Page 164 of Of Iron and Moonlight

Duncan saw them too. His hand snapped upward. “Halt!”

Lean figures began scaling the stone, climbing with a speed that bordered on unnatural, fingers finding purchase in cracks and ledges as if the wall had been shaped for them. Within moments they crested the battlements and dropped among the archers. Daggers flashed. Throats opened. Bodies pitched backward from the parapets.

And there was Merrick. A streak of dark intent cutting across the battlements. The same reckless fool who had vanished from their lives. The same boy who had once stuffed frogs into Duncan’s boots. Now carving a path through the archers to keep them alive.

Something twisted deep in Isander’s chest. Shame for doubting him. Relief sharp enough to sting. Beneath it, fierce pride he had not prepared himself to feel.

The arrows coming for them faltered. Then nearly stopped. Only distant shouts rose from within the walls as Kryovarre soldiers realized too late what had happened.

“Heave!” Duncan roared, seizing the opening.

The surviving men locked their grips and drove forward as one. The ram slammed into the western wall with a deep, resonant boom. Mortar burst from the fracture in grey sprays.

“Back!” Duncan shouted.

They staggered away, the ram swaying, boots slipping in the mud.

“Again!”

Isander poured every scrap of strength left in his battered body into the surge. The ram struck harder than before, the impact jolting through his spine.

Arrows resumed, scattered and frantic now. One sliced past Isander’s cheek close enough to sting with displaced air. Another buried itself in the shield above Duncan’s head. Two more struck the mud nearby and stood quivering like markers of how near death had come.

They drove the ram. Again. And again.

The shouts faded. Movement stalled in that dreadful instant when the world seemed to balance between ruin and reprieve as a violent crack split the air.

Stone and timber burst outward. Blocks the size of oxen plunged down, smashing through lower supports. Kryovarri men stationed along the parapets were hurled down with the collapsing wall, their screams swallowed by the cascading roar. The ram crew scattered in instinctive flight, shields abandoned as they scrambled clear.

“Duncan!” Isander shouted, searching in the thickening dust.

He found him as an arrow came arcing down.

He lunged, caught the collar of Duncan’s armor, and wrenched him sideways just as the arrow buried itself in the earth where Duncan’s neck had been.

The movement carried Isander directly beneath falling debris. A heavy timber beam struck across his back and shoulders and drove him flat into the mud. Pain crashed through him. His ribs seized. Sound vanished.

The world flashed white.

“Andy!” Duncan dropped to his knees in the sludge and gripped the beam with both hands, straining to lift it. Isander felt himself sink deeper into the mud.

Soldiers spilled from the breach and charged toward the Lemierre forces rushing in with a rising roar. Fresh archers crowded onto surviving ledges and loosed into the confusion.

“Leave me,” Isander rasped, blood thick in his mouth, vision dimming in fragments.

“No,” Duncan hissed back, fury and panic braided in his voice. An arrow scratched Duncan’s thigh, but he did not flinch. He looked around wildly for anyone close enough to help.

But the men who remained were either fighting toward the breach or scrambling clear of debris. And the larger force was still too far out, likely unaware. Duncan drove his boots deeper and heaved again. The beam shifted only an inch.

“You’re exposed,” Isander forced out through the weight crushing his chest. The battle noise warped in his ears, as though heard through water. “You must go—”

“Shut up, Andy.”

Not Duncan.

Merrick slid toward them through the mud and intercepted a charging Kryovarre soldier neither of them had noticed. His dagger flashed once in a clean arc across the man’s throat, then he loosed two sharp whistles. Two Ashfell men appeared, slipping in from opposite sides with faces stripped bare of expression.

“Lift,” Merrick barked, already crouching on the far side of the beam. One of his men mirrored him at once. The other took position beside Duncan.