The harvest festival had grown loud. More minstrels were brought in, leading the low class guests in songs like swaths of oarsmen wielding wine in their calloused hands. Even the princess’s favored skald was there, paying a visit to Aisha. He had nothing but compliments for the expectant mother, more than some of which were because talking to her excused him from repeating the most common songs of the north for the thousandth time.

But of course, this meant it was nearly time for the feasting to begin, for all those of highest station to arrive and sit and allow the politics to swarm around them. Word had already come that the king was to arrive, bringing Kassandra with him, and that meant all others who wished to eat would have to appear. A clamor of horns forced the minstrels to shut their mouths and hold their strings, so that the usher could bellow out the titles and names of perhaps the second most important family in all of Vassermark.

The warden of the north, the shield that protected against Skaldheim, Danyl Ashe strode through the middle of the hall, his sister-in-law Irina upon his arm. He said not a word, smiling to his many allies and rivals as he passed by Lucius’ seat. He spared the boy a knowing smile, then sat down at the king’s table upon the left, opposite where Prince Gabriel had settled in with the Feugards.

Trailing behind him entered a trio of his children. At center were the two flowers of Jarnmark. Annika the elder, garbed in a dress of blue striped with black, walked with the Montisferro boy on her arm. He took the shield position of the entourage, as though he might draw out his fencing saber like a back handed rogue and fend off attackers when in truth he knew more of economics than violence. Frederika wore a dress that both matched in cut and contrasted in color, slashing her blues with white, for a quite clear symbolism. The man on her arm was merely a boy, still fat in the cheeks and plagued by the red ravages of puberty. Their little brother Andrey could barely manage himself in his formal attire, squirming away from so many eyes upon them.

Indeed, almost the entire feast hall watched and gossiped, save for Aisha. She realized who they were and consequently whose table she and Lucius sat at before they arrived. She snarled at her beloved who had withheld such information for so long, but he had already risen to pay his respects to the ladies who had tormented him as a child.

“My thanks for the honor of this invitation,” Lucius said, placing a hand to the table between them.

The girls kept their chins up, eyes searching through the hall and spying upon one person after the next. Their words were for him however, “You’ve been a distant ally to the family, and a wonderfully successful one at that.” Annika seated herself as did her fiance, her hand on his.

Frederika sat, utterly ignoring her kid brother. She held herself with a degree of self-regard only possible for one who could have the prince’s hand in marriage if she so chose. That was, of course, why Gabriel gnashed his teeth at Lucius’ provocation. The ties between Ashe and Montisferro were old and economically established, a union between provincial military might and courtly management. Annika’s marriage was a soft and pleasant affair between childhood friends while Frederika was tasked with expanding the family’s influence and that could not possibly mean having an interest in such a rural nobleman as Lucius von Solhart. Any rational assessment came to such a conclusion. At most the schemers of Vassermark wondered if my pupil would be tempted by unfulfillable promises into laboring even harder for them.

Had any of them listened to what came out of her mouth, they would have been flabbergasted.

“It’s been years, hasn’t it? Do you remember me?”

She was probing on a question of earlier festivals, when she and the original Lucius had met briefly. The two were close in age, but of such vastly different statuses that nothing came of it. Alas, the boy donned a distant expression as he answered, “How could I forget?” For, in his mind were the two girls that had dressed him up as a mummery knight.

She leaned on the table, eyes on him alone but it was a scrutinizing gaze. “Father never imagined you would accomplish so much. It seems the whole world underestimates your stigmata.”

He was sorely tempted to say to her face that if her father had realized anything, he wouldn’t have been sent out into the woods with naught but a sword. He said, “I’ve put it to good use for the kingdom.”

“Father says,” she continued, “that all stigmata are unique. Have you heard of this? That even the blessings that seem different are in fact subtly different. He says that it’s the work of the Shepherd to return these blessings back to the living after the owner dies.”

Annika chimed in to say, “Foreign knowledge, but not contradicted by the temples.”

“What do you think of that?” Frederika asked.

This was a subject I had never broached with the boy, because it hardly mattered. He couldn’t die to pass on his stigmata elsewhere and without the utmost care in analysis and record keeping it would be impossible to know for a fact that a specific stigmata had reincarnated and not merely a similar ability. Nobody has ever offered an experimental measure of how long the reincarnation process might take, rendering the hypothesis scientifically rubbish.

Lucius said, “I just fought a man that could make his own arena for dueling. I’ve never seen nor heard of someone else with that power, and it seems to me like the kind of stigmata people would make note of.”

