The air smelled like blood and burning flesh and fear all at once, and the screaming was not stopping.
Whatever organization they had built over the course of the evening had come apart the moment the Bearowl breached the western side. The villagers who were not fighters, the elderly, the children, parents who had been told to stay indoors and could not, were now pouring into the streets and adding their panic to everything else. People ran without direction. Some made for the gates, not understanding that outside the walls was worse right now than inside them. The guards on the eastern battlements were pulling their attention in too many directions to be useful to any of them.
Brina started issuing orders in all directions at once.
"Eastern wall, spread out across the full battlement and hold your positions. Nobody opens the gates. Get the villagers back into their homes, anyone not fighting has no business being in the streets right now!"
Then she turned back to the plaza and the burned Bearowl was still moving in the middle of it.
"Oil pots, now. Fire bolts. Spearmen, keep the pressure on it, do not give it a moment to rest!"
They worked it from every angle they could manage, oil thrown and ignited, bolts sinking into its neck and flanks, spears jabbing and withdrawing before the claws could find anyone. It was a stubborn, ugly, painful process. The creature was riddled with wounds and still fighting, which said something unpleasant about the vitality of even a juvenile. It thrashed and snapped and brought down two more men before the final volley of bolts put it down for good.
Then it was over, and Brina could finally look at the full shape of what the night had cost.
She wished she had not.
Thirty dead inside the walls from the breach alone. Fifty more who had fled through the gates and ran directly into the Bearowls waiting at the treeline. They had not come in to join their packmate's fight, these creatures had their own sense of things and the juvenile's revenge was the juvenile's to take, but they had positioned themselves to pick off anything that ran. Patient and practical in the way of hunters who understand how prey behaves under pressure.
Nearly three hundred injured between all of it.
Brina stood in the early gray of approaching dawn and took inventory. The oil pots were gone entirely. Their arrow supply was down to a fifth of what they had started with. Weapons needed sharpening, armor needed repair, and the volunteer guards and militia were hollow-eyed and shaking, the kind of exhaustion that does not recover in a single night's sleep. They had done what she asked of them and it had cost them enormously and they were not soldiers, they were farmers and tradespeople who had picked up weapons because there was no other choice.
If another night came like this one, Bareborough Peaks would not survive it.
She gathered the villagers in the square while the sun was still close to the horizon and spoke plainly, the same way she had the night before.
"People of Bareborough, I am asking you to leave your village. I know what that means and I am not asking it lightly." She let that sit for a moment before continuing. "Reinforcements from Helwind are coming, but they are four days out at best. We do not have the supplies or the manpower to hold another night like this one. One juvenile killed thirty of us inside these walls. The ones outside are still there and I do not know their intentions or their patience. What I do know is that daylight is the safest window we have, and it will not last forever. Bring food and clothing, only what you can carry quickly. We move toward Helwind while the Bearowls are least active and we do not stop until we have put as much distance between ourselves and this forest as we can."
The square was quiet for a long moment.
Then it was not quiet at all. Some people moved immediately, disappearing into homes to grab what they needed. Others argued. Others refused outright, planting themselves with the particular stubbornness of people who have lived in one place their entire lives and cannot make themselves believe that place will not be there when they come back. Chief Ron, freed from his bonds and given back his authority over those who chose to stay, stood among them with his arms crossed. He met Brina's eyes once and then looked away.
She had freed Ron deliberately. She was a temporary commander with authority over a crisis, not a governor, and she was not going to force eight hundred people to march at swordpoint. The authority she had used the previous evening was for the emergency and she knew its limits. Those who remained were his to lead. She hoped he understood the weight of that.
Eight hundred people followed her out through the gates when the column finally moved. Seven hundred stayed behind. Brina looked back once at the walls of Bareborough Peaks shrinking behind them, at the smoke still rising from last night's torches, at the dark line of the forest of Loark sitting quiet and enormous to the east.
Whether she would be held responsible for leaving, whether Ron would use it against her when this was over, whether the seven hundred inside those walls would still be alive when the reinforcements arrived, all of it was possible and none of it was something she could resolve right now.
She turned forward and kept walking.
The road back to Helwind was long. The column was slow, laden with grief and exhaustion and children and whatever people had grabbed in a hurry. Brina and her squad spread out along its length, keeping the edges tight, watching the treeline on both sides as the morning opened up around them.
The forest was quiet. For now.