“They’re quitting the harbor!” she cried.

Once again the Lady of Brackenrock stood atop the highest tower of her citadel’s gatehouse. She looked down into the great courtyard, where her people were running back and forth in well-ordered chaos. “Archers, bring the extra arrows up to the walls!”

She spotted a lithe farmwife coming through the gate directly beneath her. “Martine, start bringing the people up from the lower terraces. We’re closing the gates, but we’ll leave the sortie door open until the last minute. Tell everyone they have to get up here now!”

“Yes, m’lady!” called Martine, and immediately raced off on her errand.

“They’re coming for real?”

Moreen recognized Bruni’s Voice and turned around with relief. The big woman emerged from the stairwell. “Yes, the signals say ‘two ships,’ but also that the boom stopped them at the harbor mouth. So they’ll be coming by land-which gives us a little time. Are the Highlanders ready?”

“All six hundred, including Strongwind’s heavy axemen. That’s fifty more strong, big men. Gustav the White was here with a load of gold from his mine, and dozens more came in his caravan. They’re anxious for the chance to fight some ogres.”

Moreen smiled grimly. “That will come to pass soon enough,” she said. “If we’re lucky, we match them in numbers now, but that counts our women, children, and elders, while they are seasoned warriors and brutes under a king who will not tolerate defeat. What about their secret weapon? Do we know anything more about it?”

“Not yet,” admitted Bruni, “but Dinekki continues to cast her bones.”

Moreen looked to the north, toward the deceptively peaceful waters of the Courrain Ocean. Sunlight reflected from the waves in shimmering patterns, and the blue sky mocked her with its promise of a beautiful day ahead. It had been a day like this, eight years before, when the ogres had attacked her village with disastrous results. Now all of these people were gathered in this cherished place, and all she could think was that the stakes were so much higher and it was her responsibility to command. If she lost this fight, it would not be just a small tribe that suffered. She was keenly aware that the stakes were nothing less than the future of all humans in the Icereach.

12

Attack on Brackenrock

Kerrick stumbled up the road. Mouse lingered behind to secure the boat in the anchorage. The elf barely noticed the fact that the ogre galleys had sailed on, past the mouth of Brackenrock Harbor. Weariness tore at his limbs, his feet felt like stone. When he looked up, the fortress seemed impossibly Far ahead. He swayed dizzily, then fell onto his back.

For an interminable moment he couldn’t seem to draw a breath. He stared up at the white sky as darkness closed in. His vision narrowed to a pinprick before, finally, air rushed into his lungs and the face of someone vaguely familiar appeared overhead. He noted the Highlander accent.

“Nice bit of work out there, closing the boom,” Strong-wind Whalebone said. “There’ll be more to do up at the fortress. Lean on me, and we’ll go up there together.”

“What… why are you here?” asked the elf, confused.

“Came down to help block the harbor,” replied the king. “I would have been too late, but it turns out you and Mouse did the job just fine.”

Kerrick remembered the ring, now safe in his pocket. He owed that feat to the magic of the golden circlet. He thought how easy it would be, how pleasant and warm, to just slide his finger through the ring again. Stubbornly, he shook his head.

The elf climbed to one knee, then allowed the king to lift him, half-draping Kerrick over one broad shoulder. Together they started up the road, which no longer seemed as though it climbed to the heights of infinity.

* * * * *

The two galleys, with Goldwing still in the lead, emerged from the Bluewater Strait into the full sweep of the Courrain Ocean swells. The powerful, deep waves surprised Grimwar Bane and in fact frightened him a little, but he didn’t let his concern show. Instead, he kept his stern, tusked composure and stared at the rocky headland.

Stariz stood at his side, holding her mask in the crook of her arm as she inspected the landscape with a critical glare. As they came around the point, turning broadside to the waves, there seemed to be no good place to land. The entire shore was a rough headland, broken sheets of rock slashing down straight into the deep, churning water.

“Ahead, a few miles around there,” Argus Darkand pointed, as the deck pitched and yawed beneath the helmsman’s feet. “There’s a long stretch of flat beaches, with a nice hillside rising all the way to the citadel.”

“I remember,” the king declared. “I noticed the place years ago, marked it for just such a situation.” He turned to his wife. “Does Captain Broadnose have the Shield-Breakers ready? I want them to be first ashore.”

The queen nodded to the foredeck, where a hundred heavily armored ogres, each carrying a monstrous double-bladed axe, had hunkered down in various states of seasickness, clinging to rails. “I daresay they will waste no time stepping onto solid land,” she said dryly.

The rowers held a strong pace, and as the mouth of the strait slipped astern the precipitous coastline dwindled into rocky spurs and narrow coves. Now the king saw the green slopes of the terraces, rising like gigantic steps from the shore of a shallow bay. This approach, he thought, could not be guarded by any contraption of sticks and chain!

“Mark a course for the middle beach, and ground us there,” the king called back to Argus, as the drummer slowed the rowers to an easy, gentle glide.

There were no defenders in sight, the humans obviously having decided to cower behind the lofty walls of the fortress. Grimwar allowed himself a low chuckle, as he thought of the potent chalice and the orb. Those walls, that sturdy gate, would not give his army any trouble.

Many kayaks dotted the shore, above the reach of the high tide, while numerous shacks gathered around the base of a long pier a short distance down the beach. The galley continued to slow as it approached the gravelly shoreline. A steady surf pounded, waves that would have capsized a lesser boat, but Grimwar Bane’s galley smoothly cut through the foaming crests. There was a scuffing of the pebbled seabed under the hull, then the ship gave a huge lurch as it grounded. Stariz stumbled, and the king caught her elbow before she fell to her knees. A hundred paces to the left Hornet drove similarly into the shallows.

The great ramps, one to either side of the prow, creaked downward as the ogre king scanned the beach.

Warriors moved into position, feet tramping on the deck.

“Take the buildings and boats at once,” ordered Grimwar Bane. “Bring any livestock you capture back to the boat. Any humans put to the axe!”

As soon as the ramps were grounded the Shield-Breakers stormed ashore, roaring the name of Suderhold in unison, hammering their axes against their shields with a thunderous din. Wading awkwardly onto the dry, flat gravel above the breaking waves, they spread into a double-rank line and charged inland, scrambling up a low sea wall and rushing across the first of the terraced fields.

The great hatches on the mid-deck slammed open and more ogres came rushing up from below, charging straight down the ramps into the shallows and gathering into twenty-warrior raiding parties just in front of the galley. These were the Grenadiers, another of the king’s elite companies. Each was armed with a sword and a bundle of javelins. Once formed, they swarmed toward the huts and piers, using their blades and heavy, iron-studded boots to quickly shatter the wooden structures into kindling.