“Sir Rodrick was of the upper class,” she said, quite ignorant of the paladin’s humble roots. “What if the previous person blessed was a serf? Or a slave in Giordana? They could have been a farmer in Aillesterra or one of the savage swamp men of Skaldheim. If that were the case, how would anyone hear of their ability?”

Lucius shook his head. “You’re arguing for ignorance and making assumptions. Someone with a truly spectacular stigmata would go and make a name for themselves.”

“If they had the chance,” she said, cutting in like a saber blade. “What if the last person to have your stigmata was just a boy sold to a circus? Kept as a freak to grift money out of merchants?”

The casual amicability he had covered his face with cracked and failed him. Part of him had hoped that she would recognize the boy she had tormented so long ago and part hoped to leave the past behind. To be obliquely accused of profiting off of his own death was like a cavalry ambush to an unprotected flank.

In a tone cool and quiet, he asked, “If the boy had my stigmata, how would he have died?”

“You’re not actually unkillable. You can’t be. You’re not a god. If you were eaten by a dragon, you’d die or do you think you’d pull yourself together out of his bowels?”

Lucius found himself snarling at his host. “That’s certainly not something I plan to find out.”

The Montisferro boy cleared his throat and reached across the table to pick up a distant flagon of wine. “Lucius,” he said, his voice booming over their conversation as he smiled. “How did you deal with that Rodrick? A one on one fight, man to man, a proper duel in the middle of a grand battle. It’s the stuff of stories!”

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Lucius let out his breath and reminded himself that he wouldn’t be at the table for long. All expectations were that he was to regale the king with the grand battle. With the skill taught to him by that circus so long ago, Lucius pulled his attention around to the savior of the conversation. “I had the good fortune of studying it at a distance before I had to confront the man. In truth, I’m not sure what would have happened if I had charged in and forced a fight with him. I realized later that the worst thing that could happen would be trapping me in a stalemate while the armies fought it out. His sub-commanders stood a good chance of out maneuvering mine. The final confrontation… well… that wasn’t a particular concern, but the first rout was nearly a catastrophe.”

Some days after the confrontation at the river, both sides had fully marshaled their armies onto the chosen valley, which left Lucius plagued by the feeling that he had been manipulated. Unfortunately, this was partly my doing. The way I had left for Bièremarché had implied that I had other schemes afoot, which I did. He made the mistake of thinking that I might have been playing both sides, because they had chosen their path exactly as if I had been the one to train their commander.

Nothing came of that, save that Lucius found himself faced with an improvised palisade of carriages and carts, cobbled into the stony walls of a foothill valley. Cut through the middle of it was a stream that Rodrick dared not dam up, but if the boy tried to march an army through it then they would have been cut to pieces by arrows and slings from above.

No ordinary commander would have chosen such a place to siege up, but Rodrick was not looking for a prolonged siege. He needed a confrontation just as Lucius needed one, so he sat his army where the boy would be sorely tempted to leave the command of his main force to another and climb his way through the cliffs. Perhaps he might go in the dead of night, with a few dozen of his wastelanders at his back to strike fire to the supply wagons and incinerate the plundered supplies of grains. He could cut his way in like a rude assassination band, aiming for Rodrick’s throat directly.

As it turned out, the boy resisted such temptation nearly by accident.

His sister, who he had dragged along in the supply chain, had taken ill the night before. Lupa conflated the girl’s symptoms with her own and thought she had been the one to make Aria fall sick. This minor burden was enough that when one of his Giordanan sub-commanders offered to lead a vanguard raid through the southern mountains, Lucius assented.

Later, he would learn that no fighting at all had occurred by those Giordanan mercenaries, because they had been confronted by Ismael and they spent the day arguing and insulting one another. Punishments were later doled out, but not too harshly. The fact remained that they had occupied nearly a thousand men of the rebel forces and taken no injuries. Unapproved diplomacy could only be frowned upon so much.

Prolonging the fight would only give the advantage to the defender in this circumstance. The day that Lucius arrived, with the mountains providing a streaked and snowy backdrop, was the weakest that Rodrick’s fortifications would ever be. The men were hard at work moving boulders, felling trees, and turning the river valley into a temporary fortress and they certainly had enough food to sit on their spears until winter.

Golden provided his advice on the fortifications, his eyesight still greater than a regular human’s despite his divine demotion. He, Lucius, and the remaining sub-commanders spent an hour bickering over paths and responsibilities before Raymi’s appointee of the Vassish soldiers declared that he would push through the gut of the enemy. Golden had spotted a span along one of the cascading ridges, that fed down to the river like terraces, a region defended by toppled hand-carts. They were shoddily built in the first place, and weather worn from the journey. A stern press by a shield formation would smash through them better than any other, so a heavy force of infantry was nominated.

