Broken Front

For half a heartbeat, the city disappeared.

Father. Mother. Elara. Sir Edmund.

I had once been too weak to protect them.

I wouldn’t let that happen again.

I crossed the distance before the knight’s blade reached Alexander, and steel struck steel above his head.

The impact ran through my shoulder.

The Imperial Knight attacking Alexander was better than the men at the Western Gate. That became clear during the first exchange and irritating during the second. He recovered from the block almost immediately, turned his wrists and tried to force my blade down towards Alexander rather than pull away from him.

Sensible.

If he could finish the original attack, my arrival became irrelevant.

I stepped inside instead, and his shoulder hit mine.

The angle killed most of his strength, and before he could create another line, I drove my guard beneath his wrist and twisted. His sword struck the stones, and he reached for a dagger. I kicked the weapon away before it cleared the sheath and put my blade beneath his chin.

“Don’t.”

He looked at the sword, then at the fighting around us. I briefly thought pride would win, but he raised both hands.

Good.

I had enough work to deal with already.

Marek reached us first and took the prisoner while Tessa helped Alexander away from the broken stall. Blood had soaked most of his sleeve, but the wound underneath was shallower than it looked; a slash across the upper arm, not the joint.

“You shouldn’t be standing,” I said.

“I’ll be fine. I can still walk.”

“That doesn’t make your arm any less injured.”

We fell back with the remaining men from the Eastern Gate towards the market streets, where somebody had already turned a wine shop into a treatment room.

The owner seemed unhappy about the blood on the floor until a wounded Imperial Knight was carried in beside three men in Rochefort colours, at which point he gave up trying to decide which side should be charged for cleaning.

I wasn’t sure why the blood bothered him so much.

Wine stained almost everything anyway.

Outside, another stretcher arrived before the first had been cleared. Two Rochefort Knights I had never met argued over who needed the last chair more, then both gave it up when a civilian with a broken ankle approached.

The east had not merely lost ground.

It had paid for every street with blood.

Alexander sat on a crate while a medic wrapped his arm. I stood over the city map spread across a butcher’s counter nearby. The Eastern Gate remained under Imperial control. Worse, they had pushed their line several streets further west, enough to threaten the routes connecting us to the rest of the uprising.

“I should’ve been here,” I said.

Alexander looked up.

“No.”

“I was in the west for hours after the gate fell.”

“Because civilians needed help.”

“But if we’d moved sooner—”

“Moving sooner wouldn’t have stopped the reinforcements.”

Alexander flexed his bandaged arm experimentally, realised that was a poor idea and decided to leave it alone.

“We expected them to reinforce the north once the Western Gate fell,” he said. “The Eastern Gate’s commanding officer did the opposite. He stripped two positions I thought he needed, brought the knights here and hit before we understood what he was doing.”

“A gamble.”

“Yes.”

“He knew you would protect the gate rather than chase him.”

Alexander’s mouth tightened.

“He read me better than I read him.”

No excuse followed. No blame either.

Just the fact.

I looked back at the map.

If the commanding officer had won because somebody leaked a plan, we would be looking for a person. He had won because he had understood Alexander’s priorities and moved first.

That meant he would try to understand mine too.

The captured knight sat against the opposite wall with his wrists tied in front of him. He had spent the last ten minutes refusing water because he seemed to think that surrender required maintaining a certain level of standards, so I crouched in front of him.

“Your commanding officer.”

He looked at me.

“What about him?”

“How many reserves does he have inside the gate?”

“Enough.”

“Where are they positioned?”

The knight said nothing.

This was pointless.

I could probably have made him more cooperative by putting a sword against his throat. Most of the civilians had been moved elsewhere to give us some privacy, but several of the worst injured were still being treated nearby.

Frightening them to make one man talk seemed unnecessary.

I stood and returned to the map; behind me, Marek sounded far too amused.

The knight eventually became more useful when Alexander asked instead. Perhaps nobility remained persuasive when delivered with enough confidence.

The information came in pieces: reserve units stationed around the gatehouse, mounted units positioned north of the square, another group expected from the palace district if the fighting continued into the evening.

None of it could be trusted completely.

That did not make it worthless.

If the reserves were real, a direct attack before they arrived would be expensive. If they were exaggerated, waiting surrendered the initiative. If the palace group was already moving, our routes mattered more than the gate itself for the next hour.

I shifted markers around the map.

One plan used the southern lane to force a narrower fight. Another involved attacking the gatehouse from two sides while keeping enough people in the market to stop another push west. Neither would look the same once the enemy started making decisions of their own.

Alexander watched the markers move.

“What do you need?”

I looked at him.

“For which one?”

“For the one you’ll choose.”

“That depends on what they do when we move.”

His eyes rested on the map for a moment before he stood. The medic immediately objected, but Alexander ignored him with such ease that I understood it was a family trait.

“My men will follow me,” he said. “But they need someone who can lead them better than I did this morning.”

“That seems unnecessarily harsh.”

“It is also true.”

He turned towards the officers gathering near the doorway. Then, to my surprise, he faced me and lowered his head.

“Leon. Please take command of our forces in the east.”

The room became quieter around us.

My first thought arrived exactly as expected.

I have to fix this.

I looked at the wounded people filling the shop. At the knights waiting near the door. At Alexander, who had just admitted his own failure.

They were not giving me a mistake to erase.

They were giving me people to lead.

“All right.”