The explosion came, all right, a dull roar tearing through the damp fabric of the night, low at first, then abruptly sharp and percussive, a thousand thousand awful rents and ruptures piled on one another until Valyn felt he might go deaf with the sound. The middle bridges, however, didn’t move, and it took him a heartbeat to realize that the explosion had come from the easternmost channel, from the packed dam of floating logs. Even as he stared, whole trunks, ten men high, were tossed into the air like so much kindling, raining down on the mud flats and the river alike, sending up great gouts of gray-white froth and spray, crushing Urghul and shattering their horses.

“Holy Hull,” Talal breathed.

Valyn could only nod as the great balance of the log raft began to flex, then give way, the pilings that had originally blocked its passage suddenly and utterly obliterated. The riders who had been approaching the makeshift bridge just before it blew reined back their terrified mounts, scrabbling for the dubious safety of the shore while logs the size of a man’s leg still clattered to earth, stabbing into the mud, cracking open on the harder ground beyond.

Laith let out a savage whoop, the sound lost in the greater chaos. “Gwenna, you vicious, redheaded genius!” he cheered. “That’s our demo woman!” he shouted, seizing Valyn by the shoulder in his celebration, stabbing his finger at the wreckage of the bridge. “She did that!”

“But how?” Valyn asked slowly. “Where is she?”

Talal’s face was sober. “The charge was triggered from beneath. You can see from the blow pattern.”

“Which means she went under,” Valyn said, staring at the insane mass of splintered logs, huge, jagged shards with the whole pent-up weight of the angry river behind them. The east channel was a churning wreckage of blasted bodies and spinning trunks. The channel had become Ananshael’s own sword. If Gwenna were there, and she had to be . . . “She’s dead,” Valyn said. The words left him hollow. “Gwenna’s dead.”

Laith stared for a second, then shoved him away. “You don’t know that.”

“We don’t know anything,” Valyn spat, “but use your fucking eyes.” He stabbed a finger at the river. “Could you swim that out?”

“We don’t know,” Laith insisted. Then more quietly, “Even if she is dead, she did what she needed to do.”

“Part of it,” Valyn amended, pointing toward the center bridge. It felt like a heartless thing to say, but having too much heart in the middle of a battle was just a way to get dead. “She blew the dam, but the Urghul can still cross from the east island to the west.”

Talal was staring through the long lens. “At a quick count, I put about three hundred on the east island.”

“Making it an even fight at the bridge,” Valyn said.