“There!” Sarika tucked a final braid into its coil and beamed.

So simple, so easy.

Instead, Lilias raised the fillet, settling it on her brow. The gold circle gleamed against her dark hair and the Soumanië was crimson against her pale skin. She looked majestic and beautiful. That had seemed important, once.

“My lady.” Pietre paused in the doorway, his face frank with adoration above his collar of servitude. “My lady, the Ward Commander is asking for your aid.”

A pang of alarm shot through her. “What is it, Pietre?”

He shook his head. “I do not know, my lady.”

With their assistance, Lilias robed herself and hurried through the halls, passing servants and wardsmen half-awake in the grey hour that preceded dawn. Everywhere, Beshtanag was feeling the pinch of the siege. Rations had been halved and working shifts had been doubled. An unseasonal chill had caught them unprepared, with a shortage of firewood laid in against the siege and a hard rainfall rendering the fortress dank and cold. The folk of Beshtanag gazed at her with banked resentment as she made her way to her reception hall.

“My lady.” Gergon bowed at her arrival.

“Is there a problem, Gergon?” Lilias asked him.

“It’s the rain.” He looked bleary-eyed and tired, and there were droplets of rain dampening the grey hairs of his brows and beard. “Haomane’s Allies have built siege-towers to assail the wall, and moved them into position overnight. We’ve been firing pots of pitch to keep them at bay, but now the rain aids their cause and the wood will not ignite. They’re clearing the wall by the score, and I’m losing men. If it keeps up, they’ll wear us down in a day. Can you help?”

“Show me,” she said.

Outside, it was hard to see in the dim light, and rain fell in cold, miserable sheets, soaking her hooded woolen cloak in a matter of minutes. Clinging to Gergon’s arm, Lilias picked her way down the cobbled mountainside road. Her wall stood, a smooth, rain-darkened expanse of granite, but here and there the framework of siege-towers scaled it. There were four all told, and Men and Ellylon stood atop the rain-slick platforms, archers armed with shortbows defending ladders thrust downward into Beshtanag’s fasthold. On the ground, Gergon’s archers shot at them, making a poor job of it firing upward in the pouring rain.

One by one, the ladders descended, and Haomane’s Allies trickled into Beshtanag. All along the wall there were skirmishes fought in the gloaming.

There, a lone Borderguardsman challenged Gergon’s wardsmen.

There, a trio of Midlanders put up a stout defense.

And they fell, fell and died, but for every one that died, two more waited to follow. There were so many of them, and so few Beshtanagi. If it became a war of attrition, Beshtanag would lose.

“Short work for a dragon,” Gergon said quietly, surveying the siege-towers.