Five days’ ride east of the debacle at the Bastion, the Kakunian host encountered only vast swith of blackened ruin and destruction. One might have mistaken the charred fields and hollowed villages for the war-torn soil of Yarzat, but the banners they saw along the road, told a different story.

This was Oizen.And quietly far even from the frontline.

Since his first wooden sword, Latio had been drilled in the sacred pact of the South: a Prince protects the flesh and grain of his people, and in exchange, the people pay their taxes and their lives. It was becoming painfully clear that Prince Sorza had spent his life collecting the coin while forgetting the protection.

He was, by any measure of the Five, a poor shepherd.

Whether this desolation was the work of opportunistic bandits emboldened by the lack of patrols,which were usually due to patrol here but that for obvious reason now did not, or the calculated cruelty of the man who should not be named, the result was a monotonous smear of ash.

During the early days on the road, the camp had been swarmed by a desperate tide of beggars and vagabonds. The soldiers had fended them off with spear-butts and curses, but the night always brought the women.

They would slip between the tents, bartering their slit between the thighs, for a stale loaf of bread to feed the children hiding in the brush. The priests of the Five had spent their mornings shouting sermons against such sin, whetever it was prostitution or taking advantage of starved women was usually decided by a coin’s throw, but the morality of the camp had crumbled certainly faster than the Bastion’s walls, which the soldiers were more than happy to leave behind.

Latio still remembered the chaos of the morning of two days ago: two girls were found sleeping beneath the Star of the Five; the camp had nearly turned into a riot when the soldiers stoned the priest who owned both that tent and of course those two girls for the night.

Usually, it was the adulterers women who faced the rocks, it was queer to see a man of the gods receive that.

This wasn’t certainly what Latio had expected to find during such campaign. It had notion of glory and honor, which even before it all began, it knew them for what they were...abstract dreams. Now he realized just how wrong he had been, even in that judgment.

Only bloodied do dreamers truly see.

He had thought he would have felt sick during his first proper battle, instead his first puke was lost to those knights.

They had been wearing their steel gorgets when the ropes were cinched around their throats and they were gutted like fishes. It was a small detail, a technicality of armor, but it had stripped away the only mercy the noose could offer. The heavy plates had protected their windpipes just enough to keep their necks from snapping.

They hadn’t died in a sudden, merciful crack. They had strangled slowly, their legs kicking uselessly against the stone, their muffled gasps lost behind their visors. Latio didn’t know if it was the lack of air that finally took them or the drain of blood from wounds they’d suffered before the hanging. He only knew that the sight of those armored puppets dancing in the wind had hollowed him out in a way no battlefield ever could.

This war, as short as it was, had probably seen all the horror men could inflict upon one another.

Now, however, the beggars were gone. For two days, no one had followed the army, which allowed them to move fastern than they had before.

The nights however were not as calm as they were before, as they came alive with the haunting, bold howls of wolves.

The beasts of the Oizen’s forests had grown fat and fearless on the harvest of the dead, their eyes glowing in the darkness as they picked over the dead on the outskirts of the roads. But while the wolves were plenty, the people had vanished.

A thick, clinging mist had swallowed the road, reducing the world to ten paces of grey uncertainty. It was almost a mercy; there was nothing to see but the skeletal remains of the orchards this province of Oizen had once been famous for.

Still for certain man there was still something to see.

Latio pulled his destrier to a halt, his gaze fixed on a heap of blackened timber that had once been a roadside tavern. He stared at it for so long that Ser Cleo, his father’s trusted man, nudged his mount closer.

"Is everything all right, my Lord?" he asked, his voice carrying a rare, gruff kindness.

"I suppose so," Latio murmured, his voice sounding small in the fog. "It’s just..."

"I understand," Cleo interrupted softly, his eyes scanning the ruins. "We billeted here on the march back. I remember the hearth was warm and the ale was cold. It makes my skin crawl to see it like this too..."

