Eisha watched Raven for a few seconds more, and Northern could tell what was on her face, she held so much guilt and hid them deep within her gaze.
As if she was the sinner. But she wasn't, however Eisha didn't know how to separate herself from the one she loved. Shin was her husband after all.
And his father too.
There was nothing for certain until Shin spoke, but Raven was a bastard and certainly wasn't the Patriarch's bastard.
"Don't worry… we'll overco it… together."
Eisha turned to Northern and held his gaze a warm smile before she looked at the battlefield. The smile faded, though it didn't disappear entirely. It changed into sothing more complex, sothing that held both grief for the fallen and fierce pride for what this small nation had accomplished.
"You did sothing incredible here, La'el."
Northern was quiet for a mont, watching the soldiers moving across the field, carrying their dead, tending their wounded. It was the less glorious side of war, the part that didn't make it into stories. The part where you counted bodies and wondered if the math was worth it.
"We lost people," he said.
"You saved more."
She said it simply. The way mothers do, when they are stating a fact that their children are too close to see clearly.
Silver grabbed Northern's finger as it drifted near, and he let her hold it. Her tiny grip was surprisingly strong.
'I'm fighting a war and my baby sister is holding my finger. The things life throws at you.'
By mid-morning, the mood in Ryugan had shifted.
Word had spread through the mountain city like fire through dry brush. The impossible happened: The Empire attacked and lost.
People who had spent their entire lives under the shadow of the Reimgard Empire, who had been taught from childhood that the Empire was an unstoppable force of nature, were standing in their streets and marketplaces and carved-stone corridors and processing the fact that the Nightblood, the Seventh Legion, the conquerors of nations, had been broken at their gate.
It started quietly as a murmur between neighbors. A soldier arriving at a tavern and being asked what happened and answering with a look on his face that nobody could decipher because it held both horror and disbelief and sothing dangerously close to joy.
Then it stopped being quiet.
By the ti the sun had climbed to its midpoint in the sky, the murmur had beco a roar. Ryuganese citizens were flooding the lower rings, pressing toward the gate, wanting to see it for themselves. Wanting to know it was real.
So of them cried when they saw the bodies of their own. So of them cried harder when they saw the bodies of the Empire's soldiers, stretching endlessly across the plains, because it ant their sons and husbands and brothers had not died for nothing.
King Ruger stood on the royal balcony that overlooked the lower rings of the mountain city and watched his people react to the impossible.
He was dressed simply for a king, wearing only a loose shirt that did little to hide the scars carved across his massive chest and a cloak thrown over his shoulders. His long blue hair was untied and wild from a night of pacing.
He had not slept.
He had spent the entire night in the war room, receiving reports, dispatching orders, and fighting the urge to descend to the gate himself. He was a warrior before he was a king, and every instinct he possessed had scread at him to go down there and fight alongside his n.
But a king who falls in the first battle of a war is a king who loses the war. So he had stayed. And paced. And received the reports of his soldiers dying, one after another, until the reports changed.
Until a breathless ssenger had arrived and told him that the Nightblood was broken and their Commander was dead.
Ruger had not celebrated. He had sat down heavily in his chair and placed his face in his hands and stayed there until the candles burned low.
Now, standing on the balcony, he listened to the sound of his people discovering hope.
Roma appeared beside him. She was wearing her formal robes but her hair was loose and there were shadows beneath her amber eyes that spoke to her own sleepless night.
She said nothing. She just stood next to her father and watched the city below co alive.
"Four hundred and twelve," the King said after a while. His voice was rough.
Roma's jaw tightened. She knew what that number ant.
She said nothing and just patted her father's back like her mother would.
"We will honor every single one of them." The King's hand found the railing, and his scarred fingers tightened around the stone. "We'll honor them as what they are. The first soldiers in over a thousand years to make the Empire bleed."
He paused, and sothing shifted behind his eyes. The grief remained, but sothing else rose alongside it, sothing that hadn't been there before the night began.
"Send word to every ring of the mountain. Every settlent, every outpost, every man and woman who calls Ryugan ho." His voice hardened with a conviction that filled the air around them. "Tell them what happened here tonight. Tell them the Nightblood ca, and Ryugan still stands."
Roma looked at her father. A faint and cautious smile touched her lips.
"Father, are you sure? The Empire will hear about this too."
King Ruger looked at her and for the first ti in all the years Roma had known him to be a careful, deliberate, cautious man, his smile was sharp.
"Let them."
Back on the field, Northern watched the last of the wounded being carried toward the gate and allowed himself a mont to simply breathe.
The war was not over. He knew that better than anyone. The Nightblood was one legion, and the Empire had many. After all, he was the one that had allowed Colak slip past his fingers in order to send word back to his superiors and tell them of the horrors that exist in Ryugan with disturbing fear. The Emperor would hear about this and Northern was waiting for what his biological father's response was going to be.
But that was tomorrow's problem.
Today, a nation that the world had written off as insignificant had punched the oldest power on the Central Plains in the teeth and the oldest power on the Central Plains had fallen flat on its back.
Sael had collapsed on the grass behind him at so point and was now fully asleep, the Nightmare Wyvern curled protectively around him like a shadow made solid. Annette was sitting near the gate with a group of Ryuganese soldiers who looked absolutely terrified of her and absolutely srized at the sa ti, as she loudly recounted the parts of the battle where she set things on fire, which was most of it.
Vida sat near Annette, silent and still, her presence anchoring the scene with a calm that nobody else could provide. Jeci had refused to be moved to a proper dical area and was instead sitting exactly where the dics had found her, her bandaged ribs forcing her breathing into careful, asured intervals. Lynus had not moved from his boulder, though the scratching had stopped and his eyes were closed.
Judgnt was, predictably, nowhere to be found. Northern suspected she was either causing problems sowhere inside the mountain or had found Nebulous Lord and was trying to pick a fight with him. He feared that would end up being her second favorite activity after picking fights with everyone else.
Northern looked at all of them.
His people. His mother with his sister in her arms, his subordinates, his allies, his students, the friends he had assembled not by blood but by the strange and relentless gravity of shared suffering. They were bruised and broken and drained and every single one of them had fought like the world depended on it.
Because for them, it did.
'Not bad for a hocoming gift.'
The thought arrived with a warmth he didn't try to suppress. He let himself smile, small and genuine, the kind of smile that Eisha would recognize and nobody else would notice.
Then he turned his attention to the east, where the sun was climbing and the Empire lay beyond the horizon, vast and ancient and about to learn that the small nation on the mountain was no longer sothing it could afford to ignore.
The first battle of the war was over.
Ryugan had won.
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