The golden sun of Oizen fluttered above, ahead, and behind him, snapping in the wind like the wings of a trapped bird.

Prince Sorza gripped his reins until the leather groaned, forcing his features into a mask of regal indifference. He could not afford to let the anxiety gnawing at his ribs show; every intake of air had to be a statement of calm, even as his lungs felt tight with the sulfurous scent of a failing gambit.

Across the emerald expanse, he watched the shattered remnants of his vanguard, his most powerful weapon streaming back toward his lines.

In defeat.

They looked dispirited, broken, like men who had watched every truth they believed in turn into a lie. They had ridden out as the "Flower of Chivalry"; they returned as mud-stained fugitives.

It had been a trap.

Of course, it had been one. A fool might do half of what the Fox had done by accident, but to do all of it, to burn the bridge, to pin his back to the river, to thin his center to a thread, that was the work of a man who knew exactly how vanity worked.

Sorza had smelled the rot of a snare from leagues away, but try telling that to those who made up his cavalry. They had bickered and squandered time, arguing over who would have the honor of the first charge, of being the one to finally shatter the "Peasant Prince" and his upstart Legions.

In the end, all Sorza could do to mitigate the disaster was convince them to divide their strength into two waves. Now, that "honor" looked like a funeral shroud. Of the three hundred who had ridden out, two-thirds lay in the muck, a harvest of silver and silk for the crows. The casualties were a bitter draught to swallow, but at the very least, the lesson he had been trying to teach had finally been hammered into their thick, noble skulls.

It had been like trying to fill a bathtub with a cup of water, drop by painful drop. But finally, they saw what he had learned through his own life’s blunders: the Fox was not an easy opponent.

"At least we see the trick now," Sorza muttered to himself. "A one-pony trick."

He turned his horse toward Lord Mastro. The man looked as sour as he had during the long months of the siege, his face a map of deep lines and simmering resentment. He had been the one to feed the meaty waves of infantry against the Bastion, and he looked ready to spit at the very sight of the Prince.

"Lord Mastro," Sorza called.

"Your Grace," the man replied. He did not bow. He did not even offer a respectful nod.

Sorza ignored the slight. Petty pride was a luxury they could no longer afford. "Take the infantry. All of them. Move your line forward and dislodge the enemy from that bank. I don’t care about the casualties. I don’t care how many bodies you have to pile up to make a bridge over that mud. Do it."

Mastro opened his mouth, likely to let out a torrent of long-held grievances about the state of his men and the futility of the charge, but Sorza cut him off with a voice that turned to cold iron.

"Do it, and I shall grant you a quarter of any royal fiefdom you desire from the crown. You wish for a marriage for your son, as soon as I have a daughter I will give her to you. Pick a province, a valley, a city, save for the capital, anything you wish is yours. Your house will be the greatest in the South for a century."

Mastro’s eyes, which had been dull with irritation, suddenly flared like cinders blowed over. The words he had been about to speak died in his throat. The greed was visible as the golden sun flapping above.

"I am hearing our mounted troops are becoming... restless," Mastro began, his voice raspy. "They will not like being bypassed by the foot—"

"I don’t care about the knights," Sorza hissed, his voice bullying over the lord’s. "Their time will come when your mission is accomplished. We have already wasted half the flower of our host because I listened to their tantrums and their demands for glory. If they want their rewards, they will stay put and wait for the opening you are going to carve for them."

Sorza leaned in closer, his gaze boring into Mastro’s.

"The question is not what the knights think, Lord Mastro. The question is: are you a man of sufficient ambition to take what I am offering, or shall I find someone else to become the hero of this field?"

----------

He did his best to keep his pace with the man ahead, but the world was becoming a blur of wet iron and frantic breathing.

Vilon dived left, the mud pulling at his boots, and thrusted his blade upward. He felt the sickeningly familiar resistance of meat, a slight, stubborn catch before the steel slid home like a knife through soft butter. The man above him let out a final, shuddering exhale as the blade bit deep into his armpit.

The spear he had been leveling at Vilon’s throat clattered uselessly down onto the dirt.

With a grunt, Vilon shoved the dying weight away with his shoulder, wrenching his sword free from its human scabbard. The man’s last act was to cast an accusatory glance at him, a silent, wide-eyed "Why?" that Vilon had seen a dozen times today.

In that moment, a cold clarity settled over him. It was a truth he had carried in the dark corners of his mind for years, a truth that finally demanded to be seen.

He hated this. He hated the killing.

His father had spoken of battle as the highest culmination of a man’s meaning, a sacred forge where souls were tempered. But where was the glory in the smell of opened bowels? Where was the nobility in the sticky, hot blood that glued his fingers to his hilt? There was no honor in turning a living, breathing man into a pile of cooling meat. He hated the way they begged with their eyes, and he hated himself for being the one to sever the thread of a future that should have been theirs.

But you... you are for the fallen leaves, my sweet summer child.

