The smoke of the burned village still clung to their cloaks by the time they reached the foothills.
Two hundred men-at-arms, fifty archers, and Knights of Blackfyre in full war panoply.
And Reitz.
On parchment, his retinue was excessive for a bandit suppression mission. On the field, everyone knew where the true weight of the force lay. The soldiers were the shield, the eyes, the hands that held the lines together.
But the sword?
That was the man riding at the front of the column, a black-clad figure on a warhorse bred for war and dragons, cloak snapping in the wind like a strip of stormcloud.
Reitz Blackfyre, Earl of the Fulmen Marches, Augmenti of the Rex Imperia.The Ashbringer.
The mountain range ahead rose like a row of broken teeth, jagged and pale against the afternoon sky. To the east, beyond those ridges, the land dropped away into the Badlands—a no-man's-land of ravines and shattered stone that belonged to no House and answered to no one but violence.
The bandits should have stayed there, Reitz thought grimly, eyes narrowed as he traced the dark mouths of caves dotting the cliff face. The Badlands are chaos, but even chaos understands deterrence.
The wind shifted. The faint, sour tang of old smoke drifted back from behind them, a ghost of the village they'd left that morning—charred beams, collapsed roofs, rows of shrouded bodies.
Ten veterans dead. Seven more villagers Reitz's men had found too late to save.And thirty-odd bastards had simply… vanished into the rocks.
It was an insult.
"Column, halt," Reitz called, raising a gauntleted hand.
The order rippled back through the ranks. Mail rustled. Hooves stamped. Shields clinked together as men shifted their weight, grateful for the chance to rest their feet, not foolish enough to slacken their grip on spear or sword.
Captain Ashen nudged his horse forward until he rode at Reitz's stirrup. The Captain's dark hair was streaked with grey, his face cut by a dozen old scars, one eye milked white but still tracking the terrain with the practiced habit of a veteran.
"We're at the outer ridge, my lord," Ashen reported. "The cave mouths yawn into the Badlands there." He gestured with his chin toward the cliff line where the rock broke open into shadowed maws. "Our local scouts say the eastern tunnels run deep. Some connect to the ravines past our borders."
A perfect rat-hole, Reitz thought. You could move three hundred men through there and never show your banner on the surface.
The image of Caspian flickered in his mind—the skinny boy in ash-streaked rags, blue eyes too old for his face, whispering of auras bright as campfires among the thieves.
Two Knight-level signatures. For a bandit gang, that alone was worrying.
And then there was the other thing.
They struck the very day I was called to the Tribunal, Reitz mused, fingers tightening on the reins. Not a day before, not a day after. When the March was headless and the garrisons were thin.
Coincidence was one thing. Timing like that was logistics.
"My lord," a smoother voice cut in.
Sir Allister reined up on Reitz's other side. He was the image of a storybook knight: blond hair tied back neatly, every strap on his armor properly buckled, shield freshly polished with the Blackfyre sigil picked out in shining crimson. His jaw was clean-shaven. His expression was composed.
To the men, he was the ideal they were told to emulate. To Reitz, he was a good sword—reliable, disciplined, deadly.
Or had been, until today's doubt.
"We're close enough now that our men can't be concealed in any approach," Allister observed. "If they're watching, they'll have seen the dust of our column for an hour. They won't risk engaging you in the open, my lord."
"Of course not," Reitz said. "Only a fool fights a dragon under the open sky."
He studied the cliffs again. The main cave mouth yawned wide, big enough to move a wagon through. Two smaller mouths flanked it higher up, like eye-sockets. The stone here was pale and layered, riddled with fault lines and old fractures.
Earth Mages' playground.
"Scouts first," Reitz decided. "I'm not marching into a bottleneck blind. Ashen, take your best men. Feel out the mouth of that main cavern. No heroics. No deep pushes. If you sense anything above the level of a gutter-flame, you turn around and run."
"Yes, my lord." Ashen saluted, fist to heart.
"Allister," Reitz continued, glancing sideways, "string the archers in a crescent along the slope. Ten-man intervals. I want overlapping fields of fire on anything that steps out of those caves. Keep the Knights with me in the center. We don't commit until we know what we're cutting."