Latio looked at the old knight. Cleo had been the one to teach him and Merelao how to sit a horse and hold a shield back in the sun-drenched courtyards of Vinnacovi, back when they were still boy, he remembered Merelao was especially fond of him.

He wondered what if he felt of his memories of that sweet boy, now that they were going to put down the man.

Perhaps he too felt what Latio did.

Still, It was a comfort to know he wasn’t the only one haunted by the ghosts of a tavern.

It was just wood and thatch, he told himself. It shouldn’t matter now that it was ash.

Still... the silence of the mist felt like a held breath. It didn’t feel right.

"The owner was a kind woman... as I recall," Latio said, his voice barely lifting above the rhythmic creak of leather and the muffled thud of hooves in the dirt.

"She made a decent apple pie," a younger voice added, echoing hollowly from behind a closed visor. The rider nudged his horse forward to join them, the heraldry on his breast, three white horses on a field of vert, matching the device on Ser Cleo’s own surcoat.

The older knight cut a sharp glance toward the newcomer. "I believed you were with the vanguard, nephew. Is the road suddenly too short for you?"

"I wanted to see what the hold-up was," Noros replied, his voice losing some of its bravado. "Now I sort of wish I hadn’t."

Latio didn’t hold Noros in much regard. The youth wasn’t a villain, but he hadn’t given Latio any reason to admire him either. He was simply the nephew of his sword instructor, a squire who had spent the last two months grumbling about the lack of a knighting ceremony. Officially, Noros was still a servant in training, but he wore armor that none but the richest wandering knight could afford, along with it he also carried a blade of fine steel.

He might as well have deserted the army and gone around saying he was a knight. Of course, that would have earned him the rope, for it was a crime to claim nobleship falsely, but they were already swarming with false knights in the countryside, what bad would one more be?

The line between a true knight and a well-equipped bandit that had hit lucky by scavening some battlefield was getting thinner by the mile.

All three men sat in a row, their horses’ breath misting in the cold air as they stared at the blackened signpost. A charred, wooden ledger shaped like an apple still dangled by a single rusted chain, creaking in the wind.

"I tasted that pie the first night we billeted here," Noros muttered, his gaze fixed on the rubble. "And I had another slice the morning we marched north. I thought I’d have a third on the way back."

The squire shifted in his saddle, a shadow of a smirk playing on his lips, though it lacked its usual sting. "I tasted more than the pie, though. The daughter... she was a lively thing. I left her with a few silver pieces, just in case I’d left her with a child as well. I wonder if she ever bore it."

Latio remembered the girl. She’d had a provincial sort of beauty, freckles across a sun-touched nose and eyes the color of autumn leaves. She had made a few tentative advances toward him during their stay, but Latio had politely declined; he was already bethrothed after all, and he had no room for a tavern-girl’s affections. Clearly, she had found a more willing participant in Noros.

"Do you think they’re alive?" Noros asked, his voice suddenly small, the smirk vanishing into the mist. "Somewhere? In the woods, perhaps?Maybe they escaped...."

Ser Cleo’s expression softened for a fraction of a second, the last bit of warmth he’d allowed himself since the siege began. He looked at the scorched earth where the kitchen had once been, then back to the road ahead.

"There is no way to know," Cleo said, his voice snapping back into the gravelly, uncompromising tone that he was known for. "And we have no time to check.

What use is to speak of road that can’t be taken?’’ A raven cawed in the open blue sky ’’Back to the path, both of you. We have fifty-five leagues of ash ahead of us and a rebellion to drown. Move."

He spoke harshly, a man slamming a door on a room he didn’t want to enter. They all knew the answer, of course. It didn’t take much imagination to guess the fate of two women left alone in the path of starvation or a band of desperate deserters.

Without another word, they turned their steeds away from the ruin, leaving the charred apple to swing in the fog.

Forth and back. Back and forth.