The first Cairn Host scout came around the rock corner at a dead sprint. His iron-rimmed target shield was held high and an eighteen-inch broadhead hunting dagger gripped low in his right hand. He was expecting frightened civilians scrambling in panic. What he found was Yseld Arken wedged into the granite angle like an iron drop-gate.
As the scout rounded the turn, Yseld didn’t lunge forward into his shield. She hooked the curved bronze lug of her ash climbing staff around the lower rim of his target, wildly yanking his shield arm downward and across his chest. The scout stumbled, his balance broken on the slick shale. It exposed the unarmored hollow above his right knee.
Yseld drove the blackened leaf-blade of her short spear forward in a short, brutal piston-thrust.
The iron point punched through his rawhide greave, grating against the kneecap with a sickening crunch. The scout screamed—a high, shrill shriek of pure agony—and collapsed onto his left hip, his shield clattering away across the stone steps.
Behind him, the second scout showed the cold, lethal discipline of a veteran light infantryman. He didn’t charge into the narrow bottleneck. He stopped five paces up the stair, dropped to one knee on a broad step. Then he raised his short horn recurve bow. In a single, fluid motion, he drew the hemp bowstring back to his right ear, aiming an iron needle-point arrow straight down at Yseld’s unprotected throat. She stepped back toward the cross line.
