The lone voice belonged to Revekah Halvor. Away to the south, she too broke the line and regarded her soldiers with disfavour.

“What?” she bellowed. “You all going to let this pampered north-wealder show us up?”

Viktor scowled the insult away.

“You’ll let that gilded princeling take your land?” Captain Halvor’s voice cracked. “Your sons and daughters? Or are you going to give Lumestra a battle worth watching?”

It seemed the goddess heard her words, for the clouds broke. Sunlight blazed across the croplands. Across the dead and wounded. Across swords and halberds hoisted high with renewed strength. Voices roared as one.

“For the Phoenix!”

Halvor cheered with them. Her gaze met Viktor’s. Her left eye twitched in what might have been a wink. Kraikons started forward, their stride outpacing flesh-and-blood comrades.

The sun warming his face, Viktor set out across the field, leaving the redoubts behind. The tramp of feet behind told him he was not alone.

The crackle of white flame swallowed the Tressian’s scream. Melanna scraped the sword back and spurred forward over the rocky ground. Her horse slammed into a knot of Tressian warriors. One went sprawling. Another perished as fire slid between his ribs.

“Ashanael Brigantim!” Aedrun’s bellow sent his men splashing through the rushing stream.

The ragtag enemy line broke. Dark figures slipped through the rocks towards the eaves of Davenwood.

Melanna’s blood blazed bright. She ignored the wearying ache in her left shoulder and hoisted the moon-banner high into the new-come sunshine.

“Drive them back! For the goddess!”

Her voice faltered as she glanced back eastward. At the bodies strewn across gulley and crag. At where the waters ran red. The white of the lunassera. The gold of Aedrun’s Immortals. The mismatched garb of the enemy dead.

Lunassera and Immortals flooded past in pursuit. Melanna let the banner drop and stared down at a sword-arm bloodied to the elbow. She’d no recollection of how many she’d slain. There was just the blur of fire, and the perfect jubilation that set her blood atremble. The same feeling as had overtaken her at Charren Gorge. The one that had set her soul coursing with incomparable joy . . . and whose ebb had left her empty and soul-sick.

She wasn’t ready to feel that way again. Not yet. Blood could fill that void – at least for a time.

The wind changed, and carried with it a rumbling, wordless battle cry. Not in her own tongue, but in dull, artless Tressian voices. Away to the south, past the hilly flanks and the nearer of the palisaded redoubts, the enemy marched into an arrow-darkened sky. At their head came a terrible, clawed shadow whose wings touched the sky.

“Ashana preserve us.” Her blood cooled with the words.