"Yes, my lord," Allister echoed smoothly. "We'll have a firing line ready in ten minutes."
As the orders spread, the column dissolved into structured motion. Men peeled off into their assigned positions, archers jogging up the scree and half-hiding behind boulders, spearmen forming a loose shield wall in front of the cave approaches.
Reitz dismounted and handed the reins to a squire. His boots crunched on the gravel as he walked toward a low outcrop that gave him a better vantage point. From there, he watched Ashen lead a wedge of thirty men toward the main cave mouth, their shields overlapping, formation tight.
He didn't extend his own aura yet. It would advertise his presence to any half-decent mage from half a mile away. Better to let them think the Lord was lingering further back with the bulk of the army.
Give them the first move. Then take everything.
"Worried, my lord?" Allister asked, joining him on the rock.
Reitz snorted. "If I start worrying about bandits, you have my permission to hit me over the head."
"Begging your pardon, but this raid was more than banditry," Allister said carefully. "The village was wiped out. The guards were veterans. There were no survivors among our men."
Reitz grunted, remembering the pattern of the corpses. The guards had died in a line, not scattered like panicked cows. Shields raised, wounds in the front. They hadn't broken.
"Exactly," Reitz said. "Bandits don't stand toe-to-toe with Knights. They cut and run. They hit cargo on roads, not garrisons. And yet here we are."
He flicked a glance at Allister.
"Do you trust the boy's assessment?" he asked. "Caspian."
Allister's lips pressed into a neutral flat line.
"He's seven, my lord," the Knight replied. "Trauma can exaggerate perception. I would not stake our tactical decisions on a peasant child's aura-sense."
Reitz's jaw shifted.
"I asked if you trust it," he repeated.
Allister hesitated for a heartbeat too long.
"No, my lord," he admitted finally. "I do not."
Reitz looked back at the cave.
"I do," he said simply.
Allister said nothing. He didn't argue. He didn't agree. He simply stood there, hands folded behind his back, the perfect portrait of professional patience.
Below, Ashen's detachment reached the cave mouth.
Reitz could feel the subtle stirring in the air as the Captain expanded his aura—just a ripple, like a dog testing the wind.
"Anything?" Reitz murmured.
"Nothing bright," Allister answered, eyes narrowed. "If there are mages, they're either masking very well or deeper in."
The scouting party disappeared into the dark.
Time stretched.
The sun edged lower, shadows lengthening across the scree. The wind whistled softly, carrying with it the faint mineral tang of the Badlands beyond.
Behind him, the Blackfyre men waited. Some muttered quiet prayers. Others tightened straps, rolled their shoulders, or checked arrow fletching for the hundredth time.
Reitz listened to the rhythm of his army. The small sounds of men on the edge of violence.
Fifteen minutes passed. Twenty.
Then—
Echoes. Faint, but distinct. The clash of steel. The distant, muffled shouts of men.
No explosions. No roar of elemental detonation. Just the wet, ugly sound of close quarters.
"Sounds like they found them," Allister commented.
Reitz folded his arms across his chest.
He didn't like this.
If there were only ordinary thugs in there, Ashen and two of his Knights would cut through them like wheat. The screaming should have been brief. But the noise went on, drawn-out, messy. Not the sharp crack of a line breaking, but the chaotic roar of a fight with too many moving pieces.
"Archers, ready," Reitz called down. "If they're routed toward the mouth, I want them feathered."
Down below, fifty bows went up as one.
The sound changed. The first distant cries of pain were replaced by deeper bellows—Ashen's voice, no doubt, bellowing orders.
Then, abruptly, it began to die down.
A handful of men stumbled back into daylight first, dragging a limping companion. Behind them, a Knight emerged, armor bloodied but intact.
No one was running for their lives.
A murmur of relief rippled through the Blackfyre line.
"Looks like Captain Ashen was right," Allister said. "Ragged equipment. Poor discipline. Nothing noble there."
Reitz didn't answer.
