Chapter 409: The Last Crossing

The dead were building beneath the water.

At first, I could see only helmets and pale hands appearing where the current broke. Then one of the chains tightened between the banks, and a length of timber turned broadside to the flow.

The next timber caught against it.

They were making a submerged causeway, using bodies that could stand in the river until the river tore them apart.

Thor followed the line with her eyes.

“If they reach the western road, the wagons stop.”

Below us, a teamster urged his exhausted mules onto Rillcross’s bridge. Behind him waited a cart full of children and three people carrying a wounded woman in a door taken from its hinges.

“How long does Lexander need?” I asked.

“Longer than they’re planning to give him.”

She turned toward the waiting messenger.

“Tell him we are holding the north bank. He finishes the withdrawal. No one comes back across the bridge for possessions.”

The messenger ran.

I looked once more at the water.

Then I chose a place to arrive.

The western bank north of town rose steeply above the river, but a narrow shelf lay beneath an abandoned orchard. That was where the enemy’s chains led.

I reached it as a thunderbolt, arriving on bare ground between two old trees.

The first skeleton was already climbing out.

Its fingers dug into the mud. Water streamed through the empty spaces beneath its breastplate.

I struck it back into the current with my hammer.

Three more followed.

Across the river, a robed figure stood beneath a black standard, holding a staff against its chest. Living soldiers waited around it. Farther behind them, giants carried fresh timbers toward the bank.

The lich lifted its head.

The dead began climbing faster.

I drove a wall of ice across the shelf, anchoring it into the bank rather than across the river. The nearest hands struck its face. Blades scraped without finding purchase.

It would hold them for a little while.

From the road above came the sound of Thor arriving with the first shield company.

“Avarn is coming,” she called. “Keep their landing narrow.”

I climbed the orchard slope to meet her.

The ground beyond the trees opened toward the western road. If the enemy broke through here, they would not need to defeat us at the bridge. They would only need to stand across the path with spears while panic did the rest.

Thor placed the shield company above the narrowest part of the shelf.

Archers took positions behind the trunks.

“Aim for joints,” she told them. “Save the broadheads for anything that bleeds.”

The captain repeated the order down the line.

Avarn arrived with six more soldiers and a scout who knew the orchard paths. He studied the river, then the road.

“There’s another way up behind the old pressing house.”

Thor sent the scout to watch it.

I looked at the ice below.

Hands were already finding the edges.

“They don’t need to breathe.”

“No,” Avarn said. “And they don’t need to win quickly.”

Across the water, the lich lowered its staff.

The first chain began to move.

The dead beneath the river pulled together.

Timbers shifted against the ice, striking low where the current had scoured the bank. The impact passed through the ground into my boots.

I felt the wall crack.

They were not trying to climb it anymore.

They were driving their unfinished crossing into it.

“Back from the edge!” I shouted.

The ice broke outward in a roar of white fragments and dark water.

Skeletons came through with it.

Thor met the first rank halfway up the slope. Mjölnir shattered a shield and the body behind it. The soldiers closed around her, spears braced low enough to stop the dead from simply falling forward through them.

Avarn moved along the line, cutting the limbs that reached between shields.

I became storm at the water’s edge.

An axe passed through my neck. A spear vanished into the rain of my chest.

My hammer remained very real when I struck back.

For several breaths, there was no room to think beyond the next body and the ground beneath my feet.

The lich changed the attack when the first rank failed.

The dead stopped climbing in one mass.

Instead, they spread along the shore, dragging the chains sideways and forcing us to cover more ground.

Thor saw it immediately.

“Don’t follow them down! Hold the rise.”

I returned to flesh beside an apple tree, breathing hard.

I was stronger than I had been when Vaerun began teaching me. The hurricane form came more easily. Holding it no longer felt like keeping a door shut against a crowd.

But easier did not mean endless.

My attention had begun narrowing. I had nearly missed a dead soldier crawling beneath the roots toward an archer’s unprotected ankle.

Avarn killed it before I moved.

“You saw it late,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then take the breath you need.”

He stepped into the space beside Thor.

I took three breaths.

Below, the river carried away broken wood and pieces of armor.

Then I went back.

The warning from the pressing house came as a horn note cut short.

A man screamed.

I turned toward the sound and saw something gray move between the trees behind our line.

It hit a soldier hard enough to knock him off his feet.

Fur. Long limbs. A muzzle drawn back from teeth.

A werewolf had climbed the second path.

Another followed, still changing as it ran, its coat splitting across broadening shoulders.

Thor could not leave the riverfront.

Avarn looked at me.

I moved.

Lightning carried me to the clear patch beyond the fallen soldier. I arrived with my sword between him and the first creature.

It struck at my face.

I let the claws pass through wind, turned, and cut across the arm before it could pull back.

Blood darkened the fur.

The creature recoiled in pain, eyes suddenly less certain.

This enemy could fear.

That did not make it slow.

The second werewolf came around the tree to my left.

I could not face both without giving one my back.

