Blood Tithes

The siege tightened like a noose.

Every day, Thornhollow's men crept closer.

Every night, the noose tightened, another knot cinched in silence and frost.

Caer Morlan had become a tomb waiting to seal itself.

Calder Vane stood atop the crumbling battlements, his breath curling in the frozen dawn.

Eyes like splintered iron tracked the enemy movements below — steady, patient, inevitable.

Their food stores had thinned to scraps.

Their blades dulled faster than they could be sharpened.

And every man and woman still breathing inside these broken walls knew — the end was coming.

The only question was how loud they screamed on the way down.

Calder made the decision before breakfast:

Fight.

Fast.

Hard.

Break the siege before it broke them.

No speeches.

No votes.

He gathered the warband with a gesture and a glare, iron-hard orders rattled out sharp as the cold wind:

First group: Saelen Crow-Eater leading, flanking the southern encampment.

Second group: Thann Veyr supporting, hitting supply lines east of the camp.

Calder and Branwen — leading the hammer blow through the exposed western flank.

It wasn't about winning.

It was about bleeding the enemy harder and faster than they could bleed back.

It was about survival, as it always was.

The gates of Caer Morlan opened with a groan of tortured iron.

The warband poured out like broken wolves, teeth bared, blades black with old blood.

Calder led them into the storm.

The first clash was a slaughter.

Thornhollow's outer sentries were half-frozen, their hands stiff on spear shafts, their eyes sluggish with fatigue.

Calder broke the first man's neck with the haft of Dog's Hunger before the fool even registered the attack.

A second lunged with a pike — Branwen caught it on his shield, twisting hard, and Calder cleaved down through the attacker's shoulder with one brutal stroke.

The snow turned slick underfoot, red pooling thick in the frozen ruts.

They hit the main camp within minutes.

Fire.

Steel.

Roaring blood.

Saelen's squad surged from the south, hacking into the confused ranks of Thornhollow's forces like a river tearing through a crumbling dam.

Screams filled the misty air — short, sharp, real.

Thann's men hit the rear, cutting the supply wagons loose, setting fire to tents and fodder piles.

Chaos.

Perfect chaos.

Calder moved through the wreckage with brutal precision.

Dog's Hunger flashed in a relentless rhythm — left shoulder, head, gut, knee — each cut a prayer to the gods of practical murder.

He didn't fight for show.

He fought to kill.

Fast.

Efficient.

Unstoppable.

A mounted knight broke through the smoke, lance leveled at Calder's ribs — Calder sidestepped, grabbed the shaft with one gauntleted hand, and wrenched.

The rider toppled, hitting the ground with a bone-crunching thud, and Calder finished him with a boot pressed hard into the man's throat until it collapsed inward.

Branwen fought at Calder's side without needing orders now.

He had stopped fighting like a noble.

Now he fought like a man who understood the world hated him and wanted to rip the last piece of him free.

A spear clipped Branwen's shoulder — he roared, drove his sword through the attacker's gut, and tore it free with a spray of steaming blood.

Good.

Calder saw it even as he smashed another soldier's face into the frozen mud:

The boy was becoming a weapon.

Maybe too good.

Maybe too fast.

The initial assault broke Thornhollow's outer line.

But reinforcements spilled out from the main siege lines, shouting, rallying, trying to pin the warband between shield walls and cavalry sweeps.

Calder snarled low in his throat.

No retreat.

Retreat was a luxury for men who didn't already have the wolf's jaw closing around their spines.

"Push west!" he barked.

His voice carried through the smoke, slicing through the confusion.

"Break their flank! Don't stop!"

They surged westward.

A wedge of blood and steel driving through the thicker mass of Thornhollow's infantry.

Saelen fought at Calder's left — her sword catching a shield and battering it down before crushing the wielder's skull in a backhanded swing.

Thann moved at the edge of the wedge, bleeding from a slice across his ribs but gritting his teeth and keeping pace.

Branwen slammed his shield into a captain's face, sending the man staggering back into the knives waiting behind them.

Forward.

Always forward.

By the time they reached the ruined treeline, the warband had left a trail of corpses long enough to choke the valley.

Smoke rose in heavy, stinking clouds from the burned tents and smashed supply carts.

But they weren't free yet.

Thornhollow's cavalry regrouped faster than Calder hoped.

The ground shook under the pounding of hooves.

Pennants whipped in the freezing gusts.

Steel glinted.

Calder spun to face his blood-soaked warriors.

No speech.

Only the grim, certain words they needed:

"Kill the horses first."

The cavalry broke over them like a wave.

The first rider came screaming down toward Calder, lance lowered to skewer him clean through.

Calder waited.

One step.

Two.

Then, at the last instant, he pivoted, Dog's Hunger sweeping in a low, vicious arc.

The blade caught the horse across the knees — not the rider — dropping the beast screaming into the mud.

The knight tumbled, hitting the ground hard enough to snap bone.

Calder stomped once — a heavy, final blow — and moved on without sparing a glance.

Around him, the warband broke the charge with blood and fury.

Saelen ripped a rider from his saddle and gutted him before he could scream.

Thann drove his spear into a charging mount's chest, barely leaping aside as it collapsed.

Branwen used his shield not for defense but as a hammer, smashing into legs and flanks, unhorsing men too slow to dodge.

