“Saving your pardon, my lord, but I’m magicked, or hermeticized, with some working that makes me—unseelie the enemy. And I’m under orders to take your best reports and return.” D’Acon shrugged. “Certes I was little troubled on my way here.”

Ser John snapped his fingers. “If there’s an army behind us,” he said.

Even Sauce looked different. She grinned. “Now we’ve got something.”

Strong in the knowledge that the company was behind him, Count John of Albinkirk threw his best knights forward in the early afternoon, and by the fortune of war they rescued the imperial rearguard—two hundred Hurans under a war chief and an imperial officer, and another hundred mixed imperial cavalrymen. It was a small victory, but they stung the pursuers, charging into an open rabble of boglins and enemy Outwallers on both sides of the road and sending them, in turn, running. But the woods behind them were alive with monsters, and Count John had no reserves to spare.

Fifteen minutes’ fighting sufficed to break the rearguard, exhausted but suddenly full of the energy of hope, free from the enemy. It also sufficed to teach Count John that he lacked the power to fight in the woods without either a mage or a lot of archery.

He had his knights and squires each take up one of the imperial Hurans on his saddle, and they trotted back to safety.

“Anyone behind you?” Count John asked Ser Giorgos.

“Not still alive,” the imperial officer said.

The Outwallers were useless for building anything. They expressed disinterest and wandered away. None of them—except Orley’s warband—could be made to build ladders except by force, and even then, the ladders they built were useless.

“Animals,” Ser Hartmut spat.

But the sailors had a more proper view of work, and they produced a dozen heavy siege ladders in short order—wood being in abundant supply. The wreck of the Morean camp was stripped for lumber, and trees were felled—not without some anger on the part of the creatures of the Wild. It was a long day, and an exhausting one.

The men on the walls of the Inn mocked them. They were loud and Ser Hartmut was curiously tender to it.

As the light began to dim and it became clear that early morning would mark the first assault, he went to find the sorcerer.

“We could save a good deal of time if you’d drop a rock on the castle,” he said.

Thorn stirred his great limbs. “It would,” he admitted. “But it is protected beyond my ability to affect it. It would take less time to send for your siege train from Ticondaga.”

Ser Hartmut’s temper exploded.

“That will take weeks,” he said. “Weeks we do not have.”

“We have won a great victory,” Thorn intoned.