The woman said in a sad if scolding tone, “Father—oh please, come away from there!”

In the fields below, a knight rode a great warhorse, speeding toward them like an arrow, his visor and his lance lowered. So swift he came. So swift.

Sylvarresta shouted the great secret. “Death!”

58

BROKEN MEN

Gaborn heard the thud of hoofbeats, the ringing of mail as links clanged against one another. He had thought it only a local knight riding across the downs—until he recognized the throaty battle chuckle, a sound that filled him with dread.

Gaborn had been watching King Sylvarresta, shocked and saddened that the poor fool, though he knew almost nothing at all, had been forced to confront mortality. It felt like watching a child get torn apart by dogs.

Gaborn only had time to push Iome behind him, spin and raise a hand to shout “No!”

Then Borenson’s gray steed thundered past, its armor rattling. Huge. Unstoppable.

Borenson’s lance was lowered on the far side of the horse, twenty feet of polished white ash with its blackened steel tip at the end. Gaborn thought of throwing himself forward, pushing that lance tip away.

But Borenson raced past before Gaborn could act.

Gaborn stood but thirty feet from King Sylvarresta, yet time seemed to slow in that second.

Gaborn had seen Borenson joust a hundred times. The man had a steady hand, a deft touch. He could skewer a plum off a fence post with a lance, even on a force horse galloping sixty miles an hour.

Borenson approached with his lance low, as if he’d go for a stomach wound, and Gaborn saw him raise it just a bit, holding steady, aiming at Sylvarresta’s heart.

For his part, Sylvarresta seemed not to recognize what was happening. The King’s face had twisted in a grimace, for he’d just remembered the one thing Gaborn had hoped he’d never come to learn, and he had been shouting the word “death,” though he could not have foreseen his own.

Then the steed bore down on Sylvarresta. Borenson pulled his lance to the right a fraction of an inch, so it would not graze one of the spears in Gaborn’s spear wall.

Then the horse charged through the spear wall, sent some shafts flying, shattered others. Almost at that same moment, the tip of Borenson’s lance took King Sylvarresta just below the sternum.

The spear entered deftly, pushing the King backward and lifting him from his feet.

Borenson let the lance slide ten feet through the King’s chest, so the tapering wood spread his ribs open wide, then suddenly released the haft and leaned clear of the dying man.

The horse thundered two steps, leapt the corpse of Gaborn’s father, crashed through the far wall of spears, and charged on past the trunk of the huge oak tree.