He watched Ashen trudge back up the incline, saluting with a blood-slicked gauntlet.
"Report," Reitz said.
"We flushed them from the first tunnel system, my lord," Ashen said, breathing hard but steady. "Maybe thirty of them, all told. Leather armor, rusted blades. They had positioned themselves along choke points, but their formations broke quickly."
"Casualties?" Reitz asked.
"Four wounded, no dead on our side," Ashen replied. "Most injuries are shallow cuts. They fought like cornered rats, but they were not organized. We saw no sign of the Knight-level mana the boy described."
"None?" Reitz pressed. "Not even a flicker?"
Ashen shook his head.
"If there were stronger mages here, they weren't in that cave, my lord," he said. "Or they are hiding deeper. The network runs further east. We hit only the first branch."
Reitz's fingers tapped a slow rhythm on his bicep.
Bandits who could slaughter ten trained veterans yesterday. Bandits who died like pigs stuck in a pen today.
Where are your bright flames, Caspian?
He looked up at the cliff.
The other cave mouths yawned dark and silent. The ridgeline above them seemed… too quiet. No birds. No scattered stones kicked loose by scrambling feet. Just stillness.
"This is wrong," Reitz muttered.
"My lord?" Allister prompted.
"This isn't the same force," Reitz said. "Either that, or our real opponents aren't in that cave. They're somewhere else. Watching. Waiting."
Allister exhaled slowly.
"If this is a trap laid by a Noble House," he pointed out carefully, "walking deeper into their prepared tunnels is playing directly into their hands. We've bloodied their expendables. We could withdraw, fortify the border, and file a formal complaint with the Magistrates."
"Withdraw?" Reitz echoed.
He thought of the village again. Of the line of small bundles on the ground—children's bodies wrapped in canvas. Of Caspian kneeling in the dirt.
We march out, kill a few rats, then tuck our tails and go home?
He almost laughed.
"No," Reitz said. "We don't withdraw. We test their hand."
He raised his voice.
"Form line!" he shouted. "First spear and shield company, forward. Two Knights in front. We push to the second branch of the cave and no further. If we sense high-ranked mana, we fall back. I want ropes on every man. If the mountain comes down, we drag them out if we can."
"Aye, my lord!" came the chorus of responses.
He hesitated, then added, more quietly, just to Allister and Ashen, "The rest hold position here. If the cliff starts to move, you pull back uphill. Do not try to outrun a landslide on level ground."
"Yes, my lord," Allister said. He rested a hand over his heart. "I will keep the line intact."
Reitz weighed him for a heartbeat.
Allister had been with him for seven years now. He'd taken a spear for Reitz at the Battle of Broken Valley. He'd lost two fingers to frostbite on the Northern Campaign and joked about them afterward.
Trust isn't built on oaths, Reitz thought. It's built on time and blood.
He nodded once, decision made.
"Good," he said. "Ashen, you're with me."
"Gladly, my lord," the Captain replied.
They moved.
The second push was smaller—fifty men this time, not thirty, shields overlapping, ropes tied around their waists and anchored to stakes driven into the scree outside. Two Knights took point, Ashen in the center, Reitz just behind them.
The cave swallowed them in cool, damp darkness. Torches flared to life, held low so as not to blind their own mages.
Reitz didn't need the light to see.
He opened his Field—not fully, not the blinding, battle-mad expansion he used in open war, but a tight, dense layer clinging to the walls and the men around him. The stone felt old and dry, threaded with faint veins of quartz. No pulses of foreign mana ahead. No flaring auras in the immediate tunnels.
Just empty rock.
They advanced slowly, boots crunching on gravel, water dripping somewhere deeper in the dark.
After perhaps fifty yards, the tunnel branched—one path sloping gently downward toward the Badlands, the other curling back eastward, parallel to the cliff face.
"Tracks this way," one of the men murmured, pointing to the eastern branch. Scuffed dust. Broken pebbles. Bare footprints.
Reitz's Field skimmed that direction.
For a moment, it brushed against something… smooth. Too smooth. Like polished stone laid over a pit.
His neck prickled.
"Stop," he ordered.
The line froze.
