He’d no illusions about his chances in a fight. Not with his litany of injuries, and the renewed fire blazing in his gut. Nor did he reckon much to his prospects for hiding. As for outrunning her? Hah! He’d never been a runner, not on his best day.

Branghall was now his only hope. His lungs burned before he’d covered even half the distance. Feet skidded in the mud. Somehow he turned each near catastrophe into fresh momentum, driving him forward step by agonising step.

The trees peeled away as he reached the outer wall.

Half-blinded by the rain, Kurkas angled for the fallen oak and the spill of crumbled masonry where the tree had struck the wall in years past. Golden light sparked and shimmered across the slighted crest. Even part-collapsed, it meant a climb of some twelve feet up a surface offering sparse purchase.

Kurkas let the useless crutch fall away and clambered up the oak. His good foot slipped on sodden moss and shot away. Desperate fingers closed around a worm-eaten bole. A knee braced against a barren limb. He kept climbing.

“There’s no escaping this.”

The hollow timbre of the words – Revekah’s voice, and yet not – washed up from below. Breath rattling in his lungs, Kurkas glanced down. Halvor stood at the foot of the oak, hair plastered across her scalp.

“No harm in trying!”

Somehow, he reached the junction of tree and wall without sliding clear. Faced with an impossible climb and death below, Kurkas did the only thing he could – he hurled himself at the wall with the defiance of a doomed man. Scratched, bloody fingers scrambled for purchase between the stones and grasped at ivy. He kicked at crumbling mortar to create toeholds.

His heart lurched every time his fingers let go and gravity dragged him outward, only to thunder back when he found scrabbled handhold. He was only ever one slip, one misjudgement, one moment of weakness from disaster.

And yet somehow, disaster never came. His straining hand found the wall’s capstone. With one last, heroic effort, he dragged his heaving chest onto the crest.

The skin on his cheeks tingled as it passed through the enchantment. The crisp, sweet air beyond filled ravaged lungs. And the light! It was like passing through a waterfall’s veil. Within, Branghall lay resplendent in sunshine. The ward-brooch pulsed on his chest.

Throat thickening to disbelieving laughter, Kurkas hooked a knee on the crest.

A hand closed around his trailing ankle. Kurkas bellowed as tortured flesh gained new burdens. He slid his knee off the wall and lashed out.

The heel of his boot thumped into Halvor’s head. She spun away, her grip broken. With a final, desperate heave, Kurkas hauled his legs over the crest and stared without enthusiasm at the twenty-foot drop into overgrown gardens.