"Sable," said Ren. "Ride back to the fort. Wake the Ninth. Every soldier, every weapon, every hammer and crowbar and saw you can find. Bring them here at a run."
Sable was already sliding back from the edge of the cliff. "And the peasants?"
"They stay. Tell Wren she's in charge of the camp."
"She'll like that." Sable hesitated. "Warden, it's eighteen miles. Even running, we won't be here before midmorning. That column will be across the bridge by dawn."
"No, it won't," said Ren.
Sable looked at him. Then she looked at the wooden span across the gorge, and at Hob, and back at Ren again.
"You're out of your mind," she said, and ran for her horse.
***
The sun came up gray and cold over the Greywater gorge.
The Varenhal column had stopped for the night on the switchbacks above the far end of the bridge. Nobody crossed a narrow bridge over a sixty foot drop in the dark. Ren had been counting on that. Now, in the first light, he could see them waking up. Thousands of men stirring along the road like a field of wheat in the wind. Banners going up. Horses being saddled.
The scouts came first. Six riders on fast horses, trotting down the last switchback and onto the stone arch on the north side.
They reached the edge of the wooden span and stopped.
Kuroda Ren was standing in the middle of it.
He'd been there for an hour. Alone, with his sword in its sheath and his hands empty at his sides. Behind him, out of sight underneath the south end of the span, Old Hob was hanging from a rope with a borrowed hammer, working at the first of the great iron pins that held the timbers to the stone.
The scouts stared at him. One of them reached for his bow.
"Kneel," said Ren.
All six horses went down. Not the men. The horses. They folded up on the stone arch and lay there trembling, and the riders tumbled off and scrambled back, and one of them screamed something up the road.
Ren waited.
It took the column twenty minutes to send someone who mattered. He watched the gold banner come down the switchbacks, slow and steady, surrounded by knights in silver mail. It stopped at the edge of the wooden span.
Ser Brannoc swung down from his gray horse. He walked out alone onto the span until he was ten feet from Ren, and stopped.
He looked older. Thinner. There was a new cut on his cheek, half healed, and his steel armor was dull and scratched. He looked at Ren for a long time without saying anything.
"Boy," he said finally.
"Ser Brannoc."
"You've grown."
"I've leveled."
"That's not what I meant." Brannoc's eyes moved over him. The black tabard. The scraped crossguard. The ash still in the creases of his knuckles from Halden's Ford. "They told us in Solenne you'd crossed. Gone over to the Empire. I didn't believe them."
"Why not?"
"Because I watched you in the yard. You're not a traitor." The knight's jaw worked. "You're something worse. You're a man who doesn't care whose side he's on."
Ren didn't answer that.
"Why are you here?" he asked instead. "You trained heroes. You didn't lead armies."
Brannoc laughed. It was a short, ugly sound with no humor in it at all. "I spoke up for you, boy. In the Hall of Judgment. In front of the king and the High Seraph. The day after you ran, I was relieved of the yard and sent to the front with a column of conscripts and orders to take this bridge." He shrugged. "The High Seraph has a long memory."
Ren looked past him, at the army filling the road.
"I'm not going to let you cross," he said.
"I know."
"I'll kill you if I have to."
"I know that too." Brannoc looked at the wooden span under his feet, at the black timbers and the white water roaring far below. Then he looked back at Ren. "I owe you something, for the yard. For what that Saionji boy tried to do while I stood there. So here's what I'll do. I'll give you until noon. Take your sword and go back to your Empire, and no one in this column will follow you."
"And if I'm still here at noon?"
"Then I'll come across." Brannoc turned to walk back. "Noon, boy. Don't be stupid."
***
The Ninth arrived an hour before noon.
Ren felt them before he saw them. Not through the bond. Through Command, the strange sense of the battalion as one body, getting closer and closer down the road from the south until he could have pointed at every one of them with his eyes closed. Then they came pounding out of the trees, three hundred of them, gasping, staggering, carrying axes and saws and crowbars and every rope in Fort Calder, with Garrick in the lead and a sledgehammer the size of a tree stump on his shoulder.
"Warden," Garrick wheezed. "Eighteen miles. You owe me."
"I know," said Ren. "Hob needs you under the bridge."
The plan was simple, because Hob said simple was the only kind that worked with soldiers who'd been running all morning.
The wooden span was narrow. Six men across at most. Two thousand men could only come at them six at a time. The Ninth would make a wall of bodies at the south end, three ranks deep. Sable's thieves, the ones with any skill at all with a bow, would spread along the cliffs on either side of the gorge and shoot down into the column as it tried to cross.
