Across the open limestone flat, the battle was over.
The Black Scythe Company—feared throughout three southern provinces as merciless raiders—had been utterly shattered without breaking a single wagon board or burning a single sheet of paper.
Thirty-eight hired blades lay bound in heavy cart driver’s knots within the wagon ring, guarded by thirty wagon drivers with hickory staves. The leftover forty-two riders, having seen their vanguard destroyed by ropes and their dismounted assault crushed by shields, had broken ranks and fled in wild panic into the southern steppe.
Captain Vane Malakor stood alone by his downed warhorse, his cutlass lying in the dust five paces away. He was surrounded by Sile Rook, Tomas Reed, and Old Kaelen Brant.
Malakor looked at Sile’s unbending heart-tall oak body-shield, then looked down at his own trembling hands. His face was white as the chalk dust beneath his boots.
“What kind of wagoners are you?” Malakor whispered, his voice trembling with disbelief. “You fight like a royal siege battalion.”
“We’re draymen, Captain,” Tomas replied calmly. He set the heel of his iron tire-lever onto the ground. “When you spend thirty years hauling sixty tons of timber down mountain passes in freezing rain, you learn the mathematics of weight, friction, and moving driving force. A charging cavalry line is just a runaway wagon without brakes. You don’t run from it. You drop the snubbing line and let gravity do the work.”
