In front, Fitzalan came trotting back from the direction of the enemy with a bear cub in his arms. He put the Golden Bear on the ground and suddenly the woods to their immediate front were full of bears—upright like men or on all fours, some with bags, or axes, or bits of armour. They were muddy, emaciated, and exhausted—but as they passed through the gap between the western boglins and Redmede’s Jacks, they let out a growl that might have been a cheer. An old bear galumphed to Redmede’s side and swatted him with a heavy paw—another, even older, with fur so grey he seemed to have come from snow, rose before Harmodius.

“By the Maker,” he said. “There is good even in men.”

Tapio made his stag rear. He waved to Bill Redmede, who nodded and raised his horn.

A dozen other men and women raised theirs, and, to the left, the Dulwar war chief raised his. To the right, Exrech was lost amid the sun-dappled leaves.

The Faery Knight raised his great green ivory oliphaunt horn and blew, and two hundred horns made their dreadful music.

The line sprang forward. But it did not move like a line of men. It moved with an organic fluidity that would have led to disintegration in an army of men, but an army of the Wild lived by a different code.

And so, too, when they sighted the enemy.

Horns blew. And then, suddenly, every creature seemed to leap at every other.

War in the Wild, Harmodius realized, was not about winning, but about being the most successful predator.

Redmede stood off the first rush—some doglike running thing that lost him three Jacks before Harmodius cleared the woods with fire and bought them the minutes they needed to find better ground, fleeing to the left until they put a muddy-ditched beaver meadow between them and their pursuers.

The northerners were overjoyed at their initial success and pushed forward. In the centre, where boglin legion slammed into boglin legion and the vicious tides of death ran together, the western boglins lost fifty yards in the first scrum and left a hundred corpses as food for their enemies. But though the northerners were bigger, heavier, and had eaten better, they also tired faster. Exrech was everywhere, and eldritch fire licked at his mandibles as he stemmed the first rout. He steadied his horde on the south bank of a small stream and the height advantage was, for a moment, enough to stop the northerners in the water below and turn it black with their blood and ichor.