And indeed, the horses needed water and a rest from men on their backs, and Goodwife Skinner, a big heavy woman with beautiful eyes and a no-nonsense face doled out sweet buns and tart cider. Men drank it without removing their blood-soaked gauntlets or gloves. Ser John looked about him, and they were all blue-red-black with ichor and blood and mud.

The horn—that horn would haunt his dreams—sounded very close.

“Get inside and bar your doors,” Ser John snapped, pushing Goodwife Skinner into her kitchen door.

“An’ don’t we wish we could come in wi’ you?” muttered Wilful Murder.

“To horse!” Ser John shouted.

His great war horse—the best he’d ever owned—seemed to give a human groan as he mounted. He trotted the horse past the barnyard and the farmer met him there at the corner, his heavy weapon spanned and ready. The farmer ran to the next gate and paused, looked around carefully and then opened the gate. He stepped through.

Ser John rode right by him. He wasn’t sure why he did it, except perhaps the sense that it was his job to protect the farmer, not the farmer’s job to protect him.

He felt the enemy through his horse before ever he saw them. They were in the next field, near the base of the valley. They’d come miles north and west, now—Lissen Carak would be only a dozen more miles that way. The edge of the woods was only a mile or two to the north, if that. That’s where the raiders were headed.

Ser John went through the gate, past the farmer, and then trotted up the muddy field. He could see his enemy through the next gate.

The closed field in which he was riding was unploughed, or his horse would have sunk to the fetlocks. But there were only two gates—the one he’d passed through, and the one ahead.

He rode up to the gate. A gout of black fire struck it just as he reached it and it blew clean off its hinges and collapsed.

The four-footed black thing was loping towards him over an unploughed hayfield. Ser John didn’t think. He just slammed down his visor and touched his spurs to Iskander, who responded with all the noble heart any knight could ask from a horse, exploding forward despite the soft, treacherous ground.

The huge black creature—it was almost amorphous, it moved so fast—reared up.

It was a troll.

It cast.

The sigil on his chest felt as if it was melting and running over his skin, and he shrieked, but he and his horse rode through a cloud of black-blue fire and he dropped his lance point a hand’s breadth—

His lance caught it in the centre of the head. Even a ten-foot-high stone statue would be damaged by a war horse and rider powering a heavy lance. His strike was so sure, so exact, that his lance tip caught on its brow ridge and bent—and broke.