Fandar had the sense of a commander, and instantly ordered his rebels to back away, pulling their wounded behind them as they retreated a hundred or so steps to give the foreign soldiers space.

  It took no more than a few breaths for three sergeants to come forward, waving hesitantly and begging for surrender. Vera just pointed to the treeline, her expression thunderous, and the soldiers began to hustle away, order reasserting itself as they too grabbed their wounded in a hurry. No doubt some poor souls would be left for dead, but that was the way of war.

  Vera had already turned her back and strode over to where Jorge lay. I followed, blinking to clear my vision and barely able to believe that it might truly be over. A gentle rain of ash fell over us, and I realised belatedly that it was all that remained of the mage from moments prior. A sickening thought.

  But there was plenty of death to be had this day wherever I looked, and I chose to focus on other things. Nathlan, running over and seemingly unharmed, though he looked drained in a way I hadn’t expected, as if some great skill had been shattered and the backlash was even now worming its way through his veins. Jacyntha, picking herself off the floor and wincing as some bruise or injury made itself known. Sadrianna watching the soldiers leave with a hard stare, guarding us as we focused elsewhere.

  Jorge lay in the mud, but he was breathing. I stepped around Vera to see his tired face, deep lines furrowed in his forehead and his cheeks far more gaunt than before. His eyes found mine, and he opened his mouth to say something before a coughing fit rocked his frame.

  I couldn’t help myself. “You look like shit,” I told him, and he laughed.

  “Aye lad, age has a way of sneaking up on you in your worst moments, true enough.”

  “You had me worried, old man,” Vera said as she levered him up with one hand. “The way you were talking at the end there, I thought for sure you’d gone for some self-sacrificial horse-shit.”

  Jorge wheezed as he stood and looked over to me. I grinned.

  “Tried that once already today, didn’t you?” I asked, though I couldn’t help the faint edge of recrimination creeping into my voice.

  Now wasn’t the time for sulking, and no doubt it had been a noble attempt at sacrifice for our sakes, but the stress of the last few bells was messing with my head, and I couldn’t figure out what emotions I should be feeling right now.

  “Aye, true enough. First Lamb, and now Nathlan…can’t an old man die in peace?” he asked with a tired smile.

  Vera slapped him.

  I’m sure it was meant to be a gentle tap, but Jorge was fragile, and the blow made him stumble. Vera looked shocked and reached out to catch him, apologies already tumbling from her bloodied lips as the old man tried to find his balance, and I was left to wonder what the fuck was going on.

  Nathlan arrived, and then Vera was speeding off to the castle carrying Jorge in her arms like a baby. I turned to Nathlan, and we looked each other up and down to check for wounds before clasping each other’s forearms and sharing a hug of relief. We’d made it.

  Jacyntha and Sadrianna appeared, and we shared surprised backslaps and hearty hugs all around for a few moments, marvelling at the miracle of our continued existence. It couldn’t last forever though, and the cries of the wounded brought us all back to earth once more.

  “We should get the wounded back to the castle,” I said. I looked to the others for guidance, and Sadrianna thankfully took over, splitting us up and assigning tasks before heading towards Brixby – the only of the rebels nearby that any of us recognised – to organise our efforts.

  It didn’t take long for us to combe through the battlefield and collect the wounded. There were only a dozen or so of them from our side, and they were swiftly taken to the castle and laid in a clean area at its foot – away from the churned battleground before the gate. The giant tree, while a boon to the future defensiveness of the castle itself and no doubt a distinctive and likely prized resource in the weeks and months to come, was currently a barrier that none of us were keen to drag the wounded over.

  Others took over the triage and healing of the injured rebels, such as it was, and once we’d found them all, we looked once more for injured enemies. We found three; two men and a woman, all with broken limbs and in a bad way – the relatively hale had left with the army, after all.

  One of them men had a nasty gut wound and was only a few moments from death. I knelt down and ended his suffering with a quick blade, cleaning my hands and sheathing my dagger with little but numbness in my heart, before we picked the two captives up and carried them to the base of the castle.

  I expected some push back from the rebels and was trying in my head to formulate the arguments I’d need to persuade them, but they just nodded and told us to set the captives down at the end of the line. Gruffly, it must be said, but they agreed to see to them all the same.

