The Dread Wyrm

Chapter One

The Inn of Dorling-The Company

Sauce was standing on a table in a red kirtle that laced up under her left arm-laces that showed she wore no linen under it. She was singing.

Her voice wasn’t beautiful-it had a bit of a squawk to it, more like a parrot than a nightingale, as Wilful Murder said to his cronies. But she was loud, and raucous, and everyone knew the tune and the chorus.

Everyone, in this case, being everyone in the common room of the great stone inn under the Ings of Dorling, widely reputed to be the largest inn on the whole of the world. The common room had arches and bays, like a church, and massive pillars set straight onto stone piers that went down into the cellars below-cellars that were themselves famous. The walls were twice the height of a man, and more, hung with tapestries so old and so caked in old soot and ash and six hundred years of smoke as to be nearly indecipherable, although there appeared to be a great dragon on the longest wall, the back wall, against which ran the Keeper’s long counter where the staff, and a few favoured customers, took refuge from the army of customers out on the floor.

Because on this, the coldest spring night of Martius yet, with snow outside on their tents, the Company of the Red Knight-that is, that part of the company not snug in barracks back in Liviapolis-packed the inn and its barns to the rafters, along with several hundred Moreans, some Hillmen from the drove, and a startling assortment of sell-swords and mercenaries, whores, travelling players, and foolish young men and women in search of what they no doubt hoped would be “adventure,” including twenty hot-headed young Occitan knights, their pet troubadour and their squires, all armed to the teeth and eager to be tested.

The crowd standing packed on the two-inch-thick oak boards of the common room floor was so dense that the smallest and most attractive of the Keeper’s daughters had trouble making her way to the rooms behind the common. Men tried to make way for her, with her wooden tray full of leather jacks, and could not.

The Keeper had four great bonfires roaring in the yard and trestle tables there; he was serving ale in his cavernous stone barn, but everyone wanted to be in the inn itself, and the cold snap that froze the water in the puddles and drove the beasts of the drove to huddle close in the great pens and folds on the Ings above the inn was also forcing the greatest rush of customers he’d ever experienced to pack his common room so tightly that he was afraid men would die or, worse, buy no ale.

The Keeper turned to the young man who stood with him on the staff side of the bar. The young man had dark hair and green eyes and wore red. He was watching the common room with the satisfaction that an angel might show for the good works of the pious.

“Your blighted company and the drove at the same time? Couldn’t you have come a week apart? There won’t be enough forage for you in the hills.” The Keeper sounded shrill, even to his own ears.

Gabriel Muriens, the Red Knight, the Captain, the Megas Dukas, the Duke of Thrake, and possessor of another dozen titles heaped on him by a grateful Emperor, took a long pull from his own jack of black, sweet winter ale and beamed. “We’ll have forage,” he said. “It’s been warmer in the Brogat. It’s spring on the Albin.” He smiled. “And this is only a tithe of my company.” The smile grew warmer as he watched the recruiting table set against the wall. The adventurous young of six counties and three nations were cued up. “But it’s growing,” he added.

Forty of the Keeper’s people, most in his livery and all his kin, stood like soldiers at the long counter and served ale at an astounding rate. Gabriel watched them with the pleasure that a professional receives in watching others practise their craft-he enjoyed the smooth efficiency with which the Keeper’s wife kept her tallies, the speed with which money was collected or tally sticks were notched, and the ready ease with which casks were broached, emptied into pitchers, the said pitchers filled flagons or jacks or battered mugs and cans, all the while the staff moving up to the counter and then back to the broached kegs with the steady regularity of a company of crossbowmen loosing bolts by rotation and volley.

“They all seem to have coin to spend,” the Keeper admitted grudgingly. His elder daughter Sarah-a beautiful girl with red hair, married and widowed and now with a bairn, currently held by a cousin-stood where Sauce had been and sang an old song-a very old song. It had no chorus, and the Hillmen began to make sounds-like a low polyphonic hum-to accompany her singing. When one of the Morean musicians began to pluck the tune on his mandolin, a rough hand closed on his shoulder and he ceased.

The Keeper watched his daughter for long enough that his wife stopped taking money and looked at him. But then he shrugged. “They have money, as I say. You had some adventures out east, I hear?”

The Red Knight settled his shoulder comfortably into the corner between a low shelf and a heavy oak cupboard behind the bar. “We did,” he said.

The Keeper met his eye. “I’ve heard all the news, and none of it makes much sense. Tell it me, if you’d be so kind.”

Gabriel paused to finish his ale and look at the bottom of his silver cup. Then he gave the Keeper a wry smile. “It’s not a brief story,” he said.

The Keeper raised an eyebrow and glanced out at the sea of men. Ser Alcaeus was being called for by the crowd, and his name was chanted. “I couldn’t leave you even if I wanted,” the Keeper said. “They’d lynch me.”

Gabriel shrugged. “So. Where do you want me to begin?”

Sarah, flushed from the effort of singing, came under the bar and took her baby back from her cousin. She grinned at the Red Knight. “You’re going to tell a story?” she said. “Christ on the cross, Da! Everyone will want to hear!”

Gabriel nodded. Ale had magicked its way into his silver cup. The magick had been performed by a muscular young woman with a fine lace cap. She smiled at him.

“It’s not an easy story to start, sweeting.” He returned the serving girl’s smile with genteel interest.

Sarah wasn’t old enough to take much ambiguity. “Start at the beginning!” she said.

Gabriel made an odd motion with his mouth, almost like a rabbit moving its nose. “There is no beginning,” he said. “It just goes on and on into the past-an endless tale of motion and stillness.”

The Keeper rolled his eyes.

Gabriel realized he’d had too much to drink. “Fine. You recall the fight at Lissen Carak.”

Just behind the Red Knight, Tom Lachlan roared his dangerous laugh. Gabriel Muriens snapped his head around, and Lachlan-the Drover, now, almost seven feet of tartan-and grey-clad muscle, with a broad, silver-mounted belt and a sword as long as a shepherd’s crook-flipped the gate back on the bar and stepped through. “Boyo, we all remember the fight at Lissen Carak. That was a fight.”

Gabriel shrugged. “The magister who now styles himself Thorn-” He smiled grimly, paused, and pointed at a glass-shielded candle on the cupboard. A dozen moths of various sizes flitted about it.

Across the press of the crowd, Mag felt the pull of ops. She tensed.

He stood on the bright new mosaic floor of his memory. Prudentia stood once more on her plinth, and her statue was now a warm ivory rather than a cold marble, the features more mobile than they had been in his adolescence and her hair the same grey-black he remembered from his youth.

He knew in his heart that she was now a simulacrum not an embodied spirit, but she was the last gift that Harmodius the magister had left him, and he loved having her back.

“Immolate tinea consecutio aedificium,” he said.

Prudentia frowned. “Isn’t that a bit… dramatic?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’m renowned for my arrogance and my dramatic flair,” he said. “He’ll be blind and with a little luck, he’ll attribute it to the said arrogance. Consider it a smokescreen for our visitor. If he’s coming.”

She didn’t shrug. But somehow she conveyed a shrug, perhaps a sniff of disapproval, without moving an ivory muscle.

“Katherine! Thales! Iskander!” he said softly, and his memory palace began to spin.

The main room-the casting chamber-of his palace was constructed, or remembered, as a dome held aloft with three separate sets of arches. In among the arches were nooks containing statues of worthies; his last year as a practitioner had clarified and enhanced his skills to add another row.

On the bottom row were the bases of his power-represented by thirteen saints of the church, six men, six women, and an androgynous Saint Michael standing between them. Above the saints stood another tier, this one of the philosophers who had informed his youth-ancients of one sect or another from various of the Archaic eras. But now, above them stood a new tier; twelve worthies of a more modern age; six women and six men and one cloaked figure. Harmodius had installed them, and Gabriel had some reservations about what they might mean-but he knew Saint Aetius, who killed his emperor’s family; he knew King Jean le Preux, who stopped the Irk Conquest of Etrusca after the catastrophic collapse of the Archaic world; he knew Livia the empress and Argentia the great war queen of Iberia.

As he called the names, the statues he indicated moved-indeed, the whole tier on which they stood moved until all three tiers of statues had moved the figures he named to the correct position over the great talismanic symbol that guarded the green door at the end of the chamber. Recently, there had appeared another door, exactly opposite the green door-a small red door with a grille. He knew what lay there, but he went out of his way not to go too close to it. And set in the floor by Prudentia’s plinth was a bronze disc with silver letters and a small lever. Gabriel had designed it himself. He hoped never to use it.

“Pisces,” he said.

Immediately under the lowest tier of statues there was a band. The band looked like bronze, and on it were repoussed-apparently-and engraved and decorated in gold and silver and enamel a set of thirteen zodiacal symbols. This band also rotated, although it did so in the opposite direction to the statues.

Clear golden sunlight fell through the great carved crystal that was the dome above them, and it struck the fish of pisces and coalesced into a golden beam.

The great green door opened. Beyond it was a sparkling grate, as if someone had built a portcullis of white-hot iron. Through its grid came a green radiance that suffused the casting chamber and yet was somehow defined by the golden light of the dome.

He grinned in satisfaction and snapped his fingers. Every moth in the great inn fell to the floor, dead.

Sarah laughed. “Now that’s a trick,” she said. “How about mice?”

Her son, just four months old, looked at her with goobering love and tried to find her nipple with his mouth.

Gabriel laughed. “As I was saying, the magister who now styles himself Thorn, once known as Richard Plangere, led an army of the Wild against Lissen Carak. He enlisted all the usual allies: Western boglins, stone trolls, some Golden Bears of the mountain tribes and some disaffected irks from the Lakes; wyverns and wardens. All of the Wild that’s easy to seduce, he took for his own. He also managed to sway the Sossag of the Great House, those who live in the Squash Country north of the inland sea.”

“And they killed Hector! God’s curse on them.” Sarah’s hate for Hector’s killer was as bright as her hair.

The Red Knight looked at the young woman and shook his head. “I can’t join you in the curse, sweeting. They have Thorn as a houseguest, now. They left him, you know. And-” He looked at the Drover. “The Sossag and the Huran would see us as the murdering savages who stole their land.”

“A thousand years ago!” Bad Tom spat.

Gabriel shrugged. At his back, Ser Alcaeus was playing a kithara from the ancient world and singing an ancient song in a strange, eerie voice. Because every word he sang was in the true Archaic, the air shimmered with ops and potentia.

Ser Michael slipped under the gate of the bar and found space to lean. Kaitlin, his wife, now so heavily pregnant that she waddled instead of walking, was already snug in one of the inn’s better beds. Behind him, Sauce-Ser Alison-glared at a Hillman until he pushed more strongly against his mates and made room for her slight form to ease by him.

He made a natural, but ill-judged, decision to run his hand over her body as she passed, and found himself wheezing on the hard oak boards. Her paramour, Count Zac, stepped on the fallen Hillman and vaulted over the bar.

The Hillman rose, his face a study in rage, to find Bad Tom’s snout within a hand’s breadth of his own. He flinched.

Tom handed the man-one of his own-a full flagon of ale. “Go drink it off,” he said.

The Keeper glared at the incursion of Albans now encroaching on the smooth delivery of ale. “Didn’t I rent you a private room?” he asked the captain.

“Do you want to hear this tale, or not?” the captain said.

The Keeper grunted.

“So Thorn-” Every man and woman in earshot was aware that the captain or the duke-or whatever tomfool title he went by these days-had just said Thorn’s name three times.

Three hundred Albin leagues north and west, Thorn stood in a late-winter snow shower. He stood on the easternmost point of the island he had made his own, his place of power, and great breakers of the salt-less inner sea slammed against the rock of the island’s coast and rose ten times the height of a man into the air, driven by the strong east wind.

Out in the bay, the ice was breaking.

Thorn had come to this exposed place to prepare a working-a set of workings, a nest of workings-against his target: Ghause, wife of the Earl of Westwall. He felt his name-like the whisper of a moth’s wings in the air close to a man’s face on a hot summer night. But many said his name aloud, in whispers, often enough that he didn’t always pay heed. But in this case, the naming was accompanied by a burst of power that even across the circle of the world made itself felt in the aethereal.

The second calling was softer. But such things run in threes, and no user of the art could ever be so ignorant as to attract his attention and leave the third naming incomplete.

The third use was casual-contemptuous. Thorn’s sticklike, bony hands flinched.

But the Dark Sun was no casual enemy, and he stood in a place of power surrounded by friends. And he had made Thorn blind, as he did on a regular basis. Carefully, with the forced calm that, in a mere man, would have involved the gritting of teeth, Thorn mended the small gap in the aether made by the calling of his name, and went back to crafting his working.

But his patience had been interrupted and his rage-Thorn thought dimly around the black hole in his memory that once he had been against rage-flowed out. Some of the rage he funnelled into his working against Ghause-what better revenge? But still he felt that the Dark Sun made him small, and he hated.

And so, without further thought, he acted. A raid was redirected. A sentry was killed. A warden-a daemon lord, as men would call him-was suborned, his sense of reality undermined and conquered.

Try that, mortal man, Thorn thought, and went back to his casting.

In doing so, like a bird disturbed in making a spring nest, he dropped a twig. But consumed by rage and hate, he didn’t notice.

“Attacked Lissen Carak, and we beat him. He made a dozen mistakes to every one we made-eh, Tom?” Gabriel smiled.

The giant Hillman shrugged. “Never heard you admit we made any mistakes at all.”

Ser Gavin chose to lean against the bar on the other side. “Imagine how Jehan would tell this tale if he was here,” he said.

“Then it would be nothing but my mistakes,” Gabriel said, but with every other man and woman in red, he raised his cup and drank.

“Any road, we beat him,” Tom said. “But it wasn’t no Chaluns, was it? Nor a Battle of Chevin.” Both battles-a thousand years and more apart-had been glorious and costly victories of the forces of men over the Wild.

Gabriel shrugged. “No-it was more like a skirmish. We won a fight in the woods, and then another around the fortress. But we didn’t kill enough boglins to change anything.” He shrugged. “We didn’t kill Plangere or change his mind.” He looked around. “Still-we’re not dead. Round one to us. Eh?”

Bad Tom raised his mug and drank.

“In summer we rode east to the Empire. To Morea.”

“That’s more like it,” said the Keeper.

“It’s a tangled thread. The Emperor wanted to hire us, but we never knew what for, because by the time we heard, he’d been taken captive and his daughter Irene was on the throne. And Duke Andronicus was trying to take the city.”

“By which our duke means Liviapolis,” Wilful Murder said to his awestruck new apprentice archer, Diccon, a boy so thin and yet so muscular that most of the women in the common room had noticed him. “Biggest fewkin’ city in the world.” Wilful knew what it meant when all the officers gathered, and he’d wormed his way patiently into the story circle.

The Keeper raised an eyebrow. His daughter laughed. “Way I hear it, she had ’im taken so she could have the power.”

“Nah, that’s just rumour,” her father said.

The Red Knight’s companions didn’t say a thing. They didn’t even exchange looks.

“We arrived,” the captain said with relish, “in the very nick of time. We routed the usurper-”

Tom snorted. Michael looked away, and Sauce made a rude gesture. “We almost got our arses handed to us,” she said.

The captain raised an eyebrow. “And after a brief winter campaign-”

“Jesu!” spat Sauce. “You’re leaving out the whole story!”

“By Tar’s tits!” Bad Tom said.

Just for a moment, at his oath, a tiny flawed silence fell so that his words seemed to carry.

“What did you just say?” Gabriel asked, and his brother Gavin looked as if one of Tom’s big fists had struck him.

Bad Tom frowned. “It’s a Hillman’s oath,” he said.

Gabriel was staring at him. “Really?” he asked. He sighed. “At any rate, after a brief but very successful winter campaign, we destroyed the duke’s baggage and left his army helpless in the snow and then made forced marches-”

“In fewkin’ winter!” Bad Tom interjected.

“Across the Green Hills to Osawa to retrieve the Emperor’s share of the fur trade.” The captain smiled. “Which paid off our bets, so to speak.”

“You ain’t telling any part of this right,” Sauce said.

Gabriel glared at her-she couldn’t tell, despite knowing him many years, whether this was his instant anger or a mock-glare. “Why don’t you tell it, then,” he said.

She raised and lowered her eyebrows very rapidly. “All right then.” She looked to the Keeper. “So we-” She paused. “Got very lucky and-” She thought of the security ramifications and realized she couldn’t actually name Kronmir, the spy, who had left the enemy and joined them and even now was making his way to Harndon with Gelfred and the green banda. “And… we… er…”

Gabriel met her eye and they both laughed.

“As I was saying,” he went on. “A month ago and more, we found through treason in the former duke’s court in Lonika the location of the Emperor, and we staged a daring rescue, met his army in the field and beat it, and killed his son Demetrius.”

“Who had already murdered his father,” Ser Alcaeus muttered, joining the circle.

“So we returned the Emperor to his loving daughter and grateful city, took our rewards, and came straight here to spend them,” the Red Knight said. “Leaving, as you don’t seem to notice, more than half our company to guard the Emperor.”

“His mouth is moving and I can’t understand a word he says.” Bad Tom laughed. “Except that we’re all still being paid.”

