No Wall to Hold (The Broken Road)

The walls held. Now the road must.

Twelve days after engineer Tomas Parker saved Auster by destroying part of its own royal quarter, victory is already becoming another kind of siege.

The king is dead. Lucan's succession is disputed. The eastern levy has stopped at Three Bridges. And the grain that could keep Auster alive will not move under a royal seal alone.

Parker is sent east with empty wagons, soldiers, engineers, civic witnesses and a son who still has not forgiven him. This time he intends to do things differently: risks named, authority shared, no community reduced to a number on somebody else's plan.

Then the road begins adding people.

Every village that joins the column brings skills, mouths, carts, wounded, animals and promises. Every success consumes time, food, rested crews and the spare capacity that lets a plan survive being wrong. At Dun Hollow, Parker proves just how much a moving defence can accomplish — and gives thousands of frightened people a reason to believe he can always find one more way through.

Marshal Serin Rovan is counting on it.

As armies, grain barges, refugees and rival claims converge on Three Bridges beneath a rising river, Parker must defend a system with no wall and too many things worth saving.

No Wall to Hold is Book II of The Broken Road Trilogy, an adult low-fantasy campaign novel of siegecraft, logistics, political fracture and the human cost of impossible promises.