The Siege of Ashfall
Forty thousand mouths. Thirty days of bread. The harvest still in the fields.
Summer. Cinder Company comes home from the Breach, all thirty, and Corvin Hale counts them in at the gate. In the commandant's office a miller waits with a sack of flour gone black. The Host has crossed at Kell's Ford. A band burned his mill and walked past him in his own doorway.
From the ford to Ashfall is a hundred and twenty miles of road, and nothing on it is held. The governor's spring returns say the March is fed "to the harvest, and the harvest in." The harvest is not in.
Governor Tennant wants to give the city to its strongest man. Magister Aurelian Drask refuses it. Corvin gets the stores of the whole city, in law. On the first day his hand finds five hundred and forty sacks heating at the bottom of the crown granary, weevil in all of them.
The city is in ten thousand cellars, too many for one hand. Vespera Kain and Wren count it loft by loft: thirty days at full ration for forty thousand. Every morning more families walk in from the burned villages, by roads the Host has left open.
On the north wall the old charm keeper says the charms are talking. On the night the Hollow scouts came, they stopped. The chronicle of the second tide says it came at the harvest, sat round the city, and left at the last low water before the autumn rise. The rise comes with rain. Nobody orders the rain.
The Host is not coming for Ashfall's walls. It is coming for the granary.
Corvin has given the count of the city to other hands. The sacks of his own store he still reads one by one.
Book 5 of the Ashfall Academy series, a men's adventure academy LitRPG. It is a complete story with its own ending. Closed-door romance (no explicit scenes), as in the earlier books. All characters are adults.
Coming soon to Amazon.
