They had their cause; they had their fierce Lioness. She had her king’s need. All this carried them, surging into slaughter, made them redden the earth with blood, made them forget they ever knew the word mercy as the din of battle filled their ears. The sound was so loud it pressed the air from their lungs, and their eyes saw such sights as another day would make their stomachs turn.

Through it all, Kerian ran fighting and searching for Thagol, for the Knight who had unleashed the butchery of the past year. She ran killing, and even before she saw him, sword high and about to plunge it into the breast of an elf, she knew she had him. He withdrew, blood dripping, and she ran at him, roaring. He laughed over the corpse and pointed, somewhere behind her, somewhere over her shoulder. Laughing still, he reached for her.

She ducked, sword staggered, her swing broken. She turned and saw what made the Skull Knight laugh.

From out of the forest, like lightning, like thunder, a band of horsemen, all armored in black, all howling for death. Her warriors fell before them, trampled beneath iron-shod hoofs, slashed, beheaded, speared upon lances and flung aside.

His face like a burn-scar, terrible eyes dark as death, Thagol lunged for her, his sword high. He screamed in her head, and it was the sound he imagined she would make, dying one of the thousand deaths he finally chose for her. Kerian turned and tried to defend. She lifted her own sword and knew the gesture for no more than that. His sword hung, right at the arc of his swing and came down-

– hard upon the skull of a young elf leaping between the Lioness and Dark Knight. She saw the boy’s face- Ander! Blood spurted, white shards of skull tumbling through the air, and in the ruin of his face Kerian she saw the terrible surprise in his eyes as he fell. On the face of the Skull Knight there was fury as he lunged again. Kerian dropped back, hoping his thrust would overbalance him. It did not, and she moved swiftly, brought up her own blade, met his and held. Thagol, the heavier, pressed. Kerian, the lighter, let him. He thrust again, she moved as though to counter, then ducked hard aside. He lost his footing on the blood-slick earth. In the instant that bought her, she turned and screamed, Retreat! Retreat! With all the air in her lungs, every second the boy’s life bought her, she shouted her warriors off the field.

They did not hear her, they did not have to. The farmers and townsmen, never trained to fight, were the first to die. The outlaws, her good warriors, knew a losing fight when they saw one. They ran, leaping over the corpses of foes and friends alike, into the forest, deep into the woods and high up the granite slopes where, maybe, horses would find it hard to follow.

Kerian ran after, cursing, and hearing Lord Thagol’s laughter ringing not in her ears but bellowing through her mind.

Kerian counted her dead. She counted them by reckoning those who did not make it out, who fell in the forest to Knights, to the trampling hoofs of war horses, to swords, to maces, to ThagoPs evil. She counted them in tears and wasn’t ashamed of that. She wept, Jeratt did, and Feather’s Flight did not, for she was among the dead. She lay among the farmers, the villagers, beside Ander the miller’s son who had refused to hand her over to Thagol’s Knights. He’d been in love with her, so said Jeratt.

“When I close my eyes, I see it on him still, Jeratt. The look on him, dying for me.” The flash of madness, of glory as he flung himself between her and the killing steel.

They sat on a high, boulder-topped hill of the kind she first saw an age ago, in another autumn, as she climbed endlessly behind Stanach to avoid Knights on the road to the Hare and Hound. Stubborn, that day she’d climbed in ill-chosen boots until her feet bled. She thought, now, that her heart bled. When she looked down the hill, Kerian saw the dwarf coming up. He’d fought well-for a one-handed man, Jeratt had said.

“What are you going to do about the dwarf, Kerian?”

Kerian shrugged. “What’s to do? He’s here, and I can’t get him safely to Qualinost. He should have stayed hehind. Damn, maybe he should have stayed in Thorbardin.”

Kerian watched Stanach labor up the hill, weary as she, sweat running on him, a filthy handage wrapped around his head.

“Are you all right?” she asked when he came close.

He looked up at her in moonlight, his eyes fierce as a blade’s edge. He said, “No, I’m Weeding. I’m hungry. I am in this gods damned forest, Mistress Lioness. I am not all right.” He looked around, behind, to the sides. “I don’t think any of us are.”

She frowned. Jeratt lifted his head.

“There’s something in the forest,” the dwarf said.

Jeratt rose, his hand on his sword.

“No.” Stanach dropped to a seat beside Kerian, his breathing a weary groaning. Kerian touched his shoulder lightly. He shook his head. “I’m all right. By Reorx’s beard, though, I am tired.

“In the forest,” he said, returning to what he’d started to say. “Not Knights. Not the rest of our folk straggling back or away. Something else. Something sly and quiet.”

Kerian nodded to Jeratt, who went off down the hill to gather a few of those still standing. They went out into the forest, cat-footed. A young woman ran up the hill-where did she get the strength?-to whisper in Kerian’s ear.

“Yes, and quickly. Keep an eye out for friends.”

Down she went, bounding, and in moments, one by one, guards took stands around the hill, setting a perimeter. Stanach put his arms on his drawn-up knees, his head on his forearms. He did not take four breaths before Kerian heard him gently snoring. She sat alone beside the sleeping emissary from Thorbardin, a dwarf far from home. When he wavered, she helped him lie down. He hardly woke, never missed a breath. Neither did he stir when Jeratt came back to say he’d found nothing and no one in the forest.

“I don’t know what the dwarf heard, but we didn’t see sign of anything. Just his imagination?”

Kerian glanced at Stanach, sleeping, then back. “Doesn’t usually have a very active imagination, does he?”

Jeratt agreed that he didn’t “What dwarf does? There’s nothing there, Kerian. Just the night, the forest and our doom, eh?”

Just those things. Jeratt sat down. He’d found a good stream and offered her his leather water bottle, fat and dripping. “That’s supper, I’m afraid, and I’m thinking breakfast won’t be much better.”

After a time, he went away to watch at the edge of the camp, and Kerian saw him walking among the warriors, bending low to speak to one, slapping the shoulder of another. In the morning they would break their fast on a bitter bread. In the morning, Thagol would come through the forest with steel.

She sat a long time thinking, gazing into the forest. After a time, she saw a fire spring up, then another. The blood in her veins was cold, and her heart weighed like stone as one after another fires of ThagoPs encampments glowed, out in the distance, out between the trees. One and one and one …they made a circle, wide and strong.

“They ring us in,” she said to the night.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again her heart stood suddenly still. Upon the forest night, the trees, the darkness, the little bits of light from campfires, something moved between her camp and that of the Knights. Hair rose up prickling on her arms, the back of her neck. Kerian’s breath caught, and she let it go silently. Whatever it was drifted, then stopped, then drifted again. It moved like smoke, like shadow, and as Kerian watched, trying to make out shape and substance, the thing vanished.

Beside her, Stanach stirred. He groaned, cursed, and shoved himself up to sitting. He saw the water and drank deeply. He offered her some, and she drank more.