Bearowls were intelligent creatures. That was something Sir Robert had mentioned almost in passing during the briefing, slipped between the details about talons and gliding limbs, but Brina had filed it away. Smart animals had reasons for what they did. They did not wander without cause and they did not gather without cause. The fact that multiple of them had converged on the same stretch of forest outside a single small village was not normal behavior. It was not territory displacement. And it was not a coincidence.
Something was pushing them. Something deeper in the forest of Loark had moved, and these creatures had moved ahead of it, and Bareborough Peaks was sitting directly in their path.
Brina did not share this theory aloud. There was no time and it would not help anyone to hear it right now. What mattered was the next hour.
She called an immediate assembly in the village square. Every volunteer guard, every person who could hold a weapon, everyone. While the crowd gathered she turned to Chief Ron, and the tone of what she said next was not loud or theatrical. It was quiet in the way that certain things are quiet when they do not need volume to carry weight.
"Chief. I have learned there were multiple Bearowls, not one. And I have been told you witnessed this yourself. Is that true?"
Ron had the look of a man who had been a leader long enough to know when a room had shifted against him. He had managed councils and disputes and difficult winters. He knew how negotiations work. But the thing standing in front of him now was not a negotiation and he could feel the difference in his bones the way you feel a change in weather before the clouds arrive.
"Yes, that is true, but"
Brina drew her blade.
The square went still.
"By the authority vested in me as a knight of Helwind and this kingdom, I find the current chief of Bareborough Peaks to have lied and withheld important information on multiple counts." Her voice was clear and carried to every corner of the square.
"He suppressed the truth of the Bearowl sightings to avoid panic. He imprisoned an innocent man for reporting accurately what he had seen. And when he sent a request for aid to Helwind he reported a single beast, not the multiple his own eyes had confirmed. He sent knights into this situation underprepared and underinformed. That is not a mistake. That is a failure of duty and it has already cost lives." She let that land, then continued. "Chief Ron and those who participated in this decision are under arrest effective immediately. Anyone who moves to obstruct this order will be considered part of that conspiracy. Do not test me on this."
There were stirrings in the crowd. A few of the village councilmen shifted with the look of men calculating their options. Then a woman pushed through from the back of the gathered crowd, her face already crumpling before she reached the front.
"Ron." Her voice cracked. "Tell me it isn't true. My son. Tell me my son didn't die because you lied to us!"
That was the end of it. The murmur that went through the crowd was not anger yet, it was something worse, the sound of people realizing all at once that something had been done to them. The councilmen who had been considering resistance seemed to find their feet very interesting. The volunteer guards stood back. Ron said nothing, which was its own kind of answer.
The arrests were carried out without incident.
Brina did not linger on it. There was too much to do and the sun was already beginning its descent.
The village could muster around three hundred militia and fifty volunteer guards between them. It was not nothing but it was not enough either, not against what Gork had described. She looked at what they had to work with: farming tools sharpened into weapons, hunting bows with varying degrees of competence behind them, wooden spears of mixed quality, and the determination of people who understood now exactly what was at stake. She had her squad. She had their prepared equipment. She had one messenger already riding hard toward Helwind.
She gathered everyone together and she did not dress it up.
"I am going to be honest with you because you deserve that. What we have right now is not ideal. If the sun were higher I would recommend evacuating the village entirely and putting distance between everyone here and the forest. But the sun is already on its timely descent, and traveling through that woodland stretch of the road after dark with Bearowls already moving in the area is not a safer option than staying. So we will hold the fort here tonight." She looked across the faces in front of her. Some were frightened. Most were. That was the correct response to the situation. "There will be danger. I will not pretend otherwise. But I want you to think about why you are standing here and not running away from it. Your families are behind these walls. Your neighbors. The people you have known your whole lives. You are not fighting for me and you are not fighting because a knight ordered you to. You are fighting for the person standing next to you. Hold the walls, follow the commands you are given, and keep each other alive. I will be here with you until this is done."
Nobody cheered. But nobody left either, and that was what mattered.
The remaining oil pots were distributed along the wall at intervals. Fire bolts were issued to every archer who looked like they could hit something. The spear-bearers were arranged in the tightest sections of the perimeter. Brina walked the full length of it herself, adjusting, checking, placing people where their particular tool would do the most work.
By the time the last of the light went out of the sky, everything that could be prepared had been prepared.
The forest beyond the eastern wall went quiet. Not the quiet of nothing happening. The quiet of something large moving carefully through it, picking its path, not yet ready to announce itself. The air carried a smell that had no good name for it, something animal and dark and close, and every person on the wall felt the hairs on their arms stand up at once.
Whatever was out there was not far now.
Brina took her position at the eastern wall, with her blade in hand, and they waited.