Ahead of them all, at the battle line, the Scouts’ maroon-colored leader chanted orders to his troops. On every side, bodyguards toppled, pulled down. Unicorns hurtled toward their injured leader like a thunder of forkhorns spooked by storm. And none of them, Ses knew suddenly, with certainty, would reach her in time. She saw that Lynex understood this. The congestion of fighters and the piling of bodies around him was too great. The pied mare was his. He was sure of it.

“Another moment, mare, and your flesh becomes my feast,” he crowed.

Ses saw blood trickle from Tek’s nostril and stain her beard. Head slightly lowered, she gazed up at Lynex. She stood three-legged, favoring the forelimb she had used to pinion his second-eldest head. Ses saw her snort blood in a fine scarlet spray. Her limbs tensed, braced, almost crouching. Her mouth moved. The pale mare was never sure after if she had heard the words, or only understood them from the framing of Tek’s lips and teeth and tongue.

“Well enough, wyrm,” the pied mare snarled at him, green eyes leveled in a gaze of pure hatred, without a hint of resignation or surrender. “Try to take it, if you dare.”

The wyrmking lunged. The black-and-rose mare reared to meet him. The sun set. Evening sky was the color of fading roses. A shrill cry halted everything. Or rather, nothing halted. It only seemed to halt. Ses felt herself frozen in time, still struggling forward like all her companions, the wyvern bodyguards falling around her, swarmed on and skewered by the Scouts of Halla. The high sound that had cut—was still cutting—the air was not a scream, the pale mare realized, but a whistle, a wild piercing battlecry shrilled by one younger and smaller than any other warrior on the field.

Turning—so slowly, it seemed as in a dream—Ses caught sight of her long-leggèd amber filly with the mane pale as milk galloping full-tilt down the cliff side above with a burning brand clutched in her teeth. The white limestone cliff rose nearly vertical. Showers of scree cascaded from Lell’s hooves. The brand in her teeth flashed and crackled, its flame orange, its buds so newly lit that Ses could still discern their shapes: hearts and rounds and crescents for the leaves, five-petaled roses for the flowers. The milkwood’s resinous sap popped, fizzing as it flamed, the smoky mingles of white and grey, smelling at once milk-sweet and tart as pitch.

Halfway down the precipitous slope, Lell sprang. The milkwood blazed as she hurtled, seemed almost to fly, sailing down toward Tek and the wyvern king. She came to earth far short, but she had gauged her leap to land her not on hard limestone but atop a heap of slain wyverns. The next instant, she sprang again, for the packed crush of living unicorns this time. Still piping her warcry, the amber filly dashed across their jostling backs, pounding hard for Lynex, milkwood brand flaming in her teeth.

Surprised, momentarily distracted, the wyrmking hesitated, turning his central head’s gaze from Tek toward Lell. To one side of him, Dagg and the leader of the Scouts dragged down the last defender blocking their path. Ryhenna thundered after them. To the wyrmking’s other side, Jah-lila broke through the wall of fallen bodyguards, her black horn slicked with wyverns’ blood. Teki vaulted in her wake. Just ahead of Ses, Calydor struggled over the motionless form of another fallen guard. It lay within their power to reach Tek now, the pale mare realized.

The king of the wyverns seemed to reach the same surmise. He turned back toward the wounded mare. She ramped and feinted before him. Heaped bodies ringed them like a barricade. Ses saw that with her injured foreleg, Tek could not flee, could not hope to climb that mound of dead unaided. She could only stand defiant, pawing the air. With a howl, the huge white wyrm lunged. Ahead, as she scrambled upward in Calydor’s wake, Ses saw Lell spring over the barricade of the slain, past Tek, swift as wind, light as wings, the firebrand blazing above her head. Full gallop, she scaled the belly and scarred breast of the king of wyrms and flung the firebrand in his face.

The wyvern leader roared, arching, knifelike nails clawing at his main head’s eyes. The other three remaining heads screamed and strained as if hoping to tear free of the wyrmking’s massive body, which tumbled backward, writhing. Lell plummeted to the ground as the scaly slope on which she had stood abruptly snatched itself away. Gaining the crest, Ses observed Jah-lila below seize the nape of her daughter’s neck in teeth and haul her bodily away from thrashing Lynex as though Tek were a weanling filly. Teki shouldered from the other side, helping the red mare drag her daughter up over the fallen bodyguards. Dagg and the leader of the Scouts sprinted across to lend their strength. Among the four of them, they managed to half-lift, half-herd the injured mare to safety.

Lell, sprawled on the limestone near Lynex, was already scrambling to her feet. Ryhenna tried to go to her, but the furious thrashing of the wyvern’s tail between them drove her back. The wyrmking keened and rolled, scattering the resinous firebrand into a thousand flaming shards. These were strewn by wind and the wyvern’s looping, sweeping tail into a broad arc.

“My eye! My eye, you little, cursèd wretch,” the king of the wyverns howled.

Sparks flew within the open space where he and Tek had lately dueled. Flames caught the wisps of summer-dry grass that sprouted in the crevices of the wyvern shelves. A semicircle of fire sprang up along the periphery of the open space. It stretched from far to Ses’s left all the way to where Tek and the others had disappeared over the mound of the fallen. Spreading fast, the two ends ran around behind the wyrm as though seeking to join. Barely in time, Ryhenna sprang out of its path.

On the far side of the open space from Ses, beyond Lynex and Lell, the two running trails of fire met, completing a ring. The dance of fire, low enough in its initial seconds for a unicorn to have sprung over, rose almost instantly to above head height. Within its circle, the wyrmking flailed, his cries subsiding. Panting, he rose, collecting himself, tail coiling, one eye of his great head wizened shut. The other heads whimpered. He turned his one-eyed gaze toward Lell. With a cry, Ses plunged toward her filly. A curtain of flame roared before her, blocking her path. The pale mare pitched to a halt, ramped helpless on the mass of wyvern dead, gazing into a ring of fire in which Lynex and her daughter now both lay trapped.

“I’ll see you rue saving your queen,” the white wyrm snarled.

Lell backed away. “Not till you wyrms rue that ever you stole our lands from us.”

The amber filly’s voice was steady, her expression wary, but unafraid. Ses tried to call to her, bid her flee, but the crackling flames drowned out her voice. Lynex lunged at Lell. She dodged, sought to skirt him. Behind him the ring, newly joined, had not yet flared unleapable. The wyvern’s tail swung, lashing, driving her back. The amber filly struck at the stings, but they were far too swift and powerful. She had to spring away to keep from being bowled over. Lynex swept his tail in a leisurely arc, herding her. One badger paw extended to intercept her as she rounded the fire ring’s inner curve.

Instead of dodging, Lell ran straight for the paw, then veered suddenly inward. Ses saw Lynex, lunging, lose his balance as he missed. His broad paw dipped into the fire. Howling, he snatched it out. Again Lell scaled the scarred slope of his breast. All four of his remaining heads bent to gape at her, but instead of fencing with her horn, she wheeled and kicked like a mountain calf, striking one of the smaller skulls smartly in the jaw. Shards of teeth fine as fishbones flew, glinting by firelight.

Sky above was the dark of flushed, sweet grapes. The burning ring lit the wyvern shelves in a yellow blaze. To one side, Ses saw Tek shouting, fighting to break past Jah-lila and Teki, Dagg and the leader of the Scouts, all of whom held her back from going to Lell. Within, the wyvern’s newly wounded head slapped and flailed, preventing his other maws from striking. Lell flew like a woodshare away from Lynex. A woodshare with nowhere to go. All around burned the impassable wall of fire.