“Did I hear you say that Host Singer Tzayin-Kha survived the battle?”

“Yes,” said his master. “I have seen her. What of it?”

“If I do not offend by putting myself forward,” Viyeki said, “I may have an idea.”

The campfires of the duke’s army had been kept small, especially those closest to the ruins. Porto and Endri had been left to guard the catapult, which loomed above them in the flickering light like a watchful dragon.

“But where did all those White Foxes come from?” Endri asked for perhaps the dozenth time.

Porto had given up trying to answer him. He poked the fire and then pushed his hands as close as he could without burning them.

“Are they ghosts? How could they get so close without our scouts hearing them?”

“Oh, sweet Aedon, they are Norns, not ghosts!” Porto felt as though something inside him wanted to escape, but if it did it might tear the world to pieces with its teeth. This hellish place was driving him into madness. “Fairies can be killed. Did you not see the bodies lying in the snow? Did you not see the blood? Red, the same as ours. And when it runs out of them, they die.”

“You heard that soldier! He put three arrows in one not an hour ago, but the creature took no hurt from it! Just vanished away. If that is not a ghost, what is?”

“God’s Blood, man, will you stop this? They are tricky, the Norns. Everybody who was at the Hayholt knows that. They make shadows and cast their voices—but shadows cannot hurt us.”

“But, still . . .” Endri was almost breathless and could not let it go. “Where did they all—?”

The fire before them suddenly blazed as if a strong wind had fanned the coals. But instead of the flames bending they grew upward until they danced higher than men’s heads. All around the other campfires were also erupting into wavering pillars of flame. Startled Northmen scrambled on their hands and knees. Porto, who had tumbled backward at the first fiery billow, sat sprawled on the freezing ground while Endri stared in bulge-eyed terror. Some of the soldiers were so frightened that they cried out for God or their mothers, or let out simple, incoherent cries of terror.

And then a face appeared in the flames in front of Porto—and not just in his campfire, but in every single one throughout the sprawling camp. This fiery mask rippled and billowed like something seen in deep water; the face was female but also not entirely real. Where the eyes should be and in the open mouth, nothing showed but flames.

“It’s the queen!” someone shouted in fright. “The queen of the White Foxes! She has come back!” Men scrambled away from the fires and began to run in all directions, like animals.

“Mortals!” The voice rolled out from every fire, from every circle of men, as chill as the ice that had crystallized on the tent ropes. “You will die in these lands! We will take back what is ours!”

Porto could not tell if the dreadful voice was in the air all around or came somehow from inside his own skull. He saw Endri stumble to his feet and managed to grab at the younger man’s leg as he lurched past, bringing him down heavily into the snowy mud. Porto had no idea what was happening, but he knew if he let him go Endri would run like a maddened beast into the freezing night, never to return. Endri fought back like a terrified child but Porto hung on, even as the apparition in the fire melted and the flames fell back to what they had been. A moment later the fires sputtered and went out entirely, plunging the camp into darkness.

With that horrible voice still ringing in his thoughts, Porto did not understand at first what else he was hearing, but then he heard men shouting in pain and surprise—brief cries, swiftly ended—and felt rather than saw a flock of swiftly moving shadows sweeping down toward the camp from the ruins atop the hill. Men were suddenly dying all around him at the hands of near-invisible enemies, but Porto could not get free of struggling Endri to unsheathe his blade.

“They are here!” he hissed into his friend’s ear. “The Norns are here, trying to kill us all! Damn you, man, get up and fight!”

Endri suddenly stopped struggling, and for an instant Porto thought one of the invisible attackers had stabbed and killed the youth right in Porto’s arms. Then a glare of red from the top of the hill revealed Endri’s face staring up toward the ruins, mouth stretched in a gape of tortured disbelief. Porto turned to find where this new light came from and saw a great blaze at the edge of the ruins, a pillar of flame higher even than the bespelled campfires, almost to the height of the surrounding trees. Now the burning object began to roll down the hill toward the camp, slowly at first, bucking and jouncing over the stony slope, but picking up speed with every one of Porto’s racing heartbeats. Its wheels were as tall as a man.

It’s a wagon, was his first, confused thought, some kind of giant war-wagon, and that was true enough, but there was also something more. Atop the wain’s vast bed lay a sarcophagus, a huge thing, but its lid was partway off and the insides were aflame so that a tail of fire streamed behind it, marking its hastening career down the hill. And even as Porto stared in astonishment, a screaming figure lurched up out of the monstrous, burning box, knocking the lid aside. The writhing figure wore a mask and was itself aflame. Burning bandages turned the thing in the casket into a wildly gyrating torch that flailed the air and shrieked and shrieked—the most inhuman noise Porto had ever heard, an unending, whistling scream without words. Any men who had held their ground during the first onslaught of shadow-warriors from the ruins now turned and ran stumbling downhill from the blazing, howling corpse atop its battle wagon.

The besiegers made no pretense of resistance, but fled the apparition as though one thought controlled them all, raw southern recruits and battle-hardened Rimmersmen alike. Many were struck down by arrows Porto could not see, or surrounded in the darkness by deeper shadows, after which they lay silent in the snow with throats slit or guts spilled.

Something crashed against Porto’s face, stunning him. It was Endri, who had lashed out in his desperation to escape and was now half-crawling, half-staggering down the slope away from the ruins, mad with fear.

Porto did not know what to do. The camp was overrun with shadows, and already dozens of his comrades were dead, the rest scattered—he could hear some of them lost in the trees, shouting for God to save them. It had all happened so fast, as if a great wind had blown their army to pieces in an instant.

He crawled to his feet and ran after Endri. He could do nothing else. He had no one else to save.

Her song completed, the Host-Singer Tzayin-Kha fell to the uneven floor stones in the central hall of the ruined fortress where she lay gasping like a landed fish, her starvation-shrunken limbs twitching. Viyeki moved to help her.

“No! Do not touch her!” Yaarike cried. “The fire spirit still flows in her. Look.”

As Viyeki watched, several more of the red-robed Order of Song moved toward Tzayin-Kha as cautiously as if she were a sleeping dragon. One put a stick beneath her and rolled her over. Viyeki recoiled. The Singer’s face and hands, the only parts of her flesh he could see, smoldered with light beneath the skin, as though she herself had no more substance than a wax candle.

“Will she live?” Viyeki asked his master quietly. “She is the best of her order that we have.”

“And she was the only one who could have made the fire speak,” said Yaarike, shaking his head. “That was a magister’s trick, but she managed it. I am impressed that she still lives, although that may not be true for long. Still, even if she recovers she will be useless to us until she can be healed from this effort back in Nakkiga.” He turned to the Singers now lifting Tzayin-Kha’s body and wrapping it in a heavy blanket. Viyeki could feel the heat still coming off her at several paces’ distance. “Go, now, all of you,” Yaarike told them. “Get her away while the mortals are still in confusion. Thanks to Tzayin-Kha’s efforts, General Suno’ku has carved us an escape route, but it will close very quickly.”