Ser Michael joined the giant. “You told what happened without any part of the story,” he said.

“That’s generally what happens,” Gabriel agreed. “We call the process ‘History.’ Anyway, we’ve been busy, we have silver, and we’re all on our way south. We’ll help Tom get his beeves to market and then most of us will go to the king’s tournament at Harndon at Pentecost.”

“With a stop in Albinkirk,” Ser Michael said.

Gabriel glared at his protégé, who was unbowed.

“To see a nun,” Michael added, greatly daring.

But the captain’s temper was well in check. He merely shrugged. “To negotiate a council of the north country,” Gabriel corrected him. “Ser John Crayford has invited a good many of the powers. It’ll run alongside the market at Lissen Carak.”

The Keeper nodded. “Aye-I’ve had my herald. I’ll be sending one o’ my brats wi’ Bad Tom. It’s a poor time to go, for mysel.” He wrinkled his nose. “And ye-pardon me. But you may be the king o’ sell-swords, but what ha’ ye to do wi’ the north country?”

Gabriel Muriens smiled. For a moment, he looked rather more like his mother than he would have liked. “I’m the Duke of Thrake,” he said. “My writ runs from the Great Sea to the shores at Ticondaga.”

“Sweet Christ and all the saints,” the Keeper said. “So the Muriens now hold the whole of the wall.”

Gabriel nodded. “The Abbess has some of it, out west. But yes, Keeper.”

The Keeper shook his head. “The Emperor gave you the wall?”

Sauce had a look on her face as if she’d never considered the implications of her captain being the Lord of the Wall. Bad Tom looked as if an axe had hit him between the eyes. Gavin was looking at his brother with something like suspicion.

Only Ser Michael looked unfazed. “The Emperor,” he said lightly, “is very unworldly.” He scratched his beard. “Unlike our esteemed lord and master.”

Whatever reaction this comment might have received was lost when a slim man with jet-black hair emerged from the dumbwaiter that brought kegs from the deep cellars. The Keeper’s folk rode the man-powered elevator from time to time, usually for a prank or when ale was needed very quickly; but most of the folk standing on the staff side of the bar had never seen the black-haired man before. He wore a well cut, very short black doublet and matching hose and had pale, almost translucent skin, like depictions of particularly ascetic saints.

“Master Smythe,” Gabriel said, with a bow.

The Keeper puffed his cheeks. “Could we,” he said carefully, “move this to another room?”

One by one they passed under the bar into the outer common room and then forced their way to the end of the great hall and out into a private solar under the eaves. It was chilly, and the young woman who had so carefully given the captain the eye knelt gracefully and began to make up a fire. She lit it with a taper and then curtsied-but this time her bright eyes were for Master Smythe.

Master Smythe surprised them all by watching her as she left for wine and ale, and a tiny wisp of smoke came from one nostril. “Ah, the children of men,” he said. He raised an eyebrow at Gabriel. “What curious animals you are. You don’t want her, but you resent her wanting me.”

Gabriel’s head snapped back as if he’d been struck and, behind him, Father Arnaud choked on his ale and hid his face.

“Must you always say what other people are thinking?” asked the Red Knight. “It would be a bad enough habit with your own thoughts. Please don’t do it with mine.”

Master Smythe smiled politely. “But why resent me?”

Gabriel exhaled for so long that it wasn’t a sigh. It was like a physical release of tension. His eyes moved-

He shrugged. “I miss the company of women in my bed,” he said with flat honesty. “And I like to be desired.”

Master Smythe nodded. “As do I. Do you perceive me as a rival?”

Sauce stepped in. “Given that you’re some sort of god and we’re not, I’m sure he does.” She smiled at the black-haired man. “But he’ll get over it.”

“I can fight my own fights,” the Red Knight said, putting a hand on Sauce’s shoulder. He nodded graciously to Master Smythe. “We are allies. Allies are-often-potential rivals. But I think you put too much on my surface thoughts and my animal reactions. I like a wench, and sometimes,” he smiled, “I do things from habit.”

Master Smythe nodded. “For my part, I am a surly companion, my allies. Do you know that before this little matter of the sorcerer in the north, I was quite happy to lie on my mountain and think? I retreated from this world for reasons. And as I play this game, the reasons seem to me ever more valid.” He looked around. “I am not filled with a sense of ambition or challenge, but just a vague fatigue. Facing our shared foe-” He paused. “I’d really rather that he just went off to another plot, another world.”

The serving girl returned. She had broad shoulders-extraordinarily broad. She had a peculiar grace, as if life in a big body had forced her to some extraordinary exercises.

The Red Knight leaned over. “You’re a dancer!” he said, delighted.

She bobbed her head. “Yes, m’lord,” she said.

“A Hillman!” Gabriel said.

Master Smythe laughed. “Surely-surely we call her a Hillwoman.”

She blushed and looked at the ground and then raised her eyes-to Master Smythe.

Gabriel took a sip of ale. “I think I’ve lost this round,” he said. Sauce rolled her eyes and leaned against the table.

The fire roared to life, the kindling bursting into an almost hermetical fire so that the small room was instantly warmer.

Father Arnaud whispered something as Bad Tom pushed in, and Sauce roared. “It’s like watching two lions with a bunny,” she said.

Father Arnaud was less than amused.

Master Smythe took his ale and sat in the chair at the end of the table, and the rest of them made do with two benches and a collection of stools brought by a trio of boys. There wasn’t really room for everyone-Ser Michael was filling out rapidly and bid fair to reach Bad Tom’s size; Bad Tom folded himself into a nook by the chimney, as if storing heat for his future of sleeping out on the moors with his flocks. Sauce hooked a stool across from the captain. Mag came in and settled on the bench next to the captain, and Gavin took the other side. The Keeper took a stool at the far end of the table from Master Smythe. Ser Alcaeus stood behind the captain, leaning with his shoulders wedged into the oak panels. Wilful Murder stood in the doorway for as long as a nun might say a prayer, and the captain made a sign with his hand and the old archer slipped away.

“Where is the remarkable young man?” Master Smythe asked.

“We have a whole company of remarkable young men.” Gabriel nodded. “You mean Ser Morgon?”

Master Smythe nodded and blinked. “Ah-I expected him here. He is in Morea.”

“Where he belongs, at school.” Ser Gabriel leaned forward.

“You have left half your company in Morea?” Master Smythe asked.

“Ser Milus deserved an independent command. Now he has it. He has almost all the archers and-” The Red Knight paused.

Ser Michael laughed. “And all the knights we trust.”

Master Smythe nodded. “Hence your escort of Thrakian… gentlemen.”

Ser Gabriel nodded. “I don’t think any of them plan to put a knife in my ribs, but I think it’s better for everyone that they aren’t in Thrake for a year or two.”

Count Zac came in and, at a sign from Sauce, closed the door with his hip. He had a tray full of bread and olive oil. He went and balanced with Sauce on a small stool.

“And we have Count Zacuijah to keep the rest of us in line,” Ser Gabriel said.

“And the magister you carried in your head?” asked Master Smythe.

There were some blank looks and, again, Sauce made a face that indicated a connection made. She bit her lip and looked at her lover. He shrugged.

Most of the men and women present had never seen the captain so at a loss-so hesitant. But he mustered his wits. “All my secrets revealed. Well. Maestro Harmodius has re-established his place in the… um… corporeal world.”

Master Smythe nodded. His gaze rested on Count Zac. “And you just happen to have joined our little cabal?” Master Smythe asked.

“I want to see a tournament,” the easterner said. “Besides, nothing exciting will happen in Morea now.”

Alcaeus grunted. “Your mouth to God’s ear,” he said.

Count Zac shrugged. “Yes-unless someone poisons the Emperor.”

Alcaeus put a hand on his dagger.

Master Smythe allowed a wisp of smoke to escape his nose. He pulled a pipe from his pocket-an amazing affectation, an Outwaller habit almost never seen in civilized lands-and began to pack it full of red-brown leaf mould. “Could we begin?” he asked mildly.

Gabriel spread his hands. “I have very little to report. And little to say beyond-thanks. We really could not have accomplished anything without you. It pains me to say it, but without your hand on the delicate balances of power and logistika, we’d have failed last winter.”

Master Smythe bowed his head in gracious assent. “How was the petard? The explosive device?”

Ser Michael barked a laugh. “Loud,” he said. “My ears still ring sometimes.”

Master Smythe played with his beard as if he’d never noticed he had one before. “Splendid. There will be more toys of a similar nature coming along in the next months. Indeed, I have arranged-or I will-that you can collect them in Harndon.” He looked around. “We are coming… to the difficult part.”

Sauce allowed her nostrils to flare. “That was the easy part?”

Master Smythe sighed. He put his pipe to his lips-a very long-stemmed Outwaller pipe decorated in an extravagant excess of porcupine quill work-and inhaled, and the pipe lit itself. “Yes,” he said. “In the next phase, almost whatever we do, we will be noticed. Even now, our adversary must be wondering if there is another player in the game. Or if the dice are rigged. He has made two attempts to put his pawn on the throne of Alba. He has made a half-hearted attempt to bring about the collapse of Morea. I think he believes that his adversary is Harmodius. So far.” Master Smythe smiled with prim satisfaction. “Now-” He exhaled smoke. “Now he is bending his schemes to Ticondaga and Dorling. My own backyard.”

Ser Gavin stiffened.

“Down, boy,” Ser Gabriel said. “I’m sure that Mater can overcome anything we face.”

Master Smythe shook his head. “Ghause is the victim of her own vanity,” he said.

Gabriel nodded. “I’ve always thought so.”

Father Arnaud laughed, and so did Sauce. Bad Tom allowed a snort to escape him. “Comes by it honestly,” he said.

Gabriel pretended to fan himself with his hand. “If you are all quite finished,” he said.

“They love you,” Master Smythe said. “Laughing at you helps them deal with your tiresome arrogance.”

“You do just keep saying these things. You must be very difficult at parties.” Ser Gabriel nodded. “Can I try that thing?”

“He just wants to learn to blow smoke,” Sauce said.

Ser Gavin was unhappy and it showed on his face. He pulled on his own beard and then shook his head. “He’s going for Ticondaga? What are we doing to counter him?”

Master Smythe handed his pipe to the captain. “We’re trying not to be deceived. We’re trying not to tip our hand. He-you know who I mean-does not care a whit for Ticondaga. He wants Lissen Carak and what lies beneath it. But-but. Do you know how my experience of your reality functions?”

Silence fell.

“You can imagine from the intensity of our stares how much we’d like to know,” Ser Gabriel said. He coughed and handed the long pipe to Master Smythe.

Master Smythe laughed. “I had that coming. Very well. If I play no part in your affairs, I find it fairly simple to observe them in a general way. In fact, it is as easy as breathing for me to regard the general flow of your reality, past, present and, as you see it, future. Or, as I might put it in your excellent language, in your infinity of presents.”

He looked around. “But once I reach out to interfere-” He adjusted a cuff. He seemed to notice the back of his hand for the first time-stared at it, and as he stared it became less smooth, more like the back of a mature man’s hand. He raised his eyebrows as if surprised. “Hmm. At any rate, once I poke about, I change everything. As do all my kin. As do you, for that matter-heh, heh.”

He laughed for a moment. No one joined him.

“Bother. What I mean is that the closer I am to the action, the less I see. The fewer infinities of the present are eventuated.” He paused. “Understand?”

Sauce sighed.

Mag smiled. “Because you have chosen to interfere, you are in this sequence of events with us, and you can’t see much else.”

“Well said. Yes. But the delicate bit is that my presence here modifies the… the… the everything. It is a different everything than if I were not here. With our adversary and others also-I like the word interfere, it’s absolutely correct-with all this interference from my kind, none of us can see anything. It is possible that we’re drawing everything into a single thread.”

Mag spoke like a character in a passion play. “Fate,” she said. “Fate is when several of you all interfere together.”

“As perceived by you,” Master Smythe said. He raised his eyebrows. “At any rate, I know depressingly little about the next few months. But enough of us are now interfering that our adversary has to notice. Further, he’s pouring power into several of his shadows and his puppets and his tools, and the results will be… cataclysmic.”

“Couldn’t you do the same?” Tom asked. “I mean-if the bastard cheats, cheat back.”

Master Smythe nodded. “I already have. The sword by your side, Ser Thomas-the black powder that burns.” He put a hand to his chin. There was something wrong with the gesture, as if his arm joints had a little too much free play. “But if there are sides in this game, I represent a side that wishes for-the most powerful entities to play by the rules. I would hesitate to describe my side as good. I would merely emphasize that my side has a smaller body count and tends to minimize-” He glanced away. “Negative outcomes,” he muttered.

“That’s heartening,” Gabriel said. “We’re on the side with fewer negative outcomes. We could embroider that on the company flag.” He took a long pull at his ale. “I appreciate that you are not trying to be mysterious and difficult, but you are succeeding magnificently. May I try returning your words? You are saying that the more you help us, the less you can see of what’s actually happening. You are saying that there are several of you, which I guessed but I don’t think we’ve ever heard said plainly before. You’ll help us to a point, but to do more would jeopardize-” Here Ser Gabriel laughed. “Your moral convictions as a deity. Or a dragon.”

“Or whatever the fuck you are,” said Sauce.

“Yes,” Master Smythe said. “You are an apt pupil.”

“Can I ask you some questions?” Ser Gabriel asked.

Master Smythe drank. “Of course. But you understand that this is about entanglement with your… event sequence. The more questions I answer, the more entangled I am, even if I take no action.”

“Bless you,” Ser Gabriel said. “But that’s your trouble, not ours.”

“I agree,” said the dragon.

“Will Harmodius now change sides?” Gabriel snapped.

A pained look crossed Master Smythe’s usually immobile face. “Master Harmodius is far along the road,” he said. “So far that he may decide to be a side, rather than adopt one. It heartens me that he was so conservative with his powers in the recent contest. I cannot go beyond that.”

“Will de Vrailly kill the King?” Gabriel asked.

There was the sound of a dozen breaths all sucked in together.

Master Smythe let a trickle of smoke-artificial smoke, not his own-come out of his mouth. “The sequence, as it applies to the King of Alba, is now completely opaque to me,” he said. “I can’t see a thing.” He sighed. “But I do not see anything happening to the king except his becoming more of a tool.”

Ser Gabriel sat back. “Damn. How about this spring? Right now? The drove and the fairs?”

Master Smythe nodded. “Again, I am too close to all of these. My adversary must be very close to exposing me. But I see this much; Thorn has made alliance with the entity who calls himself ‘the Black Knight.’ They have both slaves and allies in the north-and elsewhere-and they are preparing a major effort. Their scouts have already entered the Adnacrags-indeed, a few foolish creatures attempted to pass my Circle and a dozen raids are aimed into the valley of the Cohocton even now. So yes-yes, I expect that you will be attacked on the road, and that efforts will be made to disrupt trade. My adversary understands trade.”

They all sat, digesting this packet of information.

“Will there be another attempt on the Emperor?” Ser Alcaeus asked.

“I’m not a prophet,” Master Smythe said with visible irritation. “And given your own hand in these events, you are perilously close to annoying me.”

Every head turned.

Alcaeus flushed. “I have chosen my side. I’m here.”

Master Smythe shrugged. “Any road, I’m too close to it. But I will say that any event that threatens the stability of the city is a threat to… everything.”

“How very enigmatic and helpful,” Father Arnaud said. “Will you attend the Council of the North? You are one of the important landowners.”

This sally caused Master Smythe to smile. “By your God, Father, that was witty.” He looked around. “No, I will not attend. We are, as I have tried to say, too close to the tipping point where our adversary detects my interference pattern. That would be very difficult for me. I cannot be seen to directly aid you or I am revealed. And then-then, we fail.” He shrugged. “Even this is an evasion. I can take certain actions-others are too revealing.”

“Because he is stronger than you?” Ser Gabriel asked.

Master Smythe frowned. “Yes.”

“Drat,” Ser Gabriel said.

“Is there a God?” asked Sauce.

“You don’t mince about, do you?” Master Smythe asked. “Child of man, I have no more idea than do you.” He took a long pull on his pipe. “I will say that as my kind is to your kinds, then it would not surprise me to find an order of beings that were to us as we to you, and so on. And perhaps, above us all, there is one. And perhaps that one caring and omnipotent, rather than uncaring, manipulative, and predatory.” He shrugged. “May I share a hard truth?”

“Do you do anything else?” the captain snapped back.

“All practitioners of the art-of whatever race-reach a point of practice where they ask: what is real?” He looked around. Mag shrugged, as if the question was unimportant, and Gabriel flinched.

“Yes,” he said.

“If you can manipulate the aethereal by the power of your will alone, and shape it to the image you hold only in your head,” Master Smythe said softly, “then it behooves all of us to ask what the act of belief actually contains. Does it not?”

Sauce shook that remark off the way she’d shake off an opponent’s inept blow. “But you don’t know, yerself,” she said. “One way or another.”

Gabriel suddenly had the same almost feral look of understanding that Sauce had worn when she understood that the Muriens family now controlled the whole length of the wall. “You mean that-my whole life”-he took a breath as if it hurt-“is not by God’s will or his curse, but by an interference pattern of your kind creating my fate?”

