Nightfall found Garrick crouched at the mouth of the hidden trail with three other fighters beside him, watching the last traces of daylight fade from the ridge above the bandit camp. Below them, firelight flickered between rough timber structures, and the murmur of voices carried faintly on the wind."Quiet from here," Ilsa had told them before they split off, and Garrick repeated it to himself now like a promise.They moved single file down the narrow path, careful of loose stone, until the trail opened onto a rough shelf overlooking the camp from behind. Below them, a crude holding pen came into view, fenced with sharpened stakes, and inside it Garrick could make out shapes huddled together in the dark. A woman rocking a small child. An old man sitting with his back against the fence, unmoving except for the slow rise and fall of his chest."Two guards on the pen," whispered one of the fighters beside Garrick, a lean woman with a short bow already strung. "I can take the near one c

The report reached Zephar's desk a day after leaving Ravenford, carried by a raven, and by the time Kaelor himself arrived at the frontier town, the celebration over the rescued caravan had already faded into ordinary market noise. He didn't stop at the guild hall. He didn't ask questions of the townsfolk still trading stories about the mysterious young swordsman who'd found the hidden trail into the bandit camp. He rode straight through Ravenford and out the northern gate toward Blackstone Pass itself, understanding, as few others would have, that rumor told him nothing a battlefield couldn't tell him better. The pass was quiet when he reached it, the wreckage of the ambushed caravan still scattered where it had fallen, scavenging birds startling into the air as his horse picked its way through the wagons. He dismounted near the abandoned bandit camp beyond, where the real fighting had happened, and began his work with the patient, methodical attention of a man who had learned lon

Garrick spent the rest of that first day working the crumbled section of wall Brenric had shown him, learning stonework through trial and clumsy error, watching how the older man fitted each piece to bear weight evenly rather than simply stacking rubble into something that merely looked solid."Not like that," Brenric said, catching Garrick's third attempt at wedging a stone into place. "You're thinking about filling the gap. Think about what happens to this wall in a storm instead. Every piece needs to hold its neighbor up, not just sit there looking useful."Garrick adjusted the stone as instructed, felt it settle with a solidity the previous attempts had lacked, and looked up to find Brenric nodding, satisfied."There. You'll get faster with practice."By evening, a section of wall stood straighter than it had in years, and Garrick's hands ached with an honest kind of tiredness he found he didn't mind at all. One of the other men working alongside him, a retired soldier with a limp

The first rider reached the base of the wall just as Garrick brought his sword down in a clean arc, catching the man across the shoulder as he tried to scale the crumbled stonework, and the rider fell back with a cry that was quickly lost in the general chaos of the assault.Beside him, the retired soldier's arrows found their marks with steady precision, one rider after another dropping before they could gain any real foothold, but more kept coming, and the defenders' numbers were thin enough that every fallen enemy bought only moments of relief before the next wave arrived."East section's buckling!" someone shouted from further along the wall, and Garrick spared a glance to see two riders had managed to force their way through a gap, cutting down a farmer who'd tried to hold the line with nothing but a pitchfork.Garrick abandoned his position without hesitation, sprinting along the wall's uneven top toward the breach, and dropped down into the courtyard just as one of the riders t

Kaelor reached the tree line overlooking Stonehaven just as the eastern sky began to pale toward dawn, reining in his horse at a careful distance and studying the fortress walls with the same patient thoroughness he'd applied to every battlefield and hunting ground he'd ever worked.He didn't approach directly. He tied off his horse and moved the rest of the way on foot, circling the settlement's perimeter in the gray predawn light, noting the guard rotations, the gaps in the wall still unrepaired from the raid, the exact positions where sentries stood watch and where their attention inevitably wandered as exhaustion from the previous night's battle caught up with them.He found what he needed near a stand of trees close to the settlement's eastern edge, where two figures moved through the underbrush gathering fallen branches for the morning fires, their attention fully absorbed in the mundane task and nowhere near alert enough for what was coming.Kaelor moved without hesitation, clo