‘Should we be doing this?’ Coralen shouted to him.

‘Doing what?’

‘Charging uphill against a mounted foe.’

‘Probably not,’ Tukul called back, then laughed with the joy of it. Strategy be damned, nothing will stop me reaching my friend.

Then something huge strode through the gates. For a moment Tukul did not know what it was, then his eyes focused on the enormous jaws and hammer-like paws, tipped with thick-curved claws. A giant rode upon its back, dark-haired and brandishing spear and battle-axe. Another bear and rider filled the gates behind it.

Except perhaps that.

Tukul grinned. Now this is a fight worthy of the Jehar.

‘We’ll make a song out of this one,’ he yelled to Coralen, laughing, wind whipping his hair. She grinned back at him, raised an arm and clenched her fist, wolven claws chinking.

Attacking uphill, against a mounted enemy, giants and the great bears of the north. Madness.

He drew his sword, all about him the Jehar doing the same, a flash of lightning in the pale sunshine. He whispered to Daria, urging her into a gallop, holding his sword two-handed above his head, using foot, ankle, knee and thigh to guide his mount.

‘TRUTH AND COURAGE!’ he cried, the battle-cry taken up and echoed back at him by Coralen, Enkara and the others, a thunder-clap of voices.

Then they were crashing together, two waves of flesh, blood and bone, leather and fur and tooth and iron. Tukul had ridden Daria straight for the great bear and its rider, but warriors had flowed into the space between them.

I will carve my way to it, then.

With his first blow Tukul took a head from its owner’s shoulders, sending it spinning, blood jetting. He swerved Daria away from a spear lunge, deflected the spear-point, ran his sword down its shaft and severed the fingers that clutched it, then he was riding past, back-swinging his blade into the warrior’s neck. Daria slammed shoulders with the next horse; a roll of Tukul’s wrists, and he opened the rider’s throat, Daria stretching her neck and biting chunks of flesh from horse and rider.

Then he was through the line, blinking at the speed of it, a stretch of turf and dirt road before the gates to the hold. Behind him battle raged, and even at a glance he could tell the Jehar were cutting more of the enemy down with every stroke. To his right loomed one of the giants. As he watched, the bear it was riding crushed a horse’s skull with a swing of one huge paw, the giant lunging with his spear and skewering one of his Jehar, lifting the man from his saddle and flinging him through the air.

Tukul kicked Daria at them, raising his sword, yelling a war cry.