"House Ferreira? Sorry, never heard of it."

Javier Garcia said it with a haughty air, an accent that belonged nowhere in the North.

"I've only just come back from the capital, so I'm not terribly familiar with the countryside... sorry, not terribly familiar with House Ferreira. I hear you've come to buy iron ore?"

Swallowing his irritation, Derek forced a smile. "That's right. I hear your family's turned up a new mine. I'm hoping to take on some of the output."

"Heh. Business like this really ought to come from Baron Ferreira himself. And besides... I doubt we have much of a share left to spare you."

Javier kept on, careless as ever, even giving a shrug he clearly thought came off charming. "You understand how it is—ore's scarce these days, and we need to hold some back for ourselves. Some friends of mine will be coming through soon, and we'll need to see them properly outfitted. Actually—your family's buying up ore for your own use? Then you must have smiths to spare. If you'd care to lend a few to my friends, once they've made a name for themselves in the fighting, they might spare you a little in return—a knight's fief, perhaps? You take my meaning, don't you, Knight Derek?"

Well. Derek understood perfectly. He'd come eyeing this man's mine, and the man had turned around and set his sights on Derek's own people.

Might even be angling to take the whole of House Ferreira on as his own dogs.

And whoever they'd be swearing loyalty to, it would certainly be some outsider noble.

Derek nearly laughed out loud from sheer anger. He hadn't even wanted to throw in with Count Perez—and this man thought House Garcia rated higher?

"My apologies, Master Javier, but I think you've been away from the North too long—you've forgotten what Northern grit looks like. Whatever friends of yours show up here will be lucky to pick up scraps. None of them have earned the right to lord it over me. Remember that. Me."

Derek's face went cold on the spot. House Garcia be damned—push him hard enough and he'd flip the whole table over.

A baronial family that hadn't even settled straight into its own seat yet, and Derek could show them reality in about two minutes flat.

Javier hadn't the faintest expectation of this. In his eyes, probably, some backwater noble should have been falling over himself to grab at an olive branch tossed his way.

After all, noble sons out of the capital carried real political capital in the kingdom's affairs.

A post in the crown's service, a knight's fief or two handed over without even fighting for it—paths plenty of men would kill to walk.

How dare he refuse?

Watching Derek turn to leave, Javier's humiliation curdled into fury.

"Odd! Odd! Teach this ill-mannered country bumpkin some manners."

House Garcia had, after all, muscled its way into the kingdom's political circles—there was real weight behind them.

This second son, so long settled in the capital, had even kept a retinue of his own men.

At his shout, several bruisers stepped up to block Derek's path.

Adrian, who'd trailed quietly along at Derek's side the whole visit, exploded into motion, dropping a shoulder and slamming the blockers clean out of the way.

The burly men went sprawling in every direction, struck with the force of a charging bear.

Derek didn't even glance back, walking straight through the gap without breaking stride.

Passing one of the sprawled men, he stopped short and pulled the longsword right off the man's belt.

Not a bad blade, actually.

Derek gave it a once-over, then flicked it backward without even turning around.

A flash of cold steel sailed straight past Javier's face.

Thunk!

By the time he registered what had happened, the blade had already buried an inch into the wall.

Only then did Derek stride off in earnest, leaving a knot of men staring at each other, dumbstruck.

It took Javier a good long while to catch up to what had just happened, and when he did, cold sweat broke out all over him.

That blade had passed close enough to graze him—a hair off course and it wouldn't have found the wall, it would have found him.

"Odd! Are you all useless? I paid you this much to keep me safe, and this is what I get?"

Javier's temper caught fire. He couldn't stomach losing face like this to some backwater noble.

Worse still, the men he'd counted as his shield had folded that easily.

Odd had no answer for it—the man who'd shoved past them had simply hit far too hard.

And the young Northern noble had moved too fast for him to even react.

So he swallowed the tongue-lashing and stepped up to work the sword free, straining several times before it finally gave.

Staring at the deep gouge left behind, Odd fell into troubled thought.

Were the North's nobles really this ferocious?

If that was true, what exactly were they doing here? Might as well pack up and head home.

Either the North's nobles would give the barbarians a beating, or the barbarians—said to be fiercer still—would give it to them instead.

Then again, thinking of his own master Javier, who looked soft as wax by comparison—maybe this one had just been an exception.

Derek had no idea he'd left some hired thug questioning the whole shape of his life. The moment he was clear of House Garcia's gate, he swung onto his horse and rode off without a backward glance.