“Ah!” said Master Smythe. “That is, in fact, exactly what I mean.” He paused. “But not just my kind, children of men. All kinds. Your reality is the very result of the interference pattern of an infinite maze of wills. What else could it be?” He smiled, the smile of the cat about to eat the mouse. “Your kind twist the skein of fate, too. You yourself, ser knight. Mag, here. Tom Lachlan. Sauce. Alcaeus. All of you.”

Gabriel drained all the ale in his cup.

“Fuck you all, then,” he muttered.

Mag glanced at him. “I have a question, too,” she said quietly.

Master Smythe’s eyes rested on her. She met his squarely. And smiled. He had beautiful eyes, she thought.

“The Patriarch,” she began.

“A very worthy man,” Master Smythe said.

“He suggested-mm-that living on the frontier-with the Wild-had some effect on our powers.” Once she began to speak, it appeared that Mag wasn’t sure what she was asking.

Master Smythe pursed his lips. “An astute observation to which I will add one of my own. When two cultures face off in a war, do you know what the most common result is?”

Mag swallowed. “One is destroyed?” she asked, her voice suddenly husky.

Master Smythe shook his head as if she was an inept student. “No, no,” he said. “That scarcely ever happens. They come to resemble one another. War does that.”

“So you’re sayin’-” Mag paused. “That we are coming to resemble the Wild?”

“Mag, the Wild is a term of art used by men to describe all of us who are not men.” Master Smythe smiled wickedly. “Women might do well to join us, but I digress.” He seemed to find himself very funny, and he gasped silently for a moment. When no one joined him, he sighed. “The Wild is not a conspiracy. It’s a way of life. But the longer you are in contact with us, the more like us you’ll become. In fact-” He shrugged. “In fact, those with the long view would say that men-and women-are more adaptable than any of the other interlopers here, and are learning the Wild all too well.” Master Smythe spread his fingers on the table and looked at them with real curiosity. “You know that all the other races fear you. And that you are the-is there a nice way of putting this? The favourite tools of all the Powers. Inventive, endlessly violent, not terribly bright.” He smiled to take away the sting.

“Weapons?” Gabriel asked, his head coming up. “Tools?” He thought for a moment. “Defenders?”

“Goodness, ser knight, you don’t imagine you are from here, do you?” asked the dragon.

“Stop!” Bad Tom said. He got to his feet. “Stop. I’ve had eno’. Ma’ head hurts. I don’ need to know the secrets of the universe. I’m not altogether sure you aren’t talking out o’ your smoky wee arse.”

Father Arnaud got to his feet. He’d never agreed with Tom before, but it seemed a good place to start. “I’m not sure that they can handle any more, Master Smythe. The reality men build is more fragile than they know.”

“You are wise,” Master Smythe said. “Would you like to have back your power to heal?”

Father Arnaud reacted as if he had been struck.

Ser Gabriel rose and stood by him. “That was cruel,” Gabriel said.

Master Smythe looked puzzled. “In truth, I mean no cruelty. The good father-a worthy man, I suspect-has lost his powers due to the workings of a tiny creature… bah, it’s almost impossible to explain. But he thinks it is mysterious, perhaps mystically tied to his sin.” Master Smythe shrugged. “I understand feeling of sin. I believe in the pursuit of excellence, and I have failed myself. Too often.” He smiled like a man who grins through pain. “Perhaps this is why I fancy humans so much. Here.” He slapped Father Arnaud on the back and turned, just as the young woman with the broad shoulders entered with two foaming pitchers of ale.

She curtsied without spilling a drop.

“Do you like trout fishing?” Master Smythe asked.

The young woman lit up like a newly lit lantern. “I love the little ones in the high mountain streams, my lord,” she said.

“Yes,” he said. “They’re beautiful when they are young.” He placed the tray on the table and turned back to the room full of knights. “Good evening, allies. Or friends-I’d rather have some friends. The worst is coming. But as I said before: what we do is worth the doing. That’s all the reward we get.” He raised a mug.

All of the people in the room raised theirs. “To victory,” he said.

“To victory,” they all repeated. Master Smythe bowed. Then he took the young woman’s hand. “And the avoidance of negative outcomes.”

“Sir?” she asked.

“We’re going fishing,” Master Smythe said.

The door closed behind them.

Mag shrugged. “The girl wasn’t protesting,” she said.

“Oh, my God,” Father Arnaud said aloud.

Gabriel released a long breath, as if he’d been holding his for a long time. “Just so,” he said.

Morning came-earlier for some and later for others, and for a few, lucky or terribly unlucky as the case might be, there had been no sleep and now there was work.

For Nell, there were six horses to prepare. There was the captain’s magnificent eighteen-hand stallion, Ataelus, a new acquisition from Count Zac, a black demon with a changeable temper and a vicious bite. But on this crisp early day in Marius, Ataelus behaved himself with decorum. His only sign of equine restlessness was engendered by a mare-every few minutes, he’d raise his great head and pull his lips back over his teeth. But he was too well-bred to give voice to his thoughts.

Nell liked him. She put a lot of effort into his glossy black hide. He had four white stockings, which was judged unlucky by Albans and lucky by the steppe nomads of the east. Nell worked her way through her wallet of curry combs, coarse to fine, working at the horse with careful sweeps, wary of the places where his coat changed directions. She hummed as she worked.

She had every reason to be happy. Yesterday, the captain had praised her-by name-for her work. The wound on her face was healing nicely, with a little help from Mag, and would not leave a scar. Best of all, the new archer with all the muscles had made his views clear last night by running his tongue over her cheek.

Eventually she’d had to put a thumb in his side to curb his enthusiasm a little. What he had in mind led to babies, and she had other plans, but it had been delightful nonetheless.

She hummed Sauce’s song. No young cuckoos for her.

When she had three horses done, she went and woke him up. Once she’d made her views on intercourse plain, he’d become a fine companion and a source of warmth. And of fun.

Boys were like horses, Nell had found. A firm hand on the reins, and never a sign of fear, and all went jogging along. “Hey! Sleepy head!” she said, and gave him a loving kick in the ribs.

He mumbled, threw an arm out and got a mouthful of straw.

“Drums will beat any minute now, boyo. Get your muscular arse out of the straw. Ser Bescanon loveth not his defaulters. Hey!” He rolled over to avoid her, and she jabbed calloused thumbs into both his sides.

He exploded out of the straw like something out of the Wild.

She dissolved into giggles.

He tried to kiss her, and she reached into her belt pouch and handed him a five-inch length of liquorice root. “Your mouth smells like the jakes,” she said. “We have standards here, boyo. You took the captain’s silver-get moving.”

He rolled over, his dirty-blond-brown hair full of straw. “What do I do with it?” he asked.

“Farm boys,” she said, rolling her eyes. She was exactly one year from being a farm girl herself. “Captain says that cleanliness keeps you alive and that dirty soldiers die.” She spoke with the conviction of the convert. She knew damn well that the company were cleaner than any enemy they’d met except the Morean guards.

“Do I have to wash?” he asked, as if asking if he had to be turned into a snake by a sorcerer.

“Wednesdays and Sundays when you ain’t fighting,” she said. “Wash and clipped and shaved. When you been wi’ us a year, you can have a beard, but only if the primus pilus says so.”

“By Saint Maurzio!” the boy said. “You have a rule for everything.”

“Yep!” Nell said. “Now get your arse moving. I’ve been working an hour already.”

Out in the inn yard-as big as the drill field of many a castle-the Keeper had allowed four bonfires to burn all night. A hundred men and women were gathered around the four fires, all working-men brought wood, or arranged straight-sided kettles, or stirred them.

Nell took the boy by the hand and walked him across the yard to Ser Michael’s mess. The great knight himself was nowhere to be seen-no one expected knights to cook and clean unless they were in the shit. But his new squire, Robin, was sitting in his pourpoint with his master’s golden knight’s belt of heavy plaques across his knees. He and a pixy-faced Morean girl were polishing the plaques with rags dipped in ash.

Robin, who was a good sort and widely popular, was also a lord in his own right. Nell liked him because he kept order well, was polite to young girls and worked all the time. Nell mostly rated people by the amount of work they did.

She bent her knee. “My lord?” she said.

“Morning, Nell,” Robin said, still polishing. “Who’s he?”

“Took the silver penny last night. Hight Diccon Twig.”

Robin nodded to the new boy. “Welcome to the company, young Diccon.”

Robin was perhaps three years older than Diccon, but no one made any comment. Robin had fought well at the big battle outside Lonika-he was no longer “young Robin.” Soon he would be “Ser Robin.” Everyone knew it.

“My da-” Diccon looked at the ground. “… my da calls me ‘Bent.’”

Robin smiled. “No. Sorry, Diccon. It’s a good name, but a master archer had it and it died with him. Got another?”

“My mother calls me a God-Damned Fool,” Diccon said with a smile.

“Good, you’ll fit right in. Don’t worry about a nickname, Diccon. You’ll get one when it comes and not before.” Robin looked at Nell.

Nell said, “I think he’s to be your archer.”

Robin raised an eyebrow. “Well-we can certainly use the help. Diccon, get me four armloads of firewood and talk to that woman in the blue kirtle and the soldier’s cloak for further orders.”

“Who’s she?” Diccon asked.

Robin’s face became a shade less friendly. “Diccon, in the normal run of things, you don’t speak to me at all and you don’t ever ask me a question. Eventually-” He smiled at Nell. “Eventually you’ll be welcome to say what you please and ask all the questions you like. But just now, I gave you an order-to do work that will benefit everyone in our mess group. Don’t give me any shit. Go do your work.”

Nell stood with crossed arms and didn’t do anything to support the boy. He flushed with anger, but he swallowed it and went to get wood. Nell followed him. “She’s Lady Kaitlin’s maid, and she’s sort of the head non-combatant in your mess group. She and Robin give the orders.”

“What’s a fewkin’ mess group?” Diccon asked.

She looked at him, as if enjoying his confusion because it reminded her how far she’d come. “Do you know what a lance is?”

He didn’t stay in an ill-humour long. He grabbed a good armload of wood-nice dry maple-and started back to the fires. Just to be supportive, Nell took an armload, too.

“A spear about ten feet long?” he said.

“It’s a knight, a squire, an archer or two and a page,” she said. “Two lances make a mess group, with their lemans and their-”

“What’s a leman?” he asked.

“Lover. Whore. Partner. Wife. Husband. Whatever.” Nell laughed. “You only get to have one permanent-like with the captain’s permission.”

“Christ, it’s worse than being a monk!” Diccon said. He dropped his wood on the right pile and then stooped to stack it before going back for another load. Six pairs of watching eyes noted him stack the wood he’d just dumped with approval.

Nell shrugged. “Lemans cost money for food and bedding and everything. Any road, we don’t leave ours behind. So the veterans have lemans and they bring up the numbers of a mess group to ten or twelve. Everyone in that group eats together, sleeps together, and works together. Most of us fight together.” She grunted as she lifted a big chunk of oak.

He took it from her and held out his arms to be loaded up. “You in my group?” he asked.

“No, sweet. If I were, I wouldn’t buss you or allow any liberties. Got that? It’s a rule, too.” She smiled. “I’m the captain’s page. I’m in the command lance.”

“Is that special?” Diccon asked. His eyes were brimful of questions.

“It’ll be more than a mite special if I don’t have the horses ready for inspection. We move in two hours.” She dropped her load on the pile. “Stack mine, will ye?” she asked. “I’ll come see you later. Anything you fuck up, just say you’re sorry. Don’t cross the captain or the primus pilus. That’s all the advice I have.”

She went back to where Robin was sitting. He had a cup of hippocras in his hand and he was looking at Ser Michael’s sabatons, which had somehow started to rust overnight.

“I’m a dead man,” he said.

Nell thought that was probably true, but felt no pity. She bobbed her head. Squires got one bended knee first thing and then they were pretty much just folk. “I don’t think the new boy has anything,” she said. “Not even a blanket, and certes no horse or arms.”

Lord Robin sighed. “I’m going to catch it. Nell, can you ask Toby to help me?”

“If’n you’ll see to it that the new boy gets sorted,” Nell said. She smiled to show she wasn’t entirely serious.

Robin looked pained. “You like him,” he said.

Nell shrugged. “Yes, sir.”

Robin nodded. “Please find Toby,” he said.

Toby was attending the captain, and Nell didn’t even try and find him until all the horses were done. The sun was well up by the time she found them both, out behind the inn’s barns.

“Toby, Toby,” the captain said. “Again.”

Toby was stripped to hose and a doublet and both men were covered in sweat. They both had arming swords in their hands and, after the captain spoke, Toby cut hard at the captain’s head.

The captain retreated his front foot to his back foot so that he stood in a narrow stance and his forward leg was pulled out of an adversary’s range, standing straighter as he slipped the front foot back and covered his head with his sword. Garda di testa. Nell knew all the guards, now.

Then he uncoiled like a viper striking and Toby got his sword up. But his slip wasn’t deep enough-he didn’t pull back his front foot enough. Still, he covered his head well, and he countered-the same cut.

The captain pulled back his front foot and covered his head. And cut-

Toby raised his sword without retreating.

The captain’s sword moved so fast that it was like watching a hummingbird strike. It came to rest against Toby’s outthrust thigh.

Ser Gabriel frowned. “You’re tired. We’ll call it for today, Toby. But you have to learn to move your legs.”

Toby looked frustrated and angry.

The captain’s eye caught Nell. “Good morning, young lady. How is my beautiful new horse?”

“Eating, my lord,” Nell answered. “It’s all he does. He’ll need exercise today.”

The captain smiled. “If I don’t get on him today, you take him tonight. Yes?”

“Of course, my lord.”

He looked at her and raised an eyebrow. “Do you need something, Nell?”

“No, my lord. But I need Toby, if he’s at leisure.” She hoped that Robin appreciated how well she was keeping her end of the bargain, because this was leading with her chin. The captain could be savage, especially early in the morning after he’d been drinking.

Toby sheathed his arming sword after looking at the blade for nicks. “I’m with you, Nell,” he said.

The captain made a sign that they could talk. He was examining his own blade, the new red-gripped arming sword that matched his long sword for war-gilt-steel guard and round pommel, and two newfangled finger rings on the guard.

“What do you need?” Toby asked. He was breathing hard.

“Robin needs you. He’s hard pressed for time and water got at Ser Michael’s armour.”

“Sweet Jesu and all the saints!” Toby shook his head. “If a man will spend all night in the arms of a-” He looked at Nell. “I’ll go.”

“Feel free to give him some shit,” Nell said. “But I promised to fetch you.” Whatever Toby lacked in fighting skills-he was late to the life of arms and a slow physical learner-he was the best metal polisher in the company.

The captain had not sheathed his sword. “Nell-do I gather that you are at leisure?”

Nell’s heart did a back-flip. “Er… yes?” she said.

The captain nodded. “I don’t think I’ve paid enough attention to your training, lass. Have you been practising?”

“Yes, my lord. Sword and poleaxe. Ser Bescanon and Ser Alison. And gymnastika with Ser Alcaeus and swimming with-” She flushed. “With the women.”

The captain nodded. “You relieve my mind, Nell. But I know you took a wound in Morea and I have a mind to be a little more attentive to your life of arms. Draw.”

She had her arming sword on her hip and she took her sword carefully from her scabbard.

She was afraid of the captain at the best of times. She admired him, but he was older, bigger, and he had a temper. And his eyes glowed red when she made him angry or frustrated him.

Standing across the grass from her, he was as tall as Ataelus and his sword seemed huge, but the worst of it was that his eyes weren’t red. They were reptilian.

“I’m going to make some simple attacks,” he said. “Try not to die.” He smiled. “It would take me years to find another page as good as you.”

That cheered her up.

He struck.

She’d gotten into a guard-Ser Alison said always do what you know, and she knew that she liked having her sword out in front of her. In a world where everyone was bigger, stronger and longer limbed than she, Nell had learned that basic centreline guards were for her.

She flicked her blade into frontale, crossing the captain’s blade. His wrist was like iron, but she’d swaggered blades with Wilful Murder and Long Paw and even Ranald Lachlan in the practice yards of Morea.

He bounced back and cut again. She made sure to slip her front foot and sure enough, he cut at her leg.

He saluted her. “It’s such a pleasure to find that someone is paying attention.” He cut at her head-left/right in two tempi.

She covered and covered, but the second was sloppy and late.

He did it again, faster. But she was ready and made both covers.

He thrust.

He left the needle sharp point of his arming sword at the laces of her pourpoint. “Up until that point, you were positively excellent, except your sloppy draw.”

All she could think was, How can anyone be that fast?

From that point until they were summoned to breakfast, he made her draw her sword and return it without looking at her scabbard. She put the point of her sword through the web of her left thumb and cursed. He made her continue, and she hated him.

Father Arnaud came out in his black pourpoint. It was a handsome garment for a priest sworn to poverty-black wool velvet, closely embroidered in organic curves that emphasized his physique, which was excellent even by the company’s standards.

