Your soldiers get a little help from Marzena's witches and win the bloody melee decisively.

"Oi! Marzena! This is a bit funny, don't you think?" you shout over the din of battle as you and your retinue pass through the opened castle gates.

"Eh? What's so funny, Zoe? All the people dying? I dunno about that. It's only really funny when people die in an unexpected way. This is just normal warfare, innit?" Marzena says, holding on to her hat and keeping close to you.

"No, no, not that!" you reply. "You know all of those tapestries and... and illuminated manuscripts with pictures of battles, where it's just a big mass of armored men all standing close hacking away at each other and clashing blades toe to toe, with no lines or formations?"

"Yeah?" is Marzena's simple reply, so you continue. "Well Marzena, I always thought that they just drew it like that because it looks dramatic, and that the reality of a battle would be just a whole lot of positioning and marching with very little of that face-to-face clashing."

You sweep your hand at the utter pandemonium and unrestrained **** engulfing the castle courtyard. "But," you continue, "turns out, the reality really DOES look like that! Individual knights and armsmen fighting **** duels, all stuck in amongst the enemy! Look at them go! I should have brought my personal artist along!" You raise your voice and try to be heard over the cacophony of weapons striking armor and men shouting. "You're doing wonderfully, boys! Keep showing your love to your Countess!"

Pointing ahead, you beckon Marzena, Olivia, Rima, Hannah, and the others in your ten-woman retinue of witches, having left the rest in reserve in case you need to beat a hasty retreat. "Come on, let's go catch up with Tula there. Looks like she's walking all over them!"

In a battle such as this, where both knights afoot, trained armsmen, and levied militia are all embroiled in combat, each tier in the social and military hierarchy seeks out their opposite numbers. Levy troops carrying spears, glaives and sickles may be uneducated, but they generally aren't stupid: they know that trying to attack knights in plate armor is pointless, as their weapons can't penetrate the armor, and with no armor of their own, the odds they'll survive long enough to knock the armored warrior down and disarm them are slim. Unencumbered by armor of their own, such jumped-up peasants avoid any foes besides other poorly-armed peasants. Men at arms are trained and armed well enough that they theoretically COULD defeat knights, with maile or munition plate giving them some margin of safety, but they aren't paid well enough to try.

Tula's gathered **** of knights are essentially marching in circles around the courtyard, forcing enemies to flee from them. As a result, all those levies, mercenaries and men at arms are getting scattered, with Count Mace's troops descending from the walls at the same time that your own militia are storming them from the stairways within the courtyard.

To your sudden concern, it turns out that some of Count Mace's knights were indeed mounted and ready, and cunningly chose to hide inside the stables, waiting for your forces to get distracted before charging out. Thirty or forty armored noblemen come thundering out of the doors and slam into a block of your militia pushing back Aldergrove levies. In the process of lancing, slashing, and trampling your militia into the dirt, they end up running down dozens of their own men, seeming to care little for the casualties.

You snap your fingers. Rima begins hurling massive snowballs that she's conjured up, which are excellent for knocking the knights off their steeds, while Marzena starts throwing sulfurous fireballs. Though armor can stop the fire itself from scorching flesh, it is no protection at all against the ****, noxious fumes. "C'mon you whores!" you shout at them. "Don't worry about hitting our people, they can suck it up! Unleash everything you've got!" More magical spells lash out. Rima and Marzena's elemental magic is the flashy exception; most of the magic that witches like yours practice affect the mind and spirit rather than the body. The knights are left disoriented, confused, and sickened by the curses that strike them.

That is exactly what Tula has been waiting for. Red faced and out of breath, she leads her own band to charge the enemy knights while they're disoriented and bogged down among the fallen bodies of the Undrek militia. Those who had managed to stay upright on their panicking horses are quickly pulled down from the saddle. Since no non-magical sword can cut through a knight's armor, Tula's followers use their swords more like clubs, striking with the flats of the blades and the hilts.

Both among those knights and the swirling melee of militia and mercenaries, the battle degenerates and grows more and more crude. Shields and weapons break at a prodigious rate, and warriors fall back on wrestling one another to the ground... punching, stomping, strangling, and stabbing with knives. Those enemy knights who don't yield quickly enough - and few of them do - have their lives ended with the so-called "mercy daggers" that knights carry in hip sheaths, piercing through the joints in their neck armor and under their arms.

Although it is an atrocious bloodbath for both sides, with your militia taking especially horrific casualties, it soon becomes clear that the charge of those mounted knights was the last card the castle defenders had to play. The defenders of Aldergrove wait far too long to decide to pull back, and their retreat towards the castle keep becomes a panicked rout. Only a handful make it inside before the keep defenders bar the doors, leaving more than a hundred fleeing militia trapped outside. The levied troops pound on the closed gate with their fists and weapons, shouting desperately and pleading with their lieges to let them in.

Tula and her warriors advance on them. It seems that Tula is not accustomed to this much exercise, as she is panting with exhaustion and leaning limply against one of her knights, putting her arm over the man's shoulder to support herself. She shouts something, and her knights advance upon the cut-off enemy militia. Although most of the trapped levies drop their weapons and beg to be spared, few of them are: commoners are seldom worth enough of a ransom to be worth the trouble or expense of holding them prisoner.

You hear a horrified moan. At first you're worried that one of your witches has been struck with an arrow, but turning around, you see that it's just Hannah: the sight of so much wanton **** is too much for her, and she faints dead away, collapsing into the mud. Marzena, conversely, is not bothered at all, though she does address the other witches. "Alright girls, well done with the support! You've all earned yourselves two seasons off from leg-spreading duty! Now save your energy, the troops can handle the rest on their own!"