The barbarian chieftains made their decision on the twelfth day of the siege.

The Snowe stronghold had cost them eleven hundred dead in twelve days. The earthworks, though breached, had been rebuilt and reinforced after each breach with the engineering adaptability that General Snowe’s campaign experience provided. The Baron of Frost’s aerial interventions had disrupted three of the five planned decisive assaults, the griffon’s frost magic sealing breaches and scattering assault formations at the critical moments when the breaches should have been exploited.

The chieftains met on the ridgeline north of Snowehaven in the council circle that the highland tradition prescribed: five chieftains, seated on stones, their weapons across their knees, the thundermakers visible behind them in the firing positions that had been bombarding the stronghold for twelve days.

Warchief Garrok, the senior chieftain whose clan had led the descent from the Gorath Highlands, spoke first.

"The stone-house is hard," Garrok said. The highland dialect used simple words for complex assessments. Hard meant the target’s resistance exceeded the force’s willingness to sustain the casualties that breaking it required. "We break walls. They build walls behind walls. We break those. They build more. The old man learns."

"The flying one," said Tharn, the youngest chieftain, whose clan had lost two hundred warriors to the Baron of Frost’s interventions. "The flying one kills from above. We cannot reach him. The boomsticks fire upward and miss. The shamans’ magic does not reach the height he flies at."

"We have twenty thousand warriors," said Brokk, the largest of the chieftains, whose physical size matched the Rhakaddons’ scale and whose patience did not. "Twenty thousand. The stone-house has three thousand. We crush them."

"We have crushed eleven hundred of them and lost eleven hundred of ours," Garrok said. "The trade is equal. Equal trade against a smaller force is losing. We have more warriors but we are not gaining ground. The stone-house holds because the old man inside it knows things about walls that our warriors do not know about breaking them."

The council was quiet. The highland tradition’s council silence was the silence of warriors processing a chieftain’s assessment and weighing it against their own experience.

"South," Garrok said. "The lands to the south are softer. The towns have stone walls but the walls are thinner. The garrisons are smaller. The stone-house has cost us twelve days and eleven hundred warriors and it still stands. The towns to the south will cost us two days each and a hundred warriors each. The trade is better."

* * * * *

The barbarian column moved south on the thirteenth day.

Seventeen thousand warriors, the force reduced from twenty thousand by the campaign’s cumulative casualties, moved past the Snowe dominion’s eastern border and turned south toward the agricultural heartland that lay between the Snowe territory and the capital. The thundermakers were loaded onto their transport carriages. The supply wagons fell into the column’s rear. The march south began at dawn with the specific momentum that a force on the move produced when the force had decided to stop hitting the hard thing and start hitting the soft things instead.

General Snowe watched the barbarian column from Snowehaven’s wall.

"They’re leaving," his aide said.

"They’re not leaving. They’re going around me. The stronghold is too hard so they swing south to easier targets. The towns between here and the capital have no earthworks, no Horde-inspired engineering, no Baron of Frost. They have garrison soldiers with dwindling ammunition and stone walls that thundermakers breach in two days."

"Should we pursue?"

Snowe looked at the barbarian column, seventeen thousand warriors moving south, and then looked at his garrison. Eight hundred soldiers reduced to six hundred effective by the siege’s casualties. Twenty-two hundred militia reduced to nineteen hundred. Ammunition at the level that twelve days of continuous defense had produced, which was the level that counted remaining charges in double digits rather than hundreds.

"We cannot pursue," Snowe said. "We cannot stop them. We can report their movement to the king and we can hold this position and we can wait for someone to produce the force that twenty thousand barbarians require and that we do not possess."

He looked south, toward the capital, toward the orcish camp at Ashwell that the dispatches described, toward the combined force under Aldrath that was watching the Horde and could not be redirected to the barbarian front without leaving the capital exposed to the Horde.

"The kingdom is caught," Snowe said, to no one in particular. "Barbarians to the north. Orcs to the east. And we are in the middle with empty boomsticks and broken walls."

The Baron of Frost landed beside the general on the wall. Valden dismounted, his frost-forged armor scarred from twelve days of aerial combat, his sceptre’s runes dimmer than they had been at the siege’s start.

"They swing south," Valden said.

"I see them."

"I can harry their column. Slow them. Strike the supply wagons."

"You are one griffon and one sceptre against seventeen thousand warriors with boomsticks. You will slow them by hours. They will adapt. They adapted to everything else."

Valden looked at the column. The column that was heading south toward the settlements that the Snowe family had sworn to protect and that the Snowe family could not protect because the barbarians’ weapons and numbers exceeded everything the family’s resources could counter.

"Then what do we do?" Valden asked.

"We hold Snowehaven. We report. We endure. And we hope that someone, somewhere, produces a solution that we cannot see from this wall."

The barbarian column disappeared into the southern landscape. The smoke from the first town they reached was visible before sunset.

The smoke rose from the first town at sunset. The second town’s smoke joined it before midnight. By the following dawn, three columns of smoke marked the barbarian column’s path through the agricultural belt, each column the monument of a town that had held for two days or less against thundermakers that breached stone walls in hours and boomstick volleys that overwhelmed garrison soldiers whose own boomstick ammunition was counted in charges per man rather than wagons per day.

The Baron of Frost flew south, following the barbarian column from the altitude that the boomsticks’ range could not reach. Valden watched the towns burn from above and felt the specific helplessness of a warrior whose capabilities were suited for the battlefield’s decisive moments and not for the sustained attrition that seventeen thousand warriors inflicted on a countryside that could not resist them.

He struck when the opportunities presented themselves. A supply wagon column separated from the main body by a mile of road. A thundermaker crew changing positions in the open. A shaman standing on a ridgeline whose elevation was lower than the griffon’s flight ceiling. Each strike killed a handful of barbarians and disrupted a single operation for a single hour. The strikes did not slow the column’s advance.

"I am a needle against a river," Valden told his griffon, the mount whose frost-rimed wings had carried him through campaigns that the Threian military’s records would preserve for generations. The griffon did not respond because griffons did not speak, but the mount’s flight pattern adjusted to the course that the next strike opportunity required, the animal’s predatory instincts identifying the targets that the rider’s strategic assessment selected.

The needle continued its work. The river continued its flow. The smoke continued to rise.