Marcus and his men had been at Fort Amol for twenty-eight days, and Bent was restless.

 

That in itself was not remarkable. Bent grew restless in a queue, in a snowfall, in a conversation that went on too long. But this was a different sort of agitation, one Marcus had learned to recognize. Bent kept climbing the western wall to look north, kept asking for reports from the watch before the watch thought to give them. He kept muttering that it was wrong.

 

He was right that it was wrong, of course. He was just wrong about why he was right that it was wrong.

 

The fort crouched above the road like an old dog too stubborn to die, all cracked stone and patched timber and fresh mortar already beginning to crumble in the cold. For four weeks Marcus and his men had hauled rock, reset beams, inventoried dwindling stores, and watched the road for the Imperial response that never came. The air had grown sharper with each passing day. Frost lingered longer in the mornings. By afternoon the ground turned to slick grey slush where too many boots had churned the yard into muck. Everything about the place said they were exposed, weak, and worth taking.

 

And still no one came.

 

Bent stood atop the wall staring over the road as if he could drag an army into existence through sheer offense. Marcus climbed the steps to join him, one hand trailing along stone so cold it burned.

 

“There’s still nothing,” Bent said.

 

Marcus stopped beside him. Beyond the fort the land rolled away in dull winter colors, frozen grass and bare trees and the long pale ribbon of road threading between them.

 

“So I see.”

 

Bent turned to look at him fully. “You say that like it makes sense.”

 

Marcus kept his gaze outward. “We’ve talked about this. If they come, it won’t be for a long time.”

 

Bent let out a short disbelieving breath. “We’ve been here twenty-eight days. Twenty-eight. A key fort between Whiterun and Windhelm, manned by cripples and leftovers, and the Imperials haven’t tested us once. Not even a patrol close enough to spit at. Tell me that doesn’t bother you.”

 

Marcus shifted his weight against the wind. It carried the smell of damp stone, woodsmoke, and old mortar. Below them a squad was finishing the final repairs on the western wall, setting the last stones where an earlier breach had been patched after days of swearing and labor. Marcus eyed the new work with suspicion. It looked too neat against the old masonry, like a false tooth in a beggar’s jaw.

 

“It bothers you enough for both of us,” he said.

 

Bent frowned harder. “That’s not an answer.”

 

No, Marcus thought. The answer is that the war is a fraud and we have been posted here to be forgotten or until someone needs corpses for accounting. But that was not a thing he could say. Not to Bent, not to the men, not to anyone. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

 

So instead he said, “Maybe the Imperials have their own Jaunty in charge. Incompetence explains a great deal.”

 

That got the reaction Marcus wanted -- Bent barked out a laugh despite himself and shook his head.

 

“You really do hate him.”

 

“You have no idea."

 

Bent leaned his forearms on the parapet again and studied the empty road. “I still don’t like it.”

 

Marcus sighed as visions of Solitude, so close, taken from her just when victory had finally been at hand, danced in his head. “I hate it with a loathing you can only imagine.” He turned away before the conversation could circle again.

 

He did not trust himself around Bent lately, not with certain truths and not with certain absences of truth. In the first life, Bent had become one of the very few people Marcus -- Trendil, he corrected himself silently, then corrected himself back -- had come to trust. In this life, things were tangled, but some parts had not changed - even now, Bent’s instincts were too sharp. Another question or two and he might start cutting in directions Marcus could not afford to reveal.

 

Besides, every moment with him was a moment Marcus had to resist trying to snuggle in Bent's arms. It didn't feel like that would go as he hoped.

 

A horn sounded in the yard below for the evening meal. Men started drifting toward the cookfire with bowls in hand.

 

Bent groaned. “If it’s boiled turnips again, I’m deserting.”

 

“The Imperials will return you on grounds of poor temperament.”

 

Bent snorted and followed Marcus down the stairs. They were halfway to the cookfire when the sky screamed. The sound punched through Marcus before thought did, a tearing rush of air that drove straight down his spine. He stopped dead, swords already in his hands. Around him, men looked up too slowly.

 

“Dragon!” someone shrieked, but Marcus was already moving.

 

He ran to the center of the yard as a shadow swept over the fort. Men scattered, some toward the walls, some toward buildings, some in no direction at all. One fool simply stood there clutching his bowl and staring upward.

 

“Cover!” Marcus roared. “Under the walkways, in the gate tunnel, behind stone! Move!” His voice cracked through the panic well enough to get bodies moving.

 

The dragon came from the east, banking low over the fort on broad bronze-black wings. Not one Marcus recognized, though that meant less now than it once would have. In this timeline, everything was wrong by degrees -- some things were smaller, some larger, some merely different enough to ruin any plan that leaned too hard on memory.

 

Bent reached his side, hammer already in hand. “What do we do?”

 

Marcus looked once at the dragon circling overhead, then at the freshly repaired western wall.

 

The yard was too cramped for a clean landing. Too few archers to force it down. Too many wounded to survive a long exchange. If it kept making passes from above, they were done. If it landed in the middle of the yard, maybe they had a chance -- but only if it landed badly.

 

His mind snapped through old patterns. In another life, in another fort, with another set of men, and he smiled.

 

“I think Plan C will do just fine.”

 

Bent frowned. “What is…”

 

Marcus pointed. “Get the men hidden and ready. No one comes out until I give the word.”

