The road east out of Helwind was paved and well-worn, but it felt entirely new beneath their horses' hooves. Five women riding in formation, the wagon rolling steadily at the center, the open country spreading wide on either side. None of them had traveled this far from the walls before, and the strangeness of it sat in the air between them like something good.
Brina rode at the vanguard, and she could not stop smiling.
"Are you girls excited?" she called back, turning just enough to catch their faces. "Our first real adventure beyond Helwind."
The answer was yes, even from the ones who were quietly nervous about what they were riding toward. Seeing Brina completely unbothered had a way of doing that, loosening the knot of it, making the fear feel smaller than the moment.
Elena, riding the left flank, cupped a hand to her mouth. "Yes, sir."
Brina turned fully in the saddle and leveled a look at her. "Who are you calling sir? There are no sirs here. Only ladies."
Sophia, Mira, and Jen broke into laughter from their positions around the wagon, and just like that the last of the tension dissolved into the road's dust behind them. Mira held the wagon reins with a grin she was not bothering to hide. Jen on the right flank shook her head. Even Sophia at the rear, the quietest of them, laughed.
They kept their formation as they rode, the wagon at the center with the four of them covering each side. It was not merely a habit. The roads between towns could carry more than just merchants and travelers, and they kept one eye on the treeline as naturally as they kept one eye on the map. Bandits and highway robbers did not announce themselves.
Still, the mood stayed light. They sang as they rode, passing songs between them, harmonizing poorly and not caring at all. The road was good and their pace settled into something comfortable. Bareborough Peaks was a day or two out depending on conditions, and conditions so far were kind.
Their wagon carried the bulk of what they needed. Tents, rations, rope, emergency field kits, weapons, the fire-tipped bolts and oil pots from their briefing. Their horses carried only harnesses and what could be grabbed quickly in an emergency. It was practical thinking, the kind Brina had insisted on during preparation. No animal should be weighted down with more than it needed to move fast.
By the time the sun began to fall, they had made good distance and agreed to stop.
They chose a clearing set slightly off the road, far enough to be out of casual sight but close enough that they could watch both directions of the path for any approaching traffic. The horses were rested, ungeared, and led to a narrow stream that cut through the grass nearby. The animals drank and the women worked, setting up camp with the quiet efficiency of people who had trained together long enough to share the labor without talking through it.
When the fire was lit and the food was on, they sat together for the first time outside the walls of Helwind as a proper team. They had shared meals before, eaten together in the barracks and the mess hall. But this was different. The sky above them was open and enormous, and the night pressed in gently from all sides, and it was theirs.
"I could get used to this," Jen said, looking up.
Nobody disagreed.
The skies were clear that night, not a cloud to interrupt the view, so they left the tents packed and laid out their sleeping bags in a circle around the fire. It was a deliberate arrangement, the same way their riding formation was deliberate. Sleeping in a ring meant that any one of them who woke quickly could see the others and the perimeter at once. Good habits did not stop at sundown.
The three moons of Centuury were all out. They hung at different heights and cast overlapping silver across the grass, and the women stared up at them without speaking for a while.
Brina took the first watch. She volunteered before anyone could suggest otherwise, and her friends did not argue with her. She settled near the fire with her back straight and her eyes moving slowly across the dark while the others drifted off. The night was quiet. The stream murmured. The horses shifted occasionally and settled again. She watched the road and the treeline and the sky, and nothing came.
The watches rotated through without incident. By the time the last shift took over, the moons had moved and the deep hour before dawn had settled in, that drowsy gray stretch where the world goes very still and very cold at once.
It was at that hour that the screaming started.
It came from the direction they were heading, from somewhere down the road ahead, and it was not one voice but several, sharp and ragged and getting louder. The last watch was on her feet before the sound had fully registered. The others woke fast, the way trained soldiers wake, not with confusion but with their hands already moving. Armor buckled. Weapons drawn. Half-asleep faces going hard and alert in the span of seconds. The drilling had paid for itself in that single moment.
Brina was already up. "Assume combat positions. Elena, you handle range. The rest of you, spears out."
They moved back onto the road, putting themselves in plain sight. When the people running toward them finally saw the knights standing there in the early gray light, the relief on their faces was immediate and desperate. They ran harder.
"Help us, there is a beast chasing us!"
The survivors streamed past and around them, breathless and stumbling, faces white with the kind of fear that does not perform itself. Beyond them, down the stretch of road still cloaked in the last of the dark, something moved. A shape. Large. Wrong in its proportions in the way that things from the Bestiary drawings always seemed wrong when you saw them for the first time outside of ink and paper.
Big. Moving with a low, purposeful weight.
Every one of them thought it at the same moment, though no one said it aloud yet. They did not need to. They had spent an afternoon learning exactly what this silhouette meant, and Sir Robert's voice was already running through the back of Brina's mind like a warning she had memorized for precisely this occasion.
The shape kept coming.