The battlefield smelled of blood and smoke. Ari knelt in the muck with her bow across her knees and listened past the noise—past the roars, the clash of steel, the groan of trees tearing from the earth. She pressed the chaos into a rhythm she could use: draw, breathe, loose.
"Oriel."
The hawk answered with a fierce cry from the fog. Ari lifted her head and drew to the cheek in the same breath.
"Right flank," she whispered.
Oriel stooped. Her arrow flew. A man screamed. Another stumbled. The line shivered. Ari was already nocking the next shaft.
"Archers!" she called, voice like snapped stone. "On me."
They came—ten in all. Not soldiers. Farmers with hard hands. Trappers who knew stillness better than fear. Two she recognized at once — the young girl and her protective brother who had once begged to follow them, against all wisdom. They had come from one of the villages left broken by raiders, their faces marked by hunger and loss. And yet here they stood now, bows in hand, stubborn enough to fight in a war they didn't owe.
"We aim for groups," Ari said. "We do not waste arrows. Make them think there are a hundred of us."
She pointed, quick and clean. "You two—" her gaze cut to the siblings "—take the right perch, half a tree up. Girl, you lead. Breathe through the shot. Brother, watch her flank and call targets. If your hands shake, feed her arrows. If you can't shoot, you can still help. Understood?"
They nodded in the same sharp motion.
"Good. Everyone—set your feet. Don't lift your head to watch a man die. Trust the next arrow."
Ari loosed. The string sang. The others followed, clumsy at first, scattered shafts slapping mud. The second volley found bodies. By the third, they had a pulse. A cluster of raiders trying to force the center crumpled together as if a hand had closed on them. The tenth archer gasped like someone who had been drowning and only then found air.
"Again," Ari said.
Her fingers split and bled. She wrapped a strip of cloth and ignored the sting. Oriel's sight burned bright through her eyes; the fog became a map—light and motion, the turn of a shoulder, the lift of a horn. Twice she struck men before they fully stepped from the mist. Once she split the head from a torch; the fire hissed into the mud.
Below, freed fighters surged. Some cheered and looked up. Ari didn't. She drew, breathed, loosed. Each shot a choice; each choice a life.
A knot broke to her left—prisoners buckling under wolves. Ari didn't hesitate. One arrow took a wolf through the eye. The next sank to the fletch in a shoulder. The third clipped a handler's throat as he reached for a leash. The prisoners stumbled back to their feet, alive because she had chosen them. She did not let herself feel anything for it. There was no room.
"Left lane," the girl called from the perch, voice tight but steady. "Five together. Shields."
"Good eyes," Ari said, already drawing. "Everyone—left lane, lowest shields first."
They rained shafts at the ankles and knees. Men fell and tripped the ones behind them; the push folded on itself. The boy hissed, "Right, right!" and a fresh knot came into view. Ari flicked a glance—saw it through Oriel's tilt—and sent three arrows so quick the string burned her split fingers raw. Two fell. One reeled long enough for a freed fighter to drag a child from under his blade.
Her arms trembled now. Each draw was fire. Each release felt like the last she could manage. And still they came. For every body she dropped, two more rose out of the fog.
At her elbow, the youngest of the line sagged, bow sliding from his hands. Ari didn't look. She set her jaw and drew for them both.
"If you can't shoot, load," she said. "Hands, not heroics."
He pulled arrows from her quiver, thrust them into her palm one after another. She loosed them as fast as he fed them, the two of them a broken machine made useful by need. Her blood slicked the string; his tears wet the fletchings. Death flew anyway.
"Brace!" someone below shouted.
Ari's gaze snapped, following Oriel's dive. The hawk's vision showed a raider raising his sword over a girl too small to carry hers. Ari drew. The string cut through cloth and skin, opened her finger to the bone. She loosed. The arrow buried in the raider's throat; he fell across the girl's feet. Ari's hand shook so hard the next shaft rattled. She clenched her fist until it hurt and lifted the bow again.
"Keep firing," she croaked. It was barely sound. It was enough.
The brother choked, "They're climbing, Ari—right of the wagons!"
"I have it," the sister said, and proved it: her arrow took the first climber in the mouth. Ari let herself give the smallest nod, an approval that tasted like iron.
Oriel screamed overhead, a clean rip of sound. The hawk folded into the fog, then flashed out to rake a handler's eyes. The man reeled, dropped his leash; the wolf veered away, suddenly masterless, suddenly confused. Ari put a shaft through the animal before it could find new orders.
Below, the freed line surged again—Gerrit's barked commands carrying through the mess, Nyx and Pan winking in and out of shadow behind the wagons. Ari tracked them without meaning to: a dark smear where a man should be, a sudden collapse of a knot as if someone had cut its strings. She put arrows into the spaces Nyx made, widening every tear.
"Breathe," Ari told herself. "Draw. Loose."
The rhythm held. Her body did not.
Her shoulder ached like a tooth. Her forearm was striped with burns from the string. Every draw dragged a sound up her throat that did not belong in daylight. She swallowed it and fired again.
