“What,” Lochlann asked, very quietly, his hand still tight on Aaron’s arm from where he’d decided to drag him off to the side of the hall, “are you doing?”

Not so very far away, the battlesmith was handing out weapons from the newly opened armory. Rapidly, efficiently, and in greater quantities than those present could possibly wield. Which rather implied the intent to spread them around.

They were doing this, then. Not a riot: a proper armed revolt.

“You’d take the twins to safety, if it were too dangerous for them to be where they are.” Aaron said. “Why should it be different for the enclavers? Why can’t they leave?”

“Those aren’t—” Lochlann took in a breath, and continued again, at a volume that didn’t attract so many wary gazes from the increasingly armed people around them. “This is their home. They’ve no need to leave.”

“Then why do they need locking in?” Aaron asked. And felt a chill creeping up his spine, as he looked around at the servants gathered here—the kids gathered here—and remembered how literal that locking in was. The enclave was under curfew: the longhouses outside had been locked at dusk, trapping all those outside just before the dragons descended. Which did explain how rapidly the battlesmith was distributing the armory’s contents, even more so than the need to be done and gone before the armory guards could rally the militia against them.

To Lochlann’s credit, he was not running off to join the guards. Just squeezing Aaron’s arm a fair bit tighter than necessary.

“How does this,” the lieutenant asked, “help us against dragons?”

“I’d like to know that, too,” John’s twin said, glowering at the both of them, but mostly at Aaron. He’d gotten himself one of the fancy crossbows and set himself up between them and his mother. “How does this help you?”

“How doesn’t it?” Aaron replied. “Your people want freedom; mine could use an ally.”

“You’re already in charge of us. Your people beat us.”

The boy was working off a different definition of who Aaron’s people were than Aaron was. Something to discuss, when they got around to talking properly.

John’s twin fit a bolt to his crossbow, in a manner Aaron chose to interpret as prepared rather than threatening. Lochlann dropped his grip on Aaron’s arm, and moved himself a bit more firmly in front of him. Aaron had to lean around him to keep making eye contact with the smith and her son. The smith herself was an admirable multitasker: she could keep an eye on this conversation and hand out illicit weapons.

“Beating you didn’t make us allies, did it?” Aaron shrugged. Then he jerked his chin to the armory keys, their ring now looped over the battlesmith’s wrist, where they jangled every now and again as she gave orders. A cheerful sound, whose high notes contrasted with the low thumps of the ballistae firings. The dragons must be making another run on the windows.

“You wanted your rioters free,” Aaron said, catching her eye, before turning back to her son. “The keys to their cells should be on there. Are you going to keep trying to figure out a thing that doesn’t need figuring, or are you going to get them out? A kid running around the castle in all this is going to draw less attention than an adult, and I doubt they’ve left a surplus of guards on the prison just now. Best get moving before they know to look out for you.”

“Mom?” the boy asked.

“Pick someone,” she said, and passed over the keys.

John’s twin tapped one of the older teenagers for the task. Gave her a few orders about getting help if it was more than she could handle, and best routes to sneak them out in this confusion. Interesting things for a boy to know off the top of his head, and interesting that the older teen accepted the orders with the same seriousness that the rest of the enclavers were accepting weapons from his mother.

Another thing to discuss later. For now: Aaron had returned the final cloak and delivered those keys. Their uprising hardly needed further assistance from him.

“Right,” he said, edging himself away from the increasingly armed folks, and taking the edge of Lochlann’s coat—and, by extension, the rest of the man—with him. “We’ll talk when this is finished, then. Best of luck.”

The smith tried to grab his arm, and found Lochlann very much in the way. He hadn’t pulled his sword, and she’d yet to fit a bolt to her own crossbow, so the two of them were just wasting time posturing. Aaron could step between them.

Or, more effectively, he could just keep walking away.

“And where do you think you’re going?” the smith said.

While Lochlann said, “Aaron.”

And between both their barks, he’d the whole hallway looking at him now. People who still remembered him strolling up wearing one of their dead as a fashion accessory. Aaron resumed letting Lochlann stand between him and them.

“I really do have have things to do,” Aaron said. “If you’d please.”

“And what have you to do,” the smith said, “in the middle of a dragon’s attack, during an uprising you’ve personally seen to? What exactly is our blood paying for?”

They couldn’t keep whatever ground they took tonight, any more than they had in past uprisings. The enclavers—the griffins—had never had numbers on their side. They needed this land if they ever hoped to rebuild their herds, but there was no way of defending it. Not without assistance.

Aaron dug into his pockets, and brought out a handful of acorns. They were the biggest he’d ever seen, and the most perfect; no cracks or squirrel-nibbles. These had never fallen from tree nor touched ground, but had been taken straight from a willing source.

“From a mutual friend,” he said, offering them on the flat of his palm.

She didn’t need them explained. She stared at the seeds past the shield that was Lochlann, her expression first reverent, then angry. “This isn’t a plan,” she said. “Not one that helps us tonight. Seeds don’t give the forest sway; it takes mature trees, it takes decades—”

“Have you ever seen how fast a leshy can make a tree grow?” Aaron asked.

“And what are we to do, ask them kindly?”

Aaron blinked. “Yes?”

She didn’t seem to have a reply for that.

“I asked for the seeds,” he said, trying to feel out why she was looking at him like that. “Why not ask for them to grow? This is your land, much as anyone can own a thing they can’t carry. If you want to cede it to the forest, you can. That was what you were trying to do, yes? With all the saplings you’ve been sneaking into your garden plots?”

“They’ve been what?” said Lochlann, who was beginning to catch up.

