It was almost full dark by the time they crested the last hill above Hollowvale the following evening, and what lay below them killed whatever was left of the argument entirely.
Half the town square stood frozen in grey stone, men and women caught mid-flight, mid-scream, mid-reach for a child who was, Remus realized with a cold lurch in his stomach, also stone, small hands still outstretched toward a mother who would never finish that motion. The rest of the townsfolk, those the Basilisk's gaze hadn't found before it was killed, huddled in chains near the well at the center of the square while Orcs, huge and grey-green in the firelight, moved between cookfires and cooking pots with the unhurried confidence of an occupying force that expected no resistance at all. Smoke drifted low across the rooftops, carrying with it the smell of someone else's meat cooking over someone else's stolen wood, and beneath the smoke Remus could just make out the shapes of the town itself: a well-worn millhouse, a row of modest homes with their doors kicked open and left that way, a small shrine to the Drowned Faith with its lantern-shaped icon knocked from its post and lying face-down in the dirt.
Leo made a small, strangled sound low in his throat and didn't say anything else. His hands had curled into fists at his sides, and Remus, watching him from the corner of his eye, understood that whatever shame Leo had been carrying about this place a day ago had just been replaced, wholesale, by something considerably harder to carry: a useless, particular guilt, the kind that belongs only to a man watching the thing he'd been too afraid to face turn out to be so much worse than the thing he'd actually been afraid of.
"That's my mother's cousin's house," Leo said, very quietly, nodding toward one of the kicked-open doors. "Or it was. I don't know if she's down there among the chained ones or the stone ones. I can't tell from up here."
"Then we go find out," Remus said, "instead of guessing."
They pulled back beyond the rise before anyone below could spot them, and crouched together in the dark to work out what came next.
"If I'd abandoned my pride the moment we found the ruins," Leo said, staring back down toward the square, "none of this would have happened."
"Those people were turned to stone days ago, at least," Remus said, as gently as he could manage. "Even if we'd walked straight here the moment we found the Basilisk's body, we'd have arrived after the fact regardless. This isn't on you."
"We can't leave them chained down there while we plan," Gregory said, low and urgent. "We have to send word to the King. This is an act of war."
"By the time a rider reaches Newtown," Leo said, some of his old anxious rambling returning now that there was a problem to solve rather than a hometown to be ashamed of, "the Orcs will have crossed further into the Kingdom regardless."
"We should kill them where they stand," Andrea said, simply, no more emotion in it than she'd shown for the wyverns.
Remus turned the problem over the way he turned over every problem, looking for the shape underneath it. "What poison works on Orcs but not on humans," he said, "and can't be tasted easily in a stew?"
"Reekus root," Leo said, already brightening at the chance to be useful in the one way only he could be. "It's normally used to treat metal poisoning in people, harmless to us in the doses that matter, but it's toxic to Orc physiology and near-impossible to detect without instruments none of them will have out here. It grows in old ruins. Like the one we just left."
"Then that's the plan," Remus said. "Leo and Gregory go back for the root. Andrea and I will scout the camp and work out where the poison actually needs to go to reach every last one of them."
Leo and Gregory slipped away into the dark, and Andrea crept forward alone toward the edge of the firelight, moving in a way Remus hadn't seen her move before, low and utterly silent, the shadows themselves seeming to bend slightly around her rather than the reverse.
Skill Activated: Creeping Shadow!
She was back within the hour, breathing normally, unbothered.
"They're gathered around the cookfires, mostly," she reported. "Chained prisoners at the well, lightly guarded, everyone else clustered near the food. It's near enough to their mealtime that whatever goes into those pots will hit every one of them at once."
Leo and Gregory returned well after dark with a full sack of pale, twisted roots, and Leo worked through the night rendering them down into a thin green liquid over a hooded lantern, muttering ratios to himself the whole time like a man reciting a prayer he'd memorized wrong once and never fully trusted himself to get right again.
Andrea carried the finished poison down into the town alone, and Remus watched her go from the ridge with his heart doing something uncomfortable in his chest that he chose, deliberately, not to examine too closely.
She was back before the moon had moved a hand's width across the sky.
"Done," she said. "Now we wait."
They didn't have to wait long. Within a few hours, one by one, the fires below burned down untended and the low murmur of Orc voices faded into groans, then silence.
They came down off the ridge together, cutting the chains off the huddled townsfolk with quiet, careful hands, and a frail old man detached himself from the crowd the moment his own bonds fell away and came straight toward Remus with tears standing openly in his eyes.
"My name is Octavius," he said, "and I lead what's left of this town. On behalf of everyone still breathing tonight, I owe you a debt I don't know how to begin repaying."
"Save your thanks until we've finished the job properly," Remus said, though something in his chest eased slightly at the man's plain, unguarded gratitude, an ease he hadn't expected to feel and didn't quite trust himself to enjoy.
Leo found his mother's cousin among the chained, not the stone, shaking and bruised but breathing, and the sound the woman made when she recognized him, half sob and half furious scolding for having stayed away so long, was loud enough that half the freed townsfolk turned to look. Leo held onto her a long moment without saying anything useful at all, and when he finally straightened up and turned back toward the others, some of the old anxious slump had gone out of his shoulders for good.
Andrea singled out the Orc officer among the collapsed bodies by the quality of his gear, and Leo dosed him with the antidote alone, leaving the rest of the poisoned garrison exactly as they'd fallen. Remus had the officer chained upright against a tree by the time he came around, groggy and furious, and knelt in front of him at eye level.
"Tell me your invasion plan," Remus said, "and there's a chance you walk away from this alive."
The Orc's eyes found his, held them a long moment, and then the creature simply smiled, bit down hard on his own tongue, and choked to death before anyone could stop him.
"That was a waste of a perfectly good conversation," Gregory said, disgusted.
"I may have something," Octavius offered, hesitant, holding out two objects wrapped loosely in old cloth. One was a second Basilisk eye, undamaged, clearly cut free with far more care than the corpse's overall treatment suggested. The other was a short standard, a black sigil painted crudely on a field of red.
Andrea took the standard, turning it over, reading the sigil with the slow, careful attention of someone translating a language she hadn't used in a while.
"Orcish," she said. "This marks a scouting division. Which means this wasn't the invasion. This was the invasion's eyes, sent ahead to see what stood in the way."
"Meaning the real force is still coming," Leo said, quiet.
"Meaning we have to warn the King," Gregory said, already moving toward where their few remaining pack animals waited.
"By the time word reaches Newtown, they may already have crossed the border," Leo said.
"Not if we buy time first," Remus said. "Gregory, take a few of the able-bodied men from the town and ride for Newtown as fast as your horses will carry you. Sound the alarm. The rest of us stay here and build something that can hold a line long enough for help to actually matter."
"I'm not leaving you to face an army alone," Gregory said, and for a moment the easy adventurer's grin was entirely gone from his face, replaced by something that looked, disconcertingly, like their father's stubbornness.
"You're not leaving me to face anything," Remus said. "You're the only reason help arrives at all. If it looks like we're about to be overrun before you're back, I'll order a retreat and fall back with everyone still standing. That's a promise, not a comfort."
Gregory held his gaze a long moment, searching it for the lie he half-expected to find there, and didn't find one.
"Fine," he said finally. "Don't make me regret trusting you on this."
He left the following morning at first light, three of Hollowvale's able-bodied men riding hard beside him, and Remus watched the dust of their departure settle back over the road before turning to face the ruins of Genesis with the particular, focused calm of a man who had just run out of time to feel anything else about the decision.
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