Chapter 198: The Brat Who Sent a Message [BONUS]

The first Roamers reached the Riven an hour before sunset.

Encrid had used every minute of the hour he had.

He had placed Gareth’s Third Legion across the road a quarter of a mile north of the Span, in a line from one edge of the gorge to a steep hill on the western side. Twelve hundred men, with the knights in the center and the archers on the hill. Zuri’s Fifth Order was behind them, mounted, ready to ride wherever the line broke.

Ysolde was in the center of the line.

She had not asked. She had simply walked there and stood.

Rael and the Gleaning’s fighters were on the eastern end, where the road came closest to the edge of the gorge. Rael still did not have his greatsword. He had a Cavel spear in his good hand, and his burned hand was strapped against his chest. He should not have been standing, let alone fighting.

Nobody had been able to make him leave.

Behind the line, the column crossed the Span.

Slowly. Steadily. Four wagons side by side. People on foot in between. Merta stood at the northern end with the order in her hands, counting them across.

Encrid stood on a low rise just behind the line, where he could see everything.

He did not have a sword in his hand.

He had his crossbow.

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The Reevers came first.

They always came first. They came over the last hill in a grey flood, running flat out toward the line, and the archers on the hill shot them down by the dozen. The rest hit the knights’ shields and died on the knights’ swords.

Then the Grinners. Then the Lopers, long-legged and fast, coming around the western end of the hill. Zuri’s knights rode them down.

Then the Talljacks.

And then the rest.

It did not matter how many they killed. There were always more. They poured over the hill and down the road in a mass that did not end, that did not seem to have an end, that stretched back to the horizon where the dust still hung and the tusk still rose and fell, closer every minute.

The bloodlust was there too.

Not as strong as it had been on the Wall. But there. Pressing down from the north. Driving them.

The line held for half an hour.

Then it began to bend.

Encrid watched it happen. He watched the center give ten paces, then twenty. He watched Ysolde’s red light flash again and again in the middle of it, and the line straighten, and bend again somewhere else.

He looked back at the Span.

Merta raised her hand to him and held up two fingers.

Two thousand still to cross.

An hour and a half.

He looked north.

The Elder had come over the last hill.

It walked down toward the Riven, slow and blind and enormous, and the horde parted around it. Its one tusk rose higher than the hill beside it. Its ruined eyes were black and crusted. And every step shook the ground so hard that the knights in the line staggered.

It would reach the line in a quarter of an hour.

Encrid looked at the line. At Ysolde. At Zuri. At Rael, fighting one-handed on the eastern end. At Gareth, in the center, shouting orders.

He looked at the Span. At the two thousand people still waiting to cross.

He did the calculation.

And for the first time since he had come to this world, it did not come out at all.

There was no answer. There was no plan. There was no trench to dig, no machine to build, no letter to write. There was just the Elder, walking toward them, and the Riven behind them, and nothing in between but twelve hundred tired men and a woman with a red sword.

Encrid lowered the crossbow.

He stood on the rise and looked at the Elder coming, and he felt something he had not felt since the first morning he woke up in this body, in a room he did not recognize, with a stranger’s name.

Helpless.

"You there."

The voice came from right beside him.

Encrid turned.

There was an old man standing on the rise.

He had not been there a moment ago. Encrid was certain of it. He had been standing on this rise for an hour, and there had been no one within ten paces of him except Harun’s knights at the bottom of the slope.

Now there was an old man.

He was short. Much shorter than Encrid. He was bald on top, with a few long wisps of white hair blowing around his ears, and a short white beard. He wore a brown traveling cloak with patches on both elbows, and he leaned on a plain wooden walking stick.

He looked like someone’s grandfather. The kind of old man who sat in the sun outside a village tavern and complained about the price of bread.

Except for his eyes.

His eyes were very sharp, and very bright, and very, very old.

He was looking at Encrid with an expression of mild irritation.

"You there," he said again. "Are you the brat who sent me a message?"

Encrid stared at him.

For a moment, he could not speak.

A year and a half ago, lying awake in a narrow bed at the Wall, he had made a list. The people in this world he would need. The people who could change things. Most of the names on that list were children now. Future heroes. People who would not be strong for years.

But some names on that list were not of children.

One of those names on that list was already old.

Encrid had not known if the letter would reach him when he sent it through the Blue moon. He had not known if the old man’s address was right. He had not known if a man like that would even read a letter from a disgraced fourth son of the North, let alone answer it.

He had sent it anyway.

The fifth letter.

To a remote village in the far south, where one of the Eight Stars of Astralis was said to be living out his last years in peace, tending a garden and pretending to be no one at all.

Encrid opened Appraisal.

[ Name: ?????? ]

[ Age: ??? ]

[ Realm: ?????? ]

[ Star Level: ?????? ]

[ Talent: ?????????? ]

[ ERROR: Value exceeds display parameters. ]

Every line. Every single line.

It was the first time Encrid felt happy to see every line blocked by the system, because it meant the man standing before him was exactly as great as he assumed him to be.

Encrid closed the window.

Something rose up in his chest that he had not felt in a very long time. It was so strong that his eyes stung.

"Yes," he said.

His voice cracked.

"Yes. I am. I’m the brat who sent you a message."

? ? ?

Thank you @Stingdragon, for the Magic castle~