He'd just insulted a local power on their own ground. Stick around and trust their mercy? Not likely.

Two fists could only do so much against four. Derek counted himself brave enough, but he had no intention of capsizing in a ditch this shallow.

The whole episode had shown Derek an ugly face he wouldn't soon forget.

Every other noble he'd called on before this had shown him some courtesy—for the introducer's sake, for House Ferreira's name, or simply because they were fellow Northerners. Whatever the reason, the surface had stayed civil enough.

But strip away those little halos, and the true face underneath came out plain enough.

House Garcia wouldn't be the last of its kind. Derek's grasp of this age had only deepened for it.

Adrian, too, seethed with anger. However much he'd known in the abstract, he'd never actually lived it—and living it now left a rotten taste all its own.

"Derek. Do we keep going?"

"We keep going. A real man bends when he has to, Cousin Adrian. Whatever we swallow now becomes a story we tell after we've made it. Trust me—once we've made it, House Garcia will be the one coming to apologize."

The reassurance restored Adrian's spirits.

Derek thought more clearly than most about pride. It was not worth a copper.

The rest of the road proved every bit as hard.

Derek saw every ugly face along the way. War, sure enough, was making certain people rich beyond measure—rich enough that even a few merchants dared look down their noses at a noble son like him.

Derek endured the insults without protest, but committed every name to memory.

Just wait. One day he'd squeeze every last one of them clean out of business.

By the time he got back to the manor, the iron ore shortage had mostly worked itself out.

After that came relentless training.

Never again would he let anyone treat him like that.

Just as the whole Northern Province burned with preparation, a band of barbarians came trekking down out of the wastes further north and crossed formally into the buffer zone.

They were taller than the tallest Northerners, with rougher features, brownish skin, and pale green eyes that unsettled the men who saw them.

But not at all what people pictured: crude as their weapons might be, every man carried one, and some rode tall horses in armor of their own, radiating a savage force that hit you before they even got close.

"Fools of Locke—do you still think we're the same as thirty years ago?"

The barbarian commander rode ahead, eyes fixed on the Northern lands drawing ever closer, and let out a cold laugh.

Arrogance and prejudice clouded human judgment in every age.

Derek had met it in Javier Garcia's arrogance—the capital noble's contempt for a country one.

But he himself had made the very same mistake.

Everyone believed the barbarians backward, ignorant, foolish—that the Sundering War thirty years back had only gone the way it did because the barbarians got lucky.

...

And afterward, it was only the wars among the three kingdoms that had kept anyone from sparing the hands to settle the matter.

Maybe the barbarians thirty years ago really had matched that picture, the one Locke's nobility still carried in their heads.

But what had been taken back then was not only land, but a great many people as well.

Thirty years. How could the barbarians possibly have made no progress at all in that time?

A full generation's worth of time, and the barbarians had built themselves a rough half-feudal order, picked up real technical and military know-how, even drawn some of Locke's own descendants into serving them.

Only the North's remoteness, the buffer land standing between, and everyone's stubborn old prejudice had let the change slip past unnoticed.

The land the barbarians had willingly given up back then had, ironically, become an excellent shield.

Even the nobles who'd gone on quietly trading with them the whole time still believed, down in their bones, that the barbarians were fools.

Even Derek had thought so. How many of the North's nobility, then, could really claim clear eyes?

So when the barbarian army appeared without warning, the North's nobles were caught flat-footed, taken utterly by surprise.

Not just the Kingdom of Locke, either—barbarian columns appeared along Holy Cross's border too.

Thirty years ago, you could still call it luck.

Thirty years later, the barbarians announced themselves openly and stepped onto the southern continent's stage in full view of everyone.

The Northern Province's nobles, its crown officials, none of them ready—within a matter of days the barbarians tore through four or five cities in a lightning campaign, and even a count was beheaded.

Still more nobles and crown legions took brutal losses. The scene of thirty years past seemed to be playing out all over again.

By the time word reached Derek, ten full days had already passed since the invasion began.

After fighting through every obstacle in its way, the news finally reached the wider North.

Only then did the North's nobility realize this was no rumor.

Plenty had never gotten ready in time. War had come far faster than anyone expected.

By the crown's own timeline, there should still have been half a year to train and muster a proper force.

But now, with only two months gone, many farmers had held a weapon for less than a single month. What fighting strength could that possibly buy?

