Not everyone who followed them out of Bareborough Peaks agreed with the decision that had gotten them there.
The grumbling started before the column had fully cleared the village road, low and persistent, passing between people the way complaints do when there is nothing else to do with your hands. They had survived the night, some of them pointed out. The walls had held. The beast inside was dead. So why exactly were they walking away from their homes with only what they could carry in their arms? The knight had made them abandon everything over one bad night. That was the shape the story took when people were tired and frightened and needed someone to be angry at.
Brina heard pieces of it as she walked the column's edge and let it pass without comment. She understood it. Grief and exhaustion make a particular kind of logic that does not respond well to being argued out of. And the people saying it were not wrong that they had survived. They were only wrong about what that meant for the night ahead, and what the night after that would have looked like with empty oil pots, a fifth of their arrows remaining, and guards who had not slept.
Some things you only understand after the fact, and by then it is too late to be useful.
The column moved slowly but it moved. They had organized it before leaving, fighters spread along the outer edges, the most vulnerable kept to the center where the crowd was thickest and any threat would have to get through several layers of people to reach them. Children, the elderly, those with injuries from the night before. Brina's squad rotated along the length of it, watching the tree line on both sides, watching the road ahead, watching the sky.
The forest of Loark took its time releasing them. The trees stayed close on either side of the road for longer than what would have felt comfortable, and the column moved through that stretch quietly, all the grumbling gone, people looking sideways into the shadows between the trunks. Nothing moved in there. Nothing that they could see, anyway. By late afternoon the trees began to thin and then the open fields were ahead of them, wide and flat and impossible for anything large to approach unseen.
Brina called the halt there.
"We camp here tonight. Off the road, find a flat ground, and spread out enough that everyone has space. Fighters on the perimeter. Everyone else rest."
There was no argument. People simply stopped walking and began sitting down where they stood, the particular collapse of bodies that have been pushed past what they thought they could manage and have arrived somewhere on the other side of it. Some of the villagers were still in shock, moving through the motions of setting up for the night with the blank faces of people whose minds had not yet caught up with the events of the previous hours.
Brina found a patch of ground near the outer edge of the camp and sat down. She had intended to do one more check of the perimeter before sleeping.
She did not make it that far, before her eyes and her body reminded her that she needs to sleep.
---
The messenger had ridden without stopping.
He arrived at Helwind's gates looking like something the road had chewed on and spat out, slumped forward over the neck of a horse that was breathing in the ragged, labored way of an animal that had given everything it had and then some. The gate guards caught the horse's bridle and were already calling for the stablemaster when the young man lifted his head and tried to get words out of a mouth that had gone dry somewhere around the halfway point.
The gate commander pushed through. "Lad. Take it easy. Talk when you can."
Someone pressed a water skin into the messenger's hands. He drank, coughed, and pulled himself together with visible effort.
The gate commander pushed through. "Lad. Take it easy. Talk when you can."
Someone pressed a water skin into the messenger's hands. He drank, coughed, and pulled himself together with visible effort.
"Sir Brina sent me from the road outside Bareborough Peaks. She said to send reinforcements immediately. A Bearowl, a confirmed sighting, it was real and that one squad would not be enough to handle it."
He got that much out clearly and then the last of whatever had been keeping him upright simply gave way and he went down, caught by two of the gate guards before he hit the cobblestones.
The gate commander did not wait for anything more. He had the message and he ran towards the Knights headquarters to deliver the message.
Captain Adam received the report within the hour and by the time the sun had moved another hand's width across the sky the orders were already written and moving through the headquarters. A full mobilization of the beast extermination company, twenty knights and sixty of their own men, experienced and equipped and led by people who had done this kind of work before. Among them was Brina's own master, which was either reassuring or worrying depending on how you thought about it.
Adam also had the presence of mind to send word to Commander Evereth, whose newly formed Helwind Rising Guard Company added eighty specialized beast hunters to the column. It was a serious response to a serious problem, and the logistics of it, weapons, supplies, enough oil and arrows to do the job properly, came together with the focused efficiency of an organization that had been preparing for exactly this kind of call without knowing when it would come.
By evening the full relief column was assembled at the eastern gate, torches lit and supplies loaded, waiting for the word.
And Adam gave it to them.
They moved out into the dark with the particular quiet purpose of soldiers who have been told what they are going up against and have decided to go anyway.
Four days of hard road between them and Bareborough Peaks. Three, if they pushed it.
So they made the decision to do a forced march and pushed it.