For five days, the mortars had spoken with mighty voices. No gatehouse of West Reaches had been spared. Once proud towers were now pockmarked, and the south-western one had its tower reduced to rubble, making its portcullis impossible to retract.

  As the afternoon darkened into evening, no moonlight shone down from above. Stepping into the big tent, Stewart felt crowded for the first time within it. The wolves, all over seven feet tall and showing decidedly draconic traits now that he knew what to look for, took care of their weapons and armor.

  When Astrid saw Stewart, she dipped her head to him but kept buckling on her adamantine plate. Dark cloth, stained with pitch to make it darker still, would make them each even harder to see. As she fastened it to her thigh, she looked back at Hreti. "How long, Sir?" she asked, while Hreti dabbed ink into the fur and scales around her eyes.

  "I've given orders to light a quarter as many torches tonight. Our camp will be poorly lit, and the palisade around the gate you will be attacking will only have one in ten torches lit. You should be able to slip between our lights. If you get that gate open, we'll be charging with everything we have here. As soon as you're ready, we are."

  It was as much as Hilda had provided in the fateful charge at Northridge's gates, only Astrid didn't have to do this. She could have said no. Penelope would have understood, and Stewart didn't seem like the type to order them. "We'll open the city or die trying. If we fail, we'll come back and try again. What about a distraction?"

  "A group of our heavy cannons has been wheeled around to the long section of wall here." Stewart gestured at the map on the central table. "I've also had the mortars from the destroyed gate tower brought around to there. They'll make a start in—" The sound of heavy guns firing cut Stewart off. He saw the feral grins widen on the faces of the draconic wolves. "Good hunting."

  When the King left the tent, Astrid let out a happy sigh. "Are you done with my face?" she asked Hreti.

  "Yeah. Your eyes are not going to be beacons. Want help with that armor?"

  Nodding, Astrid stood and let her pack mate expedite the process of preparing for war. Piece by piece they assembled her armor, packing the edges with blackened cloth to muffle noise. They added weight to her frame, dragging down at her—but it was a familiar mass. It was solidness. It was a fortress around her that nothing could penetrate.

  In her time practicing sword craft in Northridge, Astrid had seen many professionals go about their daily work. Each wore clothing specific to their craft. Her craft, however, was war. These were her work clothes. As they brought her helmet down over her head, working her muzzle into it, her vision was narrowed to a crossed pair of slits. She didn't need to see everywhere, not when she could smell and hear better than most beings.

  By the time they were done, and she'd helped him with his, everyone was ready. She looked around the room and felt the tip of a berserker rage building. The information she had was of a typical Southerner city wall, gatehouse, and kill corridor. It consisted of an outer gate and a portcullis behind it, which Astrid thought was backwards, but it worked. Both would be operated by the gatehouse above them through heavy pulleys and windlasses. Then there was a long kill tunnel that would allow defenders to rain death upon attackers caught within. Finally, a pair of double-thick doors at the city end of the tunnel that were operated from ground level.

  That was, honestly, a relief to her. They had tactics for such places. "We go again to war. There's only two rules tonight: we get those gates open and try not to kill any civilians."

  Getting nods from her pack, Astrid went on. "Hreti, Liv—you two get the gates open. Njal, Trygve—you work with me screening. If you need help with the gates, call out and we fall back to get it done. Everyone knows the charts of the gatehouse. Inner gate, outer gate, and outer portcullis. Inner gate needs to be ripped from its hinges. Portcullis must be raised. Then get that outer gate unbarred and give the signal. Now, let's hear everyone move."

  Turning this way and that, jogging in place, and even shifting their weapons where they were strapped to their bodies, the wolves weren't silent—but they were far quieter than anything their size wearing plate armor should be.

  Satisfied, Astrid said, "Let's go."

  Watching Astrid and her pack leave his tent, Stewart was struck by how they seemed to swallow what little light there was. Torches were scarce and campfires even more so, and yet it felt somehow darker around Astrid's pack. He dipped his head to them as they passed, trying to put some acknowledgment of their bravery into the gesture. They didn't howl, they didn't bay, but each returned a nod to him.

  To the south, the guns sang a never-ending chorus as they pounded the wall. With luck, Stewart thought, they would breach it and Astrid would get the gate open. As they ran through the tents toward the palisades and earthworks, he wished them the best of luck. Turning to his pages, he told them, "You have your assignments. Tell the soldiers to make ready. When the gate is open, or they see a vertical gout of flame above the gate tower, you charge." When they seemed to nervously wait for more commands, he added, "Go."

  When scaling the walls of Northridge, they'd only had hardened steel daggers. The tools had been disposable, meant to be used, broken, and thrown away in the desperate scramble up the wall. Now, Astrid and her pack only carried adamantine tools and weapons. Every edge sharpened and ready to kill or carve through stone equally, and every one smeared with pitch to dull what little flash of light there might be from them.

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  Vaulting low over the palisades, they picked up speed. Astrid felt her blood begin to boil with the killing rage. She let it come—let it pour itself into her body like a welcome friend. The torches and braziers the defenders had on the wall were lit, though there weren't any heads beside them scanning the ground for attackers.

  With every sound amplified, Astrid reached the wall just ahead of Hreti and jumped, climbing daggers out to slam them home into the stonework. Panting now, she jerked her left arm back, levering the dagger out of the stone, reaching up, and slamming it home again higher up the wall. With all her strength behind it, the improvised piton sliced deep into the stone and let her start her climb.

