The force that rode out from Helwind numbered three hundred in total. Fifty knights, their men-at-arms behind them, and the town guard's monster slayer unit under Commander Evereth's banner. While Knight Captain Adam led the entirety of their battalion, riding at the front with the particular stillness of a man who has been thinking about a problem for a long time and has finally been given permission to do something about it.
Brina rode with her squad somewhere in the middle of the column and said very little.
She had been like this since the suspension ended and the orders came down. Not cold exactly, not distant in a way that pushed people away, just very quiet and very inward, her attention pointed somewhere ahead of wherever she actually was. Her friends had noticed this of course. They somewhat understood her so they had not pushed for any unnecessary conversation. They knew her well enough by now to understand the difference between Brina being troubled and Brina being focused, and this was the second one taken to a degree they had not seen before.
The allied force from Don Castilian met them at the eastern edge of the forest, three kilometers out from Bareborough Peaks, just as arranged. A sizable column, a hundred specialist knights and their retinues of five hundred, assembled and ready. The two commanders greeted each other and disappeared into the command tent to work through the plan. Maps were spread. Numbers were compared. A woman who had lived in Bareborough her whole life before the evacuation sat at the table and answered every question they put to her about the village layout, the streets, the structures, the weak points in the wall. She had been the settlement's documentation keeper. There was not a corner of that place she could not describe from memory.
Outside the tent Brina stood at the edge of the camp and looked at the direction of the village.
"Sir Brina." One of her squad members spoke from behind her. She registered the voice without turning.
"Yes."
Elena bit her lip. It was like talking to someone standing behind a glass wall. She tried anyway. "The commander is out of the tent. We are being briefed on next objectives."
"I see."
They gathered with the rest of the troops. Adam stood before them and asked for volunteers for a scouting run into the village. He needed eyes inside the walls before any attack plan could be finalized. He needed to know the layout of the beasts, their numbers, their positions, and how deeply they had already settled.
Brina's hand went up before he had finished the sentence. And it did not come back down.
Adam looked at her for a moment, then nodded.
She and her squad went in light. No heavy armor, only their main weapons and a rope, nothing that would slow them down or make noise. The allied force also sent a pair of their own scouts to go with them, and the documentation keeper walked them through the village layout one more time before they left, tracing streets and squares in the dirt with a stick, marking where the main gate sat and where the plaza opened up and where the narrower residential corridors ran.
They smelled it before they saw it.
The main road approaching the village felt wrong in a way that settled in the gut before the mind caught up with it. The Black Carrion Eaters were the first visible sign, large dark birds circling above the village and perching along the highest points in clusters, the kind of congregation that only forms over something with a great deal of dead meat in it. The gate hung partially open, unmanned, and the wood of its build was dark with something that had dried into it.
They went through slowly and in a single file.
What they saw inside was no longer a village anymore.
One of the allied scouts made it three steps past the gate before he was on his knees emptying his stomach into the dirt. Nobody made any comments about it. The smell alone was almost enough to put them all there with him, the thick layered rot of a month's worth of death in a confined space, copper and decay riding every shift of the breeze. The Black Carrion Eaters moved around them without concern, too occupied with their work to pay much attention to the small group of humans picking their way through the streets.
They went up to the walls for a better vantage. Brina pulled herself up to the battlement and looked out over the village and was quiet for a long time.
The whole place was dyed in red. Not uniformly, not in the way of something that had been painted, but in the way of somewhere that had been used to mark territories or it may simply be because that is where the people who had been chased died. Body parts in the open spaces. Bones stripped and scattered. The carrion birds were also working in methodical silence across every surface. There were things below that had been dragged, the marks of it still visible in the packed dirt of the streets.
They moved along the wall in a wide arc, checking each quarter, building a picture of how the beasts had divided the space. Four territories, roughly equal, each one anchored by what appeared to be a nest, each nest surrounded by the accumulated remains of the creature's kills. It was organized in the way that intelligent animals organize their things, not randomly, not chaotically, each of the four Bearowls having claimed its portion and settled into it.
Then they saw the center from a distance without having to step foot on it.
The village square had always been the largest open space in Bareborough Peaks, wide enough for market days and public gatherings, paved with flat stone. What sat in it now was using that space the way a throne room uses its space.
It was at least twice the size of the four in the surrounding quarters. Maybe larger. Its feathers were darker, its frame heavier in a way that suggested not just age but a different order of creature entirely. It had built itself a nest at the center of the square out of bones and wreckage and things that had once been structures, and it sat on top of this construction with the settled weight of something that had decided it owned everything it could see.
One of the bodies in the debris below it moved. Just slightly. Just enough. Brina looked and caught a pair of eyes looking back at her from a body that was no longer intact, someone who was still alive in the only way that remained available to them, eyes open, tears running, a mouth that could not form sound anymore. The body was gone from the waist down. Whatever was left was running on something that should have already stopped.
Brina looked at this and did not look away until it was time to move.
They got back to camp as the last of the daylight was going amber. Most of them went straight to the nearest patch of ground and dealt with their stomachs. Brina on the other hand went directly to the command tent, sat down across from Adam and the allied commander, and gave her report in full. Numbers, positions, territories, the size and location of the large one at the center. She described everything she had seen without inflection or hesitation, clearly and in the right order, the way a scout's report is supposed to go.
When she finished, Adam studied her face for a moment.
He did not ask how she was. He could see exactly how she was. It was in the set of her jaw and the steadiness of her eyes and the particular quality of someone who has found the thing they have been waiting to find and has already decided what comes next.
Tomorrow they would plan the assault.