The horns kept going beyond the western wall, and out on James's side of the river the circling riders stopped circling.
They came round onto a line, forty or so of them, and lowered their spears together at two thousand people standing in an open field.
There was nothing new out there. This was the same warband that had spent the first half of the night pretending to attack a gate, and it had finally run out of clever things to do, so it was spending everything it had left in two places at once — the rest of it going back at the settlement, and every rider still mounted on this bank coming for the civilians before anyone could put a line in front of them.
James looked once across the broken span.
The intact skeleton stood a pace behind Ronan on the other stump of the bridge, exactly where it had been all night, and a hundred and twenty mana would put him beside his team in a second and a half.
"Stay there," Ronan said through the party channel. "They need you."