  The wall was high, far higher than Northridge's had been, but all five wolves reached the parapet without being seen—but that ended when a guard in the gate's tower spotted Astrid and Hreti. He paused, terror plain on his face, but even as Hreti threw his climbing daggers at the man, he screamed an alarm.

  Swearing under her breath, Astrid jumped from the huge wall and dropped to the ground inside the city. A pair of thuds behind her signaled Njal and Trygve landing. "Axes ready," she said, drawing a pair of heavy axes herself while they ran along outside the killing tunnel—the inner gates their target.

  While their pack mates rushed the inner gates, Hreti with Liv trailing behind him jumped over the body of the man he'd downed with the throwing daggers to see two with heavy crossbows across the gatehouse, sighting down on him. One bolt slammed into his gorget and the second hit his shoulder. Neither penetrated the adamantine plates he wore.

  When those first two soldiers dropped to their knees, revealing two more behind them with pistols, Hreti rushed forward to make sure that if they were using anything that would penetrate his armor, they would waste both on him.

  The gunshots were loud in the gatehouse, reverberating and stinging at the ears of everyone present. Liv, somewhat shielded from the violent noise by Hreti, dodged around him and with two fast strokes of her arm, deployed her short spear into the chest of one of the gunmen and the neck of a reloading bowman.

  Hreti forsook his weapons being so close to the remaining soldiers and instead punched the remaining gunman and brought his knee up into the throat of the bowman. When the bowman, wobbling, tried to get up—he punched the man again.

  Taking up position at one of the windlasses, Liv looked over to see Hreti on the opposite side. They nodded at each other and each leaned into what would normally take eight strong people to operate, and began hefting the portcullis up its tracks.

  Drawing attention from where Hreti and Liv worked, Astrid reached up to lift the face guard of her helmet and breathed a gout of flame at the first soldiers rushing to stop them. When the man and woman hesitated, she rushed forward and brought each of her weapons around to cleave their heads from their necks, arresting the weapons' movement. Behind her, she could hear Njal and Trygve start working on the gates with their weapons, hacking at exposed hinges.

  The feel of arrows and bullets pinging off their backs didn't slow the pair, and in a few moments they had the bottom hinges torn free and destroyed, at which point they both braced their shoulders and slammed into the heavy, reinforced gates. The weight of the pair combined with their own mass was enough for two loud cracks as the upper hinges broke free too—leaving the exit of the tunnel open.

  So far, a few pikemen, crossbowmen, and riflemen had been the only targets, all of which were either uselessly ineffective or easily put down by Astrid. On the far side of the open courtyard she saw two cannons wheeled into place. As the crews readied to fire them, she turned her back briefly again to take the blast.

  Astrid was hit with both loads from the cannons. Instead of the normal cannonballs, though, a hail of high-speed mini balls struck her hard. Thrown forward, Astrid hit the ground and sacrificed no time standing up or checking on her pack—she spun around on all fours and raced toward the cannons.

  Running through her mind as she neared them was that the pair of guns would probably keep an entire army pent-up in the kill-tunnel. One crew was, inevitably, faster than the other at reloading, so Astrid rounded on the slower cannon crew and ran an evasive path, trying to force the quicker gun crew to turn their weapon to face her.

  With the prospect of a huge wolf woman about to attack their fellow gun crew, the faster of the two groups elected to fire at Astrid. The shot glanced her, but hit one shoulder with enough force to rip her right arm off. To their horror, though, the rest of Astrid didn't slow down.

  Screaming her fury, Astrid reached up and ripped her helmet off—throwing it at the second gun crew and scattering them. She pounced on the first, tearing one man's head off and biting another woman's hand and tearing it free. When two men at the back raised pistols toward her, she breathed on them with a huge gout of flame.

  The explosion of the powder keg going off killed everyone at the site and sent Astrid's corpse flying across the courtyard. The second concussive blast was from the second cannon's stored black powder. Outside the city, even the mortars and cannons hammering the southern wall seemed to pause, but Stewart and his commanders saw the twin flame signal coming from the gatehouse, and as the army began to charge across the no-man's-land, the gates opened.

  Stewart marched into the gatehouse after a few hundred soldiers rushed in to secure it. With his golden barrier up, he covered a swathe of troops rushing in behind him.

  Unlike the siege of Northridge, Stewart had enough soldiers to push into West Reaches and begin claiming streets and sections of wall. The siege had shifted rapidly in one evening. "Where's Astrid?"

  Hreti heard Stewart's question and marched up to him. He pointed at a building to the side of the square. There was little more than a blood stain and holes where Astrid's armor had been ripped off her and sent through the building as shrapnel. "She'll be back in a few days. She paid for your entrance."

  Even knowing she'd be back, Stewart would absolutely grant her several honors for her sacrifice. Breaking the outer defenses of a city was a huge step in a siege, and had pushed his timeline forward by months. She had probably saved tens of thousands of lives with the one act of courage.

  Turning his attention to the matters of securing a larger foothold in the city, Stewart lowered his golden aura and felt a huge weight crush down upon him. West Reaches, he realized, was furious, and the distance from the seat of his power left him struggling to channel enough of the kingdom to fight back. He dropped to one knee, straining to shield his army from the city's wrath.

  The weight lightened when he felt a hand on his shoulder. Looking up at Elanor, Stewart was able to stand again. "This is more of a problem than I feared."

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