They arrived at the woodland before noon the following day, having swung north and then west in a wide arc that kept them well outside Beale's scout range. The Keep's walls were visible from the tree line — three or four miles of open ground between them, Beale's siege lines spread across the eastern approach.
Evan laid it out for the unit commanders one last time: twelve horses with tree branches tied to their tails, riders keeping to the cover of the forest's edge, moving in a wide circuit to throw up a dust cloud that would carry east on the wind. The main force — just under a hundred people, in formation — would emerge from the trees at the edge of the woodland and hold position. The mortar would fire from the line's center.
"If he sends a probe," Rein said, still moving carefully after the chest damage from the day before.
"Then we show them enough of the formation to look like a professional vanguard and make them work to get past our skirmishers." Evan looked at him. "But Beale isn't going to send a probe. He's been sitting in front of that Keep for days expecting a relief force to appear from the east. We're coming from behind him."
Aymon, studying the smoke still rising from the woodland circuit, said: "If I didn't know the truth, I'd believe there was a thousand-man column behind that."
The dust moved east. They formed up at the tree line.
Rein took a crossbow from one of the soldiers and rode forward as Beale's scouts appeared at the edge of their range. One bolt, clean, and the riderless horse went back to its own lines. The scouts didn't come out again.
Beale had been watching the woodland. He saw the dust, saw the formation at the tree line, and made the calculation Evan had been counting on: the relief column was large, it had already flanked him, and its leading elements were already deployed. His own force was not in position to absorb an assault from an unexpected direction. He had a gap of perhaps ten minutes to get his men moving in good order before that gap closed.
The mortar fired.
The shot was solid iron — no explosion, no fire, just weight and velocity arriving without warning among his cavalry's forward positions. Two men went down. The formation behind them compressed and stilled.
Then Nabi Keep's gates opened and Rein's garrison came out.
Beale looked at what he had in front of him, what he had behind him, and what was apparently massing in the woodland to his west. His horn sounded. His formations peeled back from the walls in disciplined sequence, abandoning the siege equipment, moving southwest without panic. It was a professional withdrawal and Evan respected it even as he exhaled.
The cheer from inside the Keep carried across the open ground.
Count Rein came out himself to meet whoever had done this. He saw a hundred people and a mortar he recognized from Beale's inventory, and looked at Aymon with the expression of a man reviewing a surprise he hadn't prepared himself for.
"How many more are in the woods?"
"None, my lord." Aymon's voice was entirely neutral. "The dust was horses dragging branches."
A silence.
Then Rein laughed — genuinely, the kind of sound that didn't come from someone managing an impression. He gripped Aymon's arm hard. "A hundred men. A trick and a mortar and a hundred men, and you broke a nine-hundred-man siege. I haven't seen anything like this in twenty years of campaigning."
That evening, in the Keep's great hall, Rein formally invested them. Aymon's territory was extended. Felix, kneeling with his sword at his side, received his sword-touch and his oath and his title: Baron, with lands of ten square miles from the territory around the Keep.
He stood up a Baron.
In the congratulations that followed — Federik's smile was precisely as warm as it needed to be and not a degree warmer — Felix found Evan's arm. "None of this without you."
"You would have managed."
"I wouldn't have. You know that." He held his grip for a moment. "A knighthood. Anything in my power. Name it."
"I don't need the knighthood." Evan looked at him steadily. "What you need to understand is that you're a baron now. Your stepmother gains nothing by opposing you anymore — the succession is settled and it came from your own work, not your birth position. Be generous to her publicly. Be a brother to your siblings. Don't give anyone anything to point at. The people who were waiting for you to fail have run out of time to wait."
Felix nodded slowly. "And you?"
"I'm going west."
"Wait a few days while I arrange traveling money. You're not a saint and I'm not offering charity."
Evan agreed. The banquet lasted the evening, and he lasted most of it before the conversation stopped being interesting and he took his wine outside. In the courtyard, a mercenary found him — Aaron, the man who'd carried Rein's letter through enemy lines — and they talked, and Evan bought him several drinks, and somewhere in the pleasant looseness of that conversation Aaron mentioned the Bolo Hills, and the abandoned castle in them, and the reports of vampires, and the rumor — carefully labeled as a rumor — that the castle had something to do with the Philosopher's Stone.
Evan set down his cup and bought Aaron another round.