And underneath, Garrick and Hob and thirty others would cut through the pins. Slowly. Carefully. Not all the way.
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"We bring it down when they're on it," Hob said. "Not before. If we drop it now, they go upriver and find another way around, and they're behind the fort in two days. We need them to commit. We need them on the bridge."
Hob looked at the column. Then at the Ninth, still gasping on the grass.
"A day," he said. "If we're lucky."
At noon, the trumpets blew on the far side of the gorge.
***
They held the first day.
It was the worst thing Ren had ever seen. Worse than the river gate. Worse than the training yard. The Varenhal soldiers came across the span six at a time, shields up, spears leveled, and the Ninth's front rank met them with old shields and new swords, and men screamed and died and fell. Some of them fell off the edge. They didn't scream any less on the way down.
Ren fought in the front rank.
He couldn't hold a line from behind it. Command worked better when he was close. The soldiers on either side of him fought five percent harder, and he could feel the strength flowing out of him into them like water into dry ground. He used Kneel every thirty seconds, on whoever was strongest in the next row coming across, and the Ninth killed them while they were down.
By sunset, the span was slick with blood, and the Varenhal column had pulled back to the north side.
The Ninth had lost nineteen.
Ren had gone up three levels without noticing.
Level 20.
That night, they could hear the column on the far side of the gorge. Singing. Praying. Hob didn't sleep. He stayed under the bridge with a lantern and Garrick's hammer, checking the pins one by one.
"They'll come at dawn," he said. "And they'll come with everything. They know we're tired."
"Are the pins ready?"
"Three more and it goes. I could do them in a quarter hour." The old man looked at Ren. "Then it's up to you when."
***
They came at dawn. With everything.
Priests first. Ren hadn't known there were priests in the column. Twenty of them, in white robes, walking out onto the stone arch on the north side in a line. They raised their hands together, and the light came.
It wasn't fire. It was worse. A wall of white light, so bright it hurt, rolling across the wooden span like a wave. It hit the Ninth's front rank, and men screamed and fell back clutching their eyes. Ren felt it hit him too. It washed over him and he braced for the pain, and it never came.
Oathbreaker of Radiance. Resistance to holy magic.
He was the only one still standing in the front rank.
Behind the light came the Radiant Knights. Forty of them. Silver armor, white tabards, swords out, charging across the span in a solid wedge with Brannoc's gold banner in the middle.
The Ninth's line broke.
Ren felt it break. Through Command, he felt the whole battalion flinch at once, like a body flinching from a burn. The front rank was blind. The second rank was stepping back. Somebody threw down his shield and ran. Then somebody else.
They were going to lose.
Ren didn't think. He just turned around, faced the Ninth, and shouted it as loud as he'd ever shouted anything.
"Swear to me!"
They stopped.
"I can't make you strong enough!" Ren shouted. "Not like this! Swear to me, and I can! Swear to me and live!"
For one second, nobody moved.
Then Marla, who'd stolen a horse, dropped to one knee in the blood on the bridge. Then the man beside her. Then three more. Then ten.
Oath offered. Accept? Yes. Oath offered. Accept? Yes. Yes. Yes.
The doors flew open one after another, so fast he couldn't count them. Candles lit all down the line, dozens, then more than dozens, rushing through him like a river breaking through a dam.
Sworn souls: 90.
Sworn souls: 98.
Sworn souls: 104.
Dominion: Tier 2.
Skill gained: Black Banner (Active). Raise your banner. All who fight beneath it within sight gain +15% to all stats. Enemies who see it must test their Will against your Authority, or know fear.
Ren didn't have a banner.
Garrick came up out of the gorge on his rope like a bear coming out of a cave. He saw Ren's face. He didn't ask. He ripped the black tabard off his own back, tied it to the shaft of a broken Varenhal spear, and threw it.
Ren caught it. He raised it over his head.
"Black Banner," he said.
It felt like the whole world tilted.
The Ninth roared. Not a cheer. A sound like an animal waking up. The blind men in the front rank stood up and raised their shields again without seeing, and the men who'd run turned around and came back, and the whole line surged forward together into the Radiant Knights like they'd never been tired in their lives. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
On the bridge, the knights faltered. Ren saw it happen. He saw them look up at the black rag on the broken spear, and he saw their faces change. Not all of them. Maybe half. Half was enough.
