Ehren staggered in the wildly swaying coach, trying not to step all over the wounded Knight, and leaned out to grasp at the door.

He had a short look at the outside. The coach was racing along at a dangerous pace, skimming thirty feet above the six-foot-long grass stalks of the central plains of the Amaranth Vale. The sun had all but set, and the sky was scarlet and midnight blue.

It was also full of Vord.

Ehren wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking at. He recognized the shapes of the Knights Aeris readily enough, the familiar armored forms streaking by, supported by their furies’ windstreams. But there were more-many more-of the strange, black, glistening shapes with wings like dragonflies, greenly translucent.

An instinct made him look up in time to see one of the enemy plunging down toward him. He had a second, perhaps two, to get a look at it.

It almost looked human.

It had two arms, two legs, a head, with a face that was human in shape-but eerily featureless except for its segmented eyes. Dragonfly wings buzzed behind its shoulders, and its arms terminated not in hands, but in a single, gleaming, scythe-shaped talon a little less than two feet long-almost precisely the same length, Ehren realized, as a legionare’s gladius. Its armor, too, resembled a legionare’s lorica, though it melded seamlessly with its skin, all of it made from the same gleaming, dark chitin.

It looked, in fact, a great deal like a Knight Aeris.

And it was coming straight for him.

Ehren scrambled back, pulling the door shut, and flung his back against the rear wall of the coach. One of the vordknight’s vicious scythes slammed through the wood of the door where he’d been crouching an instant before. The eerie, featureless face appeared at the side window, not six inches from Ehren’s own, staring in at him through the glass.

Ehren was never sure precisely when he had drawn the knife, but in the same instant he saw that face, his right arm snapped forward, to shatter the window and bury his knife to the hilt in the vordknight’s glittering eye.

It screamed, a wailing shriek that sounded like tearing metal and the snarls of a wounded dog. Green-brown blood sputtered from the wound in a miniature fountain.

Ehren let go of the knife, braced his back, screamed for strength again, and lashed out with the heel of his boot, kicking at the scythe still transfixing the door. It snapped and broke cleanly, like the edge of a horse’s hoof, and the vordknight vanished from sight, falling away from the racing coach.

Gaius looked up from where he knelt over the wounded Knight and gave Ehren a sharp nod of approval.

And then he heard a piercing trumpet, a clarion call that carried even over the roar of wind and the shouts and cries of battle.

“Ah,” Gaius said, glancing up briefly. “Excellent.”

From outside the coach came a flash of light and a deafening racket of thunder-and another, and another. Interspaced within the head-rattling thunderclaps were smaller flashes of light, accompanied by hollow, heavy booms, and Ehren turned to see a vordknight, its wings burned completely away, its body twisted and cracked by fire, plummet past the coach’s window. The coach banked smoothly to the right and began to gain altitude again-smoothly, this time, instead of with the sharp panic of combat.

A moment later, there was a knock on the coach’s door. Ehren didn’t remember actually deciding to draw another knife, but he was just as glad that his fingers had preempted him.

“Stay your hand,” Gaius said calmly. “Let him in please, Sir Ehren.”

Ehren swallowed and opened the coach door, to find an elderly man dressed in very fine but rather outdated armor, riding a windstream parallel to the coach. He had shorn his head, but the stubble of his beard was mostly silver, and his eyes were sunken with fatigue-but shone with bitter rage.

“Your Grace,” Ehren stammered. He stepped back from the door, nodding to the High Lord Cereus to enter.

“Sire,” Cereus said with a nod, closing the door behind him.

“Your Grace,” Gaius replied. “A moment.” He closed his eyes briefly, then lifted his hand from the wounded Knight. The man lay there pale and still, but his chest was still moving, and he was no longer bleeding. “Thank you.”

“No thanks are necessary, sire. Whatever those other jackals want to pretend, Sextus, you are the First Lord of Alera and my lord. I only did my duty.”

“Thank you all the same,” Gaius replied quietly. “I’m sorry about Vereus. He was a fine young man.”

The High Lord glanced out the coach’s window at the coming darkness. “Veradis?”

“Safe,” Gaius said. “And will be so while I have breath in my body.”

Cereus bowed his head. He took a deep breath, and said, “Thank you.”

“No thanks are necessary,” Gaius said, smiling faintly. “Whatever those jackals want to pretend, I am your lord. Duty flows uphill and down.” He frowned again and looked out the window. “I’ll have our Legions in position to support Ceres in another week. What can you tell me about the Vord advance?”

Cereus looked up wearily. “That it is accelerating, despite everything we can do.”

“Accelerating?” Ehren blurted. “What do you mean?”

The old High Lord shook his head and spoke without any inflection. “I mean, Sir Ehren, my lord, that my city does not have a week.

“The Vord will be upon us in two days.”

Amara held the arrow nocked firmly against the bowstring, and kept enough steady pressure against it to ensure a swift and certain draw, but not too much to tire her arm. It had been a surprisingly difficult skill to learn, at least until she’d developed enough of the proper musculature to use the bow her husband had made for her. She took a slow step forward and put her foot down silently, her eyes focused into the middle distance, at nothing, the way she’d been trained. The forest was almost silent in the stillness just before dawn, but Cirrus, her wind fury, carried every tiny sound to her ears as clearly as if it’d been a voice speaking from directly beside her.

Trees creaked in tiny breaths of wind. Sleeping birds stirred, their feathers rustling. Something scuttled among the higher branches of a tree, probably a squirrel getting an early start on the day, or a night rodent of some kind crawling back to its nest. Something rustled, perhaps a deer making its way through the brush-

– and perhaps not.

Amara focused Cirrus on the sound and located a second rustling, that of cloth on cloth. Not a deer, then, but her target.

She pivoted toward the sound, in perfect silence, moving slowly to keep it, focusing on maintaining her own invisibility. Learning to master the use of the furycrafted cloth had been simpler than she had expected-certainly easier than employing a windcrafted veil. All she had to do was maintain a low level of concentration, focusing on the colors of her surroundings, drawing them in from what she saw, and the cloth would absorb and mimic them, rendering her into little more than a blur of background color. Granted, the original designer of the cloth, an expensive clothier in Aquitaine, had nearly shrieked the skies down when she’d heard how her invention, designed as the absolute pinnacle of wealthy fashion, was to be used.

The thought made Amara smile. Just a little.

She couldn’t see anything where her ears told her something should be, but that didn’t matter. She drew the bow in a slow, practiced motion, and loosed the arrow.

The arrow flew, swift and straight, and from the empty air appeared a form of blurred color that eventually resolved itself into the shape of her husband. The blunted wooden arrow hadn’t been a deadly threat, but as he cast back his own color-shifting cloak and rubbed at his ribs, wincing, Amara found her own side twinging in sympathy.