The Vexin war council, once a place of grim resolve, was now a hall of stunned silence. A scout, his face pale with a terror he could not hide, had delivered the final intelligence. It was not just the mercenaries. The full wrath of the King's power was now upon them.
"My Lords," the scout stammered, his voice trembling. "They are all here. The mercenaries… 10,000 of them. And the foreigners from the lowlands, 6,000 strong. And the rest of the King's Guard, 2,000 men in new armor. They are a sea of steel, an army of 18,000 men."
A cold, heavy dread fell over the room. Damon and Arion, now a single, unified force, stood over a map of the borderlands with Isolde and Lord Eran. They were outnumbered and outmaneuvered, and the fortress could not hold against such a force.
"We will not fight them on their terms," Damon said, his voice a low, powerful rumble. "They will use their numbers to crush us. We must use our cunning to break them."
He pointed to a narrow mountain pass on the map, a place where their army could hold against a larger force. "We will send a small force to hold the mercenaries in the southern pass. They will die with honor, and they will buy us the time we need to defeat the other force."
Without a word, 200 of the Vexin's finest soldiers stepped forward, their faces grim but their resolve unshakable. It was a suicidal mission, a rear-guard action that would end in certain death, but they were going to hold off a force of 10,000 to save their people.
The rest of the Vexin alliance, led by Damon and Lord Eran, a combined force of over 7,000 men, moved into a narrow mountain pass to meet the disciplined force of the 2,000 guards and the 6,000 foreign soldiers head-on. The battle would be a desperate, frontal assault, with Damon and Eran at the head of their men, a defiant wall of steel against the enemy.
But this was not the Vexin's true strategy. The true hammer blow was a smaller, more mobile force of allies, the remaining garrison from the castle, a force of less than 2,000 men. This force, knowing the mountain passes like the back of their hands, was moving in a wide circle around the enemy's flank, prepared to strike from the sides.
The two main armies met in a deafening clash of steel and bone. The Vexin, with the knowledge of their comrades' sacrifice, fought with a savage courage, a desperate fire lit by the knowledge that they were fighting for the future of their people. The battle had begun, and the fate of the Vexin alliance, and the borderlands, hung in the balance.