Adam Swift Pov The smoke didn't smell like pine needles or damp mountain brush anymore. It smelled of scorched lard, burst grain sacks, and burnt hair.I stood on the embankment above the main supply road, five miles south of the pass, watching the third baggage train burn. The fire had gutted the heavy oak wagons down to their iron rims, leaving six pairs of draft oxen lying dead in their traces. Their bellies were swollen, their hide charred black by pitch.Beside me, Voss dropped to one knee, grabbing a handful of slush and smearing it across his face to wash away the ash. He spat into the mud."They didn't touch the iron," Voss said, his voice flat, stripped of the fire he’d carried through the courtyard fight two days ago. He pointed his blood-crusted gauntlet toward a half-burned cart. "Left sixty crate-loads of steel broadswords and iron breastplates to bake in the embers. Didn't even bother to steal the horses. They cut the draft horses' hamstrings and left them in the ditch.

Adam Swift Pov The trail up to Miller’s Gap didn't allow for an army. It was a jagged, ice-choked gutter cut into the granite ribs of the ridge, barely wide enough for two men to march abreast.By three hours past midnight, the fog had come back down off the high peaks, thick as lard and cold enough to freeze the moisture on my eyelashes. We had left two hundred men at the base of the trail under Vance’s command to hold the choke point. I had only taken nine men up the high path—Ethan, Voss, and seven veteran trackers from the battalion’s old scout unit.If Jackson’s toll-house garrison caught wind of us climbing this chimney in the dark, a single thrown boulder would have cleared the whole ledge."Hold line," I whispered, pulling myself up over a frost-slick shoulder of rock.Behind me, Ethan grunted as he hauled William’s old tracker, a grey-bearded scout named Hal, up onto the ledge. We were fifty yards below the outer retaining wall of Miller’s Gap. The old crown toll house sat s

Ethan Hayes Pov The silk lining of my coat was stiff with salted sweat, dry clay, and three days of trail dust that had worked its way into every seam.Two weeks ago, I would have called a servant to burn a garment like this. I would have sat in the sun-drenched library of my father’s town estate, drinking warm spiced wine while an ink-stained tailor measured my shoulders for fresh wool.Now, I stood in the knee-deep weeds behind a collapsed stone hay-barn, scraping dried horse lather off my longsword’s crossguard with a nicked brass spoon."We aren't going to make the river road before dark, Lord Hayes," William said, his voice reduced to a dry, wet rattle.The old soldier sat against a rotten fence post, his right leg stretched out flat in the dirt. The bandage around his thigh was filthy, black with dried blood and grease from the wagon axle we’d used as a temporary splint two miles back. He looked fifty years older than the man who had trained me in the oak-panelled courtyard of

Ethan Hayes Pov The rain returned near midnight, washing the oily black soot from the estate’s outer walls and turning the charred ruins of the garden cedar trees into cold, reeking stumps.We were gathered in the old lower armory—a dry, stone-vaulted cellar buried fifty feet beneath the west wing. It was a room that didn't appear on any of the royal land surveys. The walls were six feet thick, built from local granite and lined with oiled oak racks that had held dust and iron since my great-grandfather’s days in the Border Wars.Adam sat on a low wooden bench near the cold stone hearth, his shirt unbuttoned to the waist. A graying veteran named Miller was stitching a deep cut across his forearm with black silk thread, while Vance held a flickering tin lamp over his shoulder. Adam didn't flinch as the needle bit into his skin; he just sat there, staring blankly at the dark flagstones between his boots, his right hand resting on the horn grip of Voss’s hunting knife.I stood by the ir

Ethan Hayes Pov The Blackwood Turnpike wasn't built for an army. It was a narrow, high-walled slate shelf cut into the limestone bluffs six miles north of the river ford, where the ancient oak timber pressed so close to the road that two hay-wagons couldn't pass without scraping hubs.By two hours before dawn, a wet, suffocating mountain fog had come down off the bluffs, turning the clay ditch into a soup of black grease. We had taken the toll-gate without firing a shot—Captain Vance’s border marksmen had come down through the wet timber on bare feet, slipping over the low stone wall to choke out the Duke’s tax-collectors before they could even strike a flint to their warning beacons.Now, four hundred men of the Western Reserve were hidden in the brush along the upper ridge, their dark leather coats blending into the soaked oak bark like lichen on granite.I stood in the shadow of the abandoned toll-keeper’s hut, scraping thick, yellow clay off the heels of my riding boots with a ni