[[I don’t know,]] said Anastacia. [[I’ve a great deal of repressed anger. I’m worried I might hurt someone.]]

“Enough jokes!” snapped Crovan.

“I don’t think she’s joking,” said Josiri.

He cast an eye around the hollow and saw more worried faces than eager ones.

“Let Silda go, Crovan.”

“You made this necessary, not me!”

“Maybe that’s true. But what happens next is on you.”

“You’re right,” said Crovan, his eyes dark. “Vorn! Kill her!”

Revekah closed her ears to the pale-witches’ eerie hymn. To the distant hoof-beats. To the screams that marked a race run to a bloody end. She knew she should have died long ago, cut down from behind. But if the bloody aftermath of Zanya had taught her anything, it was that you couldn’t dwell on that. You ran until you were safe, or you were dead.

New notes rose out of the slaughter: crisp, strident and clear. Revekah had lived fifteen years in fear of that sound. The fanfare of buccinas rousing knights to the charge. Now it was the sweetest of music. At last, she understood why she’d lived to flee so far.

The Knights of Essamere were charging.

Cloaks and plumes streaming in the wind, they galloped past the fleeing militia to the north. Swords glinted in the sun. Lances bit home. The leading edge of the Hadari pursuit disintegrated.

Revekah glimpsed Calenne among the knights, sword brandished high. In that moment the daughter was truly the mother reborn.

Cataphracts spurred forward from the east. A second wave responding to Calenne’s charge. Further north, pale-witches’ flickering steeds danced from the broken ground to join the counter-assault . . . And with them, a woman on a rowan horse, a moon-banner snapping behind her.

“Captain!” A breathless Tarn shook her by the shoulder. “We have to keep moving!”

“Go,” Revekah said, her lungs still heaving. “I’m right behind you.”

She looked northward once more, searching for Calenne in the melee. She saw only a mass of striving bodies, half-hidden in clouds of hoof-kicked dust.

“I’m sorry, Katya.”

Tarn screamed, a pale-witch’s spear in his back. The light fled his youthful eyes even as Revekah caught him. The killer galloped past in a rippling thump of hooves. She wheeled about, her steed sidestepping daintily.

Revekah let Tarn’s body drop. Cold fury boiled up from the pit of her stomach. She cursed Akadra for his gamble and herself for embracing it. But she cursed the pale-witch most of all.

The killer watched from atop her steed, in no hurry to finish what she’d begun.

“What’re you waiting for?” shouted Revekah. “Scared of an old woman?”

The witch spurred forward. The moonlight spear flashed. Revekah’s shield disintegrated like rotting parchment. The blade stabbed deep into her shoulder.

Revekah screamed and threw herself clear of the thundering hooves.