The ironborn continued their loud, arrogant shouting across the summer fields, throwing out the coarsest language to mock the land and the lord who held it.
"Look at the plowmen! They run faster than their own sheep!"
"They know nothing but turning the dirt and fleeing the tracks! They lack the stomach to even look upon our iron!"
"The Black Lion? A sick cat ruling over a ditch of cowards!"
Eymund joined in the coarse laughter, but as the tracking continued, a sudden discomfort slowed his stride. His eyes drifted back to the items the smallfolk had abandoned along the hedges.
A strange, freezing stillness passed straight up his spine, settling behind his ears.
The items left behind were not wooden hooves, sickles, or common tools of the soil. They were neat, stacked piles of leather brigandines, boiled wool gambesons, and even a few shirts of true castle-forged ringmail that caught the midday sun.
When he looked back toward the ridge, more shapes were stepping from the cover of the treeline. Men and women were standing at the edge of the thickets, keeping a silent, unmoving watch. They did not advance, nor did they scatter into the brush. They merely stood there, watching the raiders as if reviewing a play that concerned their own ledger.
The sailors mocked them as cowards looking for a fair, but Eymund's pulse quickened with a frantic weight. He watched in absolute horror as those distant spectators slowly, methodically began to don the armor they had retrieved from the hedges.
They were not watching a play. They were counting the axes.
"Cut them down!" The sudden roar rose from the thickets, breaking clean through the ironborn laughter. The scattered watchers had vanished, replaced by sixty farmers who moved with a terrifying, synchronized focus.
They carried heavy spears and long knives, closing the crescent from all four directions without a single break in their alignment.
The circle was shutting tightly. Harlon Botley showed no trace of fear, his arrogance turning into a sharp, bloodless grin instead. Sixty raw smallfolk would break into a frantic rout the moment the first axe met the bone.
He drew his broadsword, his voice booming as he looked at his crew. "The sheep have come to bite the wolves!"
"The green-land fools have brought their own graves to our stirrups!"
"Brothers, show them how the iron price is settled!"
The raiders answered with their typical, savage cries, swinging their heavy steel as they charged the nearest row of spears. They intended to deploy their familiar, bloody violence to shatter the line, trusting the smallfolk would scatter in terror once the first blood splattered the grass.
Yet, they discovered within the first minute that the old customs had failed. Eymund felt as though he had lunged not into a group of pressed farmers, but into a pack of wild wolves that had been starved in the hills for a winter.
The look in the smallfolk's eyes had nothing to do with fear.
It was the raw, naked greed of a hunter marking a fat prize. They looked upon the ironborn the exact way a starving beast looks upon a walking piece of fresh meat.
One raider used his sea-axe to snap a commoner's spear-shaft, lifting the steel to split the man's head, expecting the typical surrender.
But the farmer did not hesitate a single heartbeat. He dropped the broken timber, drew a long hunting knife from his belt, and threw his entire body straight into the raider's breastplate, driving the iron tip deep into the man's lower belly.
The sailor tumbled into the grass with a ragged shriek, his inner workings spilling into the mud. The smallfolk did not even afford him a glance, snatching a longsword from a companion's hand to push through the next gap in the shields.
Another ironborn managed to cut down a youth, but before his axe could clear the leather, three heavy spears slammed into his ribcage from different angles, pinning his bulk to the clay.
"The head belongs to my ledger!"
"My iron touched the throat first! The silver is mine!"
"Nonsense! My stroke broke the spine!"
Eymund was completely paralyzed by the sight. The commoners were actively shouting and debating over a single corpse, showing no regard for the steel or their own wounds. Their singular purpose was to determine whose hand held the right to harvest the head.
They were more savage than any longship crew he had ever tracked with.
Harlon Botley, the proud heir of Lordsport, was equally stunned by the frenzy. He put two men to the sword, his blade slick with brains and gray grease, yet the smallfolk did not drop their shields. Recognizing his fine plate and his position at the apex of the raiding party, they swarmed his horse in a dense mass.
His arms grew heavy as he struggled to check their blades. More commoners swarmed the ruts, their weapons crude and their style coarse, yet they fought with a desperate, bloodthirsty violence that ignored the risk of death.
Harlon's sword caught a man's shoulder, but the farmer merely swung his own edge before falling back. A sudden, blinding pain struck the captain's neck from behind. A lean, weathered old carl who looked entirely harmless had stepped through the dust, driving a heavy iron blade clean through his collarbone.
Harlon Botley's eyes remained wide as he dropped flat into the dirt of the valley he had despised. His head rolled into the weeds, and the old farmer picked it up by the hair, using a length of hemp rope to bind it securely to his leather belt.
With the captain down, the remaining raiders fell into an absolute, frantic panic. Surrounded by a wall of screaming smallfolk, several lost their stomach for the iron, throwing their axes down to beg for mercy on their knees.
But the smallfolk had no use for prisoners. A live ironborn yielded no Silver Deers from the treasury.
During the height of the slaughter, Eymund made a calculation that saved his skin. He abandoned his axe, dropped flat into the ruts, and rolled his bulk straight into a deep drainage ditch that ran alongside the wheat.
The cold, black mud swallowed his frame completely. He checked his breath, remaining perfectly still while the blood and the scraps of his companions drifted past his face in the water.
Finally, the screaming, the clashing steel, and the arguments over the dead receded into a quiet murmur.
Eymund slowly lifted his eyes above the lip of the ditch, encountering a visual that would remain in his private thoughts until his bones were gray. The smallfolk were laughing and shouting, eagerly harvesting the heads of his crew with short skinning knives.
They tied the trophies in neat rows along their belts, their faces bright with the simple, pure joy of a successful autumn harvest.
They are supposed to follow the Seven, Eymund thought, a deep tremor shaking his frame as he slid back into the mud. These creatures are entirely mad.
When the night finally cleared the tracks, he crawled from the ditch like a whipped rat, using both hands and knees to scramble through the brush toward the northern ford.
He had to clear the borders of Willowdale before the sun returned.
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