Reitz took two more careful steps, Field probing.
The smoothness snapped into focus.
Not natural. Sculpted.
Earth Magic.
Before he could shout the warning, the ground shuddered.
"Back!" Reitz barked, mana surging to his legs as he jumped.
The tunnel floor dropped away where they had just been standing. Half the line stumbled backward, dragged by the ropes; the other half scrambled, cursing.
The collapse wasn't total. It was a test—a shallow sinkhole opening into a lower tunnel, just enough to catch the unwary.
"They wanted us to push faster," Reitz realized. "To rush blindly after ghosts."
He had the ropes cut and ordered a retreat.
"This is enough," he told Ashen quietly as they backed out, never turning their backs on the dark. "They know we're willing to enter. That's all we needed to show. The real trap will be outside."
Ashen grunted, but he didn't argue.
They emerged into the light again, blinking.
"Pull everyone back fifty paces from the cliff," Reitz called. "We regroup on that ridge there. If this is their stage, we're stepping off it."
The men moved quickly, maybe too quickly, driven by nerves. Ropes were untied, stakes pulled, shields lifted as the formation began to peel away from the cave mouth.
That was when the mountain finally moved.
It started as a vibration in Reitz's boots. A subtle hum, like the purr of a great beast waking from sleep.
"Hold!" Reitz barked.
Too late.
The cliff face above the main cave shuddered. Cracks spiderwebbed through the pale stone. The cave mouth didn't just crumble; it flowed.
"The rock—!" someone shrieked.
"EARTH MAGES!" another voice bellowed.
The entrance sealed shut in an instant, stone pouring down like a waterfall, then solidifying with a deafening crack. The rope lines snapped taut as the buried ends were crushed, whipping through the air like angry snakes.
The fifty men who had remained inside—even at the outer passage—were gone. Entombed behind twenty feet of solid rock.
Ashen swore violently.
"Pickaxes! Get—"
"Forget the tunnel!" Reitz roared, senses flaring outward at last. "Form ranks! Shields up!"
The second wave hit them from above.
Boulders the size of wagons tore free from the heights, crashing down in an avalanche of rock and dust. The first impact flattened a dozen archers who hadn't had time to move. Men screamed as stone fragments scythed through armor like shrapnel.
"Raise shields!" Allister bellowed down the line, voice ringing as clear as a bell. "Brace! Brace!"
The front ranks hunched under their shields, forming improvised turtle-shells. Stones hammered down, bouncing off iron rims, cracking wood.
Reitz threw up a half-dome of fire above the densest knot of men near him, his aura condensing into a blazing umbrella that turned falling rocks into glowing rubble. Heat washed out in a wave, scorching exposed hair and cloth, but saving lives.
He felt the drain in his core immediately. That much output for that many people was not sustainable.
This is just the opener, he thought grimly. They're not trying to crush us. They're trying to break the formation. To make us clump.
"Line, pull BACK!" he shouted. "Up the slope! Don't stay under the wall!"
The order propagated. The men began to withdraw up the incline, step by step, shields still raised.
The third wave came from the treeline.
"CONTACT!" a soldier screamed.
Figures burst from the sparse pines and scrub—four of them at first, then more shapes behind, all clad in dull grey cloaks and featureless masks. Their movements were wrong for bandits; too synchronized, too efficient.
Assassins, Reitz thought. Or mercenary mages. Paid well enough to wear anonymity.
"Spears!" Ashen shouted. "Brace!"
The first four didn't rush the line immediately. They fanned out, planting their hands on the ground.
The earth bucked.
A wall of stone erupted between Reitz's vanguard and the bulk of his forces—a jagged, man-high barrier that tore through the retreating ranks, scattering men on both sides.
"Separate them!" one of the masked figures barked in a clipped, professional tone. "Front unit only—"
The rest of his words were lost as Reitz drove a fistful of flame into his face. The assassin barely had time to jerk back, stone surging up to intercept the attack.
"FALL BACK TO ME!" Reitz shouted, voice amplified by mana until it boomed across the canyon. "IF YOU CAN HEAR MY VOICE, RALLY ON THE BLACK BANNER!"
