Across the sixty paces of wet river cobbles, Marshal Ors sat his iron-grey charger like a monument of weathered granite and wolf-fur, the missing tip of his left ear showing beneath the rim of his open-faced steel helm as he pointed his heavy cavalry cleaver at the bridge gatehouse. Behind his horse’s crupper, the twenty elite halberdiers locked the iron wheel-chocks of their heavy torsion catapult and hooked their windlass levers onto the ratchet drum, aiming the three-hundred-pound granite boulder squarely at the slate-roofed belfry and nave of St. Jude’s bridge shrine just inside the wall.
Jon Hale wiped a smear of wet lime and soot from his eyes and hurried south along the timber hoarding walk toward the bridge angle, his sand shovel still gripped in his right hand.
He knew this scene to the heartbeat. In four of the eleven previous lives, when Ors’s west-wall bombardment failed to breach the timber, the old Marshal had ridden out onto the middle of the Old Bridge and offered single combat to draw the Returner out from behind the gate. And in all four of those lives, Sir Cael Ardent—driven by twelve years of chivalric conditioning and the blazing golden combat prompts of the Hearth Nail—had vaulted over the stone parapet to meet him. Every time, Cael had cut Ors from the saddle within thirty passes; and every time, the moment Cael stepped thirty yards out onto the bridge span to deliver the killing stroke, two hundred hidden Host crossbowmen and…
