The scream that tore through the mountain mist above the terrace was sharp and choked off in the throat, the clear sound of a seasoned fighter having the breath ripped from her lungs by high-speed iron. Fifty paces above the sorting yard, at the narrow rock cleft where two heavy harvest wagons blocked the central stone stair, watchwoman Cressa stumbled backward against the left wagon’s spoked wheel. Her seven-foot ash-wood pike dropped from her numbed left hand, clattering against the limestone risers. But her right fingers remained hooked like an iron talon around the wagon’s heavy forged brake pin.
Kezra Venn saw the feathered fletching first. An oily, black-varnished ash quarrel four fingers long. It trembled with the leftover shaking of its release. The heavy iron needle-point arrow head had punched clean through the gap between the wagon spokes, driven straight through the meat of Cressa’s left forearm, and buried itself three inches deep into the dense muscle beneath her collarbone. Blood, bright blood crimson against the grey wool of her winter smock, weltered through the snapped weave and dripped across the dry-stone coping.
Across the narrow terrace path, two Host scouts in greased calfskin brigandines saw the pike fall. They lunged from behind a heap of frost-heaved boulders with their recurve bows slung and short, broad-bladed cleavers drawn. They shouted for their fellows to force the gap before the basin folk could reset the barrier. If they pried the harvest wagon loose and tipped it down the forty-degree terrace…
