ASOIAF: The Rise of House Ashenblade.

Five weapons closed from different angles. The raiders had recovered from the shock of losing three men so quickly, and now they tried to use numbers properly. Two pressed from Arlan’s flanks while the others crowded the front, leaving him too little room to retreat without being driven against the hall. The pattern was familiar even if the men were not: hold the target’s attention from one direction, close the escape from another, and let numbers turn a single mistake into a killing blow.

Arlan did not try to stop every blow, and he moved toward the narrowest gap between two attackers, forcing their swings to interfere with each other, and a rusted knife passed behind his shoulder. Another weapon struck stone with a burst of sparks, and the raider nearest him tried to turn.

Arlan drove an elbow into the man’s upper body, using the attacker’s own forward movement rather than strength his fever-weakened body did not have; when the man folded, Arlan reversed the sword and thrust into the back of his neck. The body collapsed beneath him. Four raiders remained.

One of them swung a stone axe past the falling man. Arlan caught the dead raider by his hide clothing and dragged him across the blow; the axe buried itself in the corpse, and its wielder cursed while trying to wrench it loose.

Arlan’s sword went through his open mouth and struck deep enough to end the attempt, and another body dropped into the rain. Three remained, and that changed them.

A moment earlier they had been trying to surround a sick sixteen-year-old. Now five companions lay in the mud, and the boy before them had not wasted a swing. One raider stepped backward while another looked toward the gate.

Arlan’s chest burned with every breath, and the weakness left by the fever had not disappeared merely because his hands remembered how to kill. He could feel the difference between Michael’s practiced body and Arlan’s untrained one in every recovery, especially when a turn or lowered stance demanded strength from bruised muscles. Strain gathered in his thighs and shoulders, and the bruises beneath his ribs hurt each time he turned.

The first man ran. Arlan followed two steps and cut low across the back of his leg, stopping him before he could turn the fight into a chase through FireStorm. The raider fell screaming into the mud. Arlan ended him with a thrust through the chest and moved on.

The next attacker raised a stone axe in both hands and came forward in desperation. Arlan met the wooden haft near the head rather than trying to stop the heavier stone blade, and he turned the blow aside, let the man’s own strength carry the weapon past, then cut across the hand.

Four fingers fell into the mud with the axe. The raider stared down in shock long enough for Arlan to open his throat, while the last man turned and fled through the broken gate. Arlan had no strength to pursue him far.

He changed his grip on the sword and judged the distance, and the weapon was not designed for throwing, but the man was only a few paces beyond the entrance and running straight away, and Arlan threw. The sword turned through the rain and struck the raider between the shoulders.

He pitched forward into the mud, twitched, and stopped moving. Silence settled over FireStorm. Rain struck the walls, the broken gate, and eight dead men.

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Arlan remained standing for several breaths while his body caught up with what he had demanded from it; his arms felt heavier than before the first man entered, and his breathing was no longer as effortless as it had looked from the hall.

He walked to the last corpse and pulled the sword free. Blood and rain ran together along the fuller. Eight raiders. Eight bodies.

From the first man crossing the broken gate to the last one falling outside it, the fight had lasted roughly eight seconds, but the number mattered less to Arlan than why it had been possible: the raiders entered piecemeal, attacked predictably, and gave him openings he could end with one movement. The speed impressed the villagers more than Arlan, and Michael’s old instincts had been built around ending close fights before strength, numbers, or luck had time to matter.

The hall remained barred until Arlan called Morton’s name, and the door opened slowly.

Morton stepped out first with a pitchfork in both hands. Its iron tines shook against the doorframe. Behind him crowded the people of FireStorm, old and young alike, looking over the yard as though they did not understand what they were seeing.

The raiders who had already killed Ser Edwyn and broken the village’s defenders had come expecting no resistance. Now they lay dead in the mud. Morton’s pitchfork slipped from his hand, and he crossed the yard and dropped to his knees hard enough to splash muddy water over his clothes.

”My lord.” Others followed. A woman knelt while holding her child; two old men bowed their heads. Younger villagers lowered themselves beside them, and the wounded survivors tried to kneel despite splinted limbs until Morton gestured for them to stay upright. Arlan looked over the group.

Fear had not vanished from their faces, and they had watched eight armed men come through the gate, but fear was no longer the only thing there.

”Stand,” he said. Morton looked up. Arlan repeated the order. The old steward rose first, and the villagers followed. Arlan pointed toward the bodies. ”Take every useful weapon and every coin you find. Boots, cloaks, leather. Nothing that can help the village is buried with them.”

A few people hesitated at the bluntness of the instruction, but Morton did not. He began assigning people to search the dead and move the bodies away from the hall while Arlan joined the search.

Most of the raiders carried little beyond poor weapons, scraps of food, and clothing worth salvaging only because FireStorm possessed almost nothing; on one corpse he found a polished copper badge fixed beneath the animal hide. He cleaned it with his thumb. Black nightingales had been worked into the metal: the device of House Caron.

Arlan knew the device from the memories of this body, and House Ashenblade held FireStorm within the authority of Nightsong, and the Carons were one of the ancient marcher houses charged with guarding the approaches to Dorne. The badge did not belong naturally on a raider from the mountains.

Arlan turned it over. There was no name, no written order, and nothing that proved how the man had obtained it. Still, the object mattered.

The raiders had known Ser Edwyn was dead and that FireStorm had almost no fighting men left. They returned quickly enough to exploit the loss, and at least one carried a token tied to Nightsong.

Arlan closed his fingers around the badge instead of drawing a conclusion the evidence could not yet prove. Hoofbeats sounded beyond the rain, and Morton froze beside one of the corpses. More than one horse. The noise grew rapidly, hooves striking the wet road in a dense rhythm.

”My lord...” Arlan looked toward the broken gate. He did not know who was coming. Arlan’s inherited memories offered no answer, and the badge in his palm offered only suspicion. The sword in his hand was wet with rain and blood.

Arlan tightened his grip and waited, keeping the copper badge closed in his other hand.

Behind him, the people of FireStorm had already begun dragging the dead from the yard and gathering the weapons, clothing, and coins they had left behind; whatever came down the road next would find a village that had survived one more attack than anyone had expected.