By late afternoon the sky was a hard blue and the moon stood pale and obvious above the treeline like it couldn't wait its turn. The captains stopped pretending this would be like any other watch. Orders went out plainly and were repeated until everyone could say them back: bows on the north and east walks, crossbows stacked near the gate, rifles and shotguns spaced in twos and threes so no one section burned through all its rounds. Buckets of water and sand stood at regular intervals. Spare bowstrings were looped over pegs. Bolts and arrows were sorted into crates by fletch colour. The message board listed who stood where and for how long. No speeches. Just work.
Elara and the others were given simple duties that kept them moving: carry quivers, run messages, swap out empty bolt crates for full ones, bring water to the lines, haul the wounded if it came to that. The captain pointed with two fingers at her and Caleb. "You two on the east walk. Don't get clever. Don't get stuck." To Torvee and Corin: "With the archers. If you've strung a bow before, now's the time." Torvee grinned too brightly. Corin nodded once, face steady.
The armourer laid a rifle across Caleb's palms and counted out ten rounds into a cloth pouch. "That's it. Make them count." He did the same for the next man down. The gunners all knew the speech by heart and hated hearing it anyway. Bows for rhythm, guns for when rhythm failed.
On the wall, Elara moved between stations with a crate against her hip and a strap of water skins across her shoulder. The evening flattened into tasks. A bowstring creaked. Resin blackened fingertips. Someone swore at a knot in a cord. Caleb checked his sights again and again, jaw set, breath controlled. Torvee's hands were quick and sure as she helped an older archer change a string. Corin tested her draw, let the string down, tested again until her shoulder found the line it wanted and settled there.
Luke appeared at Elara's shoulder in that way he had, quiet as a thought. He didn't speak. He didn't need to. She glanced at him and found his eyes already on her. He held himself between her and the stair, between her and the darkest patch of the trees, between her and any space a mistake might come through. He never stood directly in front of her. He didn't block. He displaced risk.
The first hour after sunset belonged to the bows. The archers set a slow, careful rhythm, three men to a section keeping a steady hiss of feathers over the ditch. They weren't trying to hit anything they couldn't see. They were writing a line in the dark and telling the ferals where they would be answered. A few men with crossbows shot short, heavy bolts into places the archers marked as likely. The bolts hit with a dull thud Elara could feel in the stone. Someone somewhere loosed too fast; the captain called "Steady!" and the line steadied.
Then the howls came in properly. Not one or two, but a spread of voices that moved along the treeline and held shape. The sound made the hairs along Elara's arms stand up. She concentrated on the weight in her hands and not on the noise in her throat. Her silver stirred in her veins the way it had begun to do lately when danger pressed, not bright, just present, a hum she could breathe through.
Shapes broke the tree line and loped low. Arrows bent and flew. A feral stumbled, got up, ran on. Another dropped and didn't rise. The first shots cracked along the parapet — three, then five, then a short stutter of two together — as riflemen picked the closest targets. A shotgun boomed near the gate and someone shouted "Hold that corner!" The captain's voice travelled the stone like a drumbeat: "Two paces left — there — hold your fire — now."
Elara kept moving. She swapped crates, ducked at a shout, handed a water skin, lifted the next box, and tried not to think about how many she had left to lift if the night ran long. Caleb fired once, breathed, worked the bolt, fired again. He did not waste rounds. Torvee drew and loosed and drew and loosed, the string rasping against a leather guard she'd tied at her wrist. Corin's arrows flew in clean lines. When a man's hands shook, Corin passed him a spare leather tab without comment and he took it like a gift.
The ferals pressed closer. In the ditch a shape tumbled and slid and clawed up again. A rifle cracked; the shape folded and rolled back. More came on. The bows did their work without drama. A man near Elara muttered, "Save the noise," and shot another arrow, face blank. The gun line held its fire until the ditch filled with movement and then let go in a sharp, controlled volley that kicked smoke up into the moonlight. Spent casings chimed against stone. Somewhere, someone was shouting without words; two guards pulled him back and shoved him down onto a bench until his breathing matched theirs.
