Meanwhile, Percvale had no rest.

It started with a low thudding that people felt in their feet before they heard it properly.

Then a mass rushing. Horses... many horses actually, moving together, the ground carrying the vibration ahead of the sight and the sound both.

The man standing at the market stall felt it first and looked up from what he was doing, frowning at the road. Then the woman beside him felt it. Then the children playing in the dirt nearby stopped and looked at each other.

Then the dust appeared on the horizon. A long brown cloud rising above the road, the kind that two hundred horses on dry ground produced when they were moving at speed and not trying to be subtle about it.

Someone shouted from farther down the road.

"Riders! Many riders from the east!"

The market emptied fast, very fast.

The stall keeper grabbed his box of coins and left the rest. The woman beside him took her child by the hand and moved toward the castle’s direction.

The children who had been playing were already running.

The thudding got louder.

Then the Valdenmoor horses and the men on it came around the road’s bend.

Two hundred knights on horseback in loose formation, armor catching the morning light, the Valdenmoor banner carried at the front by a rider who held it, raising it up so the people of Percvale would see where this sudden attack was coming from.

They were not charging or rushing. They were riding at a steady, unhurried pace because there was no reason to hurry when you had two hundred knights and the place you were riding toward had significantly fewer.

The leader of the force held up a hand and the formation slowed as they reached the first stretch of houses along the road into Percvale.

He looked at the buildings. Then at the road ahead. Then back at the man beside him.

"Start here," he said. "Make it visible."

Torches were already lit. They had come prepared.

The first house to catch was the one nearest the road. One made of old timber, dry from the season, from the looks of things, it was a building that had been patched and re-patched for years without ever being properly rebuilt.

One that didn’t even need too much fire for it to be lit and burning like a mountain of fuel had been poured on it.

One torch to the wall was enough. The fire took the timber and climbed it with enthusiasm and the smoke went up black and thick into the morning air.

People still in the houses ran, doing so very quickly, running for their lives.

A woman came out of the second house with a child on her hip and stopped dead at the sight of the knights and then started running toward the castle, not looking back.

Two men tried to push a cart out of the way of the advancing horses and one of them got knocked aside and the cart went over. A dog was barking somewhere in the chaos, persistent and ignored.

The knights moved through the road, step by step, a sign this attack had been well planned before they took the road.

House by house, not all of them but enough to make the point, enough to send the smoke up high and visible from across Percvale and the surrounding countryside.

A structure at the end of the market row had a grain store attached to it and when the fire reached the grain the smoke changed color and the smell changed and people further away knew from both that this was something real and not an accident.

"Keep moving," the leader said. "Don’t stop for anyone not fighting back."

They didn’t stop.

The citizens who had been in the houses were now streaming toward the castle, some shouting for Garren, for anyone, for the knights to come.

A young boy tripped on the road and a woman behind him pulled him up by the arm without breaking stride and they kept moving.

An old man sat in the doorway of his house and watched the Valdenmoor column advance and didn’t move. A knight rode past him close enough that the horse’s shoulder nearly clipped the doorframe and the old man still didn’t move. He just watched.

This was just another event in the last days of his life. He didn’t try to run, he had nothing to lose. Running would he pointless. If he was to be chased by a Valdenmoor knight and he attempted running, it would just be for nothing because he would get caught nonetheless.

The knight didn’t stop for him. He wasn’t fighting back.

The road was burning in three places now, the fires separate but the wind carrying sparks between them, the gaps between the burning buildings narrowing. The smoke was visible from a considerable distance, thick columns of it rising and bending with the morning wind.

Inside the castle grounds, a knight of Percvale broke into a run for the barracks.

"Sir Garren! Sir Garren, they’re here, Valdenmoor’s here, there’s fire—"

The shouts carried across the training ground and the courtyard and through the castle corridors, and people who had been doing ordinary morning things stopped doing them.

Back on the road, the Valdenmoor men had reached the edge of the farmland approach. 𝒻𝓇𝑒𝘦𝘸𝑒𝒷𝓃ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝒸ℴ𝘮

The leader pulled his horse to a stop and looked at the fields. He looked at the dark soil Seren had restored, the faint green of crops coming through in the completed section and the livestock penned at the far edge.

He looked at it for a moment, examining how large it was and taking the sight of everything in it.

"Destroy the farmland too," he said. "All of it."

One of his men looked at the animals in the pen. "The livestock?"

"All of it," he said again. "King Aldric said to make it clear. Make it clear."

His man turned his horse and rode toward the farmland.

The animals in the pen were still and quiet, watching many knights come at them.