The world, William discovered, was made of mud, noise, and the sour stench of men pressed too close together. The King's host was less an army and more a slow-moving city of desperation and steel, its streets the churned-up ruts of old roads, its music the discordant symphony of clattering carts, braying mules, and the low, constant murmur of ten thousand conversations about home, fear, and food. The proud grey banner of House Marren was a mere postage stamp in a sea of larger, more vibrant sigils—fierce boars, soaring hawks, arrogant lions. Their contingent, forty-seven men from the Weeping Valley, was a small, grim island in the bustling stream.
His father, Sir Roland, had retreated into a shell of watchful silence. He rode at their head, a statue of weathered leather and rust-speckled mail, his eyes perpetually scanning the tree lines, the cloud formations, the gait of their own stumbling column. His instructions were terse, practical, and devoid of glory. "Keep your helm tied to your saddlebow until you see their archers. Conserve your horse's strength on the flat; you'll need it on a slope. That man there, with the limp—he guards his left side. Remember it."
William, buzzing with an energy he could not expend, chafed at the pedagogy. He had imagined gallant charges, not this interminable, muddy trudge. He saw knights in gleaming plate on magnificent chargers, laughing as they rode past towards the vanguard, their squires trailing like bright-plumed birds. He felt shabby, provincial, a spectator in his own saga.
The first blooding came not in a glorious battle, but in a filthy, chaotic brawl over a disputed stream crossing. A contingent from a neighboring barony, larger and better-equipped, claimed priority. Words were exchanged, tempers, worn thin by weeks of travel, snapped. Suddenly, men were shoving, then clubbing with spear butts, then drawing blades.
Roland's voice cut through the din, not a roar, but a sharp, cold command. "Marren! Form on me! Shield wall!" It was not a heroic cry, but the instinct of a cornered badger. The valley men, driven more by habit than courage, clumsily obeyed, locking their mismatched shields into a ragged, trembling line.
William found himself shoulder-to-shoulder with old Hagar's grandson, Elric, whose breath came in panicked gasps. Across from them, a hulking serjeant from the rival baron's guard advanced, a menacing grin on his face. There was no strategy here, only the raw arithmetic of violence. The man lunged. William parried, the impact jolting his arm to the shoulder. He saw an opening, a sliver of exposed thigh below the man's mail shirt. He thrust, not with a warrior's skill, but with a desperate, punching motion.
The scream was shockingly high-pitched. The serjeant stumbled back, bright blood welling through the wool of his hose. He didn't fall, but the fight went out of him, his eyes wide with surprise and pain. The skirmish ended as quickly as it began, officers from both sides wading in, bellowing curses and restoring a tense order. No one died, but the message was etched in the mud and the moans of the wounded: this was the currency. Pain, fear, and luck.
That night, by a meager fire, Roland tossed a small, cloth-wrapped bundle at William's feet. "From the baron's captain. A peace offering." William unwrapped it to find a dagger, its hilt of good staghorn, its blade sharp and clean. A warrior's tool, not a showpiece. "He marked you," Roland said, poking the fire. "You didn't freeze. You didn't aim for the kill, but you stopped the threat. It was… efficient."
The praise, such as it was, felt colder than the night air. William looked at the dagger, then at his hands. He remembered the gristly resistance of the thrust, the man's scream. This was the "key" he had spoken of so boldly. It had turned, and the lock had given way with a sound of tearing flesh. He felt no triumph, only a hollow, vibrating echo in his soul.
Days bled into weeks, and the host finally clanked to a halt before the frowning majesty of Blackcliff Keep. William's first sight of it stole his breath. It was not a castle; it was a mountain given malice, a sheer spike of black basalt erupting from the landscape, its walls seeming to grow naturally from the cliff face. The King's great war tent, a city of embroidered canvas, went up in the valley below, but the fortress above looked down like a disapproving god. The rebels' banners, a blood-red fist on a sable field, hung limp and defiant from its towers.
The siege was a lesson in impotence. Mighty catapults, "the King's Fingers," were hauled into position. Their first stones, launched with a sound like tearing sky, soared in hopeful arcs… and clattered harmlessly against the impossible cliffs or vanished into the misty abyss below the walls. Attempts to storm the lower gatehouse, a narrow bottleneck, were met with a hellish rain. Not just arrows, but showers of sharpened flint, pots of burning pitch that stuck and seared, and great millstones hurled from above that turned men and siege ladders into a paste of splinters and meat. The royal camp became a place of groans from the surgeon's tents and the low, constant mutter of discontent.
William watched his father in this new theater. Roland spent hours simply staring at the northern face of the keep, a sheer precipice considered unscalable and thus guarded by only a few token sentries. He said nothing, but William saw the old knight's eyes tracing invisible lines, his fingers twitching minutely as if feeling for holds.
It was during a war council, held in the oppressive shadow of the keep, that the idea, nurtured in silent observation, broke its shell. The King's commanders, faces etched with frustration, debated a protracted blockade. "Starve them out by winter," a portly earl growled. "Their water comes from a cistern. It will turn foul."
