ASOIAF: The Rise of House Ashenblade.

The villagers hit the Blacktooth band before it could recover its shape.

They were not trained soldiers; most carried farm tools, and several had never struck another man in anger before that night. Yet they had numbers enough to press a frightened enemy, and the enemy had just watched its chief die on a tree and eight of its strongest men vanish through FireStorm’s gate.

Arlan moved at the front because that was where the line was weakest.

A raider swung a stone axe at Morton; Arlan intercepted the man’s wrist with the flat, shifted past the return, and thrust beneath the arm. Another came from the left, and Arlan turned the dying man into the path of the attack before cutting around him.

The battle spread along the road and low wall; villagers stabbed from behind crude shields, dragged wounded raiders down with pitchforks, and struck at legs when they lacked the reach to challenge a sword. Men who had believed FireStorm already dead since Ser Edwyn fell now fought as if losing the yard meant losing the world.

The Blacktooth band never recovered from the first moments.

Their remaining fighters were used to terrified farmers, isolated travelers, and quick raids before any lord’s men could respond. With the chief dead, no one coordinated the retreat; some tried to flee toward the mountains while others continued fighting, and each choice made the other worse. Men who tried to hold the road found themselves abandoned on the flanks; men who ran discovered that frightened villagers could be very fast when they believed the danger was finally running away from them.

Arlan kept the villagers from spreading too far, and he shouted them back whenever pursuit threatened to draw them beyond sight of the wall, then pushed forward again when a knot of raiders tried to gather around a torchbearer. This was not the disciplined formation Michael would have preferred, but it was enough to stop the battle from dissolving into dozens of private chases through the dark.

Arlan did not chase blindly, and he moved where the raiders were thickest, cut down the men still trying to organize resistance, and let the villagers finish those who broke away in twos and threes. Half an hour after the first spear left the gatehouse, the road outside FireStorm was quiet.

Forty Blacktooth raiders had come to the village. None remained alive. The ground showed how little resemblance such a victory had to a song: axes lay where dead hands had dropped them, a torch smoldered in a puddle, and one villager vomited behind the low wall before returning to help drag bodies from the gate.

No Blacktooth raider survived the rout or escaped into the mountains; Morton began counting FireStorm’s own people before anyone celebrated. He moved from man to man, checking cuts and bruises, sending the more badly hurt toward the hall and ordering the rest to stay where Arlan could see them. No fresh death answered his count; for a holding that had already lost nearly every able-bodied man before Arlan rose from his sickbed, that mattered as much as the forty corpses outside.

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FireStorm’s cost was exhaustion, bruises, and wounds that could be bound. Outside the gate, the scale of the enemy’s destruction remained ugly in the mud: bodies lay among dropped torches and broken weapons, and blood mixed with rainwater in the ruts where the road dipped toward the gate.

Some villagers laughed because they had survived, while others sat down where they stood and wept. A woman murmured a prayer to the Seven as she helped bind a cut on a boy’s arm. Arlan sheathed his sword. The blade vibrated against the scabbard.

Heat stirred through the grip, weaker than the first backlash but unmistakable after so many deaths. Arlan stopped, held the weapon steady, and forced his breathing into a measured rhythm until the sensation receded instead of spreading into his thoughts; only then did he approach the Blacktooth chief.

The spear had fixed the man high enough on the oak that two villagers needed to brace the body while Arlan pulled it free; when the corpse dropped, a polished bronze badge slipped from beneath the furs. Arlan picked it up.

Black nightingales had been worked into the metal in the pattern used by House Caron of Nightsong. The workmanship was better than anything the mountain raiders carried for themselves. Morton saw the badge and went silent.

”You know it,” Arlan said.

”Nightsong.” The old steward looked toward the bodies. ”Why would one of these men carry that?”

Arlan turned the bronze piece over; there was no name, no order, and no proof written into the metal, yet it was another fact to place beside the timing of the raids and Ser Edwyn’s death. A stolen badge was possible; a traded badge was possible; the physical evidence did not tell him which. It only told him that House Caron had somehow touched a band that should have possessed nothing finer than scavenged iron and hides.

Before he could answer, hoofbeats sounded from the road; not a handful this time; torches appeared between the trees in an advancing line. Riders came behind them, disciplined enough that the lights kept formation despite the mud; Morton glanced toward the villagers, many of whom had only just lowered their weapons.

”Nightsong,” he said. Arlan closed his fingers around the badge.

Twenty mounted fighting men approached first, hard leather armor catching the firelight; thirty attendants followed with bows and short swords. Their banners showed the nightingales of House Caron, and the young man at their head reined in so sharply his horse reared before the field of bodies.

Horton Caron had expected something else; that much was visible even without knowing his orders. His gaze moved from the chief pinned moments earlier to the dead scattered along the road, then to the villagers standing beneath FireStorm’s wall with blood on their farm tools; finally he looked at Arlan.

Horton dismounted with four men and crossed the mud; his face recovered some of the assurance expected from a kinsman of Elton Caron before he spoke.

”Arlan Ashenblade?” His voice carried for the men behind him. ”Nightsong rides the border under the authority of Storm’s End. We find you here with an armed crowd and more than forty dead men. Explain why this should not be called unlawful slaughter.”

The villagers tightened around Arlan; Morton took half a step forward, but Arlan stopped him with one raised hand, and he pulled the bronze badge from his tunic and tossed it into the mud at Horton’s boots. Horton looked down. For the first time since dismounting, his expression failed him.

”These men crossed into FireStorm to raid,” Arlan said. ”Their band killed my father before their first return to this village. Tonight they sounded their horn outside my gate and demanded my head, our grain, and our women.” His voice stayed level as Horton’s eyes fixed on the badge.

”One of their leaders carried the mark of Nightsong. You came here claiming to keep the border. Tell me, Ser Horton: should I have opened the gate for them?” No one behind Horton moved. The question hung in the torchlight with the bronze nightingales between them.