  We’d removed any weapons that we could find and checked for storage rings or necklaces. It was possible they had other storage devices or hidden compartments, but it wasn’t likely, and honestly, anyone stupid enough to try and fight the winning army right now would have died long ago. There hadn’t been that many losses, but that wasn’t the same as none, and it wouldn’t take much for the healers to become killers. A fair few of the able-bodied rebels stayed nearby, commiserating with their friends, helping them with the pain, and levelling hard glares at the two injured soldiers we’d saved.

  We’d deal with them later, though I privately hoped they just ran off once their injuries were no longer life threatening. The woman’s right leg was bent backwards the wrong way though, so I doubted running was on the cards for her in the near future.

  Now that death had claimed all it could today, we climbed the massive tree, too steep to walk but not exactly a full climb – more a scramble up massive ridges in the trunk until we reached the walls a dozen or so meters up. We then hopped over them and descended into what remained of the inner courtyard, where Vera stood in conversation with Fandar, Jorge propped against a massive slab of masonry.

  As we approached, I realised that he was asleep, head lolling on his chest and breathing deep and even. Vera looked up and acknowledged us, as did Fandar, and he was the first to address us.

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  “Not exactly a smooth journey, but thank you, each of you, for helping us take back our homeland.”

  We nodded, grunted, waved a hand and otherwise accepted the thanks, and then Fandar was off again, giving orders and commiserating with his rebels. In many ways, it seemed the aftermath of a battle was the hardest work for a commander from what I could tell. The actual fighting was all chaos and changing plans and it didn’t seem to have much of a structure to it, but afterwards, everyone looked to Fandar. He was the one that needed to witness the dead, tally the living and injured, plan for the future. It looked exhausting and heart-wrenching in equal measure.

  Vera looked after him fondly though, something akin to wistfulness on her face for a moment before she turned back to us.

  “Right,” she said, clapping her hands together, and I smiled at Jorge’s familiar gesture. She really had learned a lot from him. “First, I want to know if the keep is structurally sound. If it is, we get Jorge in there, and let Fandar know as well, since I reckon it will be good for the other wounded, too. Then we scavenge the battlefield for anything of value and pile it inside to be sorted through later. Then we get any small wounds checked and clean our gear. Understood?”

  Weary sighs greeted the pronouncement. “Honestly Vera, I think we all just need a few moments to acknowledge and decompress this whole…” I said, waving around at everything.

  “No chance, Lamb. You’re running on a bit of adrenaline right now, but the moment you stop, that’s all crashing down. Get everything squared away, and then you can relax. I promise you, as someone who’s been through a few of these, you do not want to stop halfway through.”

  It was solid logic, and even it wasn’t, I wouldn’t be second-guessing our acting leader while Jorge was out cold. Especially not after watching her immolate what must have been a 4th tier mage right in front of me. Also, it was Vera. She knew best.

  “Well, since I know fuck all about masonry, I’ll be leaving that part to the rest of you,” Jacyntha smirked, before turning and heading to the battlefield again, Vera’s storage vest in hand. Sadrianna nodded and followed a moment later, and Nathlan chose to stay with me.

  I paced towards the central keep before activating the mana-sense portion of my Shatter Point skill. Hitting the soft skill cap of level 10, or more likely the impartment of the seed of the World Tree, had even further enhanced the skill, and when combined with my ever-growing mana-sense, I could now map a substantial portion of the castle within my mind’s eye relatively quickly.

  I sent the sense shooting through the stone, cataloguing faults and appraising Nathlan of areas of instability, moving around the outside of the keep before heading inside to do the same. It took close to a bell to survey the whole thing, though the tunnel that led down towards the Ashkanian ruin was closed off by the trunk of the gigantic tree that supported the castle on its bough.

  We returned to the courtyard once done, reporting to Vera the areas of the castle that we advised everyone to stay out of until they could be reinforced. Most of the central keep was still solid though, the tree somehow having grown up and through the courtyard before thickening, enough that the keep was entirely untouched by the tree, just supported from below by its massive trunk.

  The tedious work, filled with concentration and no time to idle chatter, had helped settle my mind somewhat, and the next bell of removing and cleaning my weapons and armour, caring for the dozens of small wounds I’d received and cleaning and dressing in fresh clothes was both a chore and a blessing.