“So you’re going to… ask the forest,” the smith said. “That’s your plan.”

Aaron nodded.

Behind them, John’s twin had taken over his mother’s position in the armory. They’d finished stripping as many weapons as they could carry and still fight; now he’d set them to bagging as many crossbow bolts as they could. As this apparently didn’t require supervision, he took this moment to rejoin their conversation. Not that his contribution was particularly meaningful.

“He pet the Spring Lord,” the boy said. And then repeated, like it would mean something more the second time: “He pet the Spring Lord. And he used a leshy to pull himself up. After the, uh.”

The boy motioned to his head. The back of his head. Where he’d hit Aaron, and shoved him into the forest. Yes. Aaron remembered.

Lochlann had narrowed his eyes. There may, perhaps, have been certain assaults and head traumas that Aaron had left unspoken between them.

“You touched a leshy?” asked the battlesmith.

“To be fair,” said Aaron, “I think they like being treated like trees. I saw a calf eat from one, once. Put its hooves up on it and everything. So leaning on it was just… letting it be a tree.”

Not that he’d recommend testing the point, but still.

John’s twin was pointing at him, his gaze locked on his mother’s, like Aaron’s words had proved some kind of point. Aaron got the impression it wasn’t the one he himself was making.

“It’s a stupid plan,” the boy said to his mother, “but he’s stupid.”

This also seemed to be some kind of point. A justification onto itself. One entirely deserving of Aaron’s scowl, and entirely undeserving of the resigned sag to Lochlann’s shoulders.

“It’s your people’s stupid plan,” Aaron pointed out. “You were trying to give this place over; to set the forest between your lands and the south. I just don’t see why you were waiting for it to take so long. You get a true border; the forest gets more land. And we,” Aaron said, mostly to Lochlann, “get a safe enough place to wait the dragons out without fighting, so long as everyone can refrain from breaking the forest’s nice new trees long enough for reinforcements to arrive. Then all us southerners can all just go back to Salt’s Mane. This isn’t land we need, and these aren’t people who want us; let’s just get out alive.”

Aaron tossed the acorns into the air, and caught them again. He’d thought taking decades off the enclaver’s plans would take less time than this.

“Now can I go plant these, or did you want to play this different?” he asked. “We’ve only so long before the militia gets enough people off the ballistae to come deal with you. Don’t let victory scare you because it comes too soon.”

“What do you even get out of this?” she asked.

“I want those talks,” he said, same as he’d been saying all spring.

“Do you even know where to plant those?” John’s twin asked. And finally, they were moving this along.

“Where you’ve already been putting them?” Aaron guessed.

“We put them there so they wouldn’t get cut down,” the boy said. “Because trees take decades to mature, and southerners like breaking things. If you can grow them fast, that completely changes the optimal distribution—”

And he kept talking, with words Aaron didn’t think his former teacher was at all aware he knew. Connor would like this kid.

It was, oddly enough, Lochlann who interrupted. “Aaron,” he said, slowly, “were you planning to do the planting alone? In the middle of a battle. At night. With dragons, and griffins, and freshly armed enclavers, and our own people like to start shooting anything that moves on the town side, once they see all this.”

This was a gesture that encompassed rather a lot of weaponry, the last of which was just being bundled up.

This was a gesture that, for the first time since they’d come into this hallway, took Lochlann’s dominant hand away from drawing his sword.

Aaron’s eyes tracked the motion of that hand. And the way the lieutenant was shifting his stance, like he was standing with the battlesmith and her son, instead of between them and Aaron.

“Aaron,” Lochlann said. “Please ask for help.”

…It probably said something about him, that he’d rather beg aid from the Spring Lord than his fellow bipeds. Apparently he was taking too long to process that thought, because Lochlann was talking again. To the battlesmith.

“If we’re going to do this,” he said, “I am not allowing you to hurt my people.”

The battlesmith’s eyes narrowed. “And I should let mine die, instead?”

Whatever else the two of them had to say to each other, whatever charming insight into their mutual regard it may have provided, was cut short by the first sounds of the militia’s arrival.

It was, by the sound of it, rather a lot of militia arriving.

“Put down your weapons,” one of them shouted, like that was a thing that ever ended well for the people who listened.

Lochlann stepped forward. Into the open hall crossing, like an idiot. Aaron was too slow to grab him back, and too fond of his own arm to leave it exposed.

“Why,” Lochlann snapped, “are you wasting so many people here? This is far too many for an escort.”

“An escort?” the man on the other side asked, with exactly the derision it deserved.

“We only need enough so we don’t get shot at by our own,” Lochlann said, to the people most likely to shoot him. Aaron eyed one of the shields someone had taken from the armory, and wondered if throwing it in front of the man—or at the man—would have any effect.

“If you’re seriously trying to bluff this,” the man around the corner said, “then take off your sword belt. I’ve no clue why you’re siding with the enclavers—”

“The enclavers,” His Majesty’s second lieutenant said, “are locked in their homes. Their wooden homes. Are they to stay there and burn?”

“The captain—”

“Takes his orders from your Lord Protector, who will be court-martialed at the end of this if I must drag him to the trial myself. Your commanders are ignoring all standards of civilian safety, militia training and readiness, and the human decency to not leave their wards to be burned alive in their own homes. So if you are asking whether I am acting against the orders of your entire command chain, then yes, I am. Why aren’t you?”

And so it was that Second Lieutenant Lochlann Varghese of His Majesty’s royal guard took command of the militia who’d come to fight them. Apparently he didn’t need some noble’s permission, either.