“You’re my third customer this morning,” the captain joked, waving his sword at his confessor. “Nell, don’t be angry. You are coming along nicely. But if you fumble your draw you never get to test your swordsmanship, because you’re dead. And if you can’t sheath your sword while you watch your opponent-” He shrugged. “You might still be dead.”

Nell bent her knee to the captain. “Thank you, my lord, for the lesson.”

Ser Gabriel nodded his head. “Every morning, now, I think-you and Toby.”

She had moved from anger to floating on a cloud. Praise? For her use of arms? Training with Ser Gabriel his self?

Nell wanted to be a knight. So badly she could taste it. And she knew she’d just moved a rung up that ladder.

“She pricked her hand,” Ser Gabriel said to Father Arnaud.

The priest smiled. It was a happy smile, a joyous smile. “May I see?” he asked.

She held out her hand.

He made a face and said, “In nomine patris,” and her hand was whole. Just like that. It didn’t even hurt.

“My God!” she said, shocked.

“Yes,” said Father Arnaud. He beamed.

Breakfast had been called twice, but one of the advantages of being the captain of a rich company of mercenaries is that you know someone will keep your food hot.

“He doesn’t threaten your beliefs?” the captain asked as he stepped to the right, trying to baffle his adversary’s patient attempts to change the tempo.

Father Arnaud smiled. “Not in the least,” he said. “If belief were easy, everyone would do it.”

The captain’s sword flicked out. The two men were wearing steel gauntlets as a concession to the sheer danger of sparring with sharps. Father Arnaud twisted and flicked the captain’s blade up and to his own right but his counter-cut found the captain out of distance.

“He scares the crap out of me,” the captain said. He cut down from a high inside guard-sopra di braccio-but it was a feint. Father Arnaud pulled his hand back but the captain’s blade wasn’t there anymore, but describing the almost-lazy arc of an envelopment. Father Arnaud slipped it with a wrist-flick to find that it, too, had been a feint.

“That’s it,” he said with the captain’s sword at his chest. “Now I know you are the spawn of Satan. No mortal man can use a double envelopment with a war sword.”

The captain laughed so hard he had to go down on one knee. “You should fight my brother,” he said, breathing like a smith’s bellows. “They must have searched your entire order for a man so good with both weapons and flattery,” he wheezed. “Hah!” He laughed again. “It was pretty good. I was afraid… I don’t know.”

“You are a curious man,” Father Arnaud said. “You were afraid that I would be hurt by your friend the dragon. Instead, he healed me, and in more than just my own powers.”

Gabriel sat back on his heels. “I’m glad. Let’s eat.”

They walked companionably into the common room. There were boards laid on a trestles and long benches and boxes, and grey-clad drovers sat intermixed with the knights and archers of the company. It was warm, and there was food-piles of cut bacon in big, deep wooden bowls cut from tree burls, and bread fried in fat with egg on it; good maple syrup in pitchers, buttermilk and hot wine and sassafras tea. Again, the inn staff moved like the professionals they were-huge wooden platters of food emerged from the kitchens to replace those emptied by guests-hot wine was produced, and honey.

There was a hush when the captain came into the hall, and then everyone went back to eating. The captain sat at a table with Father Arnaud, Sauce, and Ser Alcaeus. Bad Tom paused to talk to a drover and then came and settled next to Sauce, making the bench creak.

“Well?” Tom asked.

Gabriel shook his head. “We have to be very careful about our talking,” he said.

“Do you trust him?” Sauce asked with a head jerk to indicate the absent Wyrm.

Gabriel wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something bad and shook his head rapidly. He pulled a knife and a pricker from his baselard sheath and began to eat.

Tom nodded. “I need to move while the weather holds,” he said. “My lads will be that sorry to miss another night here, but I have-” He shrugged. “Three thousand head or more for Harndon. Last year the whole herd went to Lissen Carak. And the army.”

Gabriel didn’t quite look up, but their eyes met. “You’re going to Lissen Carak and then to Harndon? Yes?”

Tom frowned. “If I can find a buyer at Southford, I’m of a mind to sell him part of the herd for Lissen Carak-for the fair.”

“I need you at Ser James’s council,” the captain said.

Tom was entirely reasonable. “I wouldn’t miss it. But that’s Albinkirk, and I don’ need to risk me beasties one league west o’ the fords.” He leaned forward. “Keeper says there’s daemons in the woods and the Huran are moving.”

Ser Gabriel’s smile was thin. “Then we should probably stop talking and get a move on. Corporals and above, outside in the yard. Then we move.”

His authority was so palpable that Ser Gavin almost saluted his brother.

Armoured and ready to ride, Sauce stood by her horse in her ancient arming jacket, the one she’d stopped wearing almost a year before. She’d been forced into it this morning because her new, beautiful scarlet arming coat with its finely worked grommets and fancy quilting had torn-two grommets ripped clean through by the lace that held her right arm harness. The old one was smelly and too tight and crisp with old sweat on old leather and linen so filthy it felt like felt.

She mused on the feeling. Considering, as she munched an apple still hale after a winter in the inn’s cellars, that she’d once been used to clothes this filthy; she’d once been quite a tough thing, and now she chafed, her shoulders unused to the rough fabric.

“I’m getting soft,” she said.

Mag was already up in her wagon seat, high above Sauce. “Don’t you believe it, my sweet,” Mag muttered. “What you are getting is older.”

Sauce winced.

Mag was sewing away at her nice arming coat, and Sauce, who was virtually blind to both ops and potentia was still able to feel the strength of the older woman’s working, the way a blindfolded prisoner might feel the kiss of the sun.

Around them, one by one, the knights and men-at-arms of the company came out of the common room, paid their tabs and tallies at a long table set in the yard for the purpose and went to get the last points tied on their harnesses, or to get a strap or buckle looked at.

Ser Dagon La Forêt paused by Sauce’s horse. He was shifting uncomfortably inside his new six-piece breastplate. He settled it on his hips and winced. He gave Sauce a rueful smile. “Must we ride in harness every day? Couldn’t we let some of the bruises heal?”

Sauce was pleased at some remove to know that she wasn’t the only one bitching.

Ser George sighed. “If there’s a safer place in all Nova Terra than the country around the Inn of Dorling,” he said.

Mag laughed and nodded her agreement. “Only a fool would come inside the Circle of the Wyrm,” she said.

The Wyrm of Ercch-sometimes known as Master Smythe-held a territory many leagues across, centred on the white-topped Mons Draconis. The drovers and the inn lived within the Wyrm’s claim, and prospered. Travellers were seldom disturbed, although a few faint-hearted souls claimed to have seen a flying creature as big as a ship and refused to pass that way again. Merchants, on the other hand, always travelled across the Wyrm’s dominion.

Sauce handed her apple core to her riding horse. “By all accounts, the Outwallers came right up the stream and hit the drovers-inside the circle,” she said.

Ser Dagon grimaced.

“Company’s never been ambushed,” said an archer, the master tailor, Hans Gropf. He was standing with his palfrey to hand and two small boys waxing his leather gear at his feet.

Ser Dagon nodded his acknowledgement.

“Company’s only four years old,” Wilful Murder muttered. He stood in the middle of the yard, watching everyone with his mad eyes. He was holding all the horses-Nell’s job, but he liked the chit and she’d run off to get her boy onto the right pony, or somesuch. “Lots o’ time to get bounced and massacred. When we get soft. Mark my words.”

Ser Dagon shook his head. “Well-I’ll just suffer in silence, then.”

“If’n we start any later, we might as well wait ’til tomorrow,” Wilful Murder muttered, loudly enough to wake the dead.

Sauce saw the captain, standing in the inn door. Bad Tom came out and embraced the innkeeper’s eldest, Sarah, his dead brother’s wife. It was quite an embrace. Some of the pages looked away, and some whooped.

Mag’s head turned, and Sauce saw her searching the baggage train-all apparently a chaos of horses and wagons and donkeys and wicker baskets. Looking for her daughter Sukey. Who had been Tom’s lover for a year and more, and now was publicly displaced.

The captain-Gabriel, as he now was called-materialized at her elbow, as the bastard had the habit of doing, with Ser Michael and Ser Bescanon at his heels. Just looking at him made her smile.

“Where’s the good count?” Ser Gabriel asked.

“We had a trifling disagreement,” Sauce said in a put-on version of the genteel accent. “He’s off grooming his vanity.”

Ser Gabriel’s face twitched but gave no more away. “Sauce, will you take your banda and cover the baggage train?”

Sauce nodded.

Ser Gavin walked up. Apples were the fashion of the day, and he tossed one to his brother. “Can we get moving?” he said impatiently.

Tom appeared. If he was concerned that he had just publicly humiliated the daughter of the most powerful sorceress in a hundred leagues, he gave no sign. “You called?” he asked.

The captain nodded. “You’re not my primus pilus,” he said. “You’re the Drover. I can’t order you into my line of march.”

Tom laughed. “Nah-never think it. I’ll follow you. The fewkin’ sheep are so slow I’d just as soon butcher the lot.”

The captain nodded sharply, all business. “Right, then.” He looked around for Count Zac, found him, and beckoned him. When the short easterner rode up, the captain bowed, since, technically, he and Zac were peers. Zac returned the bow. He glared at Sauce.

Mag narrowed her eyes at Tom.

Ser Dagon smiled innocently at Ser Gavin. Ser Gavin, who was particularly eager to reach his lady love at Lissen Carak, shifted uncomfortably, as if by moving his hips he could get the column moving.

The captain sounded remarkably like himself. “Friends,” he said, “I begin to suspect that if I don’t offer you a constant diet of danger and drama, you go and manufacture it for yourselves.” He looked around. “Very well-Count Zac, if you will be pleased to lead the way. Ser Michael with me, then Gavin, and then Ser Dagon followed by Ser Bescanon. Baggage last, covered by Ser Alison. The drove brings up the rear. They’ll raise a lot of dust, and we don’t want to be the drag.”

“You are taking the precautions of war,” Count Zac said, somewhere between a protest and a query.

“Master Smythe made his views plain,” he said. “There’s a big force north of us, forming at the edge of the Adnacrags. We’re leaving the Empire and entering Alba. The sun has been warm long enough for every Outwaller in the world to have slipped south past Ticondaga. Right? We’re at war. When someone like Master Smythe gives you a warning, you’re a fool not to heed it.”

Their nods were uniform.

“Good. Let’s ride,” the captain said in his captain voice.

That voice relieved Sauce. The more he was Gabriel, the less she felt she knew him. She preferred the captain, with his steady arrogance and his adamantine self-assurance. Gabriel had entangling alliances that the captain didn’t have-a mother, a family, a set of alien obligations.

Sauce got her steel-clad leg over her riding saddle and waved at her squire, who had both her chargers. “Keep close,” she said. If the captain said war, it paid to listen.

The new trumpeter sounded a long call-the last summons. Ser Alison trotted her horse along the restless ranks of her ten lances, arrayed just outside the inn’s gates. Then she placed herself at their head and saluted the captain as he rode out with Ser Michael and the banner-three lacs d’amour in gold on black. Father Arnaud carried the banner today. The company was split into three, Sauce knew, and had new recruits in every lance, so that discipline had to be fiercer than usual and little things like saluting were suddenly important. The company’s gonfalonier, Ser Bescanon, was now the primus pilus, and few of the oldsters took well to his taking Bad Tom’s role. No new banner bearers had been appointed, and the company’s well-loved Saint Catherine was in Liviapolis with Ser Milus and the White Banda.

Behind the captain’s own extended lance-banner, trumpeter, his own squire, Toby Pardieu, and his page, Nell, and his archer, Cully-came the lances of his household; Father Arnaud had acquired his own lance, with two squires and two pages-a popular man, for all that Sauce found him hard to talk to. Then Ser Francis Atcourt, with his squire, page, and pair of veteran archers. Then Angelo di Laternum, once Ser Jehan’s squire, now leading his own lance. The last two knights were magnificent in new armour that flashed in the sun; Chris Foliak, always a popinjay, and Ser Phillipe de Beause, who was a famous enough jouster to have his own invitation to the royal tournament. Behind them came the newest recruits-two gentlemen of Occitan, Ser Danved Lanval and Ser Bertran Stofal and their squires, pages and archers. Ser Danved was almost as wide as Ser Bertran was tall, but they were veteran lances from the south, and they were accounted fine jousters. Ser Danved had a loud voice that was almost always on offer-a contrast to his brother-in-arms, who was almost always silent.

The command lances were all in scarlet and gold, even the pages. The pages wore eastern turbans with plumes over their helmets, and had curved sabres, Etruscan steel breastplates, and hornbows. They rode fine eastern mares, small horses with elegant heads and endless enthusiasm.

The command lances reeked of opulence and military power. Sauce knew it was advertising, but in war, advertising paid off as well as it did in prostitution, and she laughed to think about the similarities between her first profession and her second.

The command lances turned sharply off the road after trotting out of the gate and formed from column into line facing her across the road. The captain caught her eye and smiled. She saluted again with her sword.

Count Zac cantered across her vision, beautifully intercepting his troop of Vardariotes, two dozen steppe nomads who were at least two thousand leagues from home and two hundred from their barracks at Liviapolis. Sauce had no idea what bargain the captain had struck with the Emperor, but it had included the loan of her lover, and she thanked him silently, even if the man was being an arse this morning.

Zac looked at her, horse perfectly collected under him as he passed as if in review in front of the captain. He had the golden mace of his imperial authority in his fist, and he used it to salute the captain, and then he turned and flashed her one of his wide-open grins.

She relaxed. She hadn’t realized how much their spat had put her on edge, but as soon as she relaxed, she mocked herself inwardly for allowing a man-any man-to dictate anything to her.

Count Zac and his troop wore the scarlet and gold of the imperial livery. For the first time, Sauce noted that, since the captain had added gold to his own livery, his command lances matched the imperial livery.

She frowned.

Ser Michael’s lances-he commanded eight of them, this trip-appeared next. He had the bulk of the new recruits, and some men, even men-at-arms and knights, didn’t have their scarlet yet. They were out of scarlet cloth, and only the fair at Lissen Carak or the shops of Harndon would improve their lot. But they still made a brave sight-twenty men-at-arms and as many archers and pages, although Sauce could see some awkward young men and a shockingly slim young woman who lacked a saddle, an arming coat, or even a sword. She had a bow over her shoulder and she rode barefoot.

“Who’s the trull?” Sauce asked without turning her head.

Ser Christos-a Morean veteran with enough experience to lead an army, who’d been assigned to her, a man who’d actually wounded Bad Tom in single combat-grunted. “You should see her shoot,” he said. “I didn’t catch her name.” His Alban was halting but coming along, and his tone was confiding but respectful. He’d given her no trouble and in fact, despite his odd accent and weird views on religion, was like an old veteran and not a new recruit, so she turned in her saddle and gave him a gap-toothed smile. “Someone should get her some kit,” she said.

Mag had rolled her slab-sided wagon to the edge of the road, at the head of twenty such. She leaned down. “We’re out of everything,” she said. “And I mean, everything.”

Sauce was watching Ser Gavin’s lances pass by. They were well-ordered. Ser Gavin had mostly Albans, and he’d picked up four new lances at the inn, young men in search of “adventure.” So his troop also looked like a patchwork quilt of unmatched horses and mixed armour.

Ser Dagon had veterans, too, and his men looked worn and able, at least to a professional eye. Not a buckle out of place, and most of the brass and bronze polished, after a night of heavy drinking. For Sauce’s money, the apparently indolent Ser Dagon was a more natural choice for primus pilus and she was still puzzled that the captain had given Bad Tom’s job to the former captain of the Emperor’s mercenaries, an Occitan knight who hadn’t had any great reputation in the Emperor’s service and whose company Bad Tom had wrecked in a single charge. But as the Occitan knight’s lances came down the road, Sauce had to admit they looked good, and the man knew all the Archaic war manuals that the captain worshipped as other men worshipped… well, the Bible. The Occitan knight’s men rode matched bays, every one of them, knight, page or archer. Almost all of them had scarlet arming coats or at least temporary surcoats, and their metal was all well-polished.

Ser Alison looked back at her own. She had a mixed bag. The Moreans liked her-they’d nicknamed her “Minerva” and none of them gave her any crap, and her Morean Archaic was native. So she had more men-at-arms with worse equipment but excellent drill. She needed to come up with a great deal of gold to pay for a hell of a lot of new harness.

But they were good men and women, and they were hers. The last fight had promoted her to sub-contractor-she now hired her own lances and took a bigger cut, instead of merely working for the captain as a junior officer. Short of having her own company, she had arrived.

She grinned. The sun was shining, and she was a knight. She still had her sword in her hand from saluting the captain and the banner, and she turned her riding horse and waved her sword like some knight of romance. “On me!” she called.

Her knights and their lances filed off from the right, enveloping Mag’s wagons between two long files of fighters. As soon as they were clear of the stone-wall-lined roads through the endless sheep and cattle pens-all full of the drove-she raised one gauntleted hand over her head and moved it in a circle, and her pages left the column to rove over the countryside alongside the column, east and west.

That always gave her joy-a mere hand motion, and thirty people sprang into action.

Sauce herself trotted alongside Mag’s wagon. Her riding horse didn’t quite bring her level with the head woman.

