn. Cut. Step. Breathe. Cut.
The herd broke.
Dozens of iron-tusks scattered toward the valley's edges. They crashed through brush, leaped the stream, clawed up the slopes toward the tree line.
The Knights were waiting.
Henrik caught the first escapee at the northern tree line. His greatsword came down in a vertical arc that could have split an oak. The boar met it at full gallop. The blade entered through the top of the skull and continued through the spine until it hit the earth on the far side. Henrik pulled the weapon free, stepped left, and caught the next one through the ribs.
Along the eastern slope, two Knights worked in tandem. One drove a boar sideways with a shield bash. The other took the head with a single lateral cut. They moved like a gate, opening and closing in rhythm, dropping everything that tried to pass between them.
In the valley below, I stood among the dead.
Fifteen carcasses lay in a rough circle around me, each one killed in a different way.
I breathed out. Blue mist curled upward and dissolved.
The killing continued at the edges for another two minutes. A few boars escaped through gaps in the Knight line. Most of them would run north into deeper forest and not return for months.
When it ended, the valley was quiet.
I counted the dead while walking the field. Twenty-seven iron-tusks. Three mana-wolves that had tried to return during the chaos and regretted the decision. One two-headed deer that had panicked into a Knight's blade by accident.
I cleaned the sword on a boar's hide, sheathed it, and bent down.
The largest iron-tusk lay near the stream. I gripped it by one horn and lifted.
The carcass came off the ground.
I climbed the slope with the dead boar on my back.
Lyra stood at the ridgeline.
Her lance hung from one hand. Mara stood beside her.
I stopped in front of them.
Lowered the carcass to the ground.
"You think three Knights will be enough?" I asked. "Or should I go back for more?"
Mara's mouth worked.
She looked down at the dead boar at her feet. Then at the valley floor, where the rest of the herd lay scattered across the mud.
"Three is enough," she said.
We brought four carcasses back.
Henrik carried one across his shoulders without complaint. Two other Knights shared the third between them, its legs lashed to a stripped pine pole. I carried the largest on my own back. A Knight dragged the fourth by a horn, leaving a furrow in the mud.
When we came through Kaltbach's northern gate, the square had changed.
The supplies from the convoy had been unpacked and sorted. Lena had organized the distribution. Grain sacks formed a neat wall against the town hall's eastern face. Dried meat and salt occupied the covered market stalls, sheltered from the rain. Medical supplies had been separated into a dedicated station beside the schoolhouse.
The copper sheeting and treated timber planks had been stacked in a cleared lot near the smithy. A small crowd of tradesmen had gathered around them, running their hands across the materials.
Children watched from doorways. A few had crept into the square despite their parents' instructions.
We set the iron-tusk carcasses down in the center of the square.
People emerged.
A butcher appeared from a side street with two knives already in hand, took one look at the size of the nearest boar, and went back inside for a cleaver. Three women brought cutting boards and salt barrels. Two older men began building a fire pit from the rubble of a collapsed wall.
Within minutes, the smell of roasting meat filled the square.
Mara had not spoken since the valley.
She stood near the fire pit and watched her people work.
When she finally spoke, she didn't look at me.
"What happens next?" Mara asked. "What are your actual plans for this place?"
I opened my mouth to answer.
"Lord Kaspar!"
Dorn's voice carried across the square. He emerged from the town hall at a run, his boots skidding on the wet cobblestones.
"Sir." He stopped in front of me, breathing hard. "We finally got the comm crystal connected."
He gulped for more air.
"It's the capital. Multiple contacts in the queue. Augustin, Prince Varen's office, and Iron Cross High Command." He swallowed. "They all say it's urgent."