A horn cut the night—raw, near. More horns answered farther off. The rear was waking fully. The ground seemed to tilt as men shifted toward that call, trying to turn, trying to face a fight behind them and in front at once.
"Now," Ari whispered, and aimed for the ones who turned. Three fell before they finished the motion.
A new smell crawled through the fog then—acrid, sweet. Oil.
Fire came as thrown bottles, arcs of orange that burst and crawled. The flames took to Ashwyn's living wall at the flank and walked it, eating sap, chewing bark to black. Heat pressed the fog back in a brighter ring. Men cheered because light made them brave. The cheering made other men brave too.
Rowan's water crashed once, steam rolling like breath from a giant's lungs. The flames fell back—then rose worse. Ari saw the river shiver around him and the shapes of men closing. She couldn't do a thing about it but shoot the ones who aimed at his back.
"Rowan," she whispered, and buried another arrow in a throat that shouted for him to die.
The girl's voice cut clean across the branch above. "Ari—left mass! They're setting for a push."
"Take eyes," Ari said. "You—" to the boy "—feed her. Fast."
They worked like they had trained all their lives, not hours: the sister choosing with care, placing shafts where a man would trip on his own falling comrade; the brother counting under his breath, keeping the pace, calling angles she could not see from below. Ari followed their lead and made their good choices deadly.
"Make them think there are a hundred," she said again, louder this time, so the ten would hear it and believe it. "No gaps. No singles. Breathe—shoot—breathe."
They obeyed. The line became an instrument: crooked, shaking, imperfect, and still somehow a song. Arrows fell in ragged curtains across tight packs of men. The front ranks slowed because the second ranks feared tripping. Wolves wove and found nothing but hurt.
A raider broke the pattern, sprinting in a low crouch toward the tree that hid the siblings. Ari saw him only because Oriel's head snapped. She swung, drew, loosed. The arrow took him through the ear before he reached the trunk.
"Thank you," the boy breathed down to her without looking away from his sister's hands.
"Don't thank me," Ari said. "Keep her arrows full."
He did.
Her quiver was down to a mean fistful now. The others were no better. The youngest archer's hands shook so hard he could barely nock. Ari didn't scold him this time. She simply reached back without looking, found his wrist, stilled it with a squeeze, then lifted her bow again.
A roar rose from the rear—men trying to reform, captains pulling lines into shape. Nyx's shadow cut one captain down; Eldros burst through the fog like a piece of the forest gone to war, antlers wide as branches, flinging a wolf into a wagon wheel with a crack. Bramble's snarl rolled along the other flank; even the raiders flinched at that sound. For a breath the rear looked like prey.
"Hold," Ari murmured, and tried to make the ten sound like an army.
Her vision narrowed to a tunnel—fletching, string, the dark slice where a neck would be. Oriel's cry. Draw. Loose. Pain. Draw. Loose. Pain. She could not tell if her fingers bled or if the world simply ran red now.
A freed fighter fell to his knees, shield above him, three blades hacking at the rim. Ari put one arrow into a raised wrist, another into a throat, and a third into a knee she could barely see. The fighter looked up once as if to find her and didn't. That was fine. He didn't need her face.
"Right!" the girl snapped. "Two with spears!"
"I see them," Ari said, though she did not, not with her eyes. Oriel saw. That was enough. She dropped them both before their points met the shadow of a child.
The fire ate louder. Heat pressed; sweat stung her cuts. A bottle burst close and painted flame along the edge of a wagon. Shouts rose. The light made her an easier target; she stepped half a pace into deeper shadow without breaking rhythm.
Her last three arrows sat in her palm.
She breathed once for each. Three groups. Three choices.
The first went into the heart of a tight knot to slow the push; men stumbled over the dead instead of leaping them and the rush became a crawl. The second took a horn as it lifted; the note died unsounded. The third found a man with a captain's voice and ended that voice mid-order.
Her hand came up empty.
The boy's whisper drifted down, small and raw. "I'm dry."
"Me too," the sister said, voice frayed. "We—"
Ari lowered the bow, flexed her ruined fingers once, and looked along the line. Ten faces. Smeared with smoke and sweat and grit. None of them ready for this when the sun came up, all of them here anyway.
"Knives, then," she said calmly. "And stones. We throw until we can't lift our arms. We move before they see us. We make ten look like a hundred until the last breath."
Someone gave a broken laugh. Someone else cried. Most just nodded.
Oriel screamed above, a hard, bright sound that cut the heat. Ari lifted her chin.
"Hold the line," she said. "Just a little longer."
Down on the field, Nyx and Pan disappeared into burning shadow and came out red. Eldros drove another knot apart. Bramble vanished and reappeared with his jaws full of a man's arm. Rowan's water rose like a spine and fell like a wall. Brennar's roar ripped ragged across the choke.
Ari set her feet and raised her empty bow like a promise.
"Make them think there are a hundred," she said.
And the ten stood straighter, drew breath, and made it true.