“All done,” Mag said, biting off her thread with sharp teeth. “And now I don’t have any more scarlet silk twist, either.”

Sauce smiled. “Thanks, Mag. It’s beautiful. Your work is always beautiful.” She handed her coat back to Robin, who turned his horse and went back along the column to put the precious garment safely in a pannier.

Mag smiled, looking both tired and old. “Thanks, dear.” She shrugged. “I was making something, and now-”

Sauce knew that she’d lost her man-Ser John le Baillie. One of the best of the men. Only a middling warrior, but patient and good at almost everything. She’d liked John, who’d never given her any shit. Unlike many men.

“Have you misplaced it?” Sauce asked.

Mag shook her head. “I’ve lost interest in it,” she said. “I was making John a nice pourpoint. Like yours.”

“Oh,” said Sauce. She felt foolish. Mag was as well armoured as the captain, in her own way. She never gave out much of her feelings, which Sauce rather liked.

Sauce tried to change the subject. “Have you noticed the captain’s got his household in the imperial colours?” she asked.

Mag laughed. “Noticed? I cut the cloth, Sauce.” She smiled. “Cloth of gold. Sometimes I find all this a little hard to believe.”

“Me, too,” Sauce allowed.

They rattled along for half a league. For all their late start, it was a beautiful day. Behind them, the Green Hills rolled away to the north, with Mons Draconis rising to the north-east, its volcanic cone appearing soft in the middle distance and out of proportion to the rolling downs on either hand.

But ahead, like a wall across their path, stood the forest. It didn’t mark the edge of the Wyrm’s circle, which was a good deal farther on, but it did mark the border of the Wild. Morea was old, and settled, and the hand of man lay heavily there, but to the west of the vales of the Green Hills the woods grew tall and old, and despite the royal roads, a squirrel could leap from tree to tree from the wood line ahead all the way to the northern end of the Adnacrags or west to well past the wall where it came south of the inner sea.

“Hard to think that all this was ours once,” Sauce said.

Mag was coming home to her own country, but she nodded. “Certes,” she said. “When I was a girl, we used to play knights and monsters in the old shielings behind our house. A travelling friar told me they were part of a town-a really big town. All this was farms, once. Men lived here.”

The trees ahead were as tall as church spires. “That was a long time ago,” Sauce said.

“Aye,” Mag admitted. “Two hundred years and more before Chevin was fought.”

“There’s now as much Wild inside the wall as outside,” Sauce went on.

Mag nodded. “I heard there’s as many folk living in the Wild as in the civilized lands,” she said. “The Wyrm-Master Smythe as is-said something to the point.” She smiled at Sauce. “So what’s the Wild? If’n folk live there? And what’s civilized?”

Sauce, who’d grown up as a whore, didn’t need that comment explained at all.

Because it was early spring, many of the trees were still bare, although there was a sort of green haze over the distant woods that suggested growth and budding. And there was no dust. The royal road under their hooves and wheels was stone. Sometimes it washed out and had to be repaired, and some of the patches could crumble but mostly it was hundreds of leagues of flat, straight road, wide enough for two wagons abreast.

Behind them on the road came the Drover’s household, a dozen mounted carls with heavy axes on their shoulders. Thanks to Tom, they rode instead of walked. They wore full mail and gleaming helmets, some of apparently eldritch design with tall peaks and long bills and scallops and whorls. Hillmen were much given to display. Gold glinted from their belts and harnesses.

Bad Tom made no move to ride up and join either Sauce or Mag.

“You going to speak to Tom about your Sukey?” Sauce asked.

“No,” Mag said, in a tone that suggested that no further discussion needed to be had on that subject.

Sauce considered riding out and inspecting her outriders.

She tried a different approach. “You ever consider what the captain’s actually after?” she asked Mag.

Mag smiled. It was her warmest smile of the day so far. “Yes,” she said softly. “All the time.”

Sauce shook her head ruefully. “I just want it to go on and on. Adventure after adventure. But he’s after somewhat, ain’t he?”

Mag nodded. “Yes, dear.”

Sauce turned and looked at the older woman. “Don’t patronize me,” she spat.

Mag rolled her eyes. “No. Sorry, sweet. But none of you think about it much. You just swing your swords and ride on, don’t you?” She looked north. “He’s made himself the Duke of Thrake.”

“But that’s not for real.” Sauce looked up at the older woman. “He’s not going to sit at Lonika and administer justice and be a great lord, is he?” In fact, she realized, she’d watched him do so for five days after the battle at the crossroads. As if he’d been born to it.

Which, of course, he had.

“Shit,” she said aloud.

“I think it is for real,” Mag said. “I think he’s made two fortunes in three years, and then he’s added a great principality which will, at least for a few years, pay his taxes-a steady income so great I can’t really imagine how much money he’ll have. And he sank his claws into the fur trade. He’s getting a tithe on the imperial tax on furs. He and his father now-literally-own the entire border with the Wild.”

“He hates his father,” Sauce said.

Mag looked interested. Everyone in the company knew that Sauce went way back with the captain, but few had the spirit to question her.

“Hate’s too strong,” Sauce admitted. “But his father and mother did something-awful. Rotten. An’ he ran away.” She looked at Mag. “He’s not just going to share the wall with them.”

Mag looked ahead at the line of trees. “Never is a long time,” she said slowly. “And power is even thicker than blood. Ser Gavin is in contact with Gabriel’s mother. I know.” She smiled fastidiously. “Gabriel’s mother is the most powerful of her kind I’ve ever encountered.” She frowned. “Except the former Richard Plangere. As great as Harmodius, but all green.”

Sauce frowned. “You mean all this-riding on errantry and rescuing princesses and getting contracts-it’s all just another play at power?” She spat. “Fuck. I don’t believe it.”

Mag laughed. “For the life you’ve led, child, you can be naive. What else is it all for, to the likes of them?”

“He’s not one of them!” Sauce said.

Mag sighed. “I suspect I like him as much as you do, sweet,” she said, as she might to a child who’d just had her first courses. “But this is what they do. They are not like you and me. They’re like animals in the Wild. They play for power.”

Towards evening, the pace picked up, and they moved quickly. Sauce knew from her outriders that they were passing through the battlefield where the drove had been massacred by Outwallers last year, and that no one wanted to camp among the bones and the ghosts. The column began to string out, and a mist rose out of the deep valley of the stream.

Sauce left the column to check her outriders. Many of her Moreans had never seen woods like this-great beeches and oaks seventy feet high, with a few birches interspersed, the boles so big that two men couldn’t pass their hands around them and the undergrowth almost non-existent, especially under the oaks, although there could be tangles of blown-down limbs or even whole trees uprooted. Maple trees like green cathedrals rose above the beeches. It was beautiful, if you let yourself look.

Besides the woods, she was still grimly pleased with what she found. The Morean stradiotes knew their business, and their pages were mostly tenants and what an Alban would have called sergeants and what they lacked in experience they made up for in caution. Sauce moved along their line, pleased that each man-no women-kept his partners in sight. Evening made the woods noisy, and there were enough large animals moving to keep the vedettes awake.

Sauce wished for Gelfred, but the green-clad huntsmen were away. On another mission. Not to be discussed.

He was playing for power. She saw it now, and it pissed her off. He was doing something he knew the rest of them wouldn’t approve of-which was why he’d split the company. She knew that Ranald and Gelfred and the loathsome Kronmir had all gone somewhere. She had her suspicions that they’d gone south to Harndon.

These were surface thoughts, because the caution her outriders were showing was infectious, and because she had enough experience of the Wild to know that something was wrong.

She cantered up behind a pair of her men, Spiro and Stavros, both watching the woods across a glade to the south. Both had their bows in their hands.

Sauce reined in. “Stavros, back to the wagons, tell Mag we have something-not an alarm, but time to be careful. Then up the column, find the captain and get his arse out here. With my compliments.”

The man snapped a crisp salute, turned his horse on its hindquarters and raced away.

Spiro frowned. “Could be a deer,” he admitted.

Sauce nodded. She was still on her riding horse and sorry for it. “No self-respecting deer would be this close to a moving column,” she said.

She felt foolish, having ridden out of the column without a heavy lance or her fighting helmet. She loosened her sword in its sheath.

Something moved across the clearing.

And the mist was rising. The sun was just on the point of going down to the west-they were late on the road.

About another hour of light.

“We’re too exposed here,” she said calmly. “Back away.”

Spiro was delighted to concur, and they backed their horses among the trees-from copse to copse, one turning and then the other, covering each other.

Her opinion of Spiro went up and up. She’d barely met him, but he was solid and dependable and his head was everywhere. He was clearly shit-scared, and equally clearly good at dealing with it.

She saw movement to the west, and then a flash of reassuring scarlet. At the same time she saw her next pair of outriders waving, and she and Spiro bore west and north through a tangled thicket and emerged into another glade. Count Zac was there with four of his men.

She was so glad to see him that she felt a moment’s disorientation, and then she realized how much terror she’d felt-

“Ware!” she shouted. Its approach had been gradual, but now she knew the feeling. She’d felt it at Lissen Carak. Some of the creatures of the Wild exuded terror.

Spiro looked over his shoulder-raised his bow-

Sauce dragged her sword clear and cut-

The thing leapt. Sauce smelled the burned soap smell and saw the bright red crest. Her blow was parried with the bronze haft of a heavy stone axe-a magnificent weapon of polished lapis that came back at her like a nightmare.

The daemon sprouted a feathered shaft. She got her sword on the haft and let the weight of the blow slide off her like water off a roof as her riding horse panicked between her legs-and bolted.

The daemon-twelve feet of muscled armour and blood-red webbed crest and gills-slammed his lapis axe into Spiro, killing him instantly, crushing his ribs into his heart. Then it rotated its hips, pointed the elegant bronze staff of his axe and a beam of coherent light blew Count Zac out of his saddle. The little man landed like a sack of wheat.

Sauce was wrestling with her reins. When her palfrey stopped and reared, Sauce rolled over the horse’s rump-in armour-and landed on her feet. She turned.

The adversarius was forty feet away, twice her height, and glowed with arcane power.

Sauce had a fortune in wards on her harness-one from Mag and one from the Red Knight himself.

His blue-white fire struck her in the chest.

And dispersed.

“Fuck me,” Sauce said, and charged.

The daemon shaman hesitated, obviously disconcerted by her attack and the failure of his sorcery. It gathered power-Sauce saw that much.

A gob of white fire travelled across the shaded glade like a ball thrown by a grown man. It struck the daemon low, on the hip, and the daemon’s belt of what appeared to be emeralds burst into fire.

The thing stumbled, looked wildly around, and another ball of white fire struck it in the torso just as Sauce’s sword cut at the thing’s outthrust, scaled leg. Blood and fire sprayed in every direction, the axe flashed at Sauce and she slipped her lead foot and made a two-handed cover. The axe slammed into her blade and snapped it, and the point of her own sword cut into her left hand right through a heavy gauntlet.

But she was otherwise uninjured, and when a third gout of fire struck the daemon, it shuddered and said one word, and was-

– gone.

Count Zac was not badly hurt. Spiro, on the other hand, was messily dead. The captain’s post-mortem that night was highly complimentary to Sauce. He ended by saying, “Let’s try not to lose any more.” He shook his head and looked at Mag.

“I hit the damned thing three times,” Mag said. “It had a layered protection and some serious skills.”

The captain had a cup of watered wine in his fist and he was sitting in a camp chair with most of his officers. Zac was still in Father Arnaud’s hands.

“What was it doing out there, alone?” the captain asked. He looked around. “We’re still in the circle.”

Tom, who was grumpy because he’d missed a fight and grumpier because everyone was praising Sauce, spat. “Wild’s got to have young fools as much as folk,” he said.

“You’d know,” Sauce said.

The captain laughed. “I thought you two were sick, or something. I suspect that we are watched. My sense of the arcane in the air is that our daemon came the way he went. That’s why it was so clever of Sauce to understand.” He looked at Mag.

Mag nodded. “That’s consistent with what I felt-pulses of potentia. If it was powerful enough, it came-and then went.”

“The outriders surprised it,” Sauce said. “It didn’t expect resistance so far out from the column.”

Ser George rolled his eyes. “Once again, the omnipotent captain reads the enemy perfectly.”

Ser Danved laughed and pounded his saddle. “He does posture on and on…” He looked around.

Ser Francis Atcourt slapped him on the back. “Don’t worry, he loves being told when he’s posturing,” he said.

Instead of rising to the quip, Ser Gabriel smiled. “In fact, Master Smythe warned me pretty carefully. I cannot claim this one, and thus I’ll try not to be insufferably glad that a powerful mage-warrior couldn’t even get a view of our column.” He was silent a moment. “We’ll bury Spiro in the morning, and then, I’m afraid, we’ll march the whole company over his grave.”

Ser Bescanon had fought the Wild most of his youth, but he was shocked. “That’s desecration!” he said.

The captain shrugged. “Less a desecration than having something dig his corpse up and eat it,” he said. “We’re in the Wild. Let’s keep that in mind.”

“I miss Morea already,” Ser Michael said. “Everyone remember how we said fighting in Morea was dull? We were fools.”

The next morning arrived earlier than anyone wanted. And Sauce began to see that Ser Bescanon might have talents in Bad Tom’s direction after all. He had the entire quarter guard out and moving through camp, waking everyone. The captain’s trumpeter sounded the call every minute for ten minutes, and the woods rang with his trumpet. It was freezing cold; wooden buckets had a rime of frost, and the horse lines were horse-huddles.

It was not their first day on the road, but it was the earliest start with all the new recruits. Tents were slow coming down. Ser Gavin, temporarily in charge of his brother’s household, had trouble finding enough spare bodies to get his brother’s great pavilion packed, and Mag had to shriek like a hen wife to get her wagons packed. The sun climbed in the sky, and Count Zac emerged from Father Arnaud’s tent pale and shaken.

Sauce threw her arms around him. “I thought you were fucking dead,” she said.

“Me, too,” Zac admitted. “I owe Kostas the shaman. Big time.”

Father Arnaud smiled at them both. And then they sensed his attention leaving them, and they both turned.

A flight of faeries emerged out of the morning mist. They flitted about the clearing, moving rapidly from point to point like cats sniffing out a new house.

Eventually they gathered into a cloud of colours, a ball of darting and moving shapes. The ball moved cohesively across the clearing.

No one moved.

Bad Tom was standing while his squire-Danald Beartooth-laced his byrnie.

The faerie swarm floated to a stop in front of Bad Tom.

“We were Hector,” they said. “We remember. We do not forget.”

Tom flinched. “Hector?” he asked.

Just for a moment, the swarm took the shape of the dead Drover, Hector Lachlan. “We remember,” they said.

Bad Tom watched them. “I remember, too,” he said.

“We wait for you,” they said. “We remember. You are the sword.”

Tom drew the great sword by his side with a ferocious fluidity, but as quick as he was, the whole cloud of faerie folk was faster.

His sword glowed in red and green and blue like the shimmer of a peacock. “I’ll be right here waiting for you,” he said. “Come and try me.”

The faeries seemed to sigh. “The day cometh, man. You are the sword. We remember.”

And then they flitted away, each one going in a different direction, exploding outwards into the new day.

One faery, bolder than the others, circled close. But, alone, its voice was so quiet that only Tom could hear it.

“We will be there for you,” he said, and flitted away.

Mag looked at Sauce. “I used to love them, as a child. I cried when I realized what they are.”

Sauce was still locked in an embrace with her lover. “What, then?” she asked.

“The soul vultures,” Mag said grimly.

The captain had to ride out and direct the turn-over of the camp-guards to the outriders himself-too many new officers and too many new people. He, too, missed Gelfred.

A league farther on the road, they passed Gilson’s Hole, a break in the road. The road here had once crossed the wetlands of a large marsh on a causeway, with the upper waters of the Albin to the east, out of sight and farther down. Years and years ago, something had blown a forty-foot hole in the fabric of the road, and a combination of ill luck and botched maintenance attempts had created a hole that filled with water and wouldn’t drain, surrounded by forty bad paths around it through what was increasingly a rank and fetid swamp, not a freshwater marsh-and a settlement had grown on the high ground just to the west and south, where a low ridge offered good air and good grazing, and a higher ridge offered safety. The settlers had specialized in getting cargoes across the hole. There’d been talk of building a bridge. They’d built a small fort on the higher ridge.

Last year, the Sossag had come and burned the settlement and killed most of the folk. The fort had held through the troubles and some families had survived, but only one family had returned. The goodwife came out of her little stockade to watch the first outriders negotiate the paths around the hole, and she’d sent her eldest boy to guide them. The captain spoke to the boy and gave him six golden ducats to guide the whole column, and it still took them almost the rest of the day to get all the wagons and the drove around it.

They camped in the clearing, and because they’d had a short day, the captain ordered Oak Pew to gather a work party and clear the burned steads. A hundred men and women made short work of it, stacking the un-ruined boards and heavy house timbers and building bonfires of the rest.

The goodwife curtsied her thanks. “It’s hard to look at,” she said. “We got away, but others didn’t. And with the-wreck-gone, mayhap other folk’ll settle back.”