Amber paced a short triangle behind Elara's station, eyes on angles, not people. Garrett stood at the southern angle, still as a hammered nail, watching the ditch and the base of the wall and the place the wall met the gate frame. He didn't point. He didn't bark. When he moved, two or three men moved without looking to see why. Luke kept shifting so that Elara never had to turn far to see him. Every time she looked, he was already looking.
A feral reached the base of the wall, claws scraping stone. A crossbow thunked; the creature jerked and clung. Another bolt; it dropped, and the men on that section breathed out together like a bellows closing.
"Bolts!" someone called. Elara was already there with a fresh crate. She dropped it, slid the empty one aside with her foot, and stood to go. A hand caught her elbow, firm and brief.
"Stay close, Luna," Garrett said, eyes still on the ditch.
Elara pulled her arm free. "My name is Elara."
Garrett didn't turn. "Then stay close, Elara."
She left him there and kept moving. The heat in her jaw wasn't only from the run. She had heard the title in Luke's mouth once, low and careful. Hearing it plain, here, in the middle of work, made the ground feel steeper. She pushed the thought away and handed Torvee a water skin. Torvee gulped, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and grinned. "Tell him next time to call me Queen."
"You'd make a terrible queen," Corin said, loosing another arrow without looking away from the ditch.
"I'd make a fun one," Torvee said, and loosed too.
The night grew loud and then quiet and then loud again as if everyone on both sides had to remember at the same time to breathe. Twice the ferals pushed hard enough that the captain called for a short volley from the rifles. Twice they fell back just far enough to make men wonder if they would try the ladders they no longer built. Arrows were collected and returned along the line between pushes, fletch torn, points blunted, some snapped and thrown straight into the waste. Bolts were too precious to waste; men leaned out on belly and arm to drag them back with hooks.
Caleb fired his seventh shot and clicked on an empty chamber out of habit. He checked the pouch, counted three, and shut his jaw on the number. Elara saw him do it and wished she had more to put in his hand. She had nothing. She passed him a water skin. He drank and kept going. "Make them count," he said under his breath as if to himself, and did.
At the gate a knot of ferals gathered and tested the timbers with their weight. Crossbows answered. A shotgun barked twice. The third time a rifle cracked, the man who'd fired it got a slap on the shoulder from the captain and a word she didn't catch. It was praise. He had waited.
Amber's voice came low and clear to Luke where Elara could hear it. "If the gate looks like giving, we take her down the inner stair and out along the west wall. We're not here for these stones."
Luke answered just as plainly. "Understood."
Elara felt the words land where fear lived and didn't move. There was nothing to say against truth. She looked for Caleb and found him three merlons down, face turned to the ditch, body set. She knew if the gate started to fail he would want to stand there and spend the last round he had. She knew the wolves would disagree. She knew she was the rope between those two pulls and there would be no time to choose slowly.
A shadow leapt the last gap and hit the parapet three places down. It was fast and wrong and smaller than it had looked climbing. The nearest archer's hands went wide. Corin was between the thing and the archer in two steps, arrow reversed in her hand. She drove the shaft into the feral's throat the way you'd peg a tent: straight, hard, no flourish. Torvee swung the butt of a crossbow like a club and brought it down across the skull. The thing thrashed. A rifle boomed from two paces; the top of the head was gone. The smell was copper and old meat. Corin stood very still and then moved again, because that was the job. Torvee's blue flickered hot and then steadied. Corin's green tightened and then loosened. Elara realised she'd been holding her breath and let it go.
"Good," Amber said, not loud, not soft. "Again if you have to."
They didn't, not on the wall itself. The ditch tried the men's nerve again and again and failed to find the weak place before the moon began to slide down the sky. The riflemen counted their last rounds. The archers flexed shaking fingers. The crossbows came off the merlons to have strings checked and limbs felt for hairline cracks. Luke brought bandage and a sling for a man who had wrenched a shoulder and tied the knot without asking questions that mattered to no one.