Worse still, scattered and disorganized farmers could not be put to any real use.

Even the great stockpiles everyone had built up ended up a gift, handed straight to the barbarians.

House Ferreira called an emergency council to talk through the sudden upheaval.

"The barbarian vanguard's already reached Ironwall City. If anything goes wrong there, the whole northern half of the province falls, and Sentinel City becomes the next target."

Baron Ferreira had seen war himself once, and it had left him with a soldier's basic sense for these things.

On the map, the whole Northern Province split along two clear lines.

North of the provincial city of Ironwall lay ground facing the barbarians and Holy Cross both, directly.

South of Sentinel City lay the deeper heartland.

House Ferreira sat on Sentinel City's side of the line—not deep in the North by any measure.

Count Perez's domain, though, sat right in between.

If the intelligence held true, small barbarian bands must already be slipping past Ironwall—Count Perez's own lands might already be under attack.

There was no room for optimism. Should the front line falter, House Ferreira would take the first blow, with nowhere left to run.

The head of House Ferreira traced lines across the map in open agitation.

"The governor's orders should be arriving any day now, I'd guess. Standard practice for the crown—raise a temporary legion from whoever's nearby, send it to reinforce the front. Ironwall can't be allowed to fall, or we lose the whole North with it."

Baron Ferreira saw the shape of it clearly: hunkering down on his own little patch of land now would do nothing. Only holding Ironwall bought anyone a breath of room.

Derek, past his initial shock and already steadied by the ride over, asked the question that mattered most. "What's Ironwall's situation? Can it hold?"

"Hard to say. The current governor comes from court nobility—no battlefield record to speak of. The Iron Lion Legion's garrisoned there, three thousand strong on paper, though with the recent expansion, who knows the real count. Add the city guard and the noble houses' own retainers, and it should hold, so long as nobody does anything stupid." The baron rubbed at a splitting headache, no small part of him already inclined to doubt this governor.

A governor raised among court nobility was bound to draw scorn from Northern nobles who had earned their standing on the battlefield.

Derek hadn't expected the situation to turn this dire so fast—but he saw an opening in it too.

"Whether Ironwall holds or not, we need plans for both outcomes. Move part of the household into the mountains now. Father, you hold the castle here yourself—with these walls, we can weather at least some trouble if it comes to that. Big brother and I will prepare to march. We can't just sit here and watch."

Derek understood the logic well enough: if the front collapsed, everyone behind it would feel the cold. Once the Northern Province's organized armies were wiped out, nobles fighting alone would be finished, and there'd be no coming back from it.

So whether or not Ironwall held, this was a fight they had to join regardless.

"Derek's right, Father," eldest brother Marco agreed. "Sergei's still serving at Ironwall—we can't just look away from that either. And there's still our fourth brother at home. Send him ahead first. That covers every angle."

By reason alone, even should the worst come to pass, House Ferreira's line wouldn't die out entirely.

And between Northern honor and plain practical sense, neither one left room for them to shrink back now.

Everyone in the North had watched, thirty years back, what became of nobles who lost their land.

How many lines had died out entirely, their ancestors' honor lost along with them.

Baron Ferreira could find nothing wrong with Derek's plan.

Time to decide.

"My lord baron. Orders from the governor."

The knight-captain burst in, carrying the crown's command.

"Let me see it."

Baron Ferreira took it—a general proclamation, sent out wide.

"By order of the Governor of the Kingdom's Northern Province, a temporary legion shall be raised. Command of the Second Temporary Legion is granted to Count Perez. All forces shall muster within three days of receiving this order and march to relieve Ironwall City within ten. Every act of merit in this campaign shall be duly recorded; titles and land shall be granted after victory, without stint."

Plainly, this governor had not given up the fight and understood the situation clearly.

As the highest official in the Northern Province, he carried the authority to issue orders like this in the King's own name.

And the King would certainly make good on the reward once the fighting ended—anything less would gut the crown's own credibility.

Baron Ferreira finally made up his mind.

"We'll do as Derek said. Leave part of the men behind. Marco, take the rest with you."

The baron had it settled: the family's strength went to Marco.

Derek effectively commanded a separate force of his own.

"I'll speed up the recruiting, tighten the training—enough to hold something together if trouble comes. Derek. Look after your brother for me."

That last line was nothing more than a father's plain request.

"I will."

Derek gave his word. Whatever lay within his power, he wouldn't stand by and watch.