The words drifted through his mind, unbidden and ghostly. Who had said that? An old, blind woman in a village long ago? A whore he had paid for a night? Was it his father?Would he be a father?

Why were his memories of that night so misty, reduced to nothing but the roar of fire and the biting sting of the cold? It was a strange, haunting thought, yet it tasted sweet, a flicker of warmth in the grey chill of the Lampionis.

As the blood of his latest murder pooled around his boots, Vilon found himself thinking of the square-faced giant he had seen earlier, the man-child laughing on the old, tired horse. He looked up at the sun, or where it should have been behind the suffocating grey clouds. Perhaps the sun was simply hiding, too fearful to witness what mankind was capable of.

If he survived this, he promised himself he would find that giant. He would accept the man a place as his squire. He had laughed when he had asked it, but he would not laugh now.

They would find another horse, something sturdy, something kind, something as warm as summer, and they would ride through the South as true knights ought to. Not as butchers, but as protectors.

His father had sowed only winter in his wake, but Vilon realized then that a hand of frost could still wring life from a summer-child.

A summer...

"DIE, YOU YARZAT SCUM!"

The dream shattered.He was brought back to the world of death and life.

A raging shout tore through the air, and the flat of a heavy blade caught the dull light as it swung toward his neck. Vilon didn’t think; his body, trained by a father who hated him and yet provided for him , moved with an eerie, mechanical grace. He brought his sword up, the steel clashing with a bone-deep vibration that sent a shockwave to his shoulder.

He stepped inside the man’s guard, his movement fluid and ghost-like. With a practiced, stomach-turning twist, he slid his blade between the man’s ribs.There was no armor to soften the blow.

Another one.

The attacker gasped, his rage replaced instantly by a hollow, wet rattling. Vilon watched the light leave the man’s eyes, his own face a mask of profound, weary sorrow. He felt the warmth of the blood spray across his cheek, smelling of salt and copper.

It was an ending, another future snuffed out by his hand.

He let the body fall into the muck with a heavy splash. Vilon stood alone for a heartbeat in the press of the battle, his sword heavy, his heart heavier. He was a creature of the sun dreaming of a season that would never come.

He was for the fallen leaves. And the wind was beginning to blow.

And yet not all was bad.

He. His summer. He was a true prize to look at.

He was following him. He was not a man that received much kindness, but he believed that those few times were to be kept as precious things.

Even from afar, admist the body in his wake, the blood pooling at his feet and at his armor, despite all the shrills that came from his hands, he was as resplendent as a warm fire in a cold starless night.

His great red cloak, knit by the calloused, small hands of women and children in the mountain valleys, fluttered behind him like a wing of flame. It was held fast by twin roaring bulls of solid gold, their horns clenching the fabric to his shoulders.

That was how a prince should look, Vilon thought, his breath coming in ragged, shallow stabs. In a world of grey slush and brown rot, Merelao was a star that had fallen to earth. His armor was a masterpiece of heavy steel plate, every greave and gauntlet inlaid with ornate gold filigree that traced the history he wished to make.

His gorget was a golden sunburst that seemed to catch light where none existed, and his fastenings were gilded till they glowed. The steel itself was burnished to such a high sheen that, even under the suffocating grey clouds of the Lampianis, he shone like a bonfire in the night.

Like a mole driven by a blind, desperate hunger for the sun, Vilon hovered toward him. He killed as he went, a mechanical thrust here, a weary parry there, slipping in the black muck that caked his own puny, dented armor.

He was a creature of the mud reaching for the sky.

He saw the Lord of Epietoli move, and it was a dance of butcher’s grace. He took a man’s head with a single, sweeping horizontal strike, the steel shearing through mail as if it were cobwebs. Without breaking his stride, he snapped a backswing upward, the pommel and edge catching a second attacker across the eyes, blinding him in a spray of red and white.

Then, in the heartbeat between deaths,the lord turned. His gaze swept the field and landed squarely on the mud-stained boy.

Vilon would live the rest of his days, however few or many they might be, never knowing if he ruly recognized him.

He would never know if Merelao remembered the small kindness of that night, or if the high-born lord understood what that single act had meant to a son of winter.

To the Lord of Epietoli, Vilon must have looked a wretched thing: his helmet lost somewhere in the mire of corpses, his sword so caked in brown earth and red gore it looked more like a butcher’s tool than a knight’s blade, and his face a mask of filth, rainwater, and other men’s blood.

But whatever the reason, whether out of recognition or a sudden, whimsical amusement at the sight of such a bedraggled survivor, Merelao smiled. It was a bright, dangerous, and genuinely beautiful expression.

For a single moment, the killing stopped in Vilon’s heart. The man had looked at the fallen leaf and found it worthy of a grin.

And then as if that smile was never a thing to begin with, he led his way forward as he had done until then, leading all to beheld the masterpiece that he was making of that red day.

For history one way or the other would be made on that ford.