The river didn’t arrive with a herald or a royal proclamation. It came with the sound of grinding shingle and the sour, anaerobic silt stench of churned ditch mud.
Pella Rook stood on the greasy timbers of the old ferry turning basin, her cart driver boots ankle-deep in freezing marsh slush. Overhead, the low northern clouds were the color of lead solder. It was dawn on the twenty-seventh day of the crisis, forty-eight hours earlier than the College of Summoners had projected in their gold-trimmed tiered arena charts. Two full days before the ritual dedication of Master Davin Sorell’s Hollow Crown was scheduled to start, the mountain snowpack had broken under unseasonable warm rain. It sent a brown wall of glacier runoff through the High Tor gorge.
Along the rim of the basin, the mud was marked with fresh white animal fat chalk. Eren Tal, his wool sleeve soaked to the elbow with river grease, drove a three-foot ash stake into the bank with a heavy wooden beetle. The blow landed with a dull, wet thud that sent river gulls screeching into the drizzle. He drove it down until the notch met the waterline, then straightened with a sharp intake of breath. His hand pressed into the small of his back.
