His attack and the counter-spell were almost simultaneous. There was a detonation in front of him and his horse shied—and subsided.

He backed the horse. He had a great many tricks since the last time he’d been in a fight like this, and he cast, and cast, and cast.

A bowshot away, his opponent was silhouetted against the foliage by a matt-black wall. The creature itself—a daemon—was lit from beneath by a simple light spell cast at the ground before it and thus not susceptible to a counter.

The tree beside it exploded, wicked shards of oak as sharp as spears whipping through the air.

The adversary struck him with a gout of white fire and then another. He took both on his shields and lost both shields in the process.

“Fiat lux,” he said aloud, and loosed his own bolt of lightning.

But the adversary was gone, skipping across reality.

Down the road, the second wyvern stooped, trading altitude for airspeed and calculating nicely with the ease born of long and predatory success, passing just over the last overhanging tree branches before a long stretch with no cover on either side of the road for half a bowshot—a short causeway over a marsh. It plucked one of the goodwife’s children from the wagon, decapitated one of her daughters with a talon flick, took a raking blow from the oldest daughter with a scythe and banked hard, skimming low over the reeds and the beaver house and rising neatly over the trees on the north side of the road.

The panicked horses took the wagon off the causeway, and the wagon stopped, the horse team mired immediately and screaming and neighing their panic as the wave-front of the wyvern’s terror passed over them again.

Ser Gavin and young Angelo di Laternum cantered up. The run along the road was already tiring their war horses.

The wyvern consumed its prey—a simple flip of the child into the air and a spray of blood visible two hundred yards away. Cully’s long shot from the end of the causeway fell away short.

“Under the wagon!” Gavin shouted at the goodwife and her brood. “Into the water. Under the wagon!”

The goodwife understood, or had the same notion herself. Grabbing her youngest, she leaped into the icy water. It was only thigh deep.

“Dismount,” Gavin snapped at the young Etruscan man-at-arms. Both of them swung heavily to the ground and pulled heavy poleaxes off the cruppers of their saddles. Angelo had a long axe with a fine blade. Ser Gavin had a war hammer—a single piece of steel that was deceptively small.

Cuddy and Flarch ran along the causeway like athletes in a race. Flarch—one of the company’s handsomest men—never took his eyes off the banking wyvern.

Cully loosed another light arrow and scored against the wyvern, who was too low and slow to manoeuvre.