She walked off to look at her pickets.

She had to walk a long way. Given two full days and some farm labour, Ser John had managed a small miracle of construction. The low ridge—not so low in places, either—that hemmed in the Hole on the south and west was now crowned with a long, winding earthworks well-reinforced with lumber, and in front of it the trees were cleared to stumps for almost a hundred paces—right down to the marsh—and then piled beyond in a tangle of spruce and maple.

Closed redoubts watched the ends, with trenches. On the west side, the ridge ran to the very edge of the creek that helped define the position. On the east side, the ridge petered out into a deep, wide bog. Behind her there was the higher ground with the old fort. They didn’t have the manpower to hold it—but it would take a determined assault willing to take heavy losses to get round the east end and past the redoubt—and the covered, secret surprise.

She knew the smell of roast boglin and it was heavy in the air. She wrinkled her nose and exchanged salutes with the armoured men in the south redoubt. They’d clearly stood to arms, and now looked sheepish and bored.

“Plenty of fighting later,” she said. “Christ, only a fool looks forward to it.”

She peered out over the wall. Someone out there was alive—a very accurate sling stone buzzed past her head.

“Fuck me,” she muttered. But she was on display, and she enjoyed the salutes. They never got old. She grinned. “Don’t get hit,” she said. “That’s an order.”

A generation of very young Jarsay knights grinned back at her. She’d been, to all intents, the primus pilus for three weeks. Everyone knew her.

“Don’t stand there like gowps,” she snapped. “Get a couple of archers behind a mantlet and scour the killing ground. You know the drill.”

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.