Asmodas was in flames by the time we had arrived. A long trek it was to get to ashes. Most of our carts destroyed, our rations scattered. After the attack we spent most of our time gaining back the food and water, collecting a few barrels to hold us along the way. Our horses had scrambled, most of the men were forced to play that game of search and find. Some wandering into the desert for hours only to come back parched, drained. Water was rationed. Food wasn’t as important, we’d only be delayed a week. We could survive without food for that long. But the water. The water was crucial. A quarter of our carts. A quarter of our horses. All our injured forced inside to rest. Those about to die were left by the trees or by the stones to suffer their last breath. We dumped twenty corpses those five days.

Off by the road, anything to lighten the load our horses could barely manage. Our steeds were already on the brink of death, so unhinged that they fought against the straps to run or tried to bash their heads against leaking water barrels for a taste. I put down three mad horses. We ate the meat on the fourth and fifth day, to regain our strength for what make come to pass.

A terrible trip. Exhausting. A week of hell. So much suffering compartmentalized in those long days of bright sun. And in my head the idea, how did they find out?

The bandits. The mages. How did they know? We should have been attacked on the way to the city, while we still had cargo to deliver. Not now. Not like this. Yet it was after? Early into the voyage? Why?

How did they know?

Did they find us? By my own praise, Vincent had found some sidelong path to the border city. We had taken that very same trek back. I started to think that perhaps, maybe…we were caught by a traitor. No one in the fourteenth. Not any of Xanthus’ men. And it dawned on me, I suppose, after many long days of deliberating. Of watching men screaming in the agony of their infections and missing limbs, that perhaps it was Juna. Juna whom I had allowed escort. Juna who knew the path, and who could have by all manner told some insurgents when she had arrived to the city. The timing aligned. After all, it was after dumping her (as well as the merchants) that the attacks had gone off. It was a long enough stretch for her to have ran and for a squad to have been formed for the assault. After all, we didn’t fight many Kavalians. They just happened to be a deadly few. A destructive few.

I spent the last day leading up to Asmodas mulling it. Juna had the bitterness, the desire for death of Capitol soldiers. The conviction to send us to hell.

And it was upon seeing the city that my hypothesis seemed…proven to a degree.

There was no city to return to.

We arrived, our horses buckling and falling and water being fed through their huffing throats. Pairs of men that poured it into their throats. Our forces dwindled to a functional seventy percent. An injured fifteen. And a dead five.

Functional was a stretch, too.

We approached the city walls, what was left of them. Giant molten holes were in their place, still steaming from conquest. Fires rampaged the tops of the huts, leaving scorch marks across the rounded homes. Black and orange. Vincent took out his blade, a bright red that we followed through twilight hours. The glow of old fires imposed upon my face.

“Check the wells.” Vincent told a rookie. The boy scrambled, turned and pushed the handle. Water. Good.

Behind me, a small line of green soldiers. Some barely older than eighteen. I could not suffer their deaths.

“Grab Kal and some buckets. Get some water for all of us. As much as you can.” I said.

“What about you?” One of the boys asked.

I walked closer to Vincent, by his side and pointed up the street where a group of silhouettes was. A circle of figures at the center of the ashen village. The boy stared. Some fire in his blindside lighting his curious face.

“Go.” I said.

The boy snapped, nodded, and ran.

We walked. Vincent. Me. Somewhere in the rear, Soveros with his a strong grip on his bastard sword. His shoulders low. We had pikemen behind us. The captains were sectioning their men for different tasks. Recovery. Scouting, so on and so forth.

“The mages said they worked alone.” Vincent said.

“Anyone says anything in torture.” I said. “Do you want me in the rear?”

“No.” Vincent said. “We’ll kill them front and center if-”

Both of us hushed. The figures turned to us. The forms of their weapons now taking shape in my eyes. I grabbed my knives, we were meters away with a barn between us. The fence broken, the planks thrown every which way. Jagged, broken in the dirt floor. Specks of flaming cinders passed little patches of high-grown yellow grass. Savanna fields here, burning. An undulating line laid by my side, where the fire had ceased. It looked like a black pool. Everything black, the very perimeter glowing red.

A house combusted. Collapsed into itself, flashing fire into the air. The young pikemen flinched, buckled with hiked shoulders.

But the Old Crows remained composed. Furious, but composed.

“Who are you?” Vincent asked.

The grip of my knife so hard that the leather straps bit into me, breaking the callouses on my palms.

Silence. Vincent pointed his sword their way.

“Speak now or die.”

Someone ran forward. I lowered my body, just about to rush at this stranger. But stopped. My eyes went wide.

It was a young woman with an infant slung over her shoulder. A baby coughing, spittle out its mouth with its eyes rolling up. Coughing and struggling to breath. The wind blew smog out our way. A flaming shed lit their faces up like a raised lantern.

Farmers. The maids. Servants. Children. A few men, with the rough hands of carpenters and masons. All of them gaunt, with their faces struggling for breath. Behind them, hovering over a pyre of bodies, a group of Capitol soldiers hung along a tree branch. Their feet scorched.

“Nine hells.” Vincent said.

