The trouble was, that little taste turned into a rather large and painful bite.

They spent most of the day leading the enemy overland, keeping just out of range, exhausting his horses while they changed off on their remounts at noon, and had fresh beasts to his tired ones. Then, just before sunset, they pretended to make a stand, teased Ancar’s men into a charge, and retreated, under covering fire.

The spot for their stand had been carefully chosen; a rocky hillside with plenty of cover, and too many boulders for Ancar’s cavalry to charge. Kero watched with a critical eye, carefully gauging the weariness of Ancar’s fighters. She let three successive waves approach her position, and be driven back—waiting for Ancar’s officers to call in the tired men for the night.

Instead, they kept coming; a fourth wave, and as the sun set, a fifth.

And under torchlight, a sixth.

They were running out of ammunition, energy—and still the enemy kept coming, though he left his dead and wounded in heaps at the foot of their stony shelter.

After the eighth wave had retreated, Kero put down her bow and sagged against her boulder with exhaustion. Her arms were like a pair of lead bars; her legs shook with weariness. And she was in relatively good shape. Selenay’s people, far more inclined than hers to risk themselves for a good shot, had managed to populate the rude shelter the Healers had assembled with their wounded. Not too many Skybolts wore bandages yet, but if this kept up....

She watched the torches bobbing and dancing out beyond firing range and longed fiercely for her mages. It looked—dear gods!—like they were massing for attack-wave number nine.

“I don’t believe this,” she muttered, staring at Ancar’s lines.

“I don’t either,” said Shallan from the other side of the boulder, in a voice fogged with fatigue. “They’re not human.”

“Or they’re driven by something that isn’t human,” Eldan said grimly. “The bastard has some kind of hold over them. They’d rather face our arrows than what he’s got over there.”

Kero turned around and looked over her shoulder. “Is that a guess, or information?”

Eldan looked like the rest of them; his white uniform was smudged and filthy, there was dirt in his hair, and sweat-streaked dust on his face. “A guess,” he said, staring past her at the enemy. “I’m not an Empath, like Talia. And they have some kind of shield over them that prevents me from reading their thoughts. But I think it’s a pretty good guess.”

“Seeing as they had one mage with them that was willing to charge right in after us, you’re probably right,” Kero said, turning back to look at the enemy herself.