With the issue of what to do with the Octavian prisoners dealt with, Leon focused on getting his people back on the move. He passed out a few healing spells to those who needed them, earning him a few grateful looks, but they didn’t move quickly enough.

“FIRE!” boomed one of the giants on watch, its warning quickly spreading across the entire line of alert giants.

Leon’s head swiveled around so fast he felt his neck pop. He hadn’t been keeping an eye on the direction the Octavian forces had retreated in since the giants had been keeping watch, so he was more than a little surprised to see an enormous forest fire moving in their direction. The conflagration was clearly magical, too, since it was moving through the damp forest far faster than Leon knew it should’ve.

“Fall back!” he shouted. It hadn’t been more than ten minutes since the ambush had come to an end, but it had been enough time to get some semblance of organization back into his unit, and once his order was relayed, they began running in the opposite direction of the fires. “Lapis! That means your people, too!” Leon shouted, noticing that the giants had remained still.

At his word, the blue-streaked giant rumbled its acquiescence, and the giants began falling back, though they remained in a loose line the entire time, their attention fixed behind them.

“What the hells are they doing?!” Marcus shouted aloud not too far away from Leon. “They can’t seriously believe that this will kill us!”

Indeed, no matter how quickly the magical fire was spreading, it wasn’t moving fast enough to catch Leon’s unit in its grasp. Plus, he had a few water mages on his side, and they left a few walls of ice behind to slow the fires down.

“I doubt it’s to kill us, it’s probably just for catharsis and to deny us the use of this forest again!” Leon responded.

Marcus looked like he had more to say, but both he and Leon were immediately drowned out by a horrible sound: that of hundreds of men and women screaming in pain and panic. In their haste to leave, they hadn’t grabbed the Octavian prisoners and had left them where they had been gathered. The prisoners had been too injured to retreat with their comrades, and so too were they too injured to run from the oncoming fire.

“They’re killing their own people!” Leon said, almost amazed at the ruthlessness on display. He’d seen some dark things in his time, but this was something special.

“They’re our people, too…” Marcus quietly replied as they settled into a slow jog behind the rest of the unit, both staring back into the dull orange glow that shone from the once-dark forest.

Leon gave the young nobleman a strange look, but he said nothing. He felt little kinship with those people, but even he thought this was going a bit too far.

‘Should’ve just let Gellius kill them all, at least it would’ve been quicker that way…’ he thought to himself. He’d heard some terrible things in his twenty years of life, and none surpassed the scream of a banshee for sheer terror, but Leon had to admit that the way the people screamed as they burned alive in that forest affected him. He didn’t think he’d ever forget it, no matter how long he lived.

“Let’s keep moving,” Leon said to Marcus. They’d fallen behind the rest of the unit a bit, and the giants were catching up. The two of them were the two most highly ranked leaders of the unit, and so it wouldn’t do to lag behind so far.

Marcus was all too happy to oblige. He’d never heard a banshee’s scream, and so he was more profoundly affected by what they had just heard than Leon.

—

Ten miles and about four hours later, Leon’s unit finally regrouped in their hidden camp. The giants had carved a giant pit into which barracks and other facilities had been constructed. With a hundred giants working together, it had only taken a matter of hours to build.

The entrance to the camp was in an innocuous river valley at the foot of a hill, hidden by thick trees and dense foliage. Still, Leon was incredibly careful with how they returned, for thousands of people and a hundred giants weren’t easy to hide when on the move, and their tracks had to be covered by those who were familiar with such things. Fortunately, among the levied peasants were more than a few hunters who were willing to assist Leon in this.

They did their best, but the tracks made by the giants weren’t so easily concealed. As a result, on the final approach, Leon had Lapis and the giants submerge themselves into the ground and move that way. It was slower, but their tracks were less obvious and would require an earth mage experienced in tracking to follow them.

It wasn’t that great of a stretch for Leon to think that Duronius had such people, so he kept several giants underground on watch, along with a number of higher-tiered knights in a chamber just inside the mouth of their camp.

But following that chamber were a series of large spiral staircases that led down into their relatively small and cramped, but comfortable camp.