The attack began at noon, while the mercenaries clambered through the hills to flank. At the time, Lucius had two working canoneer units, but transporting the weapons was a laborious process of pack animals and easily assaulted. The focus had to be upon the initial hammer blow, and so Lucius himself marched with the heavy infantry. In close ranks, the Vassish locked shields like the shell of a tortoise and advanced. Skirmishers harried the other fortifications, intent on stopping any flanking action from reaching the heavy infantry. Naturally, a flanking maneuver couldn’t be stopped forever, but if the assault took more than a moment then the strategy would fail.

Lucius marched in the second row, carrying a long shield overhead. Arrows bounced off the wood when they were still a hundred paces out. They broke through even the leather cladding when they were fifty paces out. Men began to catch steel in their necks at twenty-five paces. That was when they charged. As one, the disciplined men of Vassermark hammered forward. A whoop of valor reverberated in the valley as each man braced against the man in front of him. Together, they smashed into the poor fortification and barreled through it. Men screamed, some falling down the ravine as steel began to clash.

Lucius could see only over the shoulder of the man in front of him, a small window to the battlefield. Through that, he tried to shout commands, but he could only hear the men at the sides exchange stabs with spearmen while more arrows pelted the formation.

Then Rodrick bellowed, “I challenge thee!” At once, his stigmata erected a barrier, encircling himself and one of his comrades. The forced arena sat dead in the middle of the path Lucius’ formation was set to take and their shields slammed up against, breaking like waves against a rock.

None of the Vassish were injured by it, but they were baffled by the arcane barrier. It took their attention away from the archers. That moment of success broke the spell. The requirements of the challenge depend on both combatants recognizing the other as an enemy and such a fiction could only be fleeting between allies. The wall faltered just as soon as the heavy infantry formation dispersed against it.

The paladin swung his sword tip at the nearest Vassishman. Again he bellowed, “I challenge thee!” and again the barrier was thrown up. It cut him out of the pack like a sheepdog pulling a ewe. And that barrier stayed up. Scared and uncertain of Rodrick’s power, the frontmost infantryman found himself alone and no amount of shouting for Lucius could get through his fog of trepidation.

Lucius had understood enough of the spell at once. What had seemed like weakness had been strength. Rodrick had pulled the Vassish into a trap. For as long as it took the paladin to lazily duel but a single infantryman, the formation could not advance without clambering up or down a level of the ravine. They were stuck against their enemy’s wall while archers waylaid them.

Corpses mounted, forcing the shield formation to contract and shrink, trampling over the bodies of their friends while the other forces threw themselves at the stronger fortifications. His troops were amassing nearly as many kills, but diluted across the battlefield. Blood fouled the river as Lucius slammed the butt of his sword against Rodrick’s barrier.

The paladin toyed with the infantryman. He turned spear thrusts aside, circling around him and dragging out the fight. He made it look easy, demonstrating the skill of a swordmaster. He even had the luxury, feigned I believe, to look at Lucius directly. He smirked and spoke to him, still toying with the soldier who had by then been nicked and bled almost to death. “Where’s the wizard, boy? Our fight is with him.”

Again, Lucius slammed the pommel of his blade against the barrier, finding no luck in cracking it through strength. “Your fight is with me.”

One of the Aillesterrans leapt up on a rock behind the barrier. “The wizard is gone,” he announced.

Rodrick wheeled on the foreigner, earning himself a cut to the thigh that almost sent him to the ground. A wicked slash of his blade shattered the infantryman’s spear shaft, and as the Vassishman recoiled, Rodrick shouted, “Throw the fire!”

With that command, the simple exchange of man to man in melee combat, even the exchange of missiles, ceased to matter. Artillery from both sides was lobbed. The rebels threw bottle after bottle of oil until the ground was mud and strewn with glass, but also they threw one of the Cyclops’ concoctions, a sticky and foul smelling brew of everfire. Greasy smoke rose up like curtains to the sky as some few men found their clothes ablaze. No amount of rolling or water put out the fire that had clung to them as fur does to hide.

And at the same time, Lucius’ first cannon was hammered. The percussion launched steel splinters through the wooden fortification, in turn creating more splinters. Nearly a hundred men, bunched up for volleys of arrow, fell victim to the destruction. Some died of blood loss and were left where they lay. Most died over the next few weeks while the army fled across the countryside and tetanus set in, for the grapeshot had been neglected, and a blight of rust coated the ammunition.

In the final tally, Lucius suffered one hundred deaths of his forces, and some few hundred more injuries, many of which led to dismissals. The dead taken from the rebels ultimately numbered four hundred and this great victory was reported by way of military bulletin back to Vassermark, along with several convoys of captured grain.