Today's excerpt is from "Chapter Eight: The Bridge"
Now that the sun was far enough over the horizon to cast a dim, gray light through the thick winter clouds, Dylan was able to move through the woods along the top of the ridge with quicker assurance than Clyde had done in the darkness. He was also able to follow the hoof prints of Clyde’s horse; they led him to a small clearing where the bay horse was tied to a small tree. Dylan began to follow the footprints that led away from the horse farther into the woods when Clyde appeared, retracing his own original steps.
“Kim Macnylleth,” Clyde said, “there’s no sign of the ships. I went far enough down the ridge to see the harbor. There are no longboats to be found.”
“I found them,” Dylan said. “They’ve sailed up the river.”
“The river?” Clyde said. “What on earth for?”
“They’ve packed their boats in the river channel as a platform to scale the bank and bypass the coast road and the bridge completely.”
“Making our traps useless,” Clyde said. “What should we do? The Kira hasn’t had that much time to get ahead of them. We’ve got to slow them down.”
“There’s only one thing we can do,” Dylan said. “We’ve got to drop the bridge on top of them. If we’re lucky, they’ll chase us back down the coast road to the harbor.”
“All of them against two of us?” Clyde said. “They’ll have archers, you reckon?”
“Without a doubt,” Dylan said.
“You’re a dangerous man to serve, Kim Macnylleth,” Clyde said with a grim smile.
They both mounted Clyde’s horse and rode back to the bridge as fast as they could, which wasn’t much more than a trot due to the snow and the rough terrain. Dylan was relieved to look across the bridge and see nothing more than snow on the road leading toward the castle. The Norsemen were still assembling their ladders, though Dylan and Clyde both saw that the individual sections were almost completed; it wouldn’t take long to put those sections together and begin their ascent.
“We’re only going to have enough time to drop one section,” Dylan said. “It won’t stop them, but it might slow them down enough to buy our people the time they need.” They both crawled down the center of the bridge until they reached the center joint on the far side from them. The plank that exposed the support joints was anchored with removable pegs instead of steel spikes. They each had to clear away the snow to reach the pins, and then pick up the plank and set it aside. They accomplished this without alerting the force below them, who were focused on their own preparations. Keeping their eyes on the activity below, they pulled the steel pins out of each of the three support joints that kept the platform in place. Dylan sighed with relief after he removed the third pin, and he led Clyde back the way they came to remove the plank over the second set of supports.
As they lifted the second plank out of its place, Dylan’s knees slid out from under him in the snow, and the plank fell out of his hand. It landed face down on the bridge, and all the snow that had covered the plank fell through the slot where it had been. Dylan and Clyde both looked down through the gap and saw the men on the boats below looking up at them. The men shouted for others to look up, and it was clear that Dylan had lost his chance of surprising them.
“Quickly, quickly,” Dylan said, “get those pins out. I’ll go back and pull the levers on the other side.”
“What if the platform drops on that side before you get back?”
“It shouldn’t release until all four levers are pulled!”
“How can you be sure?” Clyde asked.
“I’m not,” Dylan said. “We’ve never done this before. I built it to be able to do it. I guess we’ll see if I’ve earned my master ranking, won’t we?”
“This is madness,” Clyde said. “Let’s get out of here!”
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