Leon’s first order was for the Barons and the rest of the leadership to get a final accounting of their losses. He figured they’d be heavy, since the fighting hadn’t been entirely one-sided despite their victory, and then he and the rest of the highest leadership went to have a post-battle meeting while the senior knights got their headcount.

“We did very well out there, I’d say at least ten thousand of their troops were killed, either by our blades or their fire,” Leon said, opening the meeting with some well-deserved praise. Just as he expected, some of the omnipresent underlying antipathy in the eyes of the Barons died just a little with it, which was his goal even if he meant every word. “Now, we have to figure out how to follow this up.”

“There’s nothing really to figure out,” Marcus said, jumping right in despite the obvious fatigue in his expression and body language. “We need to get in contact with the Prince, Sir Roland, and my father. What we’ve done already has weakened us tremendously, and we need to coordinate better with the main army if we’re to inflict any lasting damage.”

“That’s what I was thinking, too,” Leon mused as he leaned back in his stone chair. Everyone was sitting in a small conference room around a circular table, all made of stone, while the only sources of illumination provided were a couple of weak light runes on the ceiling that cast dim light into the room. But everyone there was at least of the third-tier, and as such wasn’t bothered too much by the lighting.

“We haven’t received word back from that messenger, yet,” Orientis added. As the Baron with the largest number of troops in the unit, it was invariably her knights that made up the majority of the camp watch, so Leon trusted that she knew of the comings and goings in their camp better than anyone—not that there was much of either coming or going, anyway.

“We still shouldn’t try anything new until we do,” Marcus said.

“There’s something to be said for waiting,” Valeria stated, her tone calm but deliberately measured as if the statement were a reluctant confession, “but there is far more to be said for maintaining our momentum. We won today, we shouldn’t now rest on our laurels.”

“Just because we won today doesn’t mean we’ll win every time, we got lucky,” Marcus countered.

Baron Gellius finally spoke up, but in contrast to how he usually acted, he spoke quietly and patiently. To Leon, it came off like he was speaking down to Marcus, like the younger nobleman was child.

“Sir Aeneas, aggressive policies are always better than defensive ones, we shouldn’t let the traitors relax out of fear of retaliation…”

“I’m not scared of their retaliation, I’m concerned for our long-term sustainability!” Marcus retorted, clearly offended by Gellius’ tone. “A battle is not a war! And we don’t even have a good estimate for how many people we lost today! Still, I would guess that we’re down at least a third of what we started with. Today was a victory, to be sure, but many more victories like that and we’ll lose. We can’t exchange one of ours for every two or three of theirs—hells, we can’t even lose one for every ten they lose! If we’re to win this war, and not just future battles, we need to keep this in mind. By waiting to make any more attacks until we make contact with Prince August, we’ll be able to better use our strengths and maximize our chances of coming out of this with as many people still alive as possible!”

“I agree,” Alcander whispered, surprising Leon a bit. Alcander was usually down for whatever fight was going on, at least in Leon’s experience, so to hear him advocating for a more cautious approach wasn’t what Leon was expecting.

“As do I,” Orientis replied, and the other three Barons agreed, making the decision clear if Leon were to put it to a vote.

“Very well,” Leon said, deciding not to fight the issue. They’d pulled off the ambush he wanted, now he’d let everyone rest and recover, even if it meant giving up the initiative. “But they know we’re in play, now. We can rest here until Prince August lets us know what the plans are going forward, but we’re going to need some serious defenses. So while we rest, we can get started on that.”

“Thank you, Sir Leon,” Marcus said, an expression of honest and genuine gratitude on his face, but Gellius’ was completely opposite. The Baron’s obvious displeasure concerned Leon a bit, but Leon was relatively certain that he wouldn’t do anything stupid.

It would be pretty difficult to do so in the first place, but Leon knew from his own actions that it was better not to trust stupid people to make good decisions. At the very least, though, he felt certain that Gellius wouldn’t do anything suicidal.

Leon nodded to Marcus in acknowledgment, then moved on. “All right. Now that that’s handled, let’s start hammering out what our own defenses will look like…”

—

Calerus’ face burned in anger and humiliation. He was sitting at the war table with the rest of the Lords and Legates under Duke Duronius’ command, and everyone was staring at him with a mixture of pity and delight at his current circumstances.

