The iron broadhead struck the frozen cinders two inches behind Kezra’s left boot heel.
It hit with a high, violent shriek of metal on dark rock, throwing a fan of orange sparks and crushed stone dust into the freezing fog. The four-sided point buried itself three inches deep into the packed cinder crust, the dried goose fletching shaking with a high, angry hum that sounded like a hornet trapped in a clay jug.
Kezra slammed flat against the frozen ground beneath the unhitched freight wagon, the impact driving the air from her chest in a ragged gasp.
The bottom of the wagon was a low ceiling of greasy oak planks and square-headed iron carriage bolts. It smelled suffocatingly of sheep fat, stale linseed oil, and old hog manure that had dried to the underside of the bed. The rear axle—a massive square spar of upland hickory bound with iron reinforcing bands—hung barely fourteen inches above her spine.
She lay pressed into the dirt like a flattened lizard, her cheek resting against the cold cinders.
She had zero illusions about what her mapmaking could do for her.
She was an awakened Plot Mapmaker. Her bonded survey notebook was warm against her ribs. He carried the power to exchange thousands of cubic paces of solid mountain rock. But her closest live outside corner anchor was two miles to the west, carved into the dark rock shelf above the goat chimney. She hadn’t set a single corner peg in this yard. She hadn’t walked the outer edge, she hadn’t sounded the depth. She held no legal parcel beneath these cart wheels.
In this frozen space beneath eight hundred pounds of hickory and iron, her class couldn’t move a single grain of dirt. There was no shield, no armor of light, and no magical evasion that could stop sixty grains of forged iron travelling at two hundred feet per second.
If she survived the next twenty heartbeats, it wouldn’t be because she could move mountains. It would be because she had spent seven years looking at the dirt where other people only saw empty space.
Yesterday morning, when their small party had led the mule through the timber gate of Splitflint Notch, Kezra had not looked at the innkeeper’s painted sign. She had looked at the drainage.
In any upland mountain pass where snowmelt and autumn torrents washed down the crags, water followed the living stone. While Fellis had complained about his pack straps and Yseld had watched the outriders by the trough, Kezra’s eyes had automatically traced the surface geology of the eastern terrace.
She had noticed a low, nonstop rib of dense black dark rock. A natural fiery dike that broke through the superficial apron of loose scree like the spine of a buried dragon.
The rib was barely two feet high. But it was solid, unbending bedrock, smoothed by hundreds of years of stormwater. It emerged from beneath the freight cart’s left wheel hub, ran diagonally across the cinder path for twenty paces. Then it ended in the lip of a stone-lined drainage trench that flanked the lower retaining wall.
The drainage trench was three feet deep, built of drystacked dark rock blocks to carry the spring runoff away from the hostel foundations.
Two feet of solid stone, Kezra thought, her pulse hammering against her ears. Between the cart axle and the trench, that rib is the only dead ground in the notch.
Up at the front of the wagon, six paces away, a boot sole crunched sharply on the cinder path.
“Stay down!” a harsh, gravelly voice barked through the mist. It was the stocky archer with the scar on his jaw. “Don’t let her crawl out the rear! Notch another shaft, Varr! Pin her through the spokes if she moves!”
Through the wooden spokes of the cart’s left wheel, Kezra saw the heavy, oiled leather coats of the two men. They were crouched behind the wagon’s front tongue. They used the ash sideboards as their own cover while they reached into their hip quivers for fresh broadheads. Their movements were swift, clockwork, and terrifyingly efficient. Men who had practiced speed-shooting drills until their fingers could find a nock in total darkness.
The second archer—taller, with a grey wool scarf wrapped around his ears—stepped half a pace to his right. It dropped onto his right knee to peer beneath the front axle.
His eyes locked onto the dark wool of Kezra’s coat.
Kezra didn’t wait for the string to draw.
She hooked the iron shoe of her ash sounding rod into her belt loop, flattened her palms against the frozen dirt. Then she hauled her body sideways with a violent, scuttling heave of her hips.
She rolled out from under the hickory axle, throwing her chest behind the thick, solid curve of the wagon’s massive left wheel hub.
Crack!
The second arrow shattered against the outer spoke four inches above her left ear. The sound was ear-splitting in the confined space, the seasoned ash spoke splitting into long, stringy splinters that showered down across the back of her neck like handfuls of dry pine needles. The shock of the impact shook through the iron tire, numbing her fingers where they gripped the rim.
