Toqa-Timur POV

Nine days.

The ditch in front of the south gate had not changed. Six meters wide and two deep, the sides cut straight down into packed clay.

The south walkway had between thirty and forty archers at any given hour. The towers above the gate had four men each, and they had been watching the perimeter since the first morning of the siege.

The sorties were what kept Toqa from sleeping cleanly.

The garrison attacked them twice a day, alternating the east and west postern doors so the siege could not settle into a rhythm. Each one came out in a group of around thirty riders, hit a section of the perimeter at close range, and pulled back through the door before the riders on either side could close.

Three minutes from the door opening to the door closing.

Every time, Toqa’s men lost three to five. Sometimes more.

The count across nine days was seventy-three dead, and twice that wounded.

The garrison had lost less than a quarter of that, sitting safe inside their walls.

He had tried packing more riders at the doors. On the third day the garrison switched to the north postern and hit the section he’d thinned to reinforce the south, and he’d lost seven men in under two minutes.

Since then he’d kept the siege as it was and absorbed the daily cost, and gotten no closer to the gate.

The gate was the whole problem. Getting to it meant crossing the ditch, and crossing the ditch meant his riders moving under fire from three tower platforms and the south walkway, at the range where organized archers did not miss.

He had seen the garrison’s skills during the probe, they were concentrated, disciplined, the product of men who had drilled together for years.

What that kind of fire did to an assault army across sixty meters of open ground, he did not need to test to know.

He had thought about it from every direction, and the answer kept coming up the same.

He needed something between his riders and the garrison’s arrows while he crossed that ditch.

He turned his horse toward the supply area, where the captives were kept.

There were around two hundred and fifty of them, taken from the agricultural settlements since the siege began.

Old men, women, children, and a handful of young men kept back from the garrison for farm work and supply carrying.

Toqa looked at them, then at the gate, then at the ditch.

He called his jaghun commander forward.

The plan was straightforward. Drive the captives ahead of the assault formation before full light. Push them within reach of the ditch. Riders a hundred meters behind.

When the captives got to the ditch, put the material in their hands, timber planks, sacked earth, whatever the supply store had and put them to work bridging it.

The commander asked what Toqa expected.

"The garrison will fire into them?"

Toqa kept his eyes on the gate as he answered.

"Some will."

He said. "The veterans on those walls will hesitate before they shoot into their own people, but not all of them, and not forever." 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

He let that sit for a moment.

"That’s when we cross. Keep them moving. Whatever it takes to keep them moving."

The commander went.

Toqa looked at the gate. The garrison’s hesitation would not last through the whole siege.

At some point the commanders on those walls would decide the assault cost more than the lives in front of it, and the fire rate would come back up and his riders would take it.

That was the cost. Toqa had accepted it when he gave the order. As for the captives, he didn’t felt a tinge of regret about them.

Arqa POV

He was in the formation before the sky had any color.

The jaghun commander had gone through the arban leaders at midnight and by the time Arqa reached the supply area other fifteen riders were already there, standing in the cold with their crops and their sabers, looking at two hundred and fifty people who were looking back at them.

The captives were from the farming villages east of Bilyar.

Mostly older, since the young men had been pulled into the garrison months ago.

There were women with small children, old men who’d moved too slow to run when the riders came, a handful of boys in their mid-teens who watched the mounted men with the tight, fearful attention.

"Move them south." The commander ordered.

Arqa and the others worked from the outside, pushing people toward the center and then pointing them at the open ground facing the south gate.

Some went without being touched, understanding enough from the direction of the riders.

An old man near the front turned immediately when Arqa’s horse came alongside and began walking south with his hands folded at his waist, not looking at him. His pace wasn’t fast enough, and Arqa brought the crop down across his shoulder.

He stumbled, reaching for the arm of the woman next to him, and both of them kept walking.

A broad-shouldered man near the back stopped and turned around, one of the younger ones who’d been kept for supply work.

He stopped and faced the riders behind him with a resolute expression.

Arqa rode at him directly, the horse’s shoulder crashing across his chest and driving him backward. He went down on one knee, got up, and found himself facing south with nothing else to do.

He started walking and didn’t look back.

They moved the whole group that way for twenty minutes.

By the time they reached the perimeter riders and passed through them, the sky was pale gray in the east. Enough to see by.

The south gate was ahead at three hundred meters.

At one hundred and fifty meters the west tower fired.

The arrow came down flat and hit near the front of the mass of people. A woman screamed, the kind of scream that does not stop between breaths, her hand pressed to her side where the shaft had gone in.

She was still on her feet but bent forward, and the people around her opened away from her, giving her space instinctively.

Some of them were crying.

Others just stared.

A man beside her put both hands on her shoulders and tried to pull her forward. She pulled back against him and went down to her knees still screaming, and the man looked back at the riders closing in behind and kept moving, leaving her where she was.

The riders closed around the space where she was kneeling and moved through.

A second arrow from the tower hit a man in the front rank through the upper chest. He sat down without much sound, just folded and sat, and the people immediately around him scrambled away from him in a rush of panicked movement.

The east tower started shortly after.

The garrison was firing oddly. Arqa knew how veteran archers fired, continuous, overlapping, the snapping constant against the wind.

This wasn’t that.

There were gaps between the tower shots, longer gaps than made sense for men with targets at this distance. The veterans on those walls were choosing their shots.

At the front of the riders the captives were crying and shouting.

Some tried to turn back. The riders behind them kept them moving, crops and horses blocking the line of sight, the noise of a large group of frightened people being pushed in a direction they did not want to go, a low continuous crying, voices and feet on the spring ground.

At one hundred and thirty meters a shaft from the east tower hit a girl near through the back of the neck and came out through her throat.

She dropped instantly, face first, and the captives around her scattered in three directions at once, screaming, pulling away from her, and two riders moved fast to cut off the break before the formation split open.

The screaming became a single blurred note of fear.

The formation kept moving.

By then Arqa could see the south gate clearly.

Heavy timber, cross-barred. The ditch cut in front of it at the earthwork’s base, the steep sides visible from here and the distance across it real and not especially wide.

The archers from the walkway had not started firing properly yet. He could see them from here, standing at the rail, arrows nocked.

They were looking down at the mass of people and not shooting.

That would not hold much longer.