The third fort had turned itself into a lesson about time.
Layered barricades behind sealed gates. Crown formations standing wide — deliberately wide, no clusters to chain damage through. Fire trenches cut before the walls, and consecrated braziers along them, burning every corpse the fighting produced almost before it finished being a corpse. Archers and mages held loose and watchful, and the first skeleton James raised on the approach drew six arrows before its second step — not because they understood Grave Step, but because the dead had helped break two forts already, and Highwatch had decided the dead died first.
The artillery frame loomed above it all, skeletal against the glow.
Maeve studied it from the approach for a long moment, eyes half-closed, reading the fort's magic the way she'd read the wards at two forts tonight and a throne room before that.