 

Bent stared at him. “Marcus...”

 

“Do it.”

 

Perhaps something in his tone cut through whatever argument Bent had been about to make, because Bent only swore and turned, bellowing for the nearest soldiers to get under cover. Marcus ran the other direction.

 

He stopped in the open center of the yard and waited. Above him the dragon wheeled as its head turned. Marcus lifted the blades high, not in challenge but in invitation. Here I am, he thought. Come be stupid. The dragon obliged.- it folded its wings and dropped.

 

Marcus backed toward the western wall, slow enough to look deliberate, fast enough to keep the distance he needed. The world narrowed – wind, stone, the scrape of his own boots; the angle of the dragon’s descent; the roughness of the sword hilts in his palms; the old remembered motions of forms his mother had beaten into muscle long before he knew what they were for.

 

The dragon opened its mouth. Marcus waited, watching as heat kindled in the throat of the beast, then rushed outward in a torrent of fire. Marcus stepped in and cut; the blade slashed down through the oncoming flame in a motion now so familiar, it felt instantaneous. The fire split around him, parting like cloth under shears, then he dove hard to his left.

 

The dragon reacted a heartbeat too late. Shock ruined its timing; its wings flared, claws scrabbled, body twisting in an effort to climb, but the yard was too tight and the western wall too near. It slammed into the fresh masonry with a thunderous crash that shook the whole fort. Stone exploded in every direction. Dust and shattered mortar billowed across the yard. The dragon bellowed, one wing caught, shoulder jammed deep into the newly repaired section. The western wall held for exactly long enough to trap rather than merely deflect.

 

Marcus came up coughing and screamed, “Now! Kill it!”

 

The men erupted from cover with the kind of roar that only half belonged to courage -- the rest was relief, terror turned sideways into violence. Arrows thudded into the dragon’s flank and wings, spears darted in, men with axes and swords piled toward the trapped side.

 

Bent reached it first, of course -- he always did when there was something large and furious to hit. He brought his hammer down on the dragon’s forelimb with a two-handed blow that cracked bone loud enough to hear over the screaming. Marcus stood by the creature’s head and split the fire it tried to spew until it turned its head the other way, exposing its neck to Marcus’ blades. The dragon thrashed and a man went flying. Another took a tail strike and crashed into the dirt with a sound Marcus did not like. But the beast had lost the moment that mattered -- surprise, wall, weight, angle. All of it had gone wrong for the creature at once, and now sixty-five desperate soldiers were on it before it could regain itself.

 

Bent climbed half onto the broken stones and hammered at the dragon’s skull. Once. Twice. A third time with a raw sound torn from deep in his chest. The dragon shuddered. Marcus drove his swords down again, and this time something vital gave. The beast sagged into the wreckage with a long rattling exhale. Its body convulsed once, then stilled.

 

For half a heartbeat the whole fort went silent. Then the yard exploded. Men shouted until their voices cracked. Someone laughed. Someone else cried openly and did not seem ashamed of it. A pair of soldiers pounded each other’s backs as if they themselves had become immortal. Victory after twenty-eight days of waiting had the taste of release. Marcus stood in the middle of it all, chest heaving, blood and dust drying on his face, and realized he was smiling. It felt, for a brief moment, like her former life.

 

Bent shoved through the crush and stopped in front of him, breathing hard. His hair was full of grey dust and there was dragon blood up one side of his face. “You cut the fire,” he said.

 

Marcus wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and winked. “Apparently.”

 

Bent stared at him a moment, then barked a stunned laugh and slammed a fist into Marcus’s shoulder. “You impossible bastard.”

 

Around them the cheering shifted. “Marcus!” someone shouted. Then others picked it up. “Marcus! Marcus! Marcus!”

 

Marcus let it wash over him. Not the adulation – the almost-forgotten feeling of being in true control. He had been given command of the fort, but that had been meaningless -- men would follow command given from above because they had to. They followed command earned in blood because they wanted to. He raised one of his swords, because not doing so would look false, and the men roared louder.

 

Then one of the masons near the gate tunnel looked toward the western side of the fort and made a noise of deep personal betrayal.

 

“Oh, for the love of…”

 

The sound gathered the attention of the nearest soldiers, and they turned. Then more. One by one, faces swung toward the shattered section of wall.

 

The western wall, which they had spent four weeks shoring and mending and strengthening until it looked almost new and had gone from the weakest to the strongest of the fort’s walls, lay in worse disarray than when they had started. Not the whole thing, but enough. The exact stretch, in fact, they had just finished repairing that morning now lay in a fresh mound of busted stone beneath half a dead dragon. For a long moment no one said anything. Then Marucs and Bent started laughing.

 

Maybe it was Marcus first. Maybe it was both of them at once. Either way the laughter spread fast and helpless and ugly. Men bent over wheezing. One sat right down in the mud. Even the mason, who had sounded on the verge of murder, gave in after a few seconds and laughed like a man being punished by the Divines personally.

 

After they had recovered, Bent shook his head. “It’s going to take forever to get rid of this thing so we can fix the wall again.”

 

Marcus shook his head and clapped Bent on the shoulder as he started walking toward the kitchen. “Don’t worry, it will get out the way itself when it comes back to life next week.”

 

“When...what?!”

 

Marcus shook his head and just kept walking – the rest would find out soon enough.

 

 

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