“Do you have a man, Goodwife Gilson?” the captain asked. He was sitting on her firewood porch, drinking his own wine. He’d brought her some. She had twelve children, the oldest daughter old enough and more to be wed, and the youngest son barely out of diapers.

“He’s hunting,” she said. Only her eyes betrayed her worry. “He’ll be back. Winter was hard.” She eyed the six gold ducats-two years’ income. “I reckon you saved us.”

The captain waved off her thanks, and after hearing everything she knew about traffic on the road and creatures in the woods, he went back to his own pavilion. The quarter guard was forming, and there were six great bonfires burning, fed from the remnants of twenty houses and twenty firewood piles.

His brother was sharing his pavilion, and he was standing in front of it in conversation with Ser Danved, who was in full harness, leading the night watch. The captain came up and nodded, intent on his bed.

Gavin pointed out over the swamp. “This position is nigh impregnable from the north and east,” he said. Out in the swamp, faeries flitted and smaller night insects pulsed with colour. The swamp spread almost a mile north and south, which was why no one had driven a new road around it.

The sky in the west was still coloured rose, and silhouetted the stockade of the small fort behind them-currently sheltering the baggage and part of the quarter guard, on alert.

Gabriel looked around in the dusk light, as if seeing it for the first time.

Ser Danved, who always had a comment for every situation, laughed. “It’s fine if you don’t mind having both of your flanks in the air,” he said. Indeed, at their feet, a small stream-the captain had stepped over it on his way to his tent-ran down from the higher ridge into the swamp, and provided the only cover for the ridge’s northward face on its burbling way to the Albin, miles to the east. “Jesus saviour, this must be the only place in the world with a swamp halfway up a mountain.”

Bored and tired, the captain shrugged. “If I ever have to fight Morea, I’ll keep it in mind,” he said. He passed into his tent, and caught Danved and Gavin exchanging a look of amusement.

He ignored them, intent on bed.

They had two alarms in the night. Both found the captain fully armoured and ready, but there were no attacks and no engagements.

In the morning, the captain found a splay-footed track just south of the horse lines, and a heavy war arrow. He brought it to Cully, who eyed it and nodded.

“Canny said he hit something. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, it seems.” Canny was a barracks lawyer and a liar and scarcely the best archer, but the bloody fletches told their own story.

The captain tossed the arrow in the air and snapped his fingers. The arrow paused-and hung there. The captain passed his hand over the length of the broken arrow and the head flared green.

Slowly, as if a vat filling with water, something began to form in glittering green and gold, starting from the ground. Soldiers began to gather in the dawn, and there was muttering. The captain seldom used his hermetics in public.

Mag came and watched him work.

He was in deep concentration, so she

found him in his palace. As they had once been bonded-however briefly-she could enter his palace at will. He smiled to see her.

“A pretty working,” Mag said.

“Gelfred’s,” he said. “A sort of forensic spell. All the huntsmen have variants of it.”

She watched him as he manipulated his ops in four dimensions and cast, his use of power sparing and efficient.

The thing continued to fill with light.

“What is it?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” he said.

It had an elongated head and far too many teeth. The head seemed to speak more of fish than of animal-streamlined and armoured. The neck was draconian-long and flexible. The body seemed armoured in heavy shell, at odds with the elegant neck.

It crouched, ready to attack, back bent at an unnatural angle, at least to a man, with back-hinged arms and legs.

They both emerged from their palaces together to look at what he had wrought.

“What is that thing?” Ser Gavin asked. “I thought I’d seen-everything.”

Ser Gabriel shrugged. “I suspect that the Wild is much bigger than our notions of everything,” he said. “What is it? It’s the thing that came for our horses last night. Good shooting, Canny. Next time, kill it.”

He clapped his hands and the sparkling monster vanished and the arrow fell into his hands. He handed it to Wilful Murder. “Put that head on a shaft,” he said. “And keep it to hand.”

“An’ I know why,” Wilful said. He was pleased to have been picked-it showed.

The captain got on his riding horse, the last fires were put out, and the column began to ride. Wilful was one of the last men at the fires, and then he used the goodwife’s breakfast fire to get his resin soft. He didn’t leave the clearing until the sheep herd was moving, and he waved to Tom as he cantered past, leaving a mother and twelve scared-looking children alone with the Wild.

He handed the completed arrow to the captain, and Ser Gabriel took it, said a few terse words in Archaic, and handed it back to Wilful, who put it head up through his belt.

Six miles on, where the old West Road-really just a trail, and scarcely that-branched towards the tiny settlement at Wilmurt and the Great Rock Lake before plunging north into the High Adnacrags and eventually reaching Ticondaga, the scouts found a man, or the ruins of one. He’d been skinned and put on the trail, a stake through his rectum and emerging from his mouth. His arms and legs were gone.

Count Zac frowned. “I’ll have the poor bastard cut down and buried,” he said.

The captain shook his head. “Not until after the column rides past,” he said. “I want them all to see.”

Ser Michael caught his eye. “The hunter?” he asked quietly.

Ser Gabriel sighed. “Hell. I didn’t even think. Oh, the poor woman.”

Ser Michael nodded.

“I’ll go,” Father Arnaud said. He snapped his fingers and Lord Wimarc, who had joined them with word of the council at the Inn of Dorling, brought him his great helm.

The captain thought a moment. “Yes. Take Wilful. Get the body down and decently shrouded. Father, offer to take the family with you. Best take a wagon. Drat. This will cost me the day.”

“It might save your soul,” Father Arnaud said.

Their gazes crossed.

“I have to consider the greater good of the greater number,” the captain said calmly.

“Really?” asked Father Arnaud. “Am I addressing the Red Knight or the Duke of Thrake?”

The two men sat on their horses, eyes locked.

“Michael, can you think of a way I can tell the good father that he’s right and still appear all powerful?” He laughed. “Very well, Father. I am suitably chastened. War horse and helmet. Ser Michael, you have the command. If my memory serves there’s a wagon circle about half a league on, just after crossing good water. Give me one of the empty wagons and I’ll take Zac and half his lads.”

“And me,” Ser Gavin said.

The captain smiled impishly. “Knights errant,” he said. “Mercy mild. Father Arnaud, Gavin, our lances, and Zac.” He put a hand up. “No more!”

Other knights volunteered, and Sauce thought they were a pack of tomfools. So did Bad Tom when he came up.

The “empty” wagons proved to be full to bursting with the loot of southern Thrake, and some very red-faced archers-and men-at-arms-watched their belongings unloaded onto the wet stone road.

The captain was scathing. “A fine thing if they were to hit us right now,” he said. “Ripped to pieces because we had too much loot. Get it put away, gentlemen. Or dump it in the ditch.” He saluted Ser Michael.

Ser Michael did not sound like the nice young man they all knew. He sounded like the son of a great noble.

“Well, gentlemen?” they heard him say. “Time’s passing. I’ll just say a prayer for the captain’s success. And when I’m done, I’ll ask Mag to set fire to anything left on the road. Understand?”

Mag smiled.

Sauce laughed. Ten minutes later, moving again, she looked up at the wise woman. “Would you have burned it?” she asked.

Mag laughed. “With pleasure,” she said.

Sauce swore. “He sounds like the captain,” she said, waving at Ser Michael.

Mag laughed again. “He went to all the best schools,” she said.

The captain took his command lances; Atcourt, Foliak, de Beause and Laternum, as well as the new Occitan knights, Danved Lanval and Bertran Stofal. With Father Arnaud’s lance and Ser Gavin’s and his own, he had a powerful force, and the spring sun glittered on their red and gold as they rode back down the road towards the Hole. Count Zac rode ahead, the red foxtail of his personal standard shining in the sun, and half a dozen of his steppe riders spread through the trees on either side.

The company archers rode on either side of the wagon. They were all veterans, and Cully, the captain’s archer, was the company master archer. He rode a fine steppe horse and his eyes were everywhere. All of the archers had their bows strung and in their hands. Ricard Lantorn, despite being mounted, had an arrow on the string of his war bow.

The pages brought up the rear. In the captain’s household, even the pages had bows and light armour, and they, too, were strung and ready. The captain’s caution had communicated itself fully.

The spring day was pleasant. The sun was high, and the world and the woods seemed at peace. Robins sang in the high branches of the beech wood through which the Royal Road ran. A woodpecker began his endless hammering, searching for early bugs on a tall dead tree. A few early insects droned along the column. The weather was cool enough to make an arming coat and a few pounds of mail and plate seem comfortable. At the clearing, they could see the loom of the Adnacrags in the north-low hills, dark with trees, in the foreground, and farther, the sharper shapes of the high peaks-snow capped, streaked in the dark lines of distant streams.

The captain rode with his senses stretched.

His brother glanced over at him.

“Asleep?” he asked with a smile.

Gabriel shrugged. “Something is troubling me.”

“Beyond that we are riding into an ambush?” Ser Gavin asked.

“That thing-whatever the hell it was,” Gabriel said. “I wish I’d had a corpse. But it’s not from here.” He struggled for words. “And when I think about the things Master Smythe said-I wonder what that means.”

Gavin gave him a look that suggested that his brother thought that watching the woods for ambush might be more productive.

“I need to-never mind. I’m not going to be very communicative for a few minutes.” Gabriel shrugged his shoulders, moving the weight of his harness off his hips for a moment.

“Should we change horses?” Gavin asked.

Gabriel looked around. “Not yet. I want my charger fresh.”

All around him were excellent knights who had killed very powerful things. He

turned inside himself and went into his palace. Everything was there, and he bowed to Prudentia, who smiled.

“Watch for me, Pru,” he said. “I need to go in there.”

She turned her ivory head and glanced at the door. “On your head be it,” she said. “It should be safe enough.”

Very cautiously, like a man approaching a sleeping tiger, Gabriel walked over to the red door. With a deep breath that had no real meaning in the aethereal, he put his hand on the knob and pushed it open.

Instantly he was in Harmodius’s memory palace. But nothing was crisp and clear except the golden door at his back and Harmodius’s mirror, a device he’d used. It was an internal artefact that allowed the user to “see” any potentia -any workings-cast directly on his person. Harmodius had spent too long imprisoned in another’s false reality to allow himself to ever be fooled in such a way again. Gabriel was briefly surprised that the old man hadn’t taken the artefact with him, but he smiled at the thought-of course, it was a memory artefact.

Harmodius’s abandoned memory palace stretched away from the centre checkerboard and the free standing mirror to a distant and dusty obscurity, like a summer house infrequently used. Gabriel moved cautiously across the parquetry floor and then-very carefully-began to examine some of the old man’s memories.

It was very dark, and he could only see things dimly. He was rarely frightened in his memory palace; casting in combat would have been too difficult otherwise, and the lack of time inside the palace usually gave a caster time to be calm and thorough, but here, in this unlit shadow realm of another man’s mind, Gabriel was scared almost to panic. He had no idea what rules guided his passage through Harmodius’s mind or memories. He only knew that as the man had occupied his head for almost a year, the red door must lead here. Harmodius had entered his own memory palace often enough, but this was only the third or fourth time that Gabriel had gone the other way, and the first time since it was-unoccupied.

And of course, with the guiding light of the other essence gone, it was dark.

“Summoning,” Gabriel said aloud.

It grew lighter. And he watched a memory flit across the floor in wisps, like a marred projection or a magic lantern slide with honey on it. It was an interesting memory; Harmodius was sitting with Queen Desiderata in a room and casting. She provided the ops.

Gabriel watched the summoning. Because it had involved the casting of a form, the memory was very clear, and he could follow the shadows of its casting around the chamber of Harmodius’s mind.

But the experience began to leach at him somehow. He couldn’t put a finger on the experience to name it, but he felt as if-as if he was Harmodius-so he was not Gabriel. And it was almost physically painful, almost like dreams of leprosy or watching another man get kicked hard in the groin.

There was more light.

He stepped towards the golden door, which seemed farther away.

The lights grew brighter.

Gabriel moved-decisively. He ran across the tiles, past the mirror and, to his immense relief, the door did not flee before him and he grasped the golden handle. He pulled the door open and found Prudentia standing at the other side with an arm outstretched to him and he stumbled through.

He stood in his own palace and breathed deep. The sun fell like golden fire from the dome overhead and outside his green door, great gouts of green potentia rolled and seethed like the sea in a storm.

“Something is coming,” Prudentia said.

Gabriel patted her ivory hand.

“Was it bad?” she asked.

“Whatever that was, it misses its master,” Gabriel said. “I don’t think I could face it again.”

He surfaced into the real and looked around. It was still a brilliant spring day. Squirrels were running along branches that overhung the road.

“Stay sharp,” the captain yelled.

After the captain’s shout, every man looked around carefully, and for fifty jingling strides, the only sounds were those of horse hooves on stone, the woodpecker in the distance and the rattle of armour and horse harness.

The captain pushed his aethereal sense out as far as he could. He was surprised how far that was. He was not broadcasting-to do so would be to announce his presence as far away as the villages of the Huran. Instead, he listened passively. He was able to detect a strong presence well to the east; another enormous presence the same distance and more to the north that almost had to be his mother.

The Wyrm was a dull warmth from over the aethereal horizon-a line that had almost nothing to do with the actual horizon. It had never occurred to the captain before that moment to ask why distances and horizons were different in the aethereal, but in that moment, he thought of how he might hide-if he could map the gradients of power.

Distraction is one of the most dangerous failings in a hermeticist. He was building a mapping process in his memory palace when he realized that his horse had stopped moving.

Ser Gavin gave him a look left over from childhood. “Fat lot of good you are, my overmighty brother,” he said. “Asleep?”

Gabriel looked round, disconcerted. The wagon was rolling to a stop in front of the goodwife’s house. The older girl had just run inside, calling for her mother, and the archers were leering. The girl had been on the porch, spinning, wearing only a shift.

Francis Atcourt was leering, too. Gabriel raised an eyebrow and the dapper knight raised his and grinned.

“Not something I expect to see in the woods every day-a girl that pretty,” he said.

Chris Foliak, Atcourt’s usual partner in crime, grunted. “And she’s coming with us,” he said.

“And we’re protecting her from the monsters,” Ser Gabriel said slowly. “Not, gentlemen, being the monsters ourselves.”

“I won’t hurt her at all!” Foliak said, grinning. But when he met the captain’s eye, his smile vanished. “Only having a joke, my lord.”

Gabriel reached out again. There was something-

Father Arnaud emerged with the goodwife.

“How can you be sure it was my man?” she asked on the porch.

“We can’t. But having seen the signs, the captain feels you’re better in the walls of Albinkirk.” Father Arnaud glanced at Ser Gabriel.

“Shall I describe him for you? The old da, he was not a tall man-”

Father Arnaud shook his head.

“But what if there’s some mistake, and I pack and leave?” she asked. “And he comes back looking for his bairns and a spot o’ supper?”

“Mama,” the older girl said carefully. She had a low voice and she was still wearing only a shift. “Mama, these gentlemen think there’s somewhat unnatural, right here. They want to go. They ain’t stayin’. If’n we want to be with them, we need to go.”

The goodwife looked around. “It’s me home,” she said quietly.

“And I hope that in a month you can return to it,” Gabriel said. “But for the moment, ma’am, I’d request you and your oldsters get everything you can into that wagon.”

The goodwife wrung her hands for as long as a child might take to count ten.

“Yes,” she said. “But what if it were’n my old man?”

“We’ll leave a note,” Ser Gabriel said.

“Ee can’t read,” the goodwife answered. “You take the kiddies and I’ll stay.”

“I’d rather you came, ma’am,” Ser Gabriel said.

She went in, and her two eldest, a boy and a girl, went to help. When the girl emerged with the first armload, she was fully dressed in a kirtle and a gown of good wool, which showed that she had some sense, or quick ears.

The boys began to move wooden crates and trunks into the wagon, and before the sun had sunk a finger’s width, the children-all twelve of them-were up on top of the load.

“By Saint Eustachios,” the woman said. “It’s lucky we’d scarce unpacked. I hate to leave my good spinning wheel. There it is. And my baskets. Good boy.”

“You’re coming, then?” asked the captain.

She looked down. “Children need me,” she said. “The priest says… he says-” She put her head down.

Father Arnaud looked hurt.

“War horses,” the captain called. “Three leagues to go and three hours of good light. Let’s move.”

Cully shook his head. He took a heavy horse-dropper out of his quiver and tucked it through his belt. He exchanged a long look with flap-eared Cuddy, his best mate.

“Fuck me,” Cuddy said.

The captain rode with his head down, concentrating. He was nearly sure he’d caught something, or someone, breaking cover-a hermetical power trying to conceal itself.

Count Zac’s horsemen moved back and forth at the forest edge, winnowing the ground like a team of hayers with scythes. They now rode with arrows on their bows, and once, when a deer broke cover, they all shot before they fully identified the threat, or lack thereof. The deer was butchered on the spot-intestines removed, and the rest hung between two of the spare horses.

“That will attract anything we haven’t already attracted,” Gavin muttered. He scratched his shoulder. Then he reached back under his harness to scratch.

The captain looked up into the branches and saw the edge of a wing-a flash of a talon.

“Wyvern!” he called.

In an instant, every weapon was drawn. Eyes strained towards the sky.

