Mabel made her debut and killed enemy soldiers

Mabel Peloponnese’s first battle is the moment her wish to serve as a soldier becomes a direct encounter with the consequences of combat. When Balthasar’s men attack the mountain refuge, she first fights from concealment, then abandons that relative safety and takes up her sword. Her first killing helps mark the attackers’ violence as something she will no longer watch from a distance, but it also begins a lasting struggle with guilt and fear of becoming hardened to death.

Causes and Stakes

The attack comes against a background of Navon’s vulnerability. The kingdom has rarely faced a threat to its own territory; its earlier battles were fought on behalf of other kingdoms, and the burdens of those alliances helped drive many soldiers to desert. Now Tzara threatens Navon’s land and gold, while the kingdom has lost both soldiers and the protection of a former ally. Its leadership has been forced to consider what it can offer in return for assistance, even when the terms seem unfair. That political weakness gives the defense of the mountain camp an urgency beyond a single skirmish: those gathered there are exposed in a conflict that has reached Navon itself.

Shai’s band has its own reasons for considering a fight on Navon’s behalf. Shai describes his group as mercenaries who undertake practical services, including rescuing people and recovering stolen money, and proposes that they could fight for Navon if paid. Later, when Navi asks what the group demands, Shai says its members are not doing it for money. That change in the question of payment frames the camp’s defense as part of a developing alliance, though the immediate battle begins with the attackers already upon them. When a boy rushes in to warn that Balthasar’s men are coming, Alastair accuses Shai’s arrival of drawing attention to the refuge. Shai rejects the accusation as coincidence; the disagreement remains unresolved as they turn to the danger outside.

The Mountain Defense

Alastair refuses the messenger’s suggestion to hide. He orders the defenders to take up their weapons, declaring that the Expatriates’ Order will not hide, while pointing out that Mabel may stay out of sight. That distinction places her at once inside and at the edge of the group’s defense: she is present among them, but others still decide that she should avoid the fighting. The defenders plan to shoot at the soldiers as they climb the mountain, hoping to stop them before they reach the top. Some attackers nevertheless make it up. Archers remain hidden among the rocks and on the roof, while others confront the soldiers on the ground.

Mabel cannot accept remaining a spectator. She asks the man in charge of the arsenal for a bow and is refused because he expects her to waste the arrows. She insists that she can hit a target, and in the fighting she proves it: concealed among the rocks, she shoots at the advancing soldiers without revealing where the arrows come from. For a time, concealment lets her contribute while avoiding direct combat. But when the attackers move beyond her range, she sees that Shai’s fighters and the expatriates are still risking their lives below. Staying hidden begins to feel to her like withholding the very commitment she had wanted to make.

From Archer to Combatant

The first person Mabel hits is a soldier attacking the young messenger, who cannot defend himself. The sight of the assault is followed by others she reads as acts of cowardice. Her thoughts turn to what was done to her parents, and she drops the bow and arrows. She draws her sword instead, choosing to leave the cover of the rocks and enter the ground fighting. The change is practical as well as emotional: she exchanges a weapon that lets her strike from concealment for one she regards as more effective in close combat.

The change catches the attention of Shai’s men and Alastair’s followers, who briefly register the sight of a girl carrying a sword. Their surprise gives way to action as they continue fighting with axes and spears. Shai is described as a formidable combatant, while Gaspar brings down several opponents and Alastair fights ferociously. Mabel’s decision thus places her alongside a band whose members are already engaged in the defense, rather than in the safer position Alastair had offered her. The moment does not make her invulnerable: during the fighting, an enemy soldier is able to strike at her, and she reaches for his sword at his waist and pulls it away.

The First Killing and Its Aftermath

Mabel had not intended to kill anyone when she left Navon with Shai only days earlier. In the battle, however, she kills the soldier whose sword she has taken. She understands the encounter as one in which neither fighter is simply the other’s victim; she sees Balthasar as the source of the wider violence and as the enemy who must be stopped. That reasoning places her act within the demands of war, but it does not make the experience emotionally easy. The soldier falls onto her, and she cannot immediately speak or free herself. Shai lifts her up, asks if she is hurt, and takes her away from the fighting.

The killing becomes a psychological burden that continues after the battle. Mabel faces the soldiers’ complaints, intimidation, stares, and jabs as she learns to live among them, but she also begins to have nightmares in which the dead man’s face returns. She experiences those dreams as punishment for a killing that has not been punished, and recognizes that she is less invulnerable than she had believed. More troublingly, she fears that once she has endured this death, the deaths that follow may no longer produce the same guilt. The first killing therefore becomes not only a memory of what she did, but a question about what repeated violence might make of her.

Significance

The battle gives concrete form to the conflict between Mabel’s determination to act and her need to remain morally responsive. She does not simply take up a weapon and emerge unchanged: she first helps from cover, judges that safety against the risks borne by others, and chooses to join them. The choice establishes her as an active defender, while the nightmares expose the cost of that identity. Her fear that future deaths might trouble her less complicates any uncomplicated account of courage or military success. In this first battle, the defense of others and the danger of losing her humanity arrive together.