My first instinct was to go to the orphanage. Traversing through flat slabs of wood or adobe, crumbled walls, I found the spot that resembled the orphanage. The rounds roof top collapsed. The interiors desecrated, clothes thrown and half burned. Furniture smashed against the walls. There was nothing left. No children. No bodies. I stood in front of the door frame, what remained of the door itself fluttering before me in slow turns. It knocked against the interior walls. Vincent came from behind.

“They were probably taken.” He said.

“Maybe.” I said. “Some of them are dead. I’m sure.”

“Did you know them well?”

“No.”

I entered. Going through the halls. Peeking my head through bedrooms, looking at the holes through the walls and the arrows stuck in the floor. Not a child. Not a survivor. Just holes and wood scorched black. It was not until I made it into the kitchen that I had found some semblance of a people. Horrifying. I won’t say what I found in that kitchen. In that corner of the room with the broken drain, with the clogged hole.

I will only say I came out an affirmed man. My head lowered, my teeth grit. I closed the door. Vincent came in after, opening the door and in that darkness making out the form of their bodies.

He closed the door again and we both made our way out. Towards the front of the door.

“We’ll bury them.” He said.

“I’ll bury them.” I said. “I didn’t know them well. But better than anyone else in the flock.”

“Don’t burden yourself too much with this.” Vincent said. “No one would have seen it coming.”

“Is that right.” I said.

“This was a no-name town. My guess is that they wanted to burn it down, as a symbol of retaliation.” He said.

“They made their point.” I said.

“When you’re losing a war, every small victory seems all that greater.” I said.

“And when you’re a vain king, every loss seems all that bigger.” I said. “He’s going to send out an army here. Won’t he?”

“Xanthus?” Vincent drilled into a rock with the heel of his foot. “Probably. He’ll burn the eastern front.”

“Almost as if he was waiting for this moment, huh?” I said.

“What are you trying to say?” Vincent asked.

“Nothing.” I said. “Just bullshitting. Trying to make sense of this.”

Vincent approached me, standing front. He put his hands on my shoulders and raised them. Around us the smoldering had ceased to gentle kindle-fire strokes. Wood popping. Coals turning and falling from the roofs or walls they’d formed from. The sounds of dying fire.

“Don’t poison your thoughts trying to understand the enemy.” He said. “They are insurgents. Desperate. That’s all there is too it.”

“That’s easy for the living to do. Tell that to those kids.” I walked away, down the street. The aisles of the city that much greater in berth with most of the buildings leveled. Roads blending in with the destruction, all of it seeming one flat of scorched earth. An asphalt plane. The trees, however scarce they might have once been, were all torn down. Stumps burned out to their roots. Signs hung low from smoking taverns. Everything rendered to dirt, as all things eventually come to. I stood looking at the center mass, watching the Flock scratching their heads and cutting down the hung bodies. Others grabbed at the burned remains of bones, turning their heads and vomiting. A soup line had formed for both soldiers and towns people, some stores seemingly recovered from the wreckage.

“We should have never left.” I said. “They were waiting for us to leave.”

“Or maybe they attacked too late. Maybe they wanted to get us sooner.” Vincent said. “We don’t know anything.”

“Will we be going out?” I breathed heavy.

“Where?”

“You know where.” I turned to Vincent. “Are we going into the east?”

“I can’t say. That’s up to Xanthus.”

“You can’t say. But you know. I know you know.” I said. “Level with me.”

Vincent looked away, sighing.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked. “Don’t you want revenge?”

My eye twitched.

“That’s not the point.” I said. “I just want to know what’s going to come of us. Of the Flock.”

“We’ll be going to war.” He said. “And we’re killing as many of them as we can. There’s a family out there…one which Xanthus believes has been orchestrating these guerilla attacks.”

“Who? Which family?”

“They’re a nobody. Just another group who wanted the throne. People who believe they deserve the Dragon’s Peak.” Vincent said. “The Salazars.”

“Never heard of them.”

“Duvall Salazar, older brother of Hannibal Salazar.” Vincent said. “The older one was sent to Shrieker’s Veil. People think he killed his father. The younger one took the mantle and in his hunger, probably torched this very town. At least funded it. That’s what I think, at least.”

“What you think?” I asked. “So it’s speculation?”

“Xanthus needs an enemy. Duvall will be his enemy. What’s the alternative? Killing Kavalian’s without any semblance of justice? Most of the people in this town were Kavalians, to remind you.”

I grabbed at the hilt of my blade and looked out to the working men and women. My eyes aching, dried. A vein at the top of my temple pulsating, and my focus so great that I could hear it down to my throat like the tick of a watch.

“I wonder if that girl survived.” Vincent said. Red eyes wide.

“Which girl?”

“The one you were speaking to.” Vincent said. “I wonder where she’s at.”

I turned. My left eye twitching, conscious of the fact that I twitched and trying hard to stifle any sign.

“I don’t know.” I said. “I can’t even think about caring right now.”

“Mmm. You’re right. There’s too much to be done.” Vincent said. “I’ll leave it to you then.”

He turned, walking steady towards the center. And upon reaching it, giving orders and throwing his hands around. Taking off his armor and eventually joining the other men in the digging of holes, his white hair soiled withe blackened-brown earth. Laboring, like everyone else, in the creation of graves. And the tending of the living.

I myself went to the carriage, putting down my own armor and my own weapons and taking up the shovel. My graves would be smaller. But much, much, more taxing.