On the far side of the new wall, the Blackfyre standard whipped in the heated air—a dragon of crimson thread against black.
Arrows hissed overhead as some of the archers fired blindly over the barrier. A few struck the masked figures, only to bounce off sudden plates of earth that hardened into shields.
"Shit," Reitz muttered. "Earth specialists. Multiple."
"Milord!" Allister galloped up on his warhorse, having kept to the rear as ordered. Two Knights flanked him, shields raised, eyes darting between the collapsing cliff and the emerging enemies. "We have to get you out of here!"
"We have to relieve the front!" Reitz snapped, pointing at the swirling melee in front of the earthen wall. A chunk of his vanguard had been caught on that side when the stone erupted; they were now being harried by the masked mages and a flood of grey-cloaked fighters pouring from a side ravine.
"This position is compromised," Allister insisted. "If they bring the cliff down in earnest, you will be crushed. Our duty is to safeguard your life, my lord. Think of your house. Think of Lord Ezra."
The sound of his son's name hit harder than any falling boulder.
Ezra.A crib in a sunlit nursery. A baby with serious eyes and a mouth that said impossible things.
For a heartbeat, Reitz could see it: Aerwyna by the window, Ezra bundled in her arms, looking out over the training yard where Reitz should be drilling the men, not dying in a canyon like a reckless recruit.
Just one heartbeat.
He ground his teeth.
"If I retreat while my men are butchered," Reitz snarled, "I am no Lord. I am a coward with stolen land. Let go of my reins, Allister."
"Please reconsider!" Allister pressed, hand clenched white on the bridle. "We are in an ambush designed to kill Nobles. They sealed the cave. They are cutting us from the rear. This is not a skirmish, my lord. This is an assassination."
Reitz's aura flared hotter, reacting to his temper. The air around the pair shimmered with heat.
"Then let them try," he growled. "I am not some fat Baron hiding behind walls. I am—"
"ASHEN!" someone bellowed from the front. "CAPTAIN DOWN!"
Reitz's head snapped toward the shout.
Through a gap between the press of bodies and the jagged stone, he saw Ashen stagger, a stone spike protruding from his thigh. One of the masked mages advanced on him, rock-gauntleted fists clenched.
No more time.
Reitz tore his reins from Allister's grip and spurred his horse forward.
"Guards!" he shouted. "With me! Break that wall!"
His personal Blackfyre Guard—sixteen men in darker armor, bearing no heraldry but a small red flame at the throat—closed in around him in a protective wedge.
"Milord—!" Allister began again, but Reitz cut him off.
"You want to protect me?" Reitz roared over his shoulder. "Then follow my orders!"
He gathered mana into his right hand. The familiar feeling of the Flame Sabre built along his forearm—a pressure, a burning potential waiting to be shaped.
I punch a hole through their wall, he calculated, eyes already measuring the thickness, the stress fractures. I burn a path. The Guard pours through. We stabilize the front and—
A hand closed on his side.
Not a shove. Not a shielding gesture.
A grip, firm and intimate, pressing just below his ribs.
Reitz frowned, breath hitching.
"Allister, what—"
Cold bit into his flesh.
For a fraction of a second, he didn't understand what he was feeling. There was no impact, no blunt force. Just a sudden, blooming cold in his side, followed by a spreading heat that was wrong.
He looked down.
A dagger hilt jutted from the gap in his armor, the blade buried deep in his kidney. Its metal was a dull, ugly grey, etched with faint, glowing runes that made his aura stutter and flicker.
Blood poured hot over his hip, soaking his tunic, dripping down onto his boot.
The Flame Sabre guttered out, unformed. His horse stumbled under the shift in his weight.
The world narrowed to the hand still gripping the dagger.
Sir Allister's hand.
Reitz looked up, meeting the Knight's eyes.
Gone was the polished calm. Gone was the deferential respect.
In its place was something cold. Calculating. A man who had already spent his guilt and now only had a job to finish.
"Sir… Allister…?" Reitz choked, tasting iron at the back of his throat. "Why?"