Five seconds before Master Mason Alden Bram’s maul sheared the retaining pin in the valve chamber, Sir Cael stood twenty yards outside the western weir sill in knee-deep foaming water, fighting three mounted Host lancers at once with a twenty-eight-pound ash shield on his left arm and his greatsword strapped to two dead fingers on his right.
Jon Hale, hauling with all his strength on the tarred hemp guide-rope beside Harlan Pike at the inner stake, saw the exact moment Cael’s unwarded mortal body hit the wall of its physical endurance.
In the first eleven returns, when Cael had fought inside the golden grace of the Hearth Nail, his boots had never slipped on wet river slime, and his parries had never lagged a tenth of a second behind his eye. Out here beyond the iron boundary post of the Four-Cornerstone ward, with eleven loops of lung-scorch burning in his chest and the cold river dragging at his greaves, Cael was only a man—a fiercely brave, magnificently schooled man, but made of flesh that tired and bone that broke.
As the tall Host lieutenant in blackened half-armour spurred his grey charger straight at the left rim of Cael’s ash wedge-shield, a second horseman lunged in from the upstream eddy with an eight-foot ash cavalry spear couched low under his arm.
