"If he's bringing that Waer, I'll have you, Durand," Lamoric said and grinned.
And there, were hands slapping Durand's shoulders and muscling him into the teetering stern. Ouen set a pole in his hands. He caught sight of a blade glinting at one end. Then, with a shock like lightning, his glance fell on Deorwen—her face a pale oval in a dark hood.
"Steady, Durand," Lamoric said.
Durand felt a crawling chill. He wanted to swat the Knight in Red off the prow—the pole had the weight. Instead, he clamped his jaws, stabbed the pole down, and shoved the shore away.
Lamoric had to catch his balance.
As Durand dug the pole in, he eyed the gray Heavens as if the Silent King were leering down. He was in no mood to play Lamoric's shield-bearer now. And, with the wind kicking up, poling the boat was no easy feat. The pole stuck and slid under the river's skin, sliding over hard surfaces in the bottom slime.
Lord Moryn had alighted. Waer sneered from the back of his lord's boat while Durand wrestled to keep his own punt straight. A last shove rammed the bow against the island's scales for Lamoric to leap ashore.
The Red Knight's hop sent the punt bucking like a headstrong pony, but Durand poled off as Waer had done.
On the island, Lord Moryn and the Red Knight sank into guard positions, waiting while Severin stood on the shore. It took both Durand's fists to hold the boat steady in the wind. He wondered if, next time, they would fight on stilts. Or up in trees. The Herald watched. This was the end of a hundred leagues' wandering.
At the duke's nod, trumpets brayed over the water, and the two knights were in motion.
Lamoric started a crab-wise circle of the island, his boots slithering on the stones of what looked like a treacherous battlefield.
Lamoric leapt and swung. Lord Moryn countered. Back and forth they went. Moryn had the better footing, but both knights scrambled. Each stop or start pitched one man or the other to his knees. Quickly, great fingers of mud spread over Moryn's diamonds and Lamoric's crimson. Cross-guards smacked the rock. Shields clopped in rolling dodges. Everything had a desperate edge.
And Lamoric was getting the worst of it Moryn moved with savage economy, throwing tight shearing swings. A bad lunge cost Lamoric a blow across the back. A slip brought the iron down over his head. Moryn's blade punished every mistake.
Durand winced, hunkered in the
boat High overhead, the clouds were rolling now like mountains, while iron lightning flashed on the Barrow Isle.
Moryn's sword whipped down. Durand's liege lord was fighting for his life. For his every probe to claw a mailed shoulder, Lamoric caught a thunderbolt of steel over collarbone or forearm. Moryn's sword"—even blunted by iron rings—fell like an axe. Lamoric lived, he was even brave, but bones could break or red helms fold. Any slip could be the end, and the hopes of many would end with their lord.
Lamoric fought
Then Moryn caught him. A blow flashed down, nearly dashing Lamoric against the earth. He reeled, and, as he staggered, Moryn stalked him.
Lamoric tried to keep his shield in play, but Moryn swung, and a second great blow landed.
With the crowd hissing, Durand found himself crouched in the boat as if he would rush over the water.
Again, Lamoric pitched across the island, barely able to keep his feet. The watching mob was so silent, every brush and slide could be heard under the wind.
Lord Moryn waited for Lamoric to catch his balance, then hauled back and sent a third blow shuddering down on his stricken victim.
Lamoric dangled like a hanged man, skin torn under steel like flesh from a stewed apple. Yet still, he stood. To save his life, he must yield; the Red Knight game was over. They had lost, and it would be back to the road for all his men. Everyone on the river saw it, but some mad will held Lamoric upright. His knees would not buckle, and Lord Moryn hesitated in the face of it.
As Moryn watched in horror, Lamoric dragged back his sword, low and two-handed like a reaper with his scythe. Durand wondered how much blood the red knight garb hid. Lamoric wavered there, half-slumped for a moment. A good shove would have knocked him down, but Moryn held off. Then, with all his might, Lamoric heaved his blade into one great oafish swing, sure to miss.
And it would never have landed. Moryn would have slipped it. He would have twitched his shield. He would have done a hundred other things more clever than Durand could conceive of. But, just then, Creation shuddered.
In the instant of that swing, the bells bawled out, sobbing. The roiling sky flashed flat, as vast rings swung from horizon to horizon like a pond swallowing a great stone.
The punt shuddered under Durand's hipbones, and the black scales of the island slumped, pitching into gray water. And, back on the island, there was something moving: bowel-slick flesh, pale and gleaming, bulged under the Barrow Isle.
And, in the midst of all this, the arc of Lamoric's wild swing came down: one iron bite behind the ear that knocked Moryn sprawling.
Durand had an instant's stab of elation. Lamoric had won.
But Lamoric reeled after the weight of his swing, and the bowel-and-bellies gleam under the island erupted in his path.
Durand saw a livid face, broader than a shield, and a vast taloned hand, and then the boat flipped.
He was under in an instant, snatched by the weight of his armor. He scrabbled at a boat that spun like a barrel under his nails. Water shouldered every other thought from his skull. No man can swim buckled into fifty pounds of iron. Each firm hold he got on the punt seemed to pull it under. Then, like a living thing, the boat popped loose, and he was down. It was all he could do not to haul in a breath.
He hit the bottom, his skull fit to explode.
Through the quicksilver flinch of water overhead, Durand could still hear the madness of the Heavens. It roared in his ears.
He fought to master himself. He was drowning. His fingers curled in the slime. He made himself understand: The water could not be deep. He had not fallen in the sea. He'd been poling. He could fight.