So I moved again, a short flash to the open ground beside the pressing-house wall.

Both turned toward the thunder.

The fallen soldier crawled toward the shield line behind them.

That had been the point.

I called my hammer into my free hand.

The first creature lunged.

Sword to turn the claws. Hammer to the shoulder.

The impact drove it against the wall hard enough to crack rotten timber. The second changed direction before reaching me and sprang toward the road instead.

It wanted the evacuees.

I sent a ridge of ice across its path.

It leaped.

Avarn’s thrown sword struck it in the side as it cleared the top.

It fell badly, rolled, and tried to rise.

The orchard captain reached it with two spearmen.

I did not look away until it stopped moving.

The first werewolf tried to drag itself out from beneath the broken wall.

One forelimb no longer supported it.

When I approached, it bared its teeth.

“Stay down,” I said.

It looked past me toward the river, where the lich stood beneath its standard.

Something tightened around its throat.

Not a collar I could see. A narrow line beneath the fur, briefly shining as it struggled to rise against its injured shoulder.

I stopped.

“Thesra,” I called toward the messenger behind our line. “Send for someone who can examine a binding.”

The creature clawed at the ground.

I froze the torn beams around it into a cage wide enough to keep pressure off its chest, leaving its head clear so it could breathe.

That would not remove the command.

It would keep the command from driving it into another spear while we found someone who could.

Behind me, Avarn retrieved his sword.

Neither of us spoke for a moment.

A phoenix crossed the orchard with a message from Lexander.

The market hall was empty. The last wounded were crossing the bridge. Two companies remained inside Rillcross, withdrawing street by street toward the western gate.

They needed the road held until the rear company reached the far bank.

Thor listened with one hand pressed against a cut above her eyebrow.

“Tell him the north rise holds.”

The messenger launched itself back into the darkening sky.

Then Thor looked at me.

“For now.”

The enemy giants had reached the eastern riverbank.

They brought stones as well as timber.

One lifted a boulder overhead and threw it toward the orchard.

I drove it aside with a burst of wind. It tore through the pressing house roof and landed beyond us.

The werewolf flinched beneath the ice-bound beams.

Thor studied the giants’ positions.

“We can’t keep doing this from here.”

I looked at the chains disappearing beneath the water.

“Then we take their crossing apart.”

The nearest chain ran from a heavy anchor on the eastern bank to a timber buried in the mud below us.

The dead used it to hold their footing against the current while they built.

I could break our end.

If I did it carelessly, the released timber might strike the bridge downstream.

Eleanor arrived before I could send for her.

She had followed the phoenix’s route from the bridge, carrying a coil of rope and a face that suggested she already disliked what I was considering.

“Which way does it go when you release it?” she asked.

I pointed.

“Toward your work.”

“Yes.”

She studied the river.

“Break it in the middle first. Hold the western section against this bank. Let the smaller pieces go through the clear arch.”

“Can you keep the people away from that arch?”

“I can warn Bruni. You keep anything large away from him.”

She was already moving before I answered.

I went into the river as wind and rain.

The cold was familiar. The weight was not.

Water struck from every direction, and the bodies beneath it turned toward the disturbance I made. I could not see the whole crossing. Only pieces: a skull against stone, a hand wrapped around iron, beams held down by chains and the weight of the dead.

I became solid for the strike.

My hammer hit the central joining ring.

Once.

The shock ran through the chain and into both banks.

The ring bent.

Something seized my leg.

I changed before it could hold me, moved a pace along the current, and struck again.

The ring broke.

The river took the opening immediately.

Timbers lifted. Bodies turned. The current that had been forced around the growing obstruction tore through its middle.

I rose out of the water in a spiral of rain and caught the western section with ice before it could swing downstream.

The strain nearly pulled me off the bank.

Thor reached my side as the remaining chain tightened.

“Hold it.”

I braced both feet in the mud.

She struck the exposed links with Mjölnir.

Lightning flashed across the iron. I had time to feel its passage through the water before the chain parted.

The far section vanished into the current.

I dragged the trapped western timbers against the bank and locked them there beneath a thick shelf of ice.

Downstream, Bruni stood beside the bridge supports with a hooked beam in his hands, guiding smaller debris away from the narrowest opening.

The bridge remained standing.

Across the river, the lich raised its staff with both hands.

The surviving dead stopped struggling against the current.

They sank.

For several seconds, I thought we had won the crossing entirely.

Then pale hands began moving along the riverbed toward the shallower water farther north.

Thor saw them too.

“Time,” she said. “That’s what we bought.”

The message from Lexander came before the enemy could build again.

The last company was crossing.

Rillcross was being abandoned.

I looked toward the town. Smoke poured from the eastern roofs, where the giants had finally broken enough wall for the living infantry to enter.

The western gate stood open.

Soldiers moved through it in tired, ordered ranks, carrying their wounded and the standard of a town they could no longer hold.

No one cheered.

Thor ordered our orchard line to withdraw by sections.

