Dawn seemed a long time in coming. Valyn watched as the sky faded from black to bruise, from bruise to a wash of sallow yellow, dull as warmed-over wax, pale light suffusing the air above the serrated tops of the firs. By the time the sun finally rose, a blanched and pallid disc in the morning fog, the extent of the destruction below was already clear.

The eastern island, abandoned by the villagers the night before, still cracked and smoldered. The Urghul had put the homes, barns, and stables to the torch almost immediately, using the livid conflagration to light their assault on the central bridges. The houses had burned most of the night, white-hot at first, then orange, then red, glowing beams collapsing in on themselves every so often in a spray of sparks and a renewed hissing of embers. By morning the fires had ceded their light to the dull glow of the sun, but oily, acrid smoke still lingered in the air, and the hooves of the horses moving between the burned-out frames kicked up clouds of ash. Half a town destroyed in a single night. People’s homes, their history . . .

Valyn didn’t give a shit.

You could rebuild a house. An ax, a few good logs, a month to work— that was all it took. He stared at Laith’s leg. It jutted out from beneath a fallen horse, the dead flier and dead beast alike tumbled onto the mud flats when the villagers finally managed to bring down the second bridge. That was all he could see of his friend: a boot and a few feet of dirty cloth, the fabric so worn and filthy that it looked brown rather than black. There were scores of bodies down there, Urghul and Annurian, twisted in all the various poses of dead. Dancing with Ananshael, the Kettral called it. It didn’t look like dancing. It looked like death, and there was no rebuilding the dead, not with any number of axes or months.

That the loggers had brought down the bridge was just about the only bright spot in the murk of the morning. When Laith fell, the Urghul had redoubled their attack, heedless of the arrows rained on them, seemingly indifferent to the screaming of their horses as they crashed through the bridge rail and into the channel below. Even Pyrre was forced back behind the barricade, and for a few horrible minutes it looked as though the horsemen would break through. Then the loggers working beneath with their heavy felling axes managed to cut through the pilings and the whole western end of the span sagged, groaning as the wood bent beneath the strain, then snapped. It took half the barricade with it, but that didn’t matter. Without a bridge to cross, the Urghul had no way to press their attack, and so, sometime around midnight, they fell back onto the eastern island, regrouping for the dawn.