With that resolve, Durand thrashed, kicking and dragging himself, trying to get his feet under him and fighting in the direction of the island. He slid on rounded forms, slick as grease. Some were shields. His fingers caught on knobbed shapes: skulls, long bones, rusting blades. He understood then that he crawled through an upturned grave. More importantly, he knew that he had found the island's flank.
He tore into the air, sliding and splashing onto a shore that pitched like a living thing under his hands. Half-erupted from the heaping shields and helms and bones, an abomination thrashed: an ogress, a troll, a giant mockery of woman. Even caught and pinned by the weight of the barrow, the Banished fiend was larger than horses. And it screamed in spasms that convulsed the barrel-hoops of its ribs fit to burst its blue vellum skin. Creation itself seemed to shudder with its screams.
And Lamoric flailed in the talons of the thing's free hand.
As the water poured from Durand, he spotted Waer. Moryn's comrade, too, stood on the pitching island, but he had already seized his master by the collar and was pulling Lord Moryn to their boat.
With time and space for a heartbeat in the thunder, Durand knew he should strip off his armor and swim for it. He should lunge past Waer into Moryn's boat. He looked to the screaming masses, and—right off—saw Deorwen and the two wide circles of her eyes.
He turned to Lamoric. A knight-at-arms did not leave his lord to die. The ogress was wrenching itself loose. A second hand slammed down, free to push. Long breasts swung. With a roll of black eyes and a twitch of her livid face, the hag bared teeth and lifted Lamoric.
Durand charged.
In all her ages under the muck, it must never have crossed the brute's mind that anyone would try such a thing. She hardly twitched. Durand struck knees or shins, and, in a pitching instant, a weight like drowned bulls crashed down on him. The monster had just pulled its bulk onto one taloned foot, and now she pitched onto face and forearms.
Flashes burst in Durand's eyes.
Crushed and fighting for air, he prayed Lamoric was free. Then the hag was in motion.
A weight like a boulder tramped Durand's shoulder. He scrambled, gulping for air. He managed to yank his half-crushed feet from under the monster's shins, and twisted.
A full fathom over his head, the hag's face snarled under a thatch like a root ball. He read outrage there, but Durand could not get free. She smiled.
The monster shadowed the world until nothing remained but the glinting points of her teeth and a chill like deep clay. He could hear the hag haul in air like a rotten bellows. She smelled of the bottom.
Durand understood that he must die.
As the monster began its fatal leer, a jolt shook her frame. The hag froze, her mouth jutting like a clay funnel. Durand looked for an explanation and found a strange glint in the dark near his knees.
The glint was a blade. He recognized the long shaft of the pole. The thing had plunged through the monster's back to split a shield by Durand's knee. He heard a high wheezing sound.
"Durand? Get out," Lamoric commanded. "For God's sake."
Durand blinked. The creature was braced on trembling arms, her face stiff as retching. Then her eyelids twitched.
In an eruption like the hundred warhorses at Red Winding, Durand and the monster both burst into motion. Durand sprang, twisting and scrambling for freedom, while a scream ripped from the hag's body. He lunged out of reach. She was nailed to the island. And thrashing now. Every blow stamped debris into the air. Lamoric perched high on her shoulders. The fiend groped at its back, but the slim lance held the brute, like one needle holding a forest boar. No barbs or spines armed the blade, but the earth or the island held her.
Lamoric rode the hag until one sudden buck threw him wide, and he crashed down in the water beyond the fiend's talons. The river swallowed him whole..
Durand tried to crawl, but then saw motion all ar
ound him:
boats. Boats of all kinds hit the water, the whole crowd jumping into the cut. As peasants and peers hauled him to his knees, he looked at the flailing hag. Rotten shields splattered as she lashed and twisted. The lance couldn't hold long. In his mind's eye, the hag was already loose and ravening through the crowds, then he remembered the duke's speech: Mircol had turned the river.
The strangers were hustling him from the island, desperate and wide-eyed.
'The dam!" Durand shouted. A few of the harrowed men stole glances at him, but not one of them stopped. He jerked in their hands.
"They've got to close the dam! Send in the river!" Bearded elders and young boys looked down. Someone said, "Right!" and the call went up.
In the leather
bottom of some peasant's boat, Durand got his breath back and soon found himself, on his elbows in the grass. Lamoric sprawled beside him, alive. The red iron mask was gone, but another mask of muck and blood served just as well.
"Durand? Are you all right?"
Durand pawed at his own face with the shaking heel of his hand.
"I am," he answered.
"I thought it had you," said Lamoric—Lamoric, his lord, who had saved him. "Ah," Lamoric added, "here are the lads."
With curt glances, first Guthred, then Agryn, and then the rest crouched around their lord, swords in their fists. The fiend was still howling out in the water. Berchard shoved dry blankets into Lamoric's hands and Durand's.
Only Coensar did not stoop. Like a ship's master, he stood above them all, first looking across to the island, then, in a glance, taking stock of Lamoric's condition. Without a word, he strode up the bank for the duke's box.
"Host of Heaven," said Lamoric. "I thought I was dead. She held me tighter than iron, and I could do nothing but hang there waiting for her. My head. It could have been a grape in her fist."
The wary knights shifted, giving Durand a glimpse of the hag down a narrow alley of knees and shinbones. Already, a clear tide poured into the channel, clean water rising on the flanks of the island. A swing of the hag's fist clipped a spray into the air. She flailed as the water rolled over her prison once more. And soon, a last reaching talon was all that could break the surface. The Glass swallowed the Isle and its prisoner as if they had never been.
Lamoric was looking him straight in the eye.
"Durand, you could have stayed in that boat," he said.
"No, Lordship," Durand said. He could not.
Lamoric looked into the Heavens and saw the marred clouds. "God. What does it mean?"