  Vera had been right though; I would never have been able to do it after relaxing for a time first. Now that the immediate danger had worn off, and the necessary tasks of care after the battle were done, I found myself empty, with eyes heavy-lidded and yawns bursting from my mouth every few moments.

  We sat, the six of us, in a small room off the ground floor of the keep, nestled amongst a heap of blankets, clothes, bed rolls and other soft furnishings that we all had in our storage devices. The keep was exceptionally cold and austere, only a few thin tapestries and rugs dotted around to give warmth and colour to the place.

  There were furnished rooms with real beds and blankets, but we have given those to the rebels and their wounded. In many ways, we all felt more comfortable in a heap in the middle of one small room, only ourselves there for comfort.

  It was natural after all our time travelling together, and to stay in separate places would feel strange. Many of us, probably each of us, had almost died a few times over today, and the comfort of other people’s presence was a balm for our strained spirits.

  I desperately wanted to talk, to discuss and go over the day’s events, to commiserate and celebrate, and above all to ask; ‘what now?’. But I was too exhausted, as was everyone else. Sleep claimed us quickly in that small room, and only the sound of snores and the occasional grunt or twitch disturbed the peace.

  I slept fitfully, scenes playing themselves out behind my eyes that I had no part in changing. I saw faces of the men I had killed; the sharp grin of the archer, the pathetic grimace of the injured man I had executed for his own comfort, the broken bodies buried in the rubble of the barbican. That I had had good reasons for each offered me no reprieve, and I woke easily with every sound.

  At one point I woke, something feeling off. The room was dark, and I couldn’t tell what had woken me for a moment, but then I heard a sound outside. The door to our room, iron-banded and a heavy latch securing it, creaked open slowly, as if the person on the other side was trying their best to be stealthy.

  My fang dagger was in my hand before I knew it, and I was suddenly crouching, blood pumping as I crept forwards along the line of the wall behind the door. I made sure to stay out of reach were it to swing open, and waited for the intruder to sneak further inside.

  The moment the silhouette slipped in through the door, I punced on them, shoving them hard into the wall and trying to force my dagger up under the crook of their throat, determined to silence them should they so much as twitch.

  A grip like a steel vice caught my hand though, and soon my dagger was forced to one side, Vera’s cool gaze appraising me. There was a flush to her face and neck, and her hair was mussed and chaotic, but it was unmistakably Vera, and I stepped back in shock.

  She hissed at me. “Lamb! What was that?!”

  “I…errr. Sorry, I thought you were…an intruder?” I half-asked, somewhat embarrassed by my over-reaction to someone coming into our room. Good that it was Vera, since I hadn’t exactly taken the time to figure out who they were before threatening them.

  Rather than castigate me for my stupidity and recklessness though, her face softened. “It will be like that for a while, I expect. Not easy for your body to turn off those instincts,” she said, and I nodded.

  Who had I thought it would be? Assassins in the night? Varice creeping back in to take my arm truly this time? Markas, with his cold, serpentine eyes? The archer claiming vengeance, or Duke Ryonic, determined to make me beg for death?

  I stepped carefully back over to my bedroll, retrieving a long blanket, and wrapping it around my shoulders as Vera watched me.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I said, and made for the door.

  “Wait,” I heard as I felt a hand grasp my forearm.

  I turned back to Vera, and she handed me a cloak, dark and fur-lined around the neck, a deep hood nestled on top. I took it gratefully and then noticed once more her dishevelled appearance. The lines on her hard face were softer somehow, her lips twitching as if supressing a smile with every moment.

  “Who-” I began to ask, before stopping myself in realisation. “Fandar?”

  She looked momentarily surprised. “I…yes. That obvious?”

  “Aye. Well you fought together, and I thought I was picking up some tension back in the Marshes. You’ve just won a great victory, similar demands on your shoulders…plus, there’s not many other options,” I said with a smile. “That Jassine lad is a contender maybe. You seen those shoulders? Man’s almost as broad as you!”

  I saw the exact moment she decided to punch me.

  I slipped out the door with a small squeak and chucked a wink her way once I was beyond her reach. She gave me a hard glare and then a quick smile to let me know it was all in jest, and then I turned and headed for the wall, my smile already faltering.

  Bantering was fun, but I didn’t truly have the heart for it today. Too many thoughts swirling through my mind, too much thinking to do to truly relax. There would be no more sleep for me this night, I knew that much, at least.