A cold northern wind blew down from the snow-capped border peaks against the high black stone walls of Frost-Gate Fortress, the largest and strongest of Duke Tieba’s Five Northern Border Fortresses.
On top of the battlements, Fortress Commander Tie Gou—Duke Tieba’s greedy younger brother-in-law, a pudgy Rank 3 Peak martial artist wearing a thick snow-fox fur coat—was pacing back and forth while eating a plate of hot honey-glazed dates.
Around him stood five thousand garrison soldiers in patched, threadbare cotton coats, shivering in the cold wind with hollow cheeks and growling stomachs. Down in the fortress city below, nearly three hundred thousand military dependents—the wives, children, and elderly parents of the eighty thousand cavalrymen who had marched south with Duke Tieba—were queuing outside the military granary, only to be beaten back with whips by Tie Gou’s tax clerks.
“Get back! Get back, you old bags of bones!” a tax clerk snarled from the granary steps. “Commander Tie Gou said the war tax has been raised again! Until Duke Tieba returns from crushing Silver-Fork Port, nobody gets a single scoop of millet unless they pay three silver coins!”
Down in the snow-dusted street, an old silver-haired woman holding a six-year-old boy by the hand—the widow and grandson of a northern veteran—wiped her tears with her ragged sleeve. “My oldest son died five years ago, and my second son rode south with the army last week... if you don’t give us our family ration, what will Little Stone eat tonight?”
