By the time she got to North Island, the Urghul were already trying to cross back at the logjam. She couldn’t make out much more than the shapes of men, women, and horses in the distance and thickening dark, but it looked as though Annick was holding them, Annick along with the mud flats on either side of the channel and the precarious nature of the dam itself. Still, the Urghul had the numbers. Sooner or later a group would reach the near bank, and then it would be villagers and their wood axes against mounted horsemen with spears. Gwenna tried not to think about that.

To the north, Bridger and his crews had managed to divert the majority of the logs into the central and western channels, but enough still slipped through the east that simply floating with the current would be treacherous. As Gwenna watched, two huge trunks nudged together almost gently, bumping and rolling with the current. A person trapped between them would be crushed.

Well, she muttered to herself, best not get trapped.

It took only a moment to ready her starshatters and drop her boots, then three times as long to get up the courage to actually dive into the swirling, black water. The icy cold knocked the wind from her immediately, and she swirled out into the main channel kicking and gasping, trying to get a full breath as her chest constricted with the cold. She’d known it wouldn’t be like the ocean around the Islands—the Black was fed directly from the glacial runoff from the Romsdals—but this . . . her teeth were already chattering, and her fingers felt fat and foolish. She’d always found water more frightening in the darkness, as though it were a great pool that went all the way down into the earth, a hungry pit with no bottom, and darkness was falling fast.

There was nothing for it but to stroke hard downstream, to try to conserve the meager heat she’d built running north by swimming south, and so, starshatters tucked into her belt, she kicked hard for the dam. Halfway there, a log almost took her head off. She dove at the last moment, coming up on the far side as it smashed up against a floating raft of trunks. From the water, the mounted Urghul loomed up in silhouette against the gray night sky. She tried to count them, but it was all she could do to stay clear of the shifting logs, to keep her head above water as her limbs turned to lead. Somewhere ahead, a horse screamed, and someone tumbled into the water, clawing for a moment at the dam, then sucked beneath.