The second attack had more meat in it. There was a directing intelligence behind it—at least, they heard horns and bellows—and a boiling mass of boglins threw surprising amounts of wood and grass and ferns and other organic matter—including charred boglins—into the ditch. They’d crossed the marsh silently, mostly the new imps and more boglins.

A heavy crossbow coughed from a covered position well up the ridge. On one of the few small mounds of dry in the swamp, a daemon was struck right through his body. His screams went on until one of his mates finished him. The boglins crossed, climbed up the revetment, and died.

Some of the farmers from the valley and the Brogat, working away at clearing trees and digging dirt, were appalled by the wave of boglins. Some ran. A few deserted.

A few started killing boglins with shovels.

“Sign ’em up,” Sauce said. Both men proved to be farm labourers—men who owned nothing and were almost slaves.

“How’d we get all this farm labour?” she asked Ser John.

Ser John was watching the sky. They had four towers going up, all holding new-built torsion machines. He was wondering where the wyverns were. “The Captain of Albinkirk offered a year’s remission of all taxes for ten days’ digging,” he said.

Sauce grinned. “That Captain of Albinkirk, he’s one smart man.”

A little after two in the afternoon, and the mess kettles were on for dinner. A convoy rolled in from Albinkirk—forty wagons full of food and munitions. Sheaves of new arrows, already on spacers in linen bags, and new tinned-iron kettles. Some new brass kettles made in Genua.

“Miss me?” the captain said, and Sauce threw her arms around him and kissed him. Some of the newer members of the company and some of the knights with Ser Ricar were appalled. Others cheered.

She leaned back to look at him. “You look like you got the cream.”

He laughed. “We’ll see,” he said. “The cream may yet get me. In the meantime…”

He spent two hours with them, outlining the new alliance, quelling their fears of having a Wild ally, and riding along the two ridges south and west of the Hole and one high beech-tree-covered ridge north and west of the little stream.

When he was done, he bowed in the saddle to Ser John. “You’ve done it. It’s beautiful.”

Ser John was hesitant. “I was only going to be here until today—tomorrow at the outside.”

The captain nodded, his eyes on the distant Green Hills. “I expect we’ll fight tomorrow, but the real fight will be the day after.” He kept watching the hills. “I may have this all wrong. The sorcerer can still just go north into the woods and come at us on the old Ticondaga road or across West Kanata.”

Sauce raised an eyebrow. “But?”

“But he has much greater supply problems than we do,” the captain said with his breezy confidence.

“A million monsters…”