When the lead rank of General Ors’s light lancers hit the eastern neck of the exposed gravel spit, Jon Hale saw what it meant for Sir Cael to fight without the golden scaffolding of the Hearth Nail behind his ribs.
In the first eleven lives, whenever a heavy horseman had charged Cael on the stone bridge or the south causeway, the Champion’s ward-assisted muscles had moved half a beat faster than the horse’s stride—stepping inside the lance-point with effortless, inhuman fluidity and shearing the ash shaft in two before the iron butt could transmit its momentum to his feet.
Out here on the wet limestone shingle, fifty yards outside the northernmost iron ward-post of Harth, Cael had only the twenty-eight pounds of Alden Bram’s double-planked green ash shield, the six-inch iron ground-spike driven into the gravel at his left toe, and the mortal bone and sinew of his own two shoulders.
The first two eight-foot ash lances struck the iron-shod boss of Bram’s wedge-shield simultaneously with a sound like a felled oak splitting on a rock.
The impact did not glance away in a shower of golden sparks. It drove Cael’s left knee six inches deep into the foaming river gravel, tearing a raw, human grunt of effort from his throat as two thousand pounds of galloping horseflesh slammed against the angled ash planks. The buried iron spike at the foot of the shield held fast against a submerged limestone ledge, and the steep forty-five-degree slant of the mason’s timber…
