Gaborn pulled Rowan to her feet just as hunting horns sounded over the fields south of the castle.

This blare of horns was followed immediately by grunts and shrieks. Gaborn climbed a little higher up the hill to look over the Outer Wall, to the mist-shrouded fields. The river lay to the east, with fields beyond it. The trees of the Dunnwood sat on a hill across the valley to the south.

At the edge of the wood on the south hill, Gaborn suddenly spotted movement in the fog: the glint of steel armor, peaked helms—lances raised in the air. Horsemen rode at the edge of the woods, cantering through the fog.

Before them raced a thousand nomen, black shadows who lumbered over the ground on all fours, shrieking and howling in terror. The nomen fled toward the castle, half-blinded by daylight.

There, Gaborn saw a rider wearing the midnight-blue livery of House Orden, with the emblem of the green knight.

He could not fathom it—his father attacking the castle.

No! he wanted to shout.

It was a suicide charge. His father had brought a few men as a retinue. They had come as a light escort—mere decoration—not prepared for war! They had no siege engines, no wizards or ballistas.

As Gaborn realized all this, he knew it hardly mattered. His father believed that Gaborn was in Castle Sylvarresta and that the castle had fallen. His father would do whatever he thought necessary to win back his son.

That recognition filled Gaborn with guilt and horror, the thought that his stubbornness, his stupidity, had suddenly put so many people’s lives in jeopardy.

Though his father’s soldiers had come as “mere decoration,” they did not fight like decorations. The horses plunged downhill, churning the fog; their horsemen’s axes were raised high overhead. Gaborn saw nomen running, naked, fleeing the knights’ axes. They shrieked in horror, their yellow fangs gaping wide. Some nomen turned, set their spear butts in the mud.

His father’s knights surged forward on armored horses, lances shattering, axes falling, blood and mud and fur filling the air, along with the howls of nomen, the screams of the dying.

Hoofbeats thundered from the south. Hundreds of voices rose in a shout, the battle cry of “Orden! Brave Orden!”

In answer, a tremendous roar came from the east. A contingent of frowth giants rushed over the fields on the far side of the river, making toward the Dunnwood from the eastern fields—eighty giants lumbering like moving hills in the fog.

Shouts arose from guards on the castle walls, the blare of horns as Raj Ahten’s soldiers were called to battle, roused from their beds. Gaborn feared Raj Ahten would send his own knights riding onto the battlefield. House Orden had at most a contingent of two thousand men, unless his father had managed to summon reinforcements from one of Sylvarresta’s minor keeps.