Xac Wen gave ground with them, retreating amid a cluster of others who were not at the forefront of the fighting, making his way back through the twists and turns of Aphalion Pass toward the defensive walls at the far end. He held his bow and arrows ready, prepared to fight if it became necessary, aware of how fragile the line of fighters ahead of him would become if a sustained rush were mounted.

Shouts and the brittle clang of metal weapons echoed through the defile walls, a din so cacophonous that it threatened to overwhelm the boy’s courage.

He lost track of where he was, moving back in fits and starts, jostled by those about him who were doing the same, trying hard to concentrate on not stumbling and falling. He was afraid if he fell that the crush might stop him from rising again in time to avoid the wave of fighters coming after.

Then, suddenly, he was bathed in an unexpected wash of sunlight, the walls parting abruptly to form a huge arena space within the center of the passageway. It was here, he realized, that Tasha and Tenerife, leading the little company of friends from Arborlon and Glensk Wood, had come looking all those weeks ago to discover if the protective walls of the valley were really down.

It was here they had encountered the dragon.

Without even thinking about it, he lifted his gaze toward the gap in the cliffs that opened to the sky.

And thereby witnessed a miracle.

AT DECLAN REACH, earlier that same day, the sun rose with a bright glow behind the wall of the mountains, bathing the lands west in a faint sheen of silvery light that just managed to chase back the last of the night’s shadows and illuminate the features of the battlefield where the dead lay in heaps. The demon, still wrapped in his Skeal Eile disguise, took a moment to look about at the carnage he had created. Acres of bodies spread away before him, stretching from the mouth of the pass for hundreds of yards downslope toward the empty flats and rough hill country beyond. The last of the Drouj survivors picked through the remains in search of spoils, gathering up bits and pieces of lives gone dark, carrion in search of an unspecified sustenance. Only Arik Siq stood apart, his gaze shifting between the Seraphic on the one hand and the dark mouth of the pass on the other. What he was looking for was difficult to say. Perhaps he was trying to make sense of things, realizing that in some way he had transgressed beyond even what he had thought himself capable of doing. Perhaps he was just trying to stay alert to whatever else might be coming his way.