Ren stood in the torn grass and stared at the gray line until it faded.
Sworn soul lost.
Not killed. The System had said killed for Edrin Holt. For Mara Sutton. It hadn't said that for Sho. It had just said lost.
Dead, then. Or broken. An oath taken back, or an oath taken from him. Sho in a cell somewhere under the Hall of Radiance, with a seal on his chest. Sho in the river. Sho anywhere.
He didn't know. He couldn't know.
"The duel is over," said a clear voice.
Ren looked up.
Captain Aurelian of the Radiant Order sat on his white horse in front of the silver lines, and he wasn't looking at Ren. He was looking at the row of kneeling villagers. His face was calm and handsome and a little bored.
"The Hero Fujii is dead," Aurelian said. "His terms died with him." He raised one gauntleted hand. "Archers. The prisoners first. Then the demon."
Along the Varenhal line, three hundred bows came up.
***
Hasegawa Tetsuo moved before anyone else did.
He didn't run. He took four long steps across the grass and stopped in front of the kneeling villagers, between them and the army, and slammed his tower shield down into the earth so hard the ground shook.
"Bulwark," he said.
Light came up out of the shield. Not the hard white light of the priests at Greywater. A soft gray glow, like morning fog, that spread out from the edges of the steel and curved up and over, until a dome of it hung in the air above Wren and the twins and every one of the thirty two.
The arrows came down like rain. They hit the dome and stopped, and fell harmlessly into the grass.
The Varenhal line went silent.
"Guardian," said Aurelian. His voice had lost its boredom. "What are you doing?"
"I said they'd walk," said Tetsuo. He didn't turn around. Sweat was already running down his face. Holding the dome against three hundred arrows was costing him. "I said I'd make sure of it."
"You're a hero of the Holy Kingdom."
"I'm a man who made a promise."
Beside him, after a moment, a smaller figure stepped up. Taguchi Goro, the bailiff, in silver armor that didn't fit him well, with a long spear in his hands. His face was white. His knees were shaking. But he planted the butt of his spear in the grass next to Tetsuo's shield and stood there.
"Sentinel's Watch," he said, in a thin voice, and a second line of gray light ran out along the ground from his spear, reinforcing the dome.
Behind them, Endo Mika, the young lay judge with the ring on her finger, ran past both of them, through the gray light, and dropped to her knees beside the villagers. She started sawing at their ropes with a little knife from her belt. Her hands were shaking so badly she cut herself twice.
Rina just stood there. Frozen. Her hands over her mouth.
Aurelian's face went dark. He drew his sword. "Then you'll die with them. All of you. Knights!"
The front rank of Radiant Knights lowered their lances and started forward at a walk. Then a trot.
Ren stood alone in the meadow with his ribs broken and his left arm hanging useless and his sword in his right hand, and watched them come.
He reached inside himself for the hot red thing that had settled under his ribs.
"Bloodrage," he said.
***
The pain went away.
Not gone. Just far off, like it was happening to someone else in another room. His vision went red at the edges. His strength doubled at once, like someone had poured molten iron into his arms. He could feel his Will starting to drain, slow and steady. But his Will was 55. Kenta's had been 18.
He had time.
He walked out to meet the knights.
The first one reached him and he cut the lance in half and the knight off his horse in one stroke. The second one he hit with his shoulder, and the horse went down. The third, the fourth, the fifth. He didn't block. He didn't need to. Sovereign's Instinct read every lance point coming, and Bloodrage made him strong enough to break anything it found.
But there were forty of them. Then sixty. The whole front of the Varenhal vanguard was moving now, three thousand men, coming down the meadow like a wave. He couldn't stop all of them. He couldn't stop half of them.
Then he heard the horn.
It came from the south. From the hill behind him. One long, rough, ugly note, the kind you got from a horn that had been dented in a dozen battles and never fixed.
He knew that horn. It hung from a post by the main fire in the Ninth's stockade.
He turned around.
