I'd like to begin by offering five imaginary internet points and an eventual free book to anyone who can figure out the reference in the title.
Cale reined his destrier to a halt at the hill's crest and bit back the urge to scream as he looked down on Freya's Fist below. He was too late. He'd already known that when he heard the war drums pounding, but seeing it with his own eyes was a completely different kind of horror. An armed throng of thousands had the high-walled keep surrounded. The red and bronze of their armor had a wicked gleam in the in the midday sun. They were biding their time for the moment, like a noose waiting to tighten when the pedestal dropped.
The Fist was already battered and scarred from at least one assault. It didn't look like it would hold out against another. The walls were chipped where siegestones had made their mark. The peak of the northwestern tower ended in a jagged stump where the trebuchets had nearly broken through.
Cale's men fell into place behind him, two hundred of his own greenbacks and another thousand men at arms. He didn't have to look back to know the looks on their faces. He could hear their voices running together into one long, collective sigh down the ranks. “I'm sorry,” he whispered, not sure to whom exactly. To himself, maybe. To his men. To the the meager three hundred poor souls charged
with the hopeless task of holding Freya's Fist. “I'm so sorry.”
The white lion banner still flew over the keep in futile defiance of the northmen's red and gold. Saner men would have surrendered by now, but these were men of the mistcrags. They practically bled ice. Still, Cale had seen too may cities fall in his short career. And when the stones fell and the battering rams struck, all the stubbornness in the world would only buy a little extra time. Time that only mattered if help was on the way. But help wasn't coming. It was just him and his paltry host. A thousand men could have made all the difference from behind a sturdy wall. But in an open field against three times their number, they were as helpless as the men Cale had sworn to protect.
That was the part that gnawed at him the most. Cale had made a promise to Raelin that he'd return with an army before the first day of the new spring. If only he'd known that the enemy would get there sooner.
Holding back tears for his men's sake, Cale leveled his spear forward, its black tip catching the sun like newly cut obsidian. “This is our target,” he shouted back to the ranks, pointing to the battered castle with the black and silver haft of his weapon. “This is what we promised our friends, our brothers, our countrymen. This is our word and our sacred bond.” Every word that came out was a struggle against himself, but he had to appear strong.
“I won't force any man to ride into certain death beside me. Nor can I promise that the fist will hold with our aid. But every man who keeps his word will keep that banner flying, if even for just one more heartbeat. Our allies will have time to reinforce, or time to retreat. That's all I can promise.”
Shivering on the inside, Cale waited for an answer. He gripped his stallion's reins, ready to make his charge down the hillside. He would keep his promise to Raelin. He would ride to his countrymen's aid, alone if he had to.
“The choice to kill off Cale was a hard one,” Frederick Barnes admitted into the microphone to a packed auditorium of his fans. “But in the end it was a necessary choice, even if it may have caused a few readers to throw their copies of Spears of the South across the room.”
He paused to let the audience laugh. The interviewer, a skinny brunette named Rita who ran his fan site, joined in with a chuckle, adding, “I won't lie. My hardcover of Spears still has a crack in the spine from that chapter. I assume you must have gotten quite a bit of hate mail from your readers.”
“It's funny you should mention that,” he said once the laughter died down. “I'd get amazing fan letters from my readers about how bold and brave they think my writing is. Then two years later the next book comes out and I'll get a letter from one of those same people saying 'How dare you kill off my favorite character.' A lot of my fans like to think I've gotten used to giving main characters the axe by now, but to be honest, it never gets easier. I actually wrote four different endings for the Battle of Freya's Fist, and by the end of each one there was no kidding myself. I knew what had to happen.”
“Can we expect more of that in Heart of the Void?” Rita asked.
With a coy smile Barnes threw up his arms and said, “RAFO?”
“Fair enough. Well, I'm afraid that's all the time we have, folks,” Rita announced to a disappointed audience. “Mr. Barnes will be back tomorrow for a public signing at the Cold Steel panel. Remember, Flame of the North is in stores now, and Heart of the Void, the eighth and final book of the Cold Steel Chronicles, is scheduled for release in Spring of 2015. Thank you so much for being here, Mr. Barnes.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” Barnes said. The crowd applauded as he took a bow and made his way backstage.
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