The Burning Bridge recap

With Morgarath massing to invade Araluen, King Duncan sends the Ranger Gilan into neighbouring Celtica to call in its promised troops, with Will and Horace as his companions. They find the country emptied: the villages abandoned, the mines silent, and a lone survivor, a girl called Evanlyn who says she serves Princess Cassandra. The Celts have been taken by Morgarath's Wargals and forced to build a bridge across the gorge that has always protected Araluen's flank, so that an army can come in behind the King's. Gilan rides back to warn the army while the other three stay to watch. They set the bridge alight, but Will and Evanlyn are captured by the Skandian mercenaries guarding it and carried off to sea. Horace reaches the army in time; Halt destroys the Wargal column at the gorge, and when Morgarath demands single combat, Horace fights and kills him. The war ends, but Will and Evanlyn are gone, and Evanlyn is revealed to be Princess Cassandra herself.

Previously: Will, an orphan raised as a ward of Castle Redmont in the kingdom of Araluen, was refused a place in Battleschool and instead apprenticed to Halt, the fief's grim and widely feared Ranger. He learned that the Rangers are the King's scouts and intelligence corps rather than the sorcerers common people take them for, and was trained in concealment, tracking, the knife and the longbow, and given a Ranger horse, Tug. Meanwhile the exiled rebel lord Morgarath, beaten fifteen years earlier and confined since to the Mountains of Rain and Night with his Wargal army, tried to murder Araluen's senior commanders ahead of a new war by sending two Kalkara, huge beasts that arrows barely touch. Halt and his former apprentice Gilan hunted the creatures to the ruins of Morgarath's old castle at Gorlan; Halt killed one, and Will destroyed the second with a burning arrow when it had Halt at its mercy. Will also made peace with Horace, a former tormentor now training as a knight, and turned down a belated offer of Battleschool to stay a Ranger's apprentice. The attempt on the commanders told Araluen that Morgarath was preparing to move, and the fiefs began arming.

Araluen mobilises. Morgarath's army is stirring in the mountains, the fiefs are called out, and the King's council has to work out where the blow will fall, since the only ways down out of the Mountains of Rain and Night are narrow and defensible. Part of the plan depends on Celtica, Araluen's small mining neighbour, which owes a contingent of troops by treaty and has not sent word. Gilan is given the job of riding into Celtica to collect them, and takes Will and Horace with him, partly as messengers and partly because the two apprentices are useful. Halt stays with the army. The three of them cross the border in good spirits, expecting a straightforward diplomatic errand.

Celtica is empty. Village after village stands abandoned with meals half eaten and doors open, the mines are silent, and there is no sign of the army the Araluens came to fetch. In the ruins of one settlement they find a single survivor, an Araluen girl called Evanlyn, who says she is a maid to Princess Cassandra and the only member of her party left alive after it was attacked. From her and from the tracks around them, the three work out that Morgarath's Wargals have swept through the country and driven the Celts off in a body rather than killing them, which means he wants them for something. Gilan decides to follow, and Evanlyn, who has nowhere else to go, comes with them.

The trail leads to the gorge that has always protected the eastern flank of Araluen's defences, and to the answer. Morgarath has worked the captured Celts to death building a bridge across it, so that a Wargal force can cross unseen, come out behind the King's army while it faces the mountain passes, and destroy it between two forces. Gilan grasps at once that the army must be warned or it will be annihilated, and rides for Araluen at his best speed. He leaves Will, Horace and Evanlyn behind to keep watch on the bridge and report what happens there, with orders to avoid contact.

The three watch the crossing and find the work almost finished, with the bridge guarded not only by Wargals but by a hired Skandian crew, northern sea raiders taken on as mercenaries. Waiting for the army to arrive would be too late: once Morgarath's column is across, warning alone will not stop it. Will concludes that the bridge itself has to be destroyed, and the three of them plan how to reach it, get fire into the timbers, and get out again, with Horace's sword the only real protection they have if it goes wrong.

The plan works and then falls apart. The bridge is fired and the crossing ruined, but the noise and flame bring Wargals and Skandians down on them. Horace holds the approach with his sword long enough for the fire to take, killing several Wargals in the process, and is driven off into the country beyond, from where he makes for the Araluen army. Will and Evanlyn are cut off and taken alive by Erak, the Skandian jarl commanding the mercenaries, who values prisoners as property. They are carried away to his wolfship, and Evanlyn keeps up her story of being a servant, since a captured Araluen maid is worth ransom or a slave market, and nothing worse.

Horace reaches the King's army on the Plains of Uthal and reports what the three of them found and did, which is how Halt learns that his apprentice has been taken. The Araluen commanders now know both halves of Morgarath's plan, and Halt takes a force to the gorge to deal with the flanking column as it comes out of the broken crossing. The Wargals are met by horsemen, which they fear instinctively, and the column that was meant to fall on the King's rear is destroyed instead. On the plain, the two main armies form up facing each other, with Morgarath's advantage of surprise gone and his own line now the one in trouble.

With his trap sprung and useless, Morgarath demands that the war be decided by single combat rather than by a battle he is losing. Horace, an apprentice and not yet a knight, takes up the challenge and kills him. The Wargals, who fought only because Morgarath's mind drove them, stop where they stand once he is dead, and the war is over. In the aftermath the King's household learns that the girl who was taken at the bridge is not a maid at all: Evanlyn is Cassandra, King Duncan's daughter and the heir to Araluen, travelling under another name. She and Will are aboard Erak's wolfship, heading north to Skandia, where prisoners are slaves. Halt, having helped win the kingdom's war, turns immediately to the problem of getting Will back.

Morgarath's flanking plan collapses. The bridge his slaves built is burned, and the Wargal column that crosses the gorge is met and destroyed rather than falling on the Araluen army's rear. With his trap gone and his army now facing the King's, Morgarath demands that the matter be settled by single combat. Horace, still a Battleschool apprentice, answers the challenge and kills him. Deprived of the mind that drove them, the surviving Wargals stop fighting. The war that has hung over Araluen since the first book is over in an afternoon, and the kingdom has lost the enemy who defined it. The victory is incomplete for the people at its centre. Will and Evanlyn are not there: they were taken at the bridge by Erak's Skandians and are aboard a wolfship bound north for Skandia, where captives are sold or worked as slaves. In the aftermath it emerges that Evanlyn is not a servant at all but Cassandra, King Duncan's daughter and the heir to Araluen, which makes her capture a far graver matter than anyone holding her yet understands. Halt, refused nothing else by the King, sets himself to getting Will back.