"And our men will freeze in these valleys," another countered. "Our supplies are already straining."
The King, a man with tired eyes in a face of stern authority, listened in silence. It was then that William, standing at the very back behind his father, felt the words rise in his throat, a reckless bubble escaping the mud of fear and observation. He remembered the Shepherd's Tears. He remembered his father's silent scrutiny.
"The north face," he said. His voice sounded too young, too clear in the tent of grizzled voices. All eyes turned to him. A few held derision; most, simple annoyance at the interruption.
"What of it, boy?" the portly earl snapped. "It's a cliff. Goats break their necks on it."
"It is not seamless, my lord," William pressed, stepping forward slightly. He felt his father's hand, a subtle pressure on his elbow, but he ignored it. He pointed to a detailed sketch of the keep on the marshal's table. "Here, and here. The setting sun reveals fissures, ledges. A line of weakness. Not for an army. For a handful. A dagger, not a hammer."
A tense silence fell. The King's marshal, a hawk-faced man named Valerius, narrowed his eyes. "You propose a climbing party."
"I do, my lord. At the black of the moon. To seize the postern gate by the old garderobe drain."
A bark of laughter. "Suicide! They'd be heard, seen, shot down like crows on a wall."
"They would be ghosts," William said, the plan crystallizing as he spoke it into existence. "Ropes of dark wool, cloth-wrapped gear, faces blackened. The sound of the wind on that face would swallow small noises. The guards there are few and bored. They watch the valley, not the void."
Sir Roland finally spoke, his voice a gravelly rumble that commanded attention. "My son has a climber's eye. And a fool's courage. It is a thousand-to-one chance." He paused, letting the doubt hang, then turned his gaze directly to the King. "But, Your Grace, the hammer has failed. Perhaps it is time for a needle."
The King studied William, then Roland, then the implacable map of Blackcliff. "A thousand-to-one," he mused. "Better odds than we have now from down here. You will lead this needle, young Marren. Choose twelve men. Not the best fighters. The most silent, the most sure-footed. The ones who know the feel of stone and shadow."
The selection was a somber affair. William didn't choose brash warriors. He chose Elric, who had been a hunter and could move through a forest without cracking a twig. He chose two quiet brothers who were master thatchers, used to precarious heights. He chose men with balance and patience, not just bravado. He told them the odds plainly. No one backed out.
The night was a living blackness, cold and breathless. The cliff face was a negative space against the slightly less dark sky. Their world became touch and sound. The gritty bite of basalt under fingernails, the silent, agonizing strain of muscles holding a body against oblivion, the deafening thunder of their own heartbeats. One of the thatchers, Pate, froze, a silent statue of terror twenty feet up. They had to guide him down, a loss that felt like an amputation of their already slender hope.
Then, the sound. A dislodged stone, no bigger than a fist, pried loose by a searching toe. It seemed to fall for an eternity before cracking against an outcrop far below. Every man became stone. Torches flared on the battlements high above. William, pressed against the cold rock, smelled the damp moss inches from his face. He heard a sentry's voice, loud in the stillness. "Hear that? Rockfall."
Another voice, closer, weary. "Just the mountain settling. Or a goat. Stop jumping at shadows."
The torches moved away. The tremble that took William then was not from fear, but from the sheer, unbearable tension. The final ascent was a blur of agony and will. And then, his hand closed not on rock, but on the crumbling, wet mortar of the keep's foundation. They were there.
What followed on the narrow ledge was swift, intimate, and horrible. It was done with the very dagger the baron's captain had given him, a desperate, close-quarters struggle of muffled grunts and terrible, final sighs. It was not war; it was butchery in the dark. When the small iron-banded door screeched open on its unused hinges, the sound was like a demon's welcome, lost in the wind.
The signal fire they lit on the wall was a tiny, defiant eye in the vast night. From below, it must have looked like a lone, brave star. But from within, it was the spark in the tinderbox. The chaos they unleashed was precise, panicked, and brutal. When they finally heaved open the massive inner gates to the echoing blare of the King's trumpets, William was no longer a young knight from a weeping valley. He was a creature of blood-streaked ash and trembling adrenaline, standing in the heart of the impossible fortress he had just cracked open.
In the smoldering great hall, surrounded by the spoils of victory, the King named him a hero. The charter was read, the new title—Lord William Marren of Blackcliff—bestowed. Men cheered. His valley men looked at him with awe. But as the praise washed over him, William's gaze was drawn to a high, narrow window. It looked out onto the northern cliff face, now washed in dawn's pale light. He could just make out the faint, dark scar of their route.
He had climbed the ladder of steel. He had reached a giddy, glorious height. But as he accepted the formal handshakes, he felt the weight settle—not just of the new title, but of the knowledge of what it took to hold it. The cliff was behind him, but the precipice of lordship, he realized with a cold clarity, was just beginning. And the wind here, at the top, cut even deeper.