Selena moved before I could give her an order either way, and for once I let her, because stopping her would have meant putting my body between hers and a debt she'd been carrying since before I ever knew her name.
She crossed the courtyard at a dead sprint, halberd trailing frost in a line across the flagstones, and Baldric Stonewall raised his shield to meet her without breaking stride, the two of them coming together in the open ground between the ruined gate and the culvert line with a sound like the whole battle had briefly gone deaf to make room for it. Behind him, the Concordat vanguard surged to close the gap he'd opened, and behind her, Nana and a scattered line of our own soldiers scrambled to keep the flood from swallowing them both whole before the duel could even find its footing.
"Zereth." I didn't look away from the culverts, where the first ranks of holy soldiers were already pressing into Simon's iron gates hard enough to buckle the hinges. "Numbers."
