The first guard died without a sound.
Kael took him at the base of the eastern wall hand clamped over his mouth, claws driven into the soft hollow at the back of his skull. He let the body down into the long grass and kept moving. He’d counted seven men on the parapets. Now there were six.
He went up the wall.
It was almost too easy. Halt’s Reach hadn’t seen a real siege in three centuries. The stones at the eastern corner had worked themselves loose over the years, and the outer parapet had crumbled clean away at the south end. A Lycan in his ancient form could scale sheer rock Kael was in his ancient form, and the wall barely slowed him.
He came over the top into the courtyard below.
Fires. Twelve of them, just as he’d counted from the ridge. Twelve fires meant twelve clusters of bo