The Black Ninth came over the top of the hill. All six hundred of them. Shields up, swords out, gray tabards turned black with ash, moving at a dead run down the slope toward the meadow. At their head ran Garrick, with the black rag on a broken spear in both hands, the one from Greywater. And beside him, puffing, his face red, his pipe clenched between his teeth, ran Old Hob.
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"I said nobody follows me!" Ren shouted.
"You did!" Hob shouted back. "And I said I understood! I never said I'd do it!"
Ren laughed. It came up out of him, red and wild, from somewhere he didn't recognize.
"Black Banner!"
The Ninth hit the Varenhal vanguard like a hammer hits glass.
***
Afterward, nobody could tell the story of the battle at Corran's Field the same way twice.
The soldiers of the Ninth said it lasted an hour. The Varenhal prisoners said it was over in ten minutes. Hob, who was the only one with a good view, said both were true. The fighting lasted an hour. The battle was over in ten minutes.
Because ten minutes in, the Varenhal soldiers looked up at the black banner and broke.
Half of them were conscripts. Farm boys from the northern provinces, two months in the army, sent south with Kenta's vanguard to make it look bigger. They'd heard the stories. The demon who killed a Sword Saint on the first day. The demon who held Greywater against two thousand. And now they'd watched him kill Kenta in front of them, and they'd watched him walk into the Radiant Knights alone.
They saw the black banner, and they tested their Will against his Authority, and they lost.
Ren found Aurelian in the middle of it.
The Radiant captain had lost his horse. He was fighting on foot by the lone oak tree, a gold sunburst blazing on his breastplate, cutting down soldiers of the Ninth with a sword that glowed white. He was Level 35. He was good. When he saw Ren, he turned to face him, and his handsome face twisted.
"Demon," he said.
"You broke the terms," said Ren.
"Terms with a demon aren't terms."
Ren's Will was at 31 and dropping. The Bloodrage was still hot in his arms. He let it out.
It was not a long fight.
Kill confirmed. Aurelian, Paladin, Level 35.
Level up. Level 29.
Level up. Level 30.
Level up. Level 31.
***
When it was over, the meadow was quiet.
Ren stood by the oak tree with the black banner in his good hand and let the Bloodrage go. The red slid away from the edges of his vision. The pain came back all at once, his ribs, his arm, everything, and he went down on one knee in the grass and stayed there.
All around the meadow, Varenhal soldiers were throwing down their weapons. Hundreds of them. They knelt in the grass with their hands on their heads while the Ninth walked among them, taking spears and swords and piling them in heaps.
And some of the Ninth were doing more than that.
Ren saw it from where he knelt. A knot of soldiers at the north end of the meadow, chasing down a group of Varenhal boys who'd been running for the trees. One of the boys tripped. A soldier of the Ninth stood over him with his sword raised. The boy put his arms over his face.
The soldier's name was Hal. He'd sworn at Greywater. His brother had been in Millbrook.
Ren felt the candle. Burning hot. Hungry.
He reached for the bond, all of it, every door inside him at once, and he spoke.
He didn't know he could. He just did.
"Stop."
The word didn't go out into the air. It went in. Through the bond. Into every one of them. Six hundred soldiers of the Ninth, and thirty two villagers under a gray dome, and every new candle that was lighting right now as Varenhal soldiers knelt in the grass and offered him their oaths, because they didn't know what else to do.
Across the meadow, every soldier of the Black Ninth stopped moving at once.
Hal stood over the boy with his sword raised. His arm was shaking.
"Let them go," said Ren, inside all of them. "Anyone who runs. Let them run home."
Hal lowered his sword.
The System opened in front of Ren's eyes. Black letters, edged in violet. They burned brighter than they ever had.
Sworn souls: 1,000.
Dominion: Tier 3.
Skill gained: Edict (Active). Speak, and every sworn soul will hear you, wherever they are.
He stayed on his knee in the grass and read it twice.
Then the numbers kept climbing.
Sworn souls: 1,062.
Sworn souls: 1,108.
***
Endo Mika healed his arm an hour later.
She did it without being asked. She just came over to where he sat with his back against the oak tree, knelt down beside him, and put her glowing hands on his broken arm. She didn't look at his face the whole time.
