Blood and Snow

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 27

It was warmer in the morning, with pink light behind the mountains and fog over the lake and snow. Veruna’s advance guard, ranging well south of the bridge that gave Dernbridge its name, carried torches as they moved through overgrown orchards and tangled scrub climbing toward where the lines of pines began. They carried drawn swords, as well — no one really expected the outnumbered Falconguard to venture an attack, but the fog was thick and clammy, the snow-mantled trees made strange shadows in the half-light, and the wind through the branches joined with the murmuring off the lake to fill the mist with ambient, disconcerting sounds.

They were close enough to Rendale now that one outrider, clambering up one of the rocky promontories that appeared regularly in the foothills of the Guardians, spotted the Castle and its towers, distant fingers through the smoky air.

He was also the first to die, a shout rising in his throat as a bank of fog lifted and exposed a line of men moving up a nearby ridgeline — a ghostly regiment with white cloaks and white tunics covering their armor — and then the cry of warning burbled away as an arrowpoint, cold as a sharpened icicle, punctured his gorge and sent his life spilling out in a bright red stream that stained his tabard, which I'll have to wash before inspection he thought as he fell into a snowbank that was colder even than the arrow and the fog …

A few more men died amid the clutching mist and sticky snow, but Veruna's outriders were no greenhorns, and within a few moments they had realized what was happening and were falling back in good order, some forming skirmish lines to slow the enemy’s advance and others galloping back over the ridges or pounding back up the road to Dernbridge, horns wailing through the fog, dragging their comrades from brief slumber to a morning of battle.