#buckeye

How could she think about getting revenge when one of her soldiers was dying out right in front of her?

But it wasn't revenge, it was morale. And people die without morale.

So she dug her ankle down between the rocks in the river to provide a more stable resting place for the dying soldier's calves, so at least she could die dry.

Buckeye wanted that death now. Not like this, a skinny-ass prisoner trying to turn that crank so she could open the gate before everyone got shot, and before the enemy army reached the other side. 

And even now she was trying to calculate her odds of keeping the castle and surviving, when she had an obvious trap set up to spring. 

"Stoke the fires, Maya!" She shouted over her shoulder. "Seth and Mornish, go on, help him! Right in front of the gate--yes, I'm serious!" She groaned under the weight. "Good, now you take over here, and I'll--"

Buckeye abandoned the crank to the stronger hands of the two who came at her call and dashed to the piles of leaves that had been raked to the side of the courtyard, gathering them in massive armloads. The second archer fell. 

"You're damn right, Roa!" She yelled, and threw the leaves onto the coals from the blacksmith's fire. Some of them immediately blazed up, and a mass of smoke started seeping out 

"Alright stop--open that gate on my signal. Maya, how we lookin' up there?"

"Fifty feet!" Maya shouted down. 

Buckeye cussed. 

Okay, we gotta wait. Means we have more smoke on our side.

"Thirty!"

"Thirty?" Buckeye shouted back. 

"Some on horses!" Maya shouted down. 

Double time, then.

"Okay, that’s… good." Buckeye beckoned at him, though she wasn't sure how it was good, quite yet. "Get down." She turned to the soldiers as they gathered close to her. "How many horses, Maya?" 

"Thirteen." Maya alighted next to her, dusting off his hands and coughing as the wind blew a puff of smoke into the group.

"Right," Buckeye said. "Okay, make the fire bigger, and everyone with an arm to spare, take a brand."

"Oh, like a brand, brand," someone said, pulling out a red-hot set of tongs that had fallen in. 

"Yes," Buckeye said. "And scream. We want to touch our soil today, no matter what it costs us. Even if we have to make it our soil by soaking it with our blood. They can take our lives, but not our heritage." She could hear them getting closer. "So when I say charge, you scream, 'charge!'" She turned on her heel, walked up to the closed gates, and ordered, 

"Open."

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