Battle · Book 2 · Warmage · Mixed
The pitched day-long battle that broke the first gurvani horde -- and the night it ended, Duke Lenguin of Alshar was assassinated by Isily on the Family's orders, disguised as a battlefield wound. Hesia and Horka fell on the field; the Hesian and Horkan Orders would later be named for them at the Robinwing Conclave. Lenguin's death cleared Rard's path to the throne of Castalshar.
Timberwatch was the climactic battle of the early war and the engagement that founded the Kingdom of Castalshar. After months of skirmishes following the relief of Tudry, the gurvani host at last allowed itself to be drawn into a pitched field battle on a flat plain north of Tudry where it could be flanked, encircled, and broken. Marshal Minalan commanded; Duke Lenguin of Alshar commanded the Alshari host in person; Duke Rard of Castal sent thousands of his own troops. The Magical Corps was the largest concentration of irionite-armed warmagi seen since the fall of the Magocracy.
Minalan's plan turned on terrain. Timberwatch was a wide, low field at a fork between rivers; he wanted the gurvani to commit to crossing the causeways and then pinned the horde against the field walls of his own engineers' construction. Carmella and Hesia stiffened the palisades and redoubts with binding-spells until the log walls held like stone. Trebuchets and ballistae were prepared in advance, sited and ranged.
The Alshari and Castali cavalry, including the entire flower of the Alshari Wilderlords, were massed on the western flank under Azar, Horka, Delman, Landrik, and other warmagi who could ride. Minalan and the bulk of the Magical Corps stood with the centre.
The horde came on as Minalan had predicted. The warmagi cavalry charge under Azar and Horka broke the gurvani right wing on the first run; the disciplined Bovali- and Kuline-stock goblins retreated in good order, but the eastern skirmishers were trampled. A specially-designated unit of warmagi captured the camp at the foot of the westernmost causeway. Trebuchets pounded the centre. Hesia took an arrow in the arm and reported to the field hospital, came back in a sling with a warwand in her good hand, and returned to the wall.
The day was on the verge of being won when, against every officer's advice, Duke Lenguin personally led a thousand Alshari Wilderlord cavalry into the trolls' position in the dark. He believed his appearance in the saddle would shatter the enemy's morale. Azar cursed and pleaded; Horka silently glowered with his mageblade in hand; Landrik stood on military discipline. None of them could overrule a sovereign duke. Most of those thousand horse never saw the sun rise.
Sheruel committed a dragon to the centre of the line in the late stages. It tore through the formations until Horka — who never met a war he didn't want to be in front of — rode in personally with a half-dozen knights as cover, advanced under the dragon's mouth, and discharged a single specialised spell directly down its throat. The dragon fell mortally wounded. Its dying tail-strike caught Horka across the side and snapped his spine. He died on the field.
Horka went right up to that thing's monstrous maw, and he cast the spell. At first it looked like he'd gotten away with it, but then the damned thing rolled and its tail hit Horka in the side. Snapped his spine. He died instantly.
— Azar, by mind-link, reporting Horka's death
The dragon's fall broke the gurvani's right wing for the second time that day. The horde began to give ground.
The wall was held but not without losses. Hesia died with her troops behind the wall, keeping a section of it from being overrun after the second sapper attempt. Delman fell on the wall moments before Taren's great spell went off. Bendonal the Outlaw took dozens of cuts at Delman's side and was left for dead, but survived; he would recover under the long care of the healer Lelwen and rise to second-in-command of Azar's Megelin command in the years that followed. The Alshari Wilderlord cavalry lost a thousand men in Lenguin's suicide charge against the trolls.
Months later at the Robinwing Conclave, the Magical Corps formally reorganised itself into the great Arcane Orders. Two of the orders were named for the dead of Timberwatch:
Lenguin survived the day battle and the troll-raid losses. He did not survive the night.
Lady Isily of Brawin, the Alshari shadowmage Minalan had brought into the Magical Corps and who had quietly been on the Family's payroll the entire time, executed the standing order Queen Grendine of Castal had given her months earlier. The spellcraft was precise, undetectable, and timed to look like a delayed haemorrhage from a battlefield wound. Lenguin died in his tent with his retainers around him, no killer in the room. The Alshari magnates accepted the apparent cause without challenge.
Lady Arnet would later confirm the assassination obliquely to Minalan in the Remeran years that followed, as a fact too large to keep entirely buried among the magi:
After Isily's sterling service in the establishment of the kingdom, she was granted certain degree of freedom and autonomy, as well as a special portfolio.
— Lady Arnet, on Isily
The phrase "the establishment of the kingdom" was the Family's preferred euphemism for the Timberwatch assassination.
Lenguin's death left young Anguin the new Duke of Alshar, with Lenguin's widow Duchess Enora and Grendine herself the effective regents. Within months Enora was also dead in another arranged accident. Within a year Rard had united Castal, Alshar, and Remere as the new Kingdom of Castalshar, with himself as the first king. The Battle of Timberwatch ended the first war and started the second — the political, decade-long war over what kind of kingdom Castalshar would actually be.
The field itself remained an Alshari ducal possession for the next decade, eventually granted by Duke Anguin to Tyndal and Rondal's Estasi Order of Knights Magi as a remote training and evaluation site, and used as the cover for the recruitment that produced the eight hundred Glorious Victors who carried out the Overthrow of the Enultramar Rebellion. The Blue Barn on the field, originally the Marshal's command tent during the battle, was preserved as the Estasi chapterhouse and as a place of quiet pilgrimage for the magi who survived.
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