Sleet blanketed the mountain pines in choking silence until a volley of barbed whistling arrows tore through the royal supply wagons from the clifftops.
The Pine Needle Ravine was a deep-sea cleft in the northern dark rock plateau, four miles long and barely twenty paces wide at its narrowest choke point. Snow had drifted six feet deep against the sheer upright rock faces, burying the frozen military highway beneath dangerous, shifting powder.
Two days of brutal forced marching had advanced the expeditionary army deep into the gorge.
By the morning of the seventh day, the column had become dangerously fragmented.
The regular country infantry battalions, exhausted by the cold and lagging two miles behind the vanguard, had strung their baggage carts out in an uncoordinated, unsafe line. Noble cavalry captains had pulled their heated litters into the center of the column. That left the flanks unguarded along the overhanging timber ridges.
Then, the mountain erupted.
TWANG-TWANG!
From the snow-laden spruce forests atop the cliffs, three hundred bone-tipped whistling arrows plunged downward in a black, curved curtain.
