Evie releases her grip on her embedded ax and reaches for the chinstrap of his helm, using it to force his head back into the mud. She pulls her long knife free of his guts and presses the edge of its blade against the soldier’s exposed neck. Pulling his chin in the opposite direction, Evie presses down hard on the blade and drags it across his throat, a guttural sound that might belong to someone else escaping her mouth as she opens the Sicclunan’s veins.

More blood splashes the faceplate of her helm and Evie leans away from the soldier in disgust. She can no longer see through the slits in the steel over her eyes. Evie reaches up with her free hand shoves the helm up over her face. She shakes her head loose of it entirely, breathing like a drowning woman who has just broken from the surface of the water.

Evie’s gaze shoots from side to side, disoriented, trying to assess her bearings and any incoming threats. The Sicclunans are holding the front line just a few yards from where she’s straddling one of their fallen comrades. Years of resisting volleys of Savages has obviously taught them discipline. Yet no shield has replaced the one borne by the soldier beneath her, and she can spot several other holes in the line where identical shields should be. Evie can’t be certain, but through the continuing assault she thinks she sees fighting well behind the line, as well.

The bodies of fallen Savages are laid out three abreast in the mud up and down the line, and in many places they’ve begun to pile up. Evie turns her head and her gaze away from them, and from the broken wall of shields. She looks ahead to see dozens of other skirmishes taking place between her fellow Savages and the Sicclunans they’ve drawn from the line.

Through them all her eyes fix on Lariat, the old man with his walrus mustache. He’s kneeling over a prone soldier after removing the man’s helm. He rains left and right fists down on a thing that’s barely a human skull anymore in alternating, unbroken succession.

His breathing isn’t even elevated.

A furious howling shocks Evie’s attention back to the line. A Sicclunan footman is charging out from the hole she’s created among the shield wall. The sweeping, flared blade of his poleax is held high above his head, the entirety of the dawn seeming to be caught within the highly polished steel.