Duronius himself sat at the head of the table, clad entirely in brilliant white, his face covered by a long silver beard, his eyes hard and dark. There was no levity in his eyes, only cold anger.

“She’s furious,” Duronius growled, his voice deep and his aura oppressive as he stared holes into Calerus. “She’s demanding that we do something about you.”

“Her fury is misplaced! All I did was act to kill that damn savage!” Calerus protested, the memory of the water mage dead in his arms still fresh in his mind. It had been almost an entire day since the ambush, and he’d been recalled to give a report on the situation.

And it wasn’t going well.

“Had you charged into the forest, there would have been no issue,” Duronius replied, his body barely moving in his chair as if he were a marble sculpture of a distant god. “However, you burned down a significant portion of the forest in the Countess’ land. Under normal circumstances, you would be brought before His Majesty to answer such a crime.”

“These aren’t normal circumstances…” Calerus snarled through gritted teeth.

“No, they are not,” Duronius responded, his frozen tone not changing in the slightest. “But consequences are still to be expected. A noble’s land should not be burned down so flippantly. You were not out of options when you made that decision. You still outnumbered the barbarian by more than two to one, even with the giants. Can you sit there and tell me that you had no other choice than to burn down the forest? Giving up all hope of reclaiming our injured and dead?”

Calerus finally broke eye contact with Duronius, the Duke’s words finally getting through to him. He knew that even though they weren’t materially affected, the rest of the nobles around the table would demand that he be punished. Their lands weren’t burned—at least not at his hand—but it was the principle of the act that so offended. It didn’t matter who did it, the burning of a noble’s land couldn’t go unanswered, otherwise they’d all open themselves up to every arsonist in the Kingdom.

He knew that if he were in their place, he’d want the arsonist brought to justice, too.

But Calerus wasn’t in their place, and his lover now lay dead in his tent, waiting to be recovered by the man’s wife and heir. Calerus wanted nothing more than to wring bloody vengeance out of Ursus, no matter how many lives it took.

“What would you have me do, then?” Calerus quietly asked, half challengingly to Duronius. The Countess who owned the forest he burned down was relatively poor and unimportant. She hadn’t even contributed a thousand warriors to their army. He knew he was more valuable to the war effort, and he wondered how far Duronius would be willing to push him over the principle when weighed against the practical benefit.

Duronius answered instantly, not even seeming to stop to think, leading Calerus to believe that his punishment had been decided long before this meeting.

“You will hunt down the savage, take his head, kill his giants, and slaughter those who follow him,” Duronius said, and Calerus’ heart skipped a beat in surprise and excitement. “However,” the Duke continued, tempering Calerus’ glee with dread, “you will not be in command of the force to bring the barbarian to justice.

Duronius paused for effect as he glanced to his right, the place of highest honor at the table. There sat a stoic woman—golden blond hair that glimmered in the light of the command tent, beautiful oval face, high cheekbones, well-endowed hourglass figure that would make any lady-lover salivate.

The Duchess of Vesontio, a woman so quiet and stoic that Calerus had never once heard her speak or so much as narrow her eyes; a woman so powerful that she sat at Duronius’ right hand; a woman so noble that not once had Calerus ever dared to speak with her directly. She was beyond wealthy—easily one of the top ten richest nobles in the Kingdom—and had brought no less than ten thousand levies to the army, along with five thousand men-at-arms as heavy infantry and five thousand knights as heavy cavalry.

She was also the cousin of the Brimstone Paladin.

“Your Grace,” Duronius said, his voice finally softening with something that resembled respect, though not an ounce of deference, “I charge you with taking control of this situation. Kill Ursus and all those that follow him, then return with all haste.”

Vesontio didn’t say a word, but she quietly nodded her head in assent.

Duronius took a deep breath as a subtle signal that the topic was now being changed, and the rest of the table sat up a little straighter.

“The fleets of the Consul of Discord are assembling in the south,” Duronius said. “With them, taking Ariminium should be no issue at all; a few shots from our Flame Lances will annihilate their defenses. The 2nd Legion is also making its way south with its new Legate. The bastard traitor August will soon be brought to justice…”