The Red Knight backed his horse a few steps. “I think it wanted to be seen. And we’re still in the Wyrm’s circle. Someone’s either cocky or insane.”

Gavin frowned. “Or trying to make our friend show his hand.” His voice was muffled by the pig snout on his bascinet.

“Move!” called the captain. “Eyes on the woods. Only men on the road watch the sky. Keep moving. Let’s not be out here after dark, eh?”

“Didn’t Alcaeus get ambushed right here?” Gavin asked.

“Further east-four hours’ ride from Albinkirk,” Ser Gabriel said. “Drat.”

“Drat?”

“I have a flickering contact. There’s something out there, trying not to be seen, but using power. Only a little. It has some sort of ward.” He frowned.

Ser Gavin rose in his stirrups and looked around.

Ser Gabriel’s horse plunged forward. “Faster,” he said.

The wagon team began to canter, and the wagon jolted along the ancient stone road. The horses began to go faster.

“No bird song,” Ser Gabriel shouted. “Ware!”

Off to their right, one of Count Zac’s men drew to his cheek, his body arched in his light saddle, and loosed as he rose in his stirrups. He loosed down as if shooting at the ground, and his horse sprang away.

Something as fast as a rabbit and ten times as large appeared and struck the archer’s horse.

He loosed his second arrow, point blank, into the thing’s back from above.

His mare stumbled, and four more of the things hit her, tearing chunks off her haunches. She screamed but lacked the muscles to kick or even stand, and she slumped, and her rider somersaulted clear, drew his sabre and died valiantly, ripped to pieces by a wave of the things-ten or more, as fast as greyhounds but ten times as ferocious.

Zac’s other horsemen were already raining arrows on the pack, and it took hits.

“Hold!” called the captain. “On me,” he said to the knights. “Squires-charge.”

Behind him, Toby led the squires in a charge at the rest of the pack. The war horses were a different proposition from the riding horses, and whatever the things were, they died under the big steel-shod hooves. Bone cracked and chipped.

Shrill eerie screams ripped across the road to echo off the far trees.

Cully had all the archers together around the wagon. Francis Atcourt’s young page, Bobby, had all the archers’ horses in his fist and looked ready to cry.

The horses began to panic, and the boy lost them, the reins ripped from his hands.

“Wyvern!” Cully said.

In fact, there were two wyverns-or even three. One scooped up a horse-Count Zac’s much beloved spare pony-and with one enormous beat of its sixty-foot wingspan was gone.

The other went for the wagon. It took Cully’s horse-dropper in the neck and flinched, but a flailing fore-talon ripped a small boy in two, covering his siblings with his gore. Ricard Lantorn put a needlepoint bodkin deep into the thing’s left haunch and Cuddy’s horse-dropper, released from a range of twelve feet, went in high on the thing’s sinuous neck just below its skull.

The wagon was an organ playing a discordant wail of terror. Its team bolted down the road.

The wyvern baulked, turned on the archers.

Father Arnaud’s heavy lance struck it under its great, taloned left arm and went in almost as far as his hand and the great thing reared back, took two more arrows and failed to land a claw before Chris Foliak’s lance spitted it.

Ser Francis Atcourt’s lance was the coup de grâce, striking it in the head as its neck began to sink and its eyes filmed. It fell.

The archers whooped.

Atcourt put up his visor. “Well,” he said to Father Arnaud, “I-”

A gout of blue-white fire struck Father Arnaud. It lifted him from the saddle and slammed him to the ground.

Atcourt pulled his visor down.

Ser Gavin galloped by. “Save the children,” he roared. The first wyvern was coasting along, skimming the trees above the runaway wagon.

The captain rose in his stirrups and pointed a gauntleted fist. A beam of red light travelled an arrow’s flight into the woods and something there was briefly outlined in red.

“Damn,” the captain said.

His attack and the counter-spell were almost simultaneous. There was a detonation in front of him and his horse shied-and subsided.

He backed the horse. He had a great many tricks since the last time he’d been in a fight like this, and he cast, and cast, and cast.

A bowshot away, his opponent was silhouetted against the foliage by a matt-black wall. The creature itself-a daemon-was lit from beneath by a simple light spell cast at the ground before it and thus not susceptible to a counter.

The tree beside it exploded, wicked shards of oak as sharp as spears whipping through the air.

The adversary struck him with a gout of white fire and then another. He took both on his shields and lost both shields in the process.

“Fiat lux,” he said aloud, and loosed his own bolt of lightning.

But the adversary was gone, skipping across reality.

Down the road, the second wyvern stooped, trading altitude for airspeed and calculating nicely with the ease born of long and predatory success, passing just over the last overhanging tree branches before a long stretch with no cover on either side of the road for half a bowshot-a short causeway over a marsh. It plucked one of the goodwife’s children from the wagon, decapitated one of her daughters with a talon flick, took a raking blow from the oldest daughter with a scythe and banked hard, skimming low over the reeds and the beaver house and rising neatly over the trees on the north side of the road.

The panicked horses took the wagon off the causeway, and the wagon stopped, the horse team mired immediately and screaming and neighing their panic as the wave-front of the wyvern’s terror passed over them again.

Ser Gavin and young Angelo di Laternum cantered up. The run along the road was already tiring their war horses.

The wyvern consumed its prey-a simple flip of the child into the air and a spray of blood visible two hundred yards away. Cully’s long shot from the end of the causeway fell away short.

“Under the wagon!” Gavin shouted at the goodwife and her brood. “Into the water. Under the wagon!”

The goodwife understood, or had the same notion herself. Grabbing her youngest, she leaped into the icy water. It was only thigh deep.

“Dismount,” Gavin snapped at the young Etruscan man-at-arms. Both of them swung heavily to the ground and pulled heavy poleaxes off the cruppers of their saddles. Angelo had a long axe with a fine blade. Ser Gavin had a war hammer-a single piece of steel that was deceptively small.

Cuddy and Flarch ran along the causeway like athletes in a race. Flarch-one of the company’s handsomest men-never took his eyes off the banking wyvern.

Cully loosed another light arrow and scored against the wyvern, who was too low and slow to manoeuvre.

“Ware!” Cully called. He’d picked up another wyvern coming in from the setting sun in the west, right down the road. Four of them, now.

The squires’ charge was more successful than any of them would have hoped.

The daemon’s ambush-it certainly appeared to be an ambush-had been sprung from too close. There were three daemon warriors behind the first creatures, but they were so close behind that Toby’s charge first trampled the imps-Toby’s immediate name for the toothy monsters which had attacked the mare-but then crashed into the first of the adversaries. The beaked creature was as shocked as Toby, but his axe was faster than the daemon’s and he landed a hasty blow on the thing’s brow-ridge, cutting away a section of its engorged crest. Blood-red, too red-erupted as if under enormous pressure.

By sheer good fortune, Toby’s mate, Adrian Goldsmith, was right behind Toby, his horse on exactly the same line, and Adrian’s unbroken lance took the stunned daemon squarely in the mouth-entered, tore a furrow along its tongue and severed its spine. The lance broke under the weight of Goldsmith’s charge.

Marcus, once Ser Jehan’s page, an older man and not the best jouster, missed his strike and died, as a great stone-headed axe caved in his helmet and pulled him from his horse, but the horse, forced to turn, put both metal-shod forefeet into its master’s killer. Neither blow was mortal for a daemon, but the two knocked the big saurian back a yard or more and cost it its balance as it fell over its dead kin. It never got to rise, as Toby pulled his horse around. The horse did the work and Toby rode out its panicked rage.

The third daemon warrior broke to the left, its heavy haunches powering it as fast as a war horse through the undergrowth. It ran for its life.

And its allies.

Gabriel Muriens slipped off his horse neatly and quickly, freeing his feet from the big iron stirrups, getting his left leg over the high war saddle and putting his breastplate against the saddle’s padded seat as he slid to the ground.

Nell-scared beyond rational thought and yet ready-took the great horse’s reins. She’d just seen more power at closer range than she’d ever seen in her life-six exchanges of levin and fire, whirling shields of pure ops and a sword of light.

Without comment she handed her master his ghiavarina. He began to walk into the woods. Nell thought he looked like a predator stalking prey.

He spared one thought for the fights further down the road, turning his entire armoured body to look into the distance, but he didn’t raise his visor, and then the point of his heavy spear and the beak of his visor rotated back into the deep woods and he went forward.

Nell took the war horse and led it back down the road towards the archers. There was fighting in the woods to the north-the squires. And the archers had all followed the wagon, while the pages had followed Count Zac somewhere.

Nell was all by herself. And there were things moving in the woods south of the road.

After a moment of panicked lèse-majesté, she vaulted into Ataelus’s war saddle. The great horse tolerated her, even sidled to allow her to settle her weight. Horses liked her, and Ataelus knew her well enough.

She moved her weight to bring him to a trot.

The thing-she had no words for it-exploded out of the brush to her left, but she had a heartbeat of warning and Ataelus was ready, weight on his rear haunches, and he sent the thing flying with a right-left hoof combination. The dead thing lay like a sack full of raw meat and teeth.

“Good boy. Pretty boy.” Nell soothed the horse, showing as little fear as she could. Ataelus was quivering and Nell quivered with him. A few yards away, Lord Wimarc stood over the prone priest, and farther along the road, two of the knights were spurring their mounts back-towards Wimarc and the captain.

There was a flash behind her. For an instant, her shadow and that of the horse were cast, black as pitch, on the trees to the south of the road. Even at the edge of her vision, the sheer whiteness left spots.

Without volition, she turned her head after flinching.

Fifty paces away, the captain stood between two great trees. Five paces away was a daemon, his red crest fully erect, his grey-green skin glowing with power, his beak a magnificent mosaic of inlays-gold and silver, bronze and bone. He was taller than a war horse and wore a loose cloak of feathers that sparkled with fire-and which seemed to have been torn.

He also had a large splinter of wood through one shoulder and bright red blood leaked around it.

He had an axe of bronze and lapis. He pointed the haft at the Red Knight and a gout of raw power, unformed ops, crossed the space.

The Red Knight stood in a guard as if facing a more prosaic opponent. His spearhead was down on his left side, and the haft passed across his hip-dente di cinghiare. His spear rose and he seemed-as far as Nell could tell-to catch the unseemly gout of raw power and toss it aside. He stepped forward with a double pass.

The daemon cast again-the same gout of power, this time tinged with green.

The captain didn’t falter. He caught the attack high and flung it down where it burst in a shower of burned leaves and exploding frozen ground.

The lapis axe whirled and a great green shield appeared, heart shaped, traced magnificently in the air by the bronze shaft of the monstrous axe.

The captain closed another pace, spearhead low and haft now high, and as the third attack-three spheres of green-white fire at pin-point intervals-left the axe shaft, the captain’s spear turned a half circle on his forward hand, and the spearhead, glowing a magnificent blue, collected all three spheres in its sweep, and they hurtled into the woods. One blew a head-sized fragment out of an ancient oak tree, one passed all the way through the grove and crossed the road within a few feet of Nell’s head to explode in the thicket behind her, and the third vanished into the sky.

Nell watched her captain close the last pace into engagement range and saw his spear lick out. It passed effortlessly through the daemon’s glowing shield, which vanished with the shriek of an iron gate torn from its hinges. The great saurian, driven to extremes, used his bronze axe-haft to parry the blow.

The ghiavarina passed through the axe haft like a cold knife through water. An incredible amount of hoarded ops exploded into non-aethereal reality.

The storm of power seemed to consume the daemon. It passed the captain the way the sea passes the prow of a ship, and even as the shaman slumped, the captain-subsumed him. The great creature began to unmake from the head down, his very essence leached and his corporeal form un-knitting even as the storm of his own power made his skin boil and explode outward in superheated destruction.

Nell retched.

The nearby oak tree, already damaged by the sorcerous overspill, gave a desperate crack.

The tree fell.

Toby watched the last daemon warrior run. He’d seen enough fights to know a healthy fear-what if he has friends?

He reined in. “Hold hard,” he called.

Adrian was still trying to draw his sword, which, in the hurry of combat, had rotated too far on his hips and was now almost lost behind him.

“Marcus is dead,” he said. “Father Arnaud’s still down on the road. Lord Wimarc’s standing over him.”

Toby got his horse around and reached behind his friend and drew his sword. He put it in Goldsmith’s hand. The artist was shaking like a beech tree in a wind.

“You got it, Adrian,” Toby said. “That was a preux stroke.”

Adrian gave him an uneven smile. “It was, wasn’t it? Christ-all the saints. Thanks.”

There was a flash of light so bright that both squires were stunned for a moment.

“Captain’s doing something,” Toby said, turning his horse to face the empty woods.

Adrian was looking at the ground. “Daemons, Toby.”

“I know!” The older boy looked around, completely at a loss. To the east, the captain was in some sort of sorcerous duel-there were pulses of power so rapid he couldn’t follow them.

To the north there was a flash of red, and then another.

“More daemons?” Adrian said. His voice was high and wild, but his sword was steady enough.

“Back to the road,” Toby decided.

“What about Marcus?” Adrian asked.

“He’s dead and we aren’t,” Toby said. “We’ll come back for him.”

He backed his horse to get clear of the brush and turned. Adrian followed him.

There was an explosion to the north, not far away. It was so great that both men and their horses were covered in gravel and sticks and a hurricane of leaf mould. The horses bolted.

Neither man was thrown. The company stressed riding skills for its squires, and they’d spent almost a year training with the steppe nomads of the Vardariotes.

Toby’s masterless horse burst onto the road a few horse-lengths from Nell, mounted on Ataelus. She was paper white. The horse half-reared then neighed at the familiar horses, who both slowed to see their herd leader so calm.

Something horrible was a tangled mass of blood and broken teeth between the huge war horse’s feet.

“There he is,” Toby said. Lord Wimarc was ten horse-lengths away, standing with a spear over the prone form of Father Arnaud. There was blood dripping from his spear. He was watching the ground south of the road. Francis Atcourt was just dismounting by his side and Phillipe de Beause was still mounted, watching the sky. Two hundred paces to the west, the sun was setting in splendour and a knot of archers could be seen, all drawing and loosing as fast as if repelling the charge of a thousand Morean knights. They had Ser Danved and Ser Bertran covering them. Both had swords well-bloodied.

Something passed overhead and darkened the sun. The shadow went on forever, and Toby raised his head in despair-

The great oak tree fell. Gravity was faster than the captain’s best reactions and stronger than all the daemons in the Wild and the oak tree’s top smashed him to the ground and he thought-

Cuddy drew and loosed, grunting as his shaft leapt into the air, and without pausing or following its flight he bent, took his next shaft, sliding the bow down over it and lifting it already nocked.

Needlepoint bodkin.

Needlepoint bodkin.

Broadhead.

Broadhead.

Beside him, Flarch’s elbow shot up in his exaggerated draw posture-he was a thin man and he pulled a heavy bow and his body contorted with every full draw, his back curved like a dancer’s.

As he released, he took his next arrow from his belt. “Two,” he spat.

He meant he had two shafts left.

Both wyverns had chosen to turn in place, gaining altitude and timing their strike so that they could envelop the desperate stand of the knights and archers, splitting the archers’ efforts and the knights’ attention.

But it had cost them. All the archers were hitting at this range.

Gavin stood in coda longa with his war hammer stretched out behind him, prepared to deliver an enormous blow. Di Laternum had his spiked axe up in front of him.

The wyverns finished their turn and their sinuous necks flashed as one as their heads locked on to their shared prey. Both monsters screeched together.

The wave fronts of their conjoined terror struck. Di Laternum fell to one knee. Gavin’s shoulder flared in icy pain and his mind seemed to go blank.

Flarch lost the arrow in his fingers.

Cuddy loosed and missed.

The smaller wyvern was the size of a small ship, its body forty feet long top to tail and its wingspan sixty feet or more. Its underside was oddly flecked with the fletchings of a dozen quarter-pound arrows.

Its mate-if the mighty monster had a mate-was bigger. Its wings seemed to block the sun, and its body was a mottled green and brown and white like old marble. Its wave of terror was far more subtle than its younger partner’s-its terror promised freedom through submission.

The children under the wagon all screamed together.

And then a taloned claw the size of the wagon took the greater of the two wyverns and ripped one of its wings from its still-living body.

Darkness blotted out the sun. Night fell.

The dragon was so huge that no mere human mind could encompass it. Its taloned feet were themselves almost as large as the wyvern’s body. The mortally-stricken wyvern wheeled into a catastrophic crash with a scream of rage and humiliation.

The younger monster turned on a wing tip. It was cunning enough to pass under its titanic adversary, rushing for open sky and rising on a lucky thermal even as the dragon turned in the sky, so close to the ground that the vortices at its sweeping wing tips a thousand feet apart launched small spouts of leaves and the rush of its passage knocked men flat.

The wyvern rose and turned, going north. The thermal lifted it-

Ser Gavin watched with savage satisfaction as the thing was chased down. The dragon-incredible as it was-was faster.

The wyvern made two attempts. Because of the altitude, both were visible. First it dived for speed, and then it tried to fly very low, turning under its mammoth adversary again.

