CHAPTER 785: RETURNING TO THE SUMMER VILLA

In the early morning light just before the sun broke over the eastern hills, Ashlynn stood at the edge of the forest with Ollie, Virve, and the looming figure of Captain Ipiktok. The air was chill enough to turn their breath into small white clouds and a layer of frost covered the tall, swaying grass of the hillside leading up to the Summer Villa.

The Villa itself was exactly as she remembered it and for a moment, Ashlynn and Ollie exchanged a brief look and a slight smile as they remembered the time they spent together in the kitchens here. Despite everything that had happened during Ashlynn’s brief visit to this place half a year ago, something wonderful had begun here.

Now, as they gazed at the curtain wall that wrapped around the hilltop like a discarded scarf made of stone and the grand manor beyond it an entirely different set of feelings slowly took hold. Slowly, their expressions hardened as they counted the men moving up onto the walls, extinguishing watch fires and torches and preparing for a day spent staring nervously at the forest.

"I count twenty men on the walls," Ashlynn said, using vision keener than any human’s to pick out the figures of men half hidden behind the crenellations. "Ten more from the night watch that just stood down. Likely at least another twenty within the walls."

"Who does the banner belong to?" Ollie asked, pointing to the dark green banner flying from the gatehouse towers.

"Sir Cathal Wynn," Ashlynn said as she examined the figure of a mounted knight beneath an apple tree that adorned the banner. "He was here the last time I was," she reminded Ollie. "He fought as one of Bors Lothian’s captains during the War of Inches," Ashlynn added with a glance at Virve.

"Then his life belongs to me," Virve growled, flexing her hands in her darksteel fighting gauntlets. Were it not for the thick leather War Hat on her head, wrapped with a hatband studded with acorns, she wouldn’t have looked different from any of Nyrielle’s other guardsmen, dressed in her familiar armor and carrying the same weapons she had for decades as she protected the Eldritch Lady of the Vale.

Ollie, on the other hand, had changed considerably from the last time he’d been here. Like Ashlynn, he wore a coat of chain mail over a heavy, padded gambeson, but unlike the Mother of Trees, he wore a jade-green tabard over his armor, bearing the symbol of a large iron pot in front of a cypress tree.

Ashlynn had suggested he use his butcher’s cleaver or a chef’s knife as part of his sigil, but Ollie refused. He became a knight by feeding people and he never wanted to forget his days as nothing more than a kitchen boy, no matter how high he rose in the future. Besides, he’d said, the iron pot could be taken as a witch’s cauldron just as easily, making it an emblem that represented both his past and his future.

"We’ll occupy their attention while you hunt, Captain Virve," Ipoktok said in a deep, rumbling voice as he hefted the unfamiliar wooden shield on his arm. "This many men should pose no trouble with Her Dominion’s plan."

"Good," Ashlynn said with a small nod as she pulled the brim of her own War Hat down lower. She wanted to rush forward with Owain and Virve but the opening act belonged to others and she had already done her part to support the initial attack on the fortified manor.

"It’s time," Ashlynn said as she glimpsed the first rays of the sun peeking above the eastern hills. "Captain Ipiktok, charge when ready."

Set back just a hundred paces from the forest’s edge, the rest of Ipiktok’s men clustered around a giant cedar log that had been fashioned into a ram three feet in diameter and more than twenty paces long. The head of the ram had been capped with an iron cone with a rounded tip and heavy chains wrapped around the length of the ram to provide handles for Ipiktok’s Tuscans.

When they arrived at the Summer Villa, Ashlynn had selected a tree carefully to serve as their battering ram before carefully withdrawing the tree’s strength into the core that would become their ram. Branches withered and died and needles rained down on them until only this length of greatly strengthened wood remained.

She did the same thing to another tree, carefully shaping its exterior into ten massive wooden shields two inches thick and stronger than steel to defend the Tuscans from arrows while they charged the wall. She would have liked to provide Ipiktok’s men with proper armor before using them to assault a fortress of any sort, but the smiths had yet to produce enough chain mail for even one of the giants, to say nothing of producing armor for ten of them.

Now, Ipiktok’s men lifted their ram and advanced to the edge of the forest, followed closely by twenty lightly armored men of the Black Wolf Brigade. These men had traded out their old armor for thickly padded gambesons with a layer of small metal plates riveted over their torsos and backs. It wasn’t as protective as a suit of chain, but for the elite skirmishers of Savis’s second army, it was more than enough to give them an edge over the humans they’d be fighting.

"Shields and ram!" Ipiktok shouted as he took his place at the head of the column of giants preparing to charge. The walls ahead of them were thirty feet high, and his men would need to charge uphill to reach them, facing the arrows of the defenders the entire way, but as he held the chain handle of the ram, any doubts he might have had about breaching the gates fell away.

There was power beyond the strength of their muscles and the weight of the log that cried out when he lifted the ram from the ground. This wasn’t just a fallen tree turned into a weapon. It was an engine of war that had been filled with Ashlynn’s desire to tear down and destroy. Now that same desire pulsed within his heart as he lifted his trunk and let out a resounding trumpet blast like the herald of doom.

"CHARGE!" Ipoktok bellowed. "CHARGE AND DESTROY!"