Every Fight Turns Him Into a Woman, So the Whole Kingdom Kneels novel · Chapter 2 of 24
Chapter 2: Wren
Wes learns the rules of Surge, finds he cannot log out, and runs to Ravenmoor Keep, where ghouls are killing the garrison. He turns into Wren on purpose and heals three dead soldiers. The knight-captain kneels to her.
The hound let go of his boot and sneezed stone dust.
Wes looked down at it with a body that was not his.
"Stop biting," he said.
His voice came out lower than a woman's and higher than his own, and he did not enjoy hearing it.
"His name is Gravel," Sera said from the dark behind the statue. "He chose it. You can argue with him later."
Gravel sat on Wes's foot and growled up at him with amber eyes.
"Fine. Gravel." Wes tried to rub his face and found a braid in the way. "How do I turn this off?"
"You don't. Surge is the fight."
"And after the fight?"
"Once your pulse comes down, you go back to what you were."
"How long does that take?"
"A minute or two. Longer if you're angry. Longer still if something else keeps your blood up."
Wes didn't ask what the something else might be.
He picked up the glaive instead.
It weighed almost nothing in his hand, and he could feel exactly where the balance sat.
"The Quiet Glaive," Sera said. "It heals what it touches, if you tell it to."
"Heals?"
"Try it on the dog."
Gravel had a chip missing from his left wing.
Wes touched the flat of the blade to it, and the stone knit together under a pale glow.
Gravel looked at the wing, then at Wes, and licked his hand.
Then the heat went out of Wes's chest.
The braid shortened and went brown, and the shoulders narrowed back to his own.
He sat on the cold tiles as himself, with a hound on his lap.
He opened the system menu and went looking for the logout.
[Logout unavailable: session locked by administrator. Estimated release: 4 hours.]
Wes read it twice.
"Locke said he'd turn the logs off," he said slowly. "He never said anything about the door."
"Mm," Sera said.
It was not a comfortable sound, and Wes looked up at the statue.
"You don't like him."
"I don't like anyone who locks doors." She said it lightly. "The keep is south. You have until dark."
The causeway south took an hour, and Gravel rode part of the way on his shoulder, grumbling.
The smoke showed first, a black line over the reeds.
Then Wes heard the horns.
Ravenmoor Keep sat on a low rise above the marsh.
It was a squat grey fortress with two towers, and one of them had lost its roof to fire.
The gate was open, and the dead were coming through it.
Twenty bog ghouls at least were climbing the wall out of the water and swarming the road.
Behind the gate, soldiers in dented mail were backing into the courtyard.
Three of them lay on the stones by the gatehouse, and a ghoul crouched over them.
Wes stopped on the causeway.
He was a tester, and he had run a thousand fights in beta builds.
In none of them had he ever been the one who took the hit.
His dagger was in his hand, and it was useless.
"You don't have to do this," Sera said softly in his ear. "You could walk back."
"There are three of them on the ground."
"There are."
"They're code," Wes said. "I know they're code."
He ran.
Fear did it.
He felt it come up through his stomach and into his spine, and this time he did not fight it.
The heat rolled through him, and his hair fell and went white-gold.
The glaive was in his hand, and his legs were long and strong.
Wes hit the first ghoul at a run and took its head off.
He cut the second down at the knees.
A third leapt, and he caught it on the shaft and threw it into the wall.
"Left," Sera said, and Wes went left, and a ghoul's claws raked empty air.
He did not think, because the body knew the work.
Gravel dropped from his shoulder, grew a hand's width in the air and tore a ghoul's leg off.
At the gatehouse Wes put the flat of the blade on the first fallen soldier.
Light poured through the man's armor, and he sat up gasping.
The second soldier sat up too, and then the third.
The last ghoul came over the wall.
Wes pinned it to the ground with the glaive and held it there until it crumbled.
The courtyard went quiet.
Forty soldiers stood in the smoke with their weapons in their hands, and none of them moved.
A tall woman in battered plate came down the steps from the tower.
She had copper braids and a scar through her left eyebrow.
She was bleeding from the shoulder, and she did not seem to know it.
She stopped three paces away and looked at the white-gold braid and the glaive.
Then Brigid Oakes, knight-captain of Ravenmoor, went down on one knee in the ash.
"My lady," she said.
Behind her, forty soldiers knelt too.
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