Then the manifestation was over, leaving only a struggling knot of white maggots to show the great dragon’s passage. Thorn played with the notion that his master was deliberately lowering their morale, or was perhaps quite mad. But he crossed a few hundred paces of beaver swamp effortlessly and the insects didn’t trouble him, not even the new wyvernflies as big as hummingbirds.

He found Ser Hartmut and wakened him.

“I spoke to the master,” he said, tasting the word master and hating it. “He agrees. Dorling.”

Chapter Fifteen

North of Lissen Carak—Harmodius

The forces pursuing the Black Mountain Pond Bears were not really an army, but more of a wave front. The Faery Knight’s army moved to engage them, and everything Harmodius knew of war was turned on its ear. War of the Wild was not like the war of men.

The Faery Knight didn’t hold a command council, or issue orders. He merely informed Mogon and the other captains where the enemy could be found—and what he intended to do. Before the sun rose shining above the tree canopy, Lissen Carak’s plains were empty, and the forces that had marched from N’gara had formed their own weather front, almost two miles long, the ends trailing away in ever thinner spreads of beings that might have stretched for two more miles into the trackless wilderness. In the centre, the boglin warriors moved with precision, holding to routes as though they were marked on the ground—but then suddenly dropping to all sixes to swarm around an obstacle in a way that made a human’s stomach churn. On the left, Redmede’s humans and their Outwaller allies moved together in a long, thin skirmish line—the Outwaller war parties kept reserves of tried warriors in their brightest paint hidden, but the Jacks put all their men and fighting women in a single line, two deep, two yards between files.

Harmodius chose to ride behind the Jacks. The boglins were too alien, and Harmodius found it difficult, almost painful, even to converse with Exrech. The irks, once they put on their war faces, became hideous creatures out of nightmare and with behaviours to match.

“You regret what we become,” Tapio said from behind him.

“I do. You give up so much beauty to be monsters,” Harmodius said.

“War hasss that effect on all the sssentient peoplesss,” Tapio said. “We merely wear it openly.”

“You do not,” Harmodius said.

“My gift. Perhaps my curse.” The Faery Knight was the very image of glory in bronze and red and bucksin and green.