The lost day was welcomed by many—dry bowstrings and dry clothes cooked yellow at fires, as if nature, too, had decreed a day of rest. Out of a misty morning came a bright afternoon. Men wandered about—walking out into the pristine woodlands or along the gorge in chaotic patterns that hid—to those above—that more were leaving camp than returning. The sun dappled the glades around the camp and lit the bright green leaves and the last farmer’s fields of the now distant Brogat, and the men and women, Alban, Occitan and Morean, settled in to a good meal with heavy guards. Sukey’s girls carried mess kettles out to the mounted vedettes and Gelfred’s partisans and tried not to giggle as they passed rows of hungry men in hastily dug trenches. The guard changed an hour before sunset, and heavy patrols suddenly launched from both ends of the camp.

They found nothing, but they made the captain feel better, and they put on a good show for the distant barghasts.

Just at the edge of night, the Queen’s party came in, trailing the monstrous avians like picnickers trailing mosquitoes.

Gabriel was ready—indeed, ever since the Queen had come back into his range, he’d been in contact with her, and now, both used weak counters and cast reckless and inaccurate missiles until the barghasts grew bold. Swooping from the safety of their altitude, they dropped on the Queen’s party as they rode, fully exposed, along the low path in the gorge’s edge. They leaped like wolves upon sheep.

Sheep seldom have hundreds of professional soldiers guarding them. Nor was the animal cunning of the barghast any match for Gelfred’s hunter mind. He had designed the ambush, complete to slaughtered sheep left in forest openings—and crossbowmen in trees with woven leaf screens who could loose their bolts down into the gorge where the overbold barghasts circled below the archers, trapped like trout against a beaver dam.

Every caster present, no matter how lowly, cast together on the first shrill of the horns, and twenty-one set to frame the words Fiat Lux. Every avian was surrounded in a nimbus of light that perfectly outlined them against the darkening sky—

Before Desiderata’s golden light began to pluck them from the air, before the captain rose from his body, dangerously exposed, to chase the last two down—before that, the population of barghasts was culled in a sheet of forged iron tips and heavy bodkin points and quarter-pound arrows. An ancient wyvern—an important clan leader—died in a moment.

The sky was empty.