General Snowe fortified the dominion.

The Snowe family’s estates occupied approximately forty square miles centered on Snowehaven, the ancestral seat whose stone walls and defensive towers had been built by the general’s grandfather and maintained by six generations. The town’s permanent garrison of eight hundred soldiers was peacetime staffing, not the garrison that twenty thousand dwarven-armed barbarians required.

Snowe requisitioned every able-bodied man between sixteen and fifty. The militia numbered twenty-two hundred. He armed them with the dominion’s armory: boomsticks from the estate’s hunting stocks, spears, swords from the family smithy. The boomstick ammunition was the hunting ammunition that the dominion’s population had stockpiled for decades of sport and pest control, not military supply. It would do.

"They are farmers," his aide said, watching the militia drill.

"They are people defending their homes," Snowe said. "Farmers defending their homes fight differently from farmers defending someone else’s territory. The motivation changes the arithmetic."

The fortification work consumed every hour of the fourteen days the barbarian advance rate provided. Earthworks at the northern approach. Trenches across the road. The garrison’s three thundermakers positioned at the approaches. The earthworks were not garrison engineering. They were the earthworks that a commander who had spent four months fighting the Yohan First Horde had learned to construct, the berms and trenches inspired by the Horde’s defensive positions, the timber-framed packed earth that Snowe had studied from the wrong side for months and now replicated from the right side.

The general stood on Snowehaven’s wall on the twelfth day and looked north. The barbarians were two days away. Smoke from the towns they had burned was visible on the horizon, the columns rising with the specific quality that burning settlements produced, the columns Snowe had seen before from the other side, when the settlements being burned were orcish and the army doing the burning was his.

The recognition settled into him with the weight that recognition carried when the recognition was personal. He had burned settlements. He had watched smoke rise from the communities he had destroyed. He had done to the orcs what the barbarians were now doing to his people. The campaign against the orcish settlements had been three years ago and three years had seemed like enough distance to make the memory bearable, and now the distance had collapsed because the smoke on his horizon was the same smoke and the people fleeing toward his walls were fleeing the way the orcs had fled and the thing happening to his dominion was the thing he had made happen to theirs.

The irony of Snowe’s defensive position was the irony that the entire campaign had been built on, the irony that connected the kingdom’s past actions to its present consequences through the specific chain of causation that history produced when history’s lessons were expensive enough to be unforgettable. The general who had commanded the forces that burned orcish settlements was defending his own settlements against an enemy whose tactics resembled the tactics that the orcish settlements’ defenders had faced. The earthworks that held the barbarians were the earthworks that the orcs had taught him to build. The defensive engineering that kept his dominion alive was the engineering of the people he had helped destroy.

The recognition was not comfortable. The recognition was the recognition that soldiers produced when they saw their own actions reflected in an enemy’s behavior and when the reflection was accurate enough to be painful. Snowe had burned settlements. The barbarians burned settlements. The experience of watching the smoke rise on the northern horizon was the experience that the orcs had had when they watched the smoke of their own settlements rise, and the experience was the same experience regardless of which side’s settlements were burning.

* * * * *

The barbarians arrived on the fourteenth day. Their advance guard appeared at dawn, iron-armored warriors in loose formation, boomsticks screening the thundermaker teams behind. Three thousand in the advance guard. The main body visible in the dust cloud, the remainder of the twenty thousand, reduced by the campaign’s engagements but replenished by highland reinforcements.

The first thundermaker ball struck the earthwork and the earthwork held. The timber-framed construction absorbed the energy, distributing it across the frame rather than allowing the punch-through that solid earth and stone allowed.

"They expected stone walls," Snowe said. "Stone cracks. Timber bends. The orcs taught me that."

The barbarian assault cost four hundred dead on the first day without breaching the position. The shamans’ magic found the iron stakes Snowe had driven into the ground at intervals that disrupted the shamanic vibrations’ propagation, the countermeasure his battlemages had improvised from their analysis of the shamanic techniques observed in the king’s engagements.

The dominion held. The first day. The second. The barbarians pushed. The earthworks bent. The earthworks did not break.

"How long?" his aide asked.

"As long as the ammunition lasts. Our boomstick supply is the hunting stockpile. The barbarians have dwarven military supply. When our ammunition runs out, the earthworks without fire support are earthworks that twenty thousand warriors will overwhelm."

He calculated. Three thundermakers with limited shot. Eight hundred garrison boomsticks. Twenty-two hundred militia with hunting weapons and hunting ammunition.

"Twelve days. After twelve days, we fight with steel. And steel against dwarven boomsticks and thundermakers and shamanic magic is steel that loses."

He looked at the northern wall where the militia stood at their posts, farmers with hunting boomsticks holding the line between their homes and the burning.

The barbarians maintained their siege with the patient thoroughness that unlimited supply provided. They did not need to assault. They needed to wait until the ammunition ran out. The dwarven wagons continued arriving. Each probe the barbarians sent was designed not to breach but to draw fire, each drawn shot one fewer for the breach that would eventually come.

A militia farmer named Daren held his position at the northern earthwork and squeezed off his shot at a probing barbarian. The ball struck the barbarian’s shoulder plate and the barbarian dropped behind cover. The farmer checked his pouch. Seven charges remaining. Seven shots between him and the moment his boomstick became a club.

His wife was in Snowehaven with their children. The earthwork was the line between his family and the burning. He would fire his seven shots and then he would hold the position with the boomstick as a club and then with his hands if the club broke. The motivation that Snowe had described, the motivation that changed the arithmetic, was the motivation of a man whose family was behind the line he was holding and whose holding was the only thing preventing the burning from reaching them.

"Unless something changes," his aide said.

"The king’s army is losing. The Horde sits at Ashwell and watches. Nothing is coming to change our situation except time, and time is not on our side. We hold for twelve days and hope that twelve days is long enough for something unexpected to happen."

The barbarians settled into the siege. The earthworks held. The ammunition counted down. And the general who had burned orcish settlements was defending his own against an enemy with better weapons and better supply, using the defensive engineering he had learned from the orcs he had burned.