Somewhere past the second hour before dawn the howls thinned the way water runs out of a bucket — not at once, but definitely. The shapes in the ditch slowed. The bow rhythm eased. The captain said, "Hold," and then, when everyone had convinced their bodies to listen, "Stand easy," and men leaned back into the wall as if they had been keeping it up by hand and could finally allow it to do its own work.
Caleb lowered his rifle and put the three remaining rounds back into the pouch like coins into a cup. He looked at Elara, then at the wolves, then away. He didn't speak. She understood that too.
Garrett rolled his shoulders once. Amber rubbed the heel of one hand along her forearm where the muscles had cramped and shook it out. Luke's gaze made another measured circle of the wall-walk and the yard and the stair and returned to Elara.
The cheer, when it came, was not loud. It was tired and real and lasted five seconds and no more. Men clapped each other on the back because that was what you did after standing together and not breaking. Someone laughed at nothing. Someone cried. Someone sat down and stared at the moon like it had cheated him personally.
Elara didn't cheer. She looked at the ditch and the trees and the gate and the faces that were faces again and not shapes to be arranged on a board. She felt the weight of Garrett's "Luna"—no, Elara—in the middle of all that noise, and the plainness of Amber's plan, and the hard line of Caleb's jaw, and Luke like a door you could shut in a hurry if you had to.
Garrett came to stand near her without crowding. He kept his eyes on the wall below. "You did what you were told," he said. It wasn't praise. It wasn't not. It was a checkmark on a list.
"So did you," she said.
He nodded once. "We'll do it again tonight." No threat. No prophecy. A timetable.
Amber added, "Rest. Eat. Don't go far from the inner stair. If trouble comes early I want you where I can find you in three breaths."
"I'm not hard to find," Elara said.
"You'd be surprised," Amber answered. "People vanish in noise."
Caleb joined them, rifle unloaded, pouch tied shut. He didn't look at Garrett or Amber when he spoke. He looked at Elara. "If the gate goes," he said, "I'm not leaving people on the wall to run. I'm not built that way."
Garrett answered before she could. "Understood." He didn't blink. "If we pull her out, you can come or you can stay. That choice is yours. Her coming with us is not up for debate."
Caleb's mouth thinned. "Good to have it plain."
"It is," Garrett said.
Luke's hand brushed Elara's sleeve, a small, practical contact, like adjusting a strap. "I will be at your door," he said. "If anyone else knocks, don't answer."
"Fine," she said, and meant it.
They left the wall-walk in a loose string. Down in the yard the cooks were already setting pots and swearing at damp kindling. The air smelled of woodsmoke and wet stone and that sharp iron tang that meant the ditch had been busy. People moved like people do after a hard night: not slower, exactly, just with the knowledge that each step cost something and would be paid for later.
In the corridor outside her door, Elara paused. She took stock, the way she had begun to do at the end of every day.
Bows had done their job. Guns had spoken only when needed. Ammo was low but not gone. The wall had held. The ferals had pressed and learned and pulled back to try again. The wolves had not fought for the keep; they had stood where she was and moved when she moved and made their plans around the line her body drew on the map.
She understood it. She didn't have to like it.
Inside, she sat on the bed and unlaced boots with fingers that had more strength in them than they had had a month ago. The silver in her blood settled like a kettle taken off the boil. She let her head rest against the cold stone for a count of ten and then stood, because there was food somewhere and people she cared about who would forget to eat unless someone put a bowl in their hands.
On her way out she found Luke already in the corridor, as promised. He didn't ask how she felt. He didn't offer words she didn't need. He fell in beside her and matched her pace to the kitchen.
The moon was still heavy in the sky. It would be there again tonight. The plan did not change because anyone wished it would. Work filled the gap between now and then. That was enough for the next hour. After that, they would see.