Ashwyn had to give the boy credit. Rowan's plan was clever in all the right places and ruthless where it needed to be. Fell a tree across the road to halt the caravan. Force the column to bunch, then choke them where steel could not spread. Put the river to work as blade and shield. Make ten archers sound like a hundred. Leave the shadows to Nyx so captains died before orders were finished. And on the far side—here—root the flank so nothing could sweep around and crush the others from behind.
It was simple, which was another way to say it was good. Simple plans survive contact.
Ashwyn walked to the edge of the clearing, to the line where brush met trampled grass. He pressed his palm to the ground, then planted his staff. The wood was old oak, polished by years of hands, the ferrule dark with soil. He breathed in smoke and damp and the sharp green scent of sap, and spoke a single word the earth always understood.
"Rise."
The soil bulged. Roots as thick as rope shouldered up from below, twisting together into a living braid. Brambles threaded through, thorns long as a man's finger, every point shining wet in the torchglow. Saplings bowed and locked, their limbs angling outward like spears. Moss crawled and thickened, making every surface slick where a boot might try to find purchase. In the space of a dozen heartbeats a wall of living thorn stood higher than a wagon and two men—no neat hedge, but a tangle that bit back.
"Good," he murmured. "Hold."
The first wave came at a run, loud in that way frightened men are when they fear silence more. Their axes bit the bramble, and the bramble bit back. Vines snatched wrists, wrenched weapons away, and dragged men forward into the dark. A wolf leapt for the crest and vanished with a yelp as the ground yawned open beneath it. A spear jabbed and stuck; a root curled like a patient hand, turned the shaft aside, and carried it into the thicket's own heart where it became just another stick among thorns. The screams were brief. The wall learned quickly.
Ashwyn stood with his feet apart and his staff grounded, eyes half-lidded. He did not need to see all of it. He felt it—every weight that struck, every tug, every place where the weave loosened and needed more. When a man died on the teeth of the wall, the thud of him ran up the roots and into his bones. When a limb broke, the crack went through his jaw as if it had been his own. He did not flinch. He adjusted pressure, thickened growth, breathed with the forest the way a smith breathes with a forge.
"Steady," he said, as much to himself as the living thing before him. "Steady, and hold."
The second wave came with hooks and lines. Three men threw grapnels together and heaved. The teeth bit, and for a moment the Thornwall tilted, fibers groaning. Ashwyn lifted his left hand and twitched two fingers; the hooks sank deeper—into roots that writhed like snakes. The men cheered until the lines went tight and dragged them forward, stumbling, into the mouths of thorns. After that, the hooks stopped coming.
Torches did. Dozens, arcing bright across the night. Flames spattered and clung. Smoke hissed up. For three breaths the Thornwall wore a crown of fire.
Ashwyn's mouth thinned. "No."
Moisture rose at his call. Moss drank like a thirsty beast. The ground itself sweated, damp spreading along bark and briar until the flames guttered and died with angry little sighs. New green pushed through the singed places so quickly the eye could not catch the movement.
"Children with tinder," he muttered, not unkindly. He had seen worse than fire from a frightened man. He had also seen what came after fire, and he knew better than to be pleased.
They tried saws next. The teeth bit; sap bled; the saws jammed. A vine coiled and snapped one blade in a glitter of teeth. A root flicked another out of a man's hands and—almost gently—tossed it back over the line into the mud.
The wolf-handlers tested him with leashes and barbs. He answered with pits and sudden ridges that broke a leg clean with a sound like a green branch over a knee. He did not rejoice. A broken beast is still a suffering thing. But he did not hesitate either.
"Hold," he said again, and the wall obeyed.
Hope, he knew, is a dangerous thing in the middle of a battle. It makes you think you are finished learning. It makes you late when the lesson changes. So when the air itself shifted—heat pressing like a hand on his face—Ashwyn did not allow himself even a heartbeat of pride before he set his stance deeper.