The dragon pivoted in mid-air. It was too far away for its size to register-far enough that the whole of the incredible monster was visible, top to toe, a bowshot or more long, with a neck as long as a road and a noble head with nostrils as big as caves and teeth as tall as a man on a horse.

The great mouth opened, and all the men on the road gave a shout.

Silence fell.

And then all hell was given voice in the woods north of the road.

When the ambush was sprung, Count Zac’s first thought was to envelop the northern arm of the ambush. It was bred in him, not a conscious decision. He gathered every man on every pony, all the pages and his own survivors, and they rode into the deep woods north of the road, sweeping wide around his best guess of where the enemy might lie.

The great wardens were no aliens to the easterners. The lightning-fast carrion dogs were a terrible surprise, but he’d seen them now.

Like the veteran hunters they were, the Vardariotes spread as they rode, casting a net as wide as they could. The pages tended to clump up. Zac ignored them as amateurs.

His own boys and girls trotted-and then when his sweep turned in a neat buttonhook south, and he raised his arm, they reined in.

Every man and woman with him drew their sabre and placed it over their right arm, so that the gentle curve nestled in the archer’s elbow, sword drawn and ready.

In his own language, Zac called, “Ready, my children. Be the wind!”

The pages followed, screeching.

Zac was confident of his location and his array. He cantered back south, his skirmish line flashing red behind him.

And, as he expected, the enemy had forgotten him. They had formed up to converge on another target, perhaps never having noticed his envelopment. His satisfaction was marred by how many of them there were. Twenty daemons were not going to be swept away in a charge.

He had two calm heartbeats to take it in-three great wardens struggling with the branches of a downed tree. Another raising a stone axe and striking-what, the tree?

Perhaps Zac caught a glimpse of red and gold surcoat. Perhaps he did indeed have a spirit to advise him. Perhaps his instincts for war were so finely honed that he guessed.

“Through them!” he called. He loosed his first arrow, leaned over his horse’s mane, and began to kill.

Gabriel lay, trapped in the weight of his armour, pinned to the ground by an oak branch that lay across his torso and had crumpled his left greave and broken the leg inside it.

He tried to use potentia to move the tree. The pain from his leg was so distracting that he hadn’t even managed to open his visor when the first daemon appeared, sprinting in heavy-footed majesty, leaping through the branches.

Gabriel watched it come. He stretched out his right hand for his ghiavarina.

It was too far.

He worked to summon it. He couldn’t even get into his palace. He reached for Prudentia and a wave of pain thrust him back into bloody reality.

The daemon’s stone axe swept up. He saw its open beak, heard its scream of triumph.

He thought quite a few things-about Amicia, and Irene, and Master Smythe.

And then, despite the last efforts of his straining right hand to grab the ghiavarina, the axe fell.

The daemon’s weapon seemed to slide around his head. It missed.

Gabriel didn’t pause to consider the ramifications, although he was fully aware that he should be dead. He got his right hand on his baselard and drew it. Its effect was tonic-he steadied. The baselard itself held power-

The daemon-so close as to be like a lover and smelling of burned soap and flowers and spring hay-cursed. Even in the alien language, his curse was obvious-the great axe flew up again-

Gabriel dived into his place of power. He leaped onto the bronze disc set in the floor and pulled the lever. This simple symbol governed a nested set of pre-prepared workings, each cascading into the next.

Gold and white and green light flared in a set of nested hemispheres over his prone body.

Zac saw the fireworks and drew the correct conclusion-loosed a shaft with the daemon nearly at the point of his arrow, whirled and loosed again over his shoulder even as his magnificent pony leapt the downed tree and then he was turning.

But the wardens were running. One of their number lay with his feet drumming in the final dance and one of his best warriors, Lonox, was down, cut from the saddle for being too daring, but the wardens wanted no more of the fight.

Kriax, a woman with a face so tanned it seemed made of leather, reined up. “We have them!” she shouted and gave a whoop of pure delight.

Zac pursed his lips. “If I set this ambush…” he said, and waved.

She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were slightly mad with unexpressed violence.

“… I’d have a covering force,” he said. “Back to the road and break contact.”

She saluted with her sabre as her left hand flicked her bow back into the case at her hip. She gave a specific scream-an ululating yell.

Like a flock of starlings, the whole line of Vardariotes turned all together and rode away, leaving the pages-exhilarated and terrified-to follow. Zac bellowed for them in his version of Morean.

He rode over to the tree. The Megas Dukas was no doubt under the brightly coloured shields. Another warden lay there, too, his body sliced neatly in half by sorcery and both sides cauterized. A third lay pinned, badly wounded, under the branches of the trees. Some sand and a gilded beak suggested the ruin of a fourth.

“Hey! Captain!” Zac called. “Hey! We’re here!” He edged closer to the tree.

Eerily, like something really bad on the steppes, the voice came straight into his head.

Be sure, Zac. When I drop these wards, I’m going to have nothing left.

Zac didn’t like the voice in his head at all. “Can we leave you? To make sure? No fucking idea what happened to the east.”

Hurry, said the voice.

Ser Gavin had scarcely been engaged in the fighting, but he was sorely tested in the aftermath. Aware-as they were all aware-that the captain was down and so was the chaplain, Ser Gavin had to comprehend the scale of the fight, covering as it had, three different venues spread over almost half a league of ground, and then isolate and secure his three widely spread parties.

He insisted that they be secured first, before any acts of mercy or rescue began. The downed captain, surrounded in his aethereal shells, he left to Count Zac. The chaplain’s body-dead or dying-he put in the charge of Ser Francis Atcourt and the squires, and the drowned wagon and the family he left to young di Laternum, who was suddenly thrust into command, with the sun setting in the west and children sinking in the mud and an unknown enemy moving in the woods to the west. Cully stepped up to the young man-at-arm’s shoulder and whispered in his ear.

Ser Gavin rode briskly up and down the road in the fading light. His second time past the squires, he took Toby off the watch and ordered him to take his riding horse, ride his charger, and try to fetch help.

Toby glanced west, gulped, and nodded.

No questions were asked. Every man and woman present knew how dangerous their situation was.

Ser Gavin knew what his brother would do next. The immediate crisis was past. It was time to plan.

He ticked off the points on his armoured gauntlets.

First, gather all his people in one place. Nothing along the road was particularly defensible. But in one place, with a couple of fires and a deception or two, they’d have a chance.

Horses. The horses would have to be picketed. There was no forage and none closer than the swamp.

He rode back to di Laternum, who had the goodwife out of the water and had, himself, waded into the mud and retrieved the mangled corpse of one of her children. The other was, of course, gone. Cully had an arrow on every string-and had the wagon out of the water, for which incredible engineering feat No Head received Gavin’s terse and hurried thanks. Two horses from the wagon team were coyote food, and two were exhausted but alive.

The goodwife, a solid woman who had seen many defeats, was sunk in her grief. Ser Gavin rode up to her-at a loss. She knelt in the road next to the appallingly small bundle that was her dead second daughter.

“I made her,” she said. “I made ’em all, and I sweated blood, and I love ’em. Oh, blessed Virgin, why?” She looked up at the knight. “You came to rescue us?”

Ser Gavin had seen enough grief to know the anger was a part of it.

“Into the wagon,” he said gruffly. “We’ll mourn tomorrow. Tonight, we live.”

“I’m not-” the woman said, but whatever she was not, her eldest daughter took her elbow and moved her to the wagon.

“But Jenna! We can’t leave Jenna to get ate!” she wailed.

Her eldest son, without even a flirtation with hesitation, scooped up the bloody linen shawl that held his sister’s corporeal remains and carried it-tenderly-to the wagon.

Cuddy had the heads of both horses. They were weak and twitchy and deeply scared.

Ser Gavin reined in.

Cuddy waved him off. “I’m gonna walk with ’em.”

“We’re going back,” Ser Gavin said. “For the captain.”

“Course we are,” Cuddy said.

“Amen to that,” No Head agreed.

Gavin wanted to gallop down the road. There were ten minutes of useful light left, and something was making noise north of the marsh.

It made him want to cry, deep inside, that he was learning to lead men from his brother-the brother whose effeminacy he’d mocked throughout his youth. But he took the time to turn his horse and clap a hand on di Laternum’s arm as the wagon began to move. “Well done,” he said.

The Etruscan boy-he looked like a boy now, with dark circles under haunted eyes-shrugged. “I scarcely did a thing, my lord,” he said. “Cully…”

Ser Gavin managed a hard smile. “Listen to Cully. But think for yourself, too.” He gave the boy a crisp and very real salute, hand to his visor, and cantered off east to find his brother. He still didn’t know if his wonderful, terrible brother was alive or dead.

And only now could he let himself wonder.

Zac had a cordon around the tree, and he’d found the shaman’s feather cloak and the pieces of his axe.

Feeling almost foolish, he said aloud, “Darkness is close. You’re safe for the moment. I have people all around you.” He shrugged, talking to a rainbow. “Your brother has taken command.”

Good. When I let go, the pain may knock me out. There’s some better than remote chance I’ll just die. I’ve made a stupid mistake and I’m out of ops.

Count Zac crossed himself and touched an amulet.

The rainbow of light shimmered and went out. The woods were suddenly darker.

The captain screamed.

When Gavin had the archers-when the knights and squires were together, and the wagon was parked over Father Arnaud, who hadn’t moved-he led every spare man to try and save his brother.

Who was still alive, as could be told from his screams.

It took an hour of torch-lit axe-work to clear enough of the trunk to allow them to make the right effort, and the constant movement of large animals or enemies out in the darkness did nothing to improve Ser Gavin’s sense of urgency.

But he pretended to be calm, and twice, he told archers to take their time.

The steppe woman, Kriax, volunteered to go into the darkness and watch. She slipped from her pony and vanished into the haze at the edge of the torchlight.

“She has cut many throats at home,” Zac said with a shrug. “That’s why she’s here.”

It took ten men and a woman to move the tree. By the time they levered the section of trunk off his brother’s legs, the stars were out in the sky above.

Ser Gavin calculated constantly. Assume that the company is camped a league from where we left them. That’s four leagues from here. An hour for Toby to find them, if something doesn’t eat him. An hour back, and half an hour to raise the force to get it done right.

I should never have sent him alone. I should have gone myself. Or sent Nell and Cully with him to get the message through.

But a wyvern would eat all three of them.

I’ve heard wyverns are blind at night. And that they can see in the dark.

I hate this. Is this what he does every day? What Pater does? Decide people’s lives?

Ser Gavin sat on his war horse, still in full harness, his shoulders straight, and pretended to be a tower of strength and leadership. Like all commanders, everywhere.

When the pole star rose, the archers sung a quiet night prayer and everyone joined in, even Cuddy, who was notorious for his blasphemy. When the prayer was done, Kriax slipped into the fire circle and tossed a toothy head on the fire. She had a grim smile, and Zac had to bandage both her arms, which had been savaged. She never so much as grunted. The squires watched her with something very like worship.

Adrian Goldsmith volunteered to crawl out into the darkness.

Gavin let him go.

They built a second fire-a decoy. They put it up the road, and then they built a third down the road.

The third watch came. Ser Gavin began to despair that he would have to add Toby to his butcher’s bill. His brother wasn’t moving, and neither was Father Arnaud.

Ser Gavin started to pray.

Gabriel was not so much unconscious as deep in his palace-by far pleasanter than screaming his lungs out at the pain from his crushed and mangled right leg. Even as it was, a tidal wave of pain would, from time to time, push him out of the aethereal and into the real. Where he would be painfully aware of his loss of blood, of how cold he was, and how little time he had left to live.

He tried to sort the shaman’s memories-those he’d managed to take. His sublimation of his opponent had been too fast and too thorough. And he’d spent the power foolishly. His shields-his emergency spells-had been far too powerful. He could see, now-too late-the error in design that allowed them to seize every scrap of his power, like a tax collector seizing a poor man’s assets.

He replayed the other daemon’s cut at his head. His unprotected head.

I should have died. But I didn’t.

And now-even now-I should probably be dead.

It occurred to him to work out why he was alive. There was a small, constant feed of potentia coming from outside. He could feel it.

It occurred to him-time was a problem in the palaces-that he should try to find Father Arnaud.

To think was to act.

He stepped across into the chaplain’s memory palace and found himself in a darkened chapel. It was beautiful-the lectern was a magnificent bronze of a pregnant Madonna with her hands crossed over her stomach, standing quietly. A magnificent stained-glass rose window rode over him, set-in the freedom of the memory palace-as a three-dimensional rose roof that rose like a cupola of glass. On the window were portrayed scenes from the life of the saviour, but it was too dark to determine what, exactly, they were.

Indeed, it was very dark, and very cold, and Gabriel’s first thought was that the light behind the window was fading.

“Arnaud!” he called.

To think was to find.

Father Arnaud lay in the midst of his place of power, arms out-flung. He smiled at Ser Gabriel.

“Welcome,” he said. “It might have been better if we had been this way when I was alive.”

“Alive?” Gabriel asked.

“My body is passing,” Arnaud said with some humour. “In the real, I have perhaps twenty heartbeats left.”

Gabriel reached for his link, checking, like any veteran magister, for enough ops to heal.

Arnaud smiled. “No. I will heal you. I will give you this last gift. And as I cross the wall and go into the far country, I leave you this. Save them, save them all. In doing so, brother, you will save yourself.” He smiled, again with pure good humour, and Gabriel could see what a handsome young man he had been. “Please accept these gifts.”

Arnaud’s body gave a convulsion, and light flared, and for a moment-an eternal moment-the chapel was bathed in light. The figures of the rose window leapt into life, and a leper was cured, a blind man given his sight, a dead man raised, and a centurion’s servant saved.

“Arnaud!” Gabriel shouted.

But the miracle of light was declining, and in its wake the cold of absolute void, and the dark.

Gabriel wrenched himself clear of the dying man’s palace and

woke.

The pain was gone. Around the fire stood a dozen men and women and every head was turned to him, and they all looked stunned.

His leg was healed.

Gabriel burst into tears. “I don’t want this!” he shrieked.

And then rolled over and put his hands on either side of his chaplain’s helmeted head. But Father Arnaud was a corpse, and wherever he had gone, his face was calm and wore the gentle smile of absolute victory.

When the flare of power lit the aethereal worlds, Thorn was hovering, torn by indecision, balanced on the knife edge between aggression and caution. He’d followed some of the combat; he sensed the Dark Sun’s injury and depletion but he had a healthy fear of the Dark Sun’s reserves and talent. To project himself across the aethereal could be done but was, itself, fraught with peril. And it would expose him, like an army too far from its supplies, to envelopment. It was too new a talent to be trusted. And his dark master was not available for advice or encouragement.

Something passed across the divide between life and death-something mighty.

Is he dead? Thorn whispered into the darkness. Suddenly bold, he cast himself across the abyss.

Gavin was kneeling by his brother. He had not seen his brother cry-not openly-since the other man had been a boy, and it made him feel sick with old feelings of rage and weakness and bullying strength.

But Gabriel’s tears were quick. Almost like a mummer or a vagabond actor at a fair, he raised his head, eyes still full of tears that glittered in the firelight, but his voice was suddenly steady.

“Everyone run,” he said. “Now.”

“Incoming!” shouted Adrian Goldsmith. The squire didn’t sound terrified-he sounded relieved. “It’s Ser Michael!”

Ser Gavin froze.

Something began to form at the edge of the firelight.

“Run,” Gabriel said.

He meant it. Perhaps he leaked ops into his command. But every man and woman at the fire broke and ran into the dark.

Gabriel tried to rise. But he had nothing left-except the trickle of ops that had, against all odds, preserved him.

He sighed. He heard horses on the road, heard voices.

He got to one elbow.

The heavy black shadow became material.

Thorn emerged from the aethereal with a hiss of lost air and bite of incredible cold. He was no longer like a tree. He was now more like a shadow or a pillar of smoke, lit from behind by a red fire. Two eyes glowed high above the captain.

A horse bellowed its fear.

“Ahh!” Thorn intoned. The syllable was full of surprise and satisfaction.

Gabriel lay and swallowed bile.

Then Mag was there. She was a woman of middle height, wearing the cowled hood of a woman pilgrim. She didn’t even have a staff.

In the aethereal, she wielded a pair of scissors made of light, and she reached to cut Thorn’s links to his home and his base of power. Her strike was faster than the flicker of summer lightning, and she did not guard herself, so decisive was she.

Gabriel had time to register the shriek of Thorn’s disappointed rage, and the un-human magister was-gone.

Just for a moment, Mag seemed to tower over the fire like an avenging angel, and then she was just an aging woman in a cowled hood.

She leaned over the captain, who managed a very shaky grin. “I’m not having a good day,” he said.

Mag kissed his cheek. “Stay with us, my dear.”

“That was-” Gabriel struggled for words.

Mag laughed. “I’ve been wondering when he might try a straight-up kill,” she said. “I’ve been working on that for months.” She was brimful of power-and pride. Until she saw Arnaud.

She bent over him, but he was dead.

Gabriel reached up and put a hand on her skirts. “Did you-hit him?”

“No. He bolted at my first twitch.” She smiled. “I knew he had to.” Her smile grew shakier. “That is, I hoped he had to.”

She sat suddenly. And then she put a hand on the dead priest’s hands, and cried.