"Thank you," Ren said, when the bone had knitted.
Mika finally looked at him. She was twenty five, maybe. Her ring was a cheap silver band with a little blue stone.
"I didn't do it for you," she said. "I just don't like watching people hurt." She stood up. "That's all I ever wanted to do, back home. Be a nurse. My parents said there wasn't any money in it." She looked out at the meadow. "Now I'm a Cleric in a magic world, healing a demon. They'd be so proud."
She walked away to help with the wounded. Both sides.
Taguchi the bailiff had surrendered his spear to Garrick and sat by the stream with his head in his hands. Rina was gone. She'd called up a wind in the middle of the battle and simply flown, north over the trees, and nobody had seen where she came down.
Wren Halloway was untied, sitting on a rock with one of the twins on each side of her, staring at nothing. A rider from Millbrook had come in an hour before with news that made her put her face in her hands and cry for the first time since Ren had known her. Her daughter was alive. They'd found her asleep in the root cellar under the apple tree, wrapped in a blanket, exactly where Wren had put her when the horses came.
And Hasegawa Tetsuo stood a few yards away, with his shield on his back, looking at Ren.
Ren got up. It hurt. He walked over.
They stood there for a while without saying anything. The wind moved through the meadow grass.
"Ogawa told me," Tetsuo said. "Before they took her. About her hand. About the stone." He looked down at the grass. "Then I watched Mori say it. And I saw her hand close."
Ren didn't say anything.
"I hated you for a year," Tetsuo said. "Every hearing. Every day. You were the only thing I had left of her. Hating you. It was the only thing that made sense." His jaw worked. "Now it doesn't make sense anymore, and I don't know what to put there instead."
"I'm sorry," said Ren.
"Don't." Tetsuo's voice was rough. "Don't be sorry. You didn't do it." He took a breath. "That doesn't make us friends. I want you to understand that. I'm not going to swear to you. I'm not going to fight for your Empire."
"I didn't ask."
"I know." Tetsuo looked up at him. "But I can't go back. Not after today. Aurelian's dead, and Ishida saw what I did, and she'll tell them." He paused. "So I'll stay. For now. Near the villagers. Somebody has to watch them who isn't you."
"All right."
Tetsuo turned to go. Then he stopped.
"Kuroda," he said. "They're going to hang her. At the festival."
"I know."
"Get her out." It came out of him low and hard. "She told the truth. She's the only one who did. Get her out."
"I'm going to," said Ren.
Tetsuo looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded once and walked back toward the villagers by the stream.
***
They raised the banner on the oak tree at sunset.
Garrick did it, climbing up into the branches with the broken spear on his back and lashing it to the highest limb with a rope. The black rag hung limp at first. Then the evening wind caught it, and it snapped out over the meadow, over the six hundred soldiers of the Black Ninth and the five hundred Varenhal prisoners who had sworn to it and the thirty two villagers who had knelt under it and lived.
Across the meadow, every face turned up to look.
Epithet recognized by 300,000+ souls: The Demon Hero.
Ren stood at the foot of the tree and looked up at it.
Nine days, he thought. Nine days until the Festival of Light.
He heard the horse before he saw it. Coming fast from the south, over the hill, the way the Ninth had come. A single rider on a lathered horse, hood up, riding like the road was on fire behind her.
Sergeant Brisa pulled up in front of him and didn't dismount. She held out a letter. The seal was red wax, pressed with a crowned flame.
"From the Empress," she said. "She said to put it in your hand and nobody else's. She said to ride until the horse dropped if I had to."
Ren broke the seal.
It was in the same sharp, slanting script as before. Short. No decoration.
Varenhal has sent an envoy to Kharos to discuss peace. He arrived this morning under a white flag. He is one of your summoned. His name is Mori Daiki.
The Holy Kingdom offers to end the war. Fort Calder, Westmarch and the northern provinces, ceded to the Empire. Eighty years of fighting, over.
Their price is you.
Come to Kharos, Captain.
I have not decided yet.
I.