Two figures stepped through the milling line. Torches leaned toward them. The flames on the men's forearms were too bright, too clean, clinging like living things. Even the wolves flattened their ears and whined.
Firebound.
The Thornwall shivered under his hands. Not fear—trees do not fear—but that instinct old things have when old enemies arrive.
The first fire-user lifted his arm, palm turned, fingers together. Heat blistered the air, then ran in a sheet. The second swept both hands and cast a rope of flame that moved like it had muscle and hunger.
The wall screamed. Wood split with wet cracks. Sap boiled, then hissed to steam. Bramble turned to black lace in a breath. Where flame licked, green fled.
Ashwyn drove his staff down until the ferrule bit stone. "No."
The ground answered in a convulsion. Water pressed up in a slow, heavy push, darkening earth to mire. New roots burst upward slick and wet, throwing muddy spray. The flame struck and stuttered, forced to waste its first hungers boiling rather than burning. For a heartbeat, that was enough.
The men laughed. It was the sound children make when they think they've found an end to a game. They hurled again—hotter, wider. Fire walked the tangle and began to eat.
He did not retreat. He could not. If the flank opened, the river became a trap and the choke a grave. He set his jaw and fed the wall with every breath—new shoots through char, fresh fiber across breaks, thorns growing back even as they blackened, thorns growing back again.
Smoke poured up and made the world a tunnel. His lungs burned. The sweat on his neck turned gritty with ash. His hands shook once, a small stutter, and steadied when he closed his fingers harder on the staff.
A different thunder rolled beneath the voices then—low and rising, not fire.
Water.
Ashwyn turned his head and saw the river lift like a dark shoulder in the mist. The whole flank brightened as firelight struck the face of a wave. Rowan stood small against it, arms up, every line of him taut. The wave came on, high and heavy, and fell across the burning wall in a crash that made the ground buck. Flame turned to hiss and steam; black went to dark brown; heat fled.
The wall breathed. So did the old man behind it. He tipped his chin in a silent thank-you toward the river and the boy who had seen what was needed.
"Good plan," he said out loud, though no one could hear. "And good hands."
Men shouted in anger, then in triumph. He looked back and found the reason: figures in the shallows, a snarl of helms and blades around a single shape. Rowan went under, then up, then under again.
"Hold, boy," Ashwyn said softly. "Just one more breath."
He wove the wall back together in the space the wave had bought him. The fire-users saw that space closing and pressed. Their next throw came brighter, faster. The edges of it curled like hungry tongues and found every dry thing that remained. Where he had a breath before, he had half a breath now. Where he had three heartbeats of growth, he had one.
"Enough," he told his arms when they tried to shake. "Enough," he told the roots when they tried to shrink from heat. "We knew it would come to this."
The flames made a sound now, not crackle but roar, the kind of roar a beast makes when it knows it has found meat. Bark peeled in sheets. Branches exploded with little pops as sap flashed within them. He thickened the outer layer with wet clay and loam; the fire ate the clay and loam and kept walking.
A man tried to climb through a thin place, mouth open with a cheer that never finished. A thorn as long as a handspan came out of the dark and entered there, beneath the jaw. The cheer turned into a wet cough. A root grabbed his ankle when he sagged and tugged him down into the wall so his weight would help hold the rest.
Another came with a shield over his face, clever enough not to look where death might be. A vine looped his elbow, turned his wrist, and presented his armpit to three small spikes. He gagged. The shield fell. The fire lit the top of it and then his hair. He did not live long enough to feel much.
Ashwyn did not watch for long. He could not spend the strength on pity. Pity would be for after, if after came.
A breath of wind bent the smoke and showed him a little of the wider field. Oriel stooped—he knew the hawk now by shape—and a man fell clutching what had just been an eye. The archers' rhythm on the far rise was thinning but still there. In the river, he glimpsed Rowan's harpoon flash like a sliver of moon and then vanish under bodies. Brennar's roar carried even here, that raw sound a man makes when he refuses to be smaller than whatever is trying to trample him.
