As the first arrow sped to him, he grabbed for it, thinking to knock it from the air. But when his mailed fist slapped the arrow, such was the velocity and momentum at which both his hand and the arrow traveled, that the wooden shaft snapped in two. The head of the arrow veered toward his chest, and Raj Ahten had to grab for it again quickly, catch it in his hand.

At that moment, the deadly rain of arrows slammed into his knights, their mounts.

A huge iron ballista bolt unseated the knight next to him, and the Wolf Lord was forced to raise his small shield, knock away more arrows that sang through the air toward him.

A shaft struck between the plates of his horse’s armor, sliding into its ribs, and the mount began to stagger. It stepped on a caltrop and let its feet give way.

Suddenly Raj Ahten found himself flying through the air, seemingly in slow motion, unhorsed, grabbing and kicking arrows from his path, twisting so that a shaft broke against his vambrace rather than pierced his scale mail.

He was a strong man, but even Raj Ahten could not break the fundamental laws of motion.

The momentum of the horse’s fall threw him somersaulting headfirst over the beast’s shoulder.

He knew that if the force of his landing did not crack his skull, the weight of the armored horse rolling over him afterward might crush him.

Raj Ahten managed to reach out, push himself slowly off the ground as he moved toward it, then tuck, so that he rolled cleanly over the grass, away from his charger.

But that maneuver cost him, for as he came around, a vividly painted red arrow lodged in his collarbone just above the line of his mail, and another bit into his thigh.

Raj Ahten crawled away from his falling horse, looked up at the grim soldiers on the castle walls.

He grabbed the arrow in his thigh, pulled it free, and hurled it back at his attackers.

But when he grasped the red shaft in his collarbone, it snapped in two.

He held it up, astonished, for he’d taken it gingerly. It should not have broken under so slight a pressure.

The shaft broke, he now saw, because the arrow had been hollowed and notched. The shaft was meant to break away. Raj Ahten guessed the reason behind this even before he felt the fiery poison creeping toward his heart.

He stared hard at the castle wall, saw one soldier a hundred feet above him—a tall fellow with a thin face and yellow teeth, a tunic made of pig hide. The fellow threw his longbow in the air, shouting in triumph at having killed the Wolf Lord of Indhopal.

As this first volley of arrows finished landing, a quiet moment followed where the skies remained relatively free of missiles.