The wedge broke apart. The Ninth drove it back, step by step, across the wooden span. Back toward the north. Back into the middle.
"Hob!" Ren shouted. "Now!"
Under the bridge, Garrick swung the sledgehammer three times.
The span screamed. A long, groaning, splintering sound, like a tree coming down. The black timbers in the middle of the gorge shuddered, and sagged, and then broke apart all at once and fell sixty feet into the white water, and took two dozen Radiant Knights with them.
The Ninth stopped on the stone arch at the south end, staring down.
When the noise of it faded, there was a gap thirty yards wide across the Greywater. On the far side, the whole Varenhal column was standing on the road, frozen.
And on the near side, standing alone on the stone arch among the bodies, was Ser Brannoc.
He'd made it across. He'd been at the front of the wedge. He stood there with his sword in his hand and the gold banner at his feet, looking at the empty air behind him where his army used to be.
Then he turned around and looked at Ren.
***
It was a short fight. Ren had known it would be.
Brannoc was Level 31. Ren was Level 21 now, and he couldn't remember the last two level ups. But under the Black Banner, his stats were half again what they'd been at dawn, and every sworn soul in the Ninth was a thread of strength running into him.
He tried Kneel once. Brannoc staggered. He didn't fall. His Will was too high.
Then they crossed swords, and Ren saw something he hadn't expected.
He knew Brannoc's forms. He'd seen them once, on the first day in the yard, when the old knight had shown the summoned heroes the basic cuts. Once. Sovereign's Instinct had remembered every one. He could see each of Brannoc's swings start, and he knew where it was going, because he'd watched the man who taught it demonstrate it on a wooden post.
On the eleventh exchange, Ren used one of them against him. A low cut, turning into a high one. Brannoc's own move, done faster.
Brannoc's sword went flying. It spun over the edge of the bridge and fell into the gorge.
The old knight stood there, empty handed, breathing hard. He looked at Ren's sword at his throat.
"I taught you that," he said.
"You showed it once."
"Once." Brannoc almost smiled. Then he slowly lowered himself to his knees on the bloody stone. "I yield, boy."
Ren looked at him for a long moment.
"Garrick," he said. "Tie his hands. Gently."
Level up. Level 22.
They counted the dead while they waited. Thirty nine of the Ninth, over two days. Ren made himself learn every name.
And one by one, while they counted, the rest of the battalion came to him. The ones who hadn't sworn in the middle of the fight. They didn't make speeches. They just knelt in the blood on the stone where their friends had died, and put their hands on the ground, and waited for him to say yes.
By the time the sun was high, every soldier of the Ashen Ninth still alive had sworn.
Sworn souls: 304.
Dominion Share: +12 to all stats.
***
The Imperial cavalry arrived an hour later.
Two hundred lancers in polished red, coming up the road from the south at a gallop. Marshal Vex rode in front of them on a black warhorse. He reined in at the end of the bridge and looked at the gap in the span, and the Varenhal column still standing frozen on the far side of the gorge, and the Ninth sitting in the blood on the stone, too exhausted to stand.
Then he looked at Ser Brannoc, kneeling with his hands tied.
His face changed.
"Brannoc," he said softly. "Brannoc of Solenne."
Brannoc looked up at him. "Gorran."
"Do you know who this is?" Vex swung down from his horse. He was looking at Ren, but his milky eye was fixed on the kneeling knight. "This man killed my son. At the siege of Tollan. Eleven years ago." He drew his sword. "Stand aside, Warden."
"No," said Ren.
Vex stopped.
"He yielded," Ren said. "He's my prisoner."
"Your prisoner." Vex's voice went very quiet. "Your prisoner. You refuse my orders at the gate. You keep your peasants. You keep your paper. And now you stand between me and the man who killed my son." He raised his sword hand, and behind him, two hundred lancers lowered their lances. Up on the cliffs, Ren heard the sound of crossbows being cocked. Vex's men. More than he'd counted. "You are a traitor to the Ardent Empire, Kuroda Ren. Stand aside, or I'll kill you both."
Ren didn't move.
He felt it before he saw it. Through the bond, through all three hundred and four of them, a single feeling rising at once. Not fear. Something harder.
Behind him, Garrick stood up.
Then Sable. Then Hob, with his bad knees. Then Marla, and the man beside her, and the next one, and the next, until the whole Ashen Ninth was on its feet on the stone arch at the end of Greywater Bridge, exhausted, bloody, filthy, swaying.
Two hundred and sixty swords rose together.
Every one of them was pointed at the Empire.