“She’s behind the hub!” the tall archer shouted, his voice rising in frustration. “Circle the tongue! Flush her toward the scree!”
Kezra didn’t stay at the hub.
She used the wooden wheel as a screen. She slid on her stomach into the lee of the black dark rock rib.
The rock was freezing—ice-coated and sharp as broken pottery—but it was twelve inches of solid fiery dark rock rising between her ribs and the two men at the front of the cart. She pressed her face into the cold gravel. She pulled her legs tight behind her, her boots scraping through the cinders as she began to crawl.
She moved on her elbows and knees. Her belly scraped the dirt, using every inch of the dark rock rib’s shadow to mask her dark shape against the grey morning mist.
Ten paces.
Behind her, the two archers were moving. She could hear the rapid, heavy crunch of their hobnailed boots circling the front of the heavy cart, coming around the tongue to establish an angle of fire down the length of the wagon’s flank.
“Varr, go wide!” the scarred man snarled. “Cut off the path to the gate! I’ll take the trench!”
If the scarred man reached the lip of the drainage trench before her, he would have an open, downward shot into her exposed spine.
Kezra drove her toes into the frozen cinders. She ignored the tearing of her wool breeches, ignored the raw scrape of the rock against her palms, and lunged forward like an animal scrambling out of a collapsed burrow.
Fifteen paces.
Five paces ahead, the black dark rock rib plunged downward into the mouth of the stormwater trench. The ditch was three feet deep, filled with eight inches of half-frozen autumn slush and dead fern leaves. But its drystone dark rock walls were high enough to hide a crouching person entirely from anyone standing on the terrace above.
From the front of the wagon, the tall archer cleared the front wheel.
He saw her.
He dropped his weight onto his rear foot, raising his recurve bow in a single, fluid motion. The iron broadhead was drawn to his ear in half a heartbeat, the waxed linen serving on the string glistening with lard.
“Stand, girl!” he bellowed.
Kezra didn’t stand.
She threw her body sideways, launching herself off the lip of the dark rock rib into the empty air above the trench.
As she fell, a sound erupted from the upper courtyard behind the hostel. A sound that made the hair on the archer’s forearms stand on end.
It wasn’t a scream of terror. It wasn’t a call for help.
It was a flat, piercing war cry. A short, rhythmic bark of three dropping syllables that carried the terrible, disciplined ferocity of a frontline mountain cohort breaking through a shield wall.
“KRAIL-VOD-DAHN!”
The tall archer flinched, his head snapping involuntarily toward the sound. For a split second, the iron discipline of his aim wavered. His fingers opened on the release half a heartbeat before his eye had lined up the sight.
The arrow hissed through the air where Kezra’s throat had been, burying itself harmlessly in the frozen mud of the ditch’s eastern bank.
Kezra slammed into the bottom of the drainage trench, cold muddy water splashing over her boots and soaking into her gaiters. She rolled onto her back, her ash rod gripped across her chest, her chest heaving as she looked up through the grey mist.
Above her, on the upper retaining wall that separated the hostel courtyard from the lower freight terrace, a figure appeared.
It was Yseld Arken.
The guide had not run down the beaten cinder path into the archers’ prepared kill zone. She hadn’t chased blindly into the fog.
Instead, Yseld had sprinted along the top of the four-foot drystone retaining wall that hemmed in the courtyard. She used the height to look over the roof of the unhitched heavy cart. Her grey cloak had been discarded, leaving her in her sleeveless leather vest and homespun wool smock. Her dark hair was whipped back by the crest wind, her eyes cold and murderous as a mountain wolf’s.
In her hands, she held her six-foot climbing staff.
She had reversed the grip. The heavy, tarred-twine wrap where the wire splint heavy the wood was pressed tight against her forearm. The four-inch curved iron hook at the head gleamed in the pale dawn light like the claw of an eagle.
She was standing directly above the two archers, looking straight down into their exposed necks.
The scarred bowman heard the boots on the wall above him. He whirled, wildly reaching for an arrow from his hip quiver. His mouth opened to shout a warning to his partner.
He was too late.
With a single, smooth, terrifying leap, Yseld vaulted off the top of the stone wall, the iron hook of her staff swinging downward through the mist like a falling scythe.