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To the north of the River Luath, the Dunn Barony sprawled over a vast stretch of land that butted up against the western forests to the north of the Vale of Mists.

Villages that had grown large enough to be called small towns dotted the landscape along with many other small villages and hamlets.

All along the western border, dirt roads worn down by constant patrolling of soldiers on horseback connected the network of tiny settlements to Castle Dunn and its surrounding town.

What made the hamlets and villages of the Dunn Barrony unique, even in Lothian March, is that every single one of them, even if it was home to less than a hundred people, was surrounded by strong wooden walls and a wide, dry moat.

Some had filled their moats with wooden stakes, while others had lined them with stacked stones but every single settlement was prepared to be attacked by demons at any moment.

When Liam Dunn put out the call for men to join his banner, it wasn’t just the glory of fighting demons or the riches a person could obtain by presenting a trophy taken from a slain demon that he used to entice people with.

These small communities, tiny as they were, formed a vital part of his recruiting strategy.

A village should be overseen by a knight and this had been the custom in the Kingdom of Gaal and even in the old countries for hundreds of years.

However, a baron was limited in how many knights could serve under his banner.

For over a century, countless barons had chafed at their inability to expand their domains with the limited number of knights at their disposal.

Many had watched vast areas within their domains remain wild, unable to be settled and tamed because they had exhausted their supply of minor lords to administer to new domains.

The Dunns had followed a different path.

Instead of constructing one village and installing a knight to lord over it, they constructed a string of smaller hamlets and connected them with primitive roads.

These hamlets were overseen, not by knights, but by Guard Captains and a small contingent of armed men who could defend the hamlet if it was ever attacked.

There was an unspoken promise between the Dunn family and these guard captains.

One day, the shackles that held the Dunns back would fall away and they would assume a higher position.

When that happened, many more knights would be needed and many of these hamlets would be allowed to grow into proper villages.

Of course, the Dunn family wasn’t investing in all of those hamlets and guardsmen for nothing.

Now that Liam Dunn had raised his banner in the name of conquering new land, offering men the chance to carve out a parcel of land for themselves and maybe, one day, a title, the trained soldiers of the Dunn family were able to form a strong core of a fighting force, supplemented with twice their number in irregular recruits.

Some of those irregulars were excellent fighters with good equipment who worked as mercenaries or merchant guards most of the time. Others were young men with hand-me-down weapons and armor and heads stuffed with tales of glory and valor that served them as well as cotton stuffed into their ears.

It was the latter type of irregular soldier that Guard Captain Jorg cursed as he limped through Liam Dunn’s command camp in the wilderness. Bandages wrapped around his right thigh and knee, holding the arrow in place that had pierced his gambeson and breeches alike.

It had to be a miracle of some sort that it hadn’t cut one of the large arteries in his leg or he would surely have bled out before he managed to make it back to camp.

As is, the wound might still end his career as a soldier but as long as he reached the care of Lord Loman Lothian at least he would likely survive.

"Almost there, Captain," A soldier at his right side said as he helped his captain struggle through the bustling camp. "Lucky for us, Lord Loman is here. He’ll patch you right up, good as new in no time."

"Pev," the captain said, shaking his head at the other soldier who’d accompanied him from their tiny hamlet to the north. "I can’t go back out there with those fools. The next one who charges off after a demon and sets off one of their infernal traps is going to get us all killed. We won’t be so lucky again. "

No sooner had Jorg’s group of professional soldiers and irregular recruits caught their first glimpse of a flat-tailed demon than one of the young fools had rushed forward, waving his ax and shouting that he would claim the gold sovereign for the demon’s tail.

Two other fools had chased after him, shouting boldly that they would be the ones to claim the prize.

Jorg’s shouted orders to return to formation meant nothing to the hot-headed glory hounds and moments later they’d blundered into a fiendish trap that dropped half a dozen slender trees on them.

The trees had trunks that were slender enough for a man to wrap his hands around, but Jorg and his men were immediately mired in a tangled sea of branches and leaves that made moving around impossible.

It was only after his men were pinned down that the rain of arrows began. The charging idiots were the first to suffer at the hands of the demons but by the time anyone had freed themselves from the primitive trap, half his men were sporting wounds from at least one arrow.

"We’re just lucky the demon cared more about running away than finishing the job," Pev said, making a sign with his free hand to honor the Holy Lord of Light for protecting them from the demon archers. "If they’d had more time, we’d have been pincushions."

As he spoke, the two men reached one of the largest tents in Lord Liam’s camp.

Unlike the grand command tent at the center of camp which was draped in silks and displayed several colorful banners outside its entrance, this tent was simple and shaped in a long rectangle to hold as many people as possible.

"More wounded?" Loman Lothian said in a ragged, fatigued voice as he stood up from beside a rough cot and the pale-faced soldier lying atop it to look at the soldiers entering.

At most, the tent could hold forty men on simple cots made of canvas stretched across a wooden frame.

Presently, more than half of those cots were full and Loman had been working from dawn until dusk in the summer heat just to keep enough cots free to receive a fresh batch of wounded soldiers at the start of the next day.

"I brought Captain Jorg back first," Pev said as he helped his captain to one of the open cots. "There are nine more making their way back here as fast as their wounds will allow.

"Nine more," Loman said, turning to the other lord in the room and looking at him with weary, exhausted eyes. "Lord Liam, is it always like this when you lead your men to fight the demons?"

"No, not even close," Liam said darkly as he watched Loman gather up his supplies and move to the injured captain’s side to begin cutting away the bandages so he could remove the arrow. Liam had fought the demons before. He’d even conquered two demon villages, wresting a sizeable chunk of land from demon hands and allowing the establishment of four new hamlets.

But this time, something was different. The demons were inflicting cruel injuries instead of killing his men outright.

Liam wasn’t Owain, each death cut like a knife to his own flesh and his family paid a sizeable reward to the family of a fallen soldier who fought well on the battlefield.

It was one of the reasons that people were so willing to fight for the Dunns whenever they raised their banner to purge the demons from the neighboring lands.

But now, the demon’s new tactics weren’t only merciless, they were cruel, inflicting all manner of wounds on his soldiers and then fleeing like ghosts without finishing anyone off.

It should have been a blessing, but seeing the suffering in this bloody tent day after day, Liam wasn’t so sure that it was.

The demons were plotting something... and if his guesses were right, they were about to discover what that plot was.