The bridge roadway was slick with black river mud, severed hemp ropes, and the dark grease of burned tallow.
Jon Hale stood ten paces behind Sir Cael Ardent on the stone crown of the second arch, his boots braced against the wheel-ruts worn into the granite by a hundred years of hay wains. Behind them, the gatehouse arch was empty, the surviving town guards having retreated to the inner street barricade under Dain’s blood-soaked command. Before them, five heavy Host infantrymen in soot-streaked chain emerged through the billowing granary smoke, their boots splashing through the brown puddles.
They advanced in a crescent, shields locked rim to rim, their short hacking swords held ready to butcher the lone knight who barred the town’s throat.
Cael did not raise his shield. He had discarded his buckler three lifetimes ago, finding the extra leather and bronze merely dragged half a second from his recovery stroke. His two hands rested lightly on the cord-wrapped grip of his ancestral greatsword, the tip pointed toward the flagstones at a thirty-degree angle.
“Surrender the crossing, White Rose!” shouted their leader, a grizzled border veteran with a bronze torc welded around his neck. “The ridge batteries have breached your inner flume! You have no army behind you!”