Steel clashed.

Horses shrieked.

Men died — some clean, most not.

The ground turned slick underfoot, a treacherous mire of shattered armor, broken limbs, and blood-soaked snow.

Calder fought with a cold, mechanical brutality.

No wasted movement.

No mercy.

A rider tried to flank him — Calder ducked under the sweep of a sword, drove his dagger up into the rider's armpit, and ripped free with a wet tearing sound.

The man sagged, lifeless, slumping into the mud without a word.

The cavalry charge faltered — broken against the stone wall of sheer, stubborn survival.

Then it broke entirely.

The surviving riders pulled back, dragging their wounded and panicked mounts behind them.

The valley fell into a tense, throbbing silence, broken only by the ragged breaths of those still standing.

The warband gathered at the treeline, bloodied but alive.

Fewer now.

Always fewer.

Calder counted them with a quick, ruthless eye:

Saelen, breathing hard but grinning like a skull.

Branwen, leaning on his shield, cuts striping his arms.

Thann, pale and shaking but upright.

Half a dozen others — the desperate, the stubborn, the dying-but-not-dead.

Dren's absence was a cold hollow at the edge of Calder's thoughts — but only because it made the numbers thinner.

Not because the man was missed.

They had broken the siege's first ring.

Not crushed it.

Not ended it.

But they had carved a wound deep enough to bleed Thornhollow's forces badly.

Deep enough that Calder could feel the desperation creeping into their lines now.

Desperate men made mistakes.

Mistakes meant survival.

As the sun clawed its way down behind the ridges, Calder gathered the warband inside a broken millhouse west of Caer Morlan's main path.

Retreating to the keep would have been safer but predictable. And predictability was a death sentence in the Marches. Calder decided to push what little advantage his warband had clawed from Thornhollow's forces.

The walls leaned inward like drunkards, the roof half-collapsed, but it was shelter enough from the creeping death of the Marches' winter wind.

They set no fires.

They spoke little.

Only the sound of swords scraped clean and wounds hastily bound filled the darkness.

Branwen sat beside Calder, rolling a strip of cloth between bloodied fingers.

When he finally spoke, it was low, hollow.

"We can't win this."

It wasn't despair.

It wasn't weakness.

It was just truth, laid bare in the dark between dying men.

Calder wiped a smear of blood from the edge of Dog's Hunger.

His voice was iron ground down to a dull edge.

"No," he said.

"We can only outlast them. Make them pay until there's nothing left worth fighting for."

Branwen nodded slowly.

Not agreeing.

Just understanding.

A dangerous thing.

The hours crawled like wounded things.

Frost thickened on the beams overhead.

The wolves in the valley howled again — hungrier this time.

Near midnight, Calder woke to a noise.

Subtle.

Wrong.

Boots.

Too many.

Too careful.

He rose without a word, Dog's Hunger in hand, and nudged Branwen awake with a heavy boot.

The boy came up fast — sword in hand, wide-eyed but silent.

Good instincts now.

Hard-won.

The door of the millhouse cracked inward under a heavy blow.

Not siege engines.

Not rank and file.

Assassins.

Specialists.

Thornhollow had changed tactics and Calder's gamble had failed.

No more slow bleeding.

Now they meant to cut the head from the snake.

The first attacker came through the splintered wood — black-clad, blade flashing.

Calder met him mid-lunge, catching the man's wrist, twisting sharply, and slamming the heavy pommel of Dog's Hunger into his jaw.

Bone cracked.

Teeth sprayed the floor.

Branwen caught a second man low, shield-checked him into the wall, then stabbed upward under the ribs, quick and brutal.

Chaos exploded through the ruined millhouse.

Saelen fought two at once, her blade flashing like a comet in the dark.

Thann grappled with a smaller assassin, their knives flashing too close for comfort, each trying to gut the other first.

Calder moved through the melee like a storm — no wasted movement, no hesitation.

The assassins were fast, trained, deadly.

It wasn't enough.

Calder wasn't fighting to win honor.

He fought to kill.

Fast.

Efficient.

Inevitable.

By the time the last of the black-clad killers fell twitching to the floorboards, the millhouse reeked of sweat, blood, and ruin.

Calder stood in the wreckage, breathing slow and steady.

Dog's Hunger hung heavy in his grip, dripping black into the snow-crusted dirt.

He looked around.

Counted again.

Thann Veyr wasn't moving.

The boy lay crumpled against the far wall, eyes wide, mouth working uselessly.

Blood spread in a thick pool under his tunic, seeping into the dirt.

One of the assassins had found his mark.

Slit deep.

Deep enough that even if Calder bent every scrap of knowledge he had to the wound, it wouldn't matter.

Branwen knelt beside Thann, trying to stem the blood.

Desperation in every frantic movement.

Calder watched for a moment.

Then turned away.

Pulled a battered cloak tighter against the cold.

Nothing left worth saving there.

The Marches took what they wanted.

Always had.

Always would.

Thann Veyr just joined the list a little earlier than the rest.

Outside, the wolves howled again.

And Calder Vane — the Stonewolf — set his boots toward the dark horizon, dragging what remained of his broken warband after him, deeper into blood, deeper into survival, deeper into the endless winter of wolves.