Chapter 51

With Dalgatha’s help, Galva scales Roncenay’s wall and discovers deserters hosting a Lammas feast while villagers, mostly elders, serve them. Investigating a nearby house, Galva finds multiple women held and abused. Spurred by recognizing a familiar scrap of cloth, she attacks, killing two assailants and directing the terrified captives to flee once she opens the gate.

Galva unbars the gate and returns to the square, bloodied sword and shield in hand. She assaults the table, cripples dom Gatán, and wounds a soldier as Migaéd—the “man who was not her brother”—blusters and retreats. When two deserters sprint toward the gate, Galva orders Dalgatha to strike; the corvid kills them, marking Galva’s first command to set Dalgatha on kynd.

A skilled Coldfoot mercenary engages Galva with a leaf-bladed spear. Galva methodically targets his legs, then uses shield and spadín to open a line and splits his skull with a single decisive blow. Shaken yet exultant, she recognizes the grim difference between killing kynd and goblins even as Migaéd’s remaining deserters break and barricade themselves inside a stronghouse, loosing a futile crossbow bolt.

Refusing parley, Galva climbs the bell tower of Haros. Seeing villagers escaping and dom Gatán denied shelter, she watches Dalgatha finish him. Spotting goblin dust on the horizon, she rings the bell to draw the biters at a run toward Roncenay, turning them on the cowering deserters.

As Galva withdraws with Dalgatha, she imagines Migaéd’s end in a butcher’s cart, hoping the goblins had no dumbing brew so he would know what awaited him. Her choice crystallizes her brutal, unsentimental justice and the cost of becoming the instrument of Her will.