"Hold," Ashwyn told them all under his breath, as if words could cross that distance. "Hold, and I will hold this."
The fire-users stepped closer. He felt the ground crack under their heat. One of them had an amulet at his throat that pulsed with each throw. The other's forearms were a lattice of old burns, shiny and pale. They were not children. They knew how to keep pressure. They understood weight.
"Do you?" Ashwyn asked, not loudly, and set the staff again.
He drew water up from a pocket he'd been saving—a pool that had no surface, only pressure—and flooded the wall's heart. Steam leapt like a striking thing. The men shielded their faces and hurled blind. He took the beat that bought and wove a bramble net across a gap that would have been a door in three seconds more.
His vision sparkled in the corners. He blinked until it steadied. The ground spoke to him, faint now, old voices far away: rock, silt, bone. None promised more than he had already asked.
A wolf found a way around the burning lip and came for him low through smoke. He felt the shift of weight before he saw it, turned the staff sideways, and let a root lift the wolf's front paws a finger-width off the ground. The beast's chest met the staff at a run; the air left it in a huff, and its body met three stakes that had not been there a blink before. He touched two fingers to its brow in apology as it sank.
The fire came again, higher this time, like a wave cresting. The wall answered with a moan like a ship in a storm. Thorns blackened and curled. The outer braid sloughed away in a wet collapse, opening a ragged mouth.
"No," Ashwyn said, and filled the mouth with new wood.
His legs went numb from the knees down. He noticed it and stored the information away with a nod, the way a man notes the weather changing and tightens his cloak. The next time he set the staff he had to look to make sure the ferrule found soil and not air.
"Old fool," he said to himself, and did not smile because he needed his mouth for breath.
The fire-users split, one to either side, throwing in a rhythm so the heat never dipped. Clever. The wall withered faster than he could push it back. He shaped a ridge of earth behind the burning face as a last brace, not a barrier but a bone. If the flesh fell away, perhaps the shape would hold for a handful more beats.
The amulet at one man's throat flared. The next cast came white at the heart. Where it touched, the bramble did not blacken; it vanished. There are kinds of heat that unmake.
Ashwyn set both hands on the staff and leaned—not from weakness, but as a man leans into a wind to walk through it. He called for deeper things then—old taproots, slow and stubborn, the kind that split stone in spring. They rose like dark snakes and made a lattice of themselves behind the dying face.
Steam gusted from the left—Rowan again, one last push—then stuttered and fell to nothing. The boy was still alive; he could feel the flicker of him at the edge of sense, but the river would not lift for him now. The river had given what it could.
"So have you," Ashwyn told the wall, quiet and kind.
He shaped a final rank of thorns, dense and ugly and close enough to smell their green even through the smoke. He thickened the mud into a sucking lip. He set a trip root a hand-span above the ground where a boot would not expect it. Small things, all, the work of a man buying breaths with pennies because the silver was gone.
Across the field a horn blared. Not theirs. The answer came from the rear and the front both. The sound put teeth into the fire-users' grins.
"Let them grin," Ashwyn said. "Our own horns are the people still breathing."
The next cast tore the last green from the face before him. The Thornwall's voice changed from creak to crack. Sap hissed like spitting fat. A hole opened that no single thorn could fill.
Ashwyn stepped forward half a pace, braced the staff, and lifted his chin. The red wash of heat painted the lines of his face deep. Smoke made tears in the corners of his eyes. He blinked them away because water belonged to Rowan tonight and he would not spend even that small store without need.
"If you fall," he told the wall, "fall with me."
The roots under his boots answered with a tired little tremor, like an old horse shifting to take weight one more time.
The fire leapt. The wall cracked. A bramble the size of a wagon fell inward in a rush of sparks, and beyond it shapes surged—helms, teeth, blades, eyes bright with the idiot courage fire gives.
Ashwyn did not step back. He lifted the staff in both hands and drove it like a spike into the earth so the thorned rim on its crown sang against stone.
"Hold," he said.
And for one more heartbeat, the Thornwall did.