They got about forty meters.
James ran with Durendal low and his lungs burning and let himself believe, for the length of those forty meters, that the road was going to stay open, that two enormous things had found each other in the mud and would be busy with it long enough to matter.
Then Morcant stopped fighting the orc.
He did it mid-exchange. He turned an axe stroke off his blade, gave ground twice, and simply broke contact and started moving away from the fight, across and cutting a diagonal through the churned ground toward Raymond.
He had come down that lane for James. He was Baldwin's Lord Commander before he was anybody's grieving master, and the man closing on his prince with a sword and a claim was not the necromancer.
Kargan took it as an insult.
The Orc Chief roared something that had no words in it and came after him, because in whatever code an orc war-chief lived by, a man did not simply decide he had somewhere better to be halfway through.