The wounded were carried first. The archers followed. Avarn stayed with the final shields while I held the lower shelf against the dead still climbing from the river.

Our captured werewolf remained beneath the broken beams.

I looked toward Thor.

She followed my gaze and swore softly.

Then she called for the reserve cart.

“We aren’t leaving that command to finish the job.”

Moving it required more care than the fighting had.

The creature had begun slipping back toward a human shape, though the change stopped and restarted as the hidden binding forced it to struggle.

An attendant brought a covered cloak. We wrapped it around him once the transformation settled enough to do so without catching injured limbs.

He was a man, older than I had expected, with gray at his temples and terror in his eyes.

“Don’t let me loose,” he rasped.

“We won’t yet,” I told him.

He swallowed hard.

“Not near them.”

His gaze moved toward the road full of fleeing families.

We secured the carrying frame inside the cart, leaving room around his broken shoulder. Two soldiers rode with him, out of reach but close enough to notice if he stopped breathing.

He kept apologizing until the attendant asked him to save his strength.

I did not know what he had done before the binding.

I knew what I had seen it make him do.

Lexander crossed the bridge with the town’s commander beside him.

The commander carried the damaged standard himself.

Behind them, four soldiers brought the final stretcher.

Eleanor counted them off the western approach before turning toward Thor.

“Clear.”

The enemy had reached the far end.

Living soldiers first, careful enough to hesitate when they saw us waiting. The dead behind them did not hesitate at all.

Thor looked at the commander.

He stared at the bridge.

For a moment, I thought he would refuse.

Then he said, “Do it.”

Eleanor had chosen the section. Bruni had loosened the temporary supports only after every one of our people crossed.

I froze the water inside the cracked eastern approach, driving the damaged stone apart along lines Eleanor had marked.

Thor struck.

One span collapsed into the river.

The sound followed us long after the dust settled.

We withdrew along the western road beneath dragon escort.

The phoenixes carried messages ahead to the receiving station and back to the rearguard. Unicorn guides led the weakest travelers toward the firmer edges of the track where the carts had not churned the ground into mud.

Behind us, Rillcross burned in places.

Its commander rode without looking back for nearly a mile.

Then he stopped.

I stopped beside him.

“My father helped repair that bridge,” he said.

I had no answer that would improve the view.

He looked toward the wagons.

“He used to complain that the eastern stones were never set properly.”

“They held until the last stretcher crossed.”

His jaw tightened.

After a while, he nodded.

We rode on.

Farther ahead, someone began singing the walking song Enna had sent.

The words were different from the ones on her page.

The chorus was the same.

At the receiving station, the healers took the wounded and the clerks began the slow work of matching families to the people who had arrived earlier.

We had saved the withdrawing column.

We had not saved everyone in Rillcross.

The commander gave Mary’s clerk the names of defenders killed before and during the evacuation. Some bodies had been brought out. Others remained beneath the eastern wall.

I stayed while he spoke them.

Then I went to the guarded cart.

The captive werewolf was shivering beneath his cloak. A binding specialist from the reserve knelt beside him, examining the pale line at his throat without touching it.

“It receives the command,” she told Thor. “It does not need the commander close by.”

“Can you stop it?”

“For now, I can prevent a new order reaching him. Removing what remains will take longer.”

She began.

The man’s muscles loosened by degrees.

When he finally slept, he looked ordinary enough to make the whole evening feel stranger.

We sent the first complete report to Greykeep before dawn.

The western road remained open. The bridge was down. Surtr’s force held the town but would need another crossing before bringing its heavy wagons after us.

Thor assigned rested scouts to watch the river north of the ruins.

Nobody expected the lich to abandon the attempt merely because we had spoiled its first construction.

Eleanor found me sitting beside a cooking fire with my boots off.

“Your ice held the wreckage clear,” she said.

“Bruni helped.”

“I thanked him too.”

She handed me a cup.

I drank without asking what was in it.

Across the camp, children slept beneath wagon covers while their parents waited for news of the next road.

Avarn sat down beside me.

“You changed weapons without losing the man behind you.”

I looked at him.

“At the pressing house.”

It took me a moment to remember.

Then I nodded.

“I did.”

Evelyn’s reply arrived with the morning supply carts.

She had read the preliminary report. The receiving wards at Greykeep and Concordia were ready. Adriana and Io were coordinating the families who would need rooms near the wounded.

There was a smaller note beneath the practical details.

Garrick asked whether you still have both boots. Carol said you should bring the river giant home for supper.

I looked across the camp at Bruni, who was eating from a pot with a spoon that seemed unfairly small in his hand.

Thor read the note over my shoulder.

“He will accept.”

“I suspect so.”

For the first time since the dead entered the river, I laughed.

Then Eliza arrived with a dispatch from the northern scouts.

They had found the escort exchange named on the route sheet.

Beyond it, the road ended at a gate standing alone between two hills.

During the night, it had opened.

Someone on the other side had called a prisoner’s name.

The scouts had written it down.

Thor stopped smiling as she read.

I put the cup aside and reached for the page.