“Ware!” Cully called. He’d picked up another wyvern coming in from the setting sun in the west, right down the road. Four of them, now.

The squires’ charge was more successful than any of them would have hoped.

The daemon’s ambush—it certainly appeared to be an ambush—had been sprung from too close. There were three daemon warriors behind the first creatures, but they were so close behind that Toby’s charge first trampled the imps—Toby’s immediate name for the toothy monsters which had attacked the mare—but then crashed into the first of the adversaries. The beaked creature was as shocked as Toby, but his axe was faster than the daemon’s and he landed a hasty blow on the thing’s brow-ridge, cutting away a section of its engorged crest. Blood—red, too red—erupted as if under enormous pressure.

By sheer good fortune, Toby’s mate, Adrian Goldsmith, was right behind Toby, his horse on exactly the same line, and Adrian’s unbroken lance took the stunned daemon squarely in the mouth—entered, tore a furrow along its tongue and severed its spine. The lance broke under the weight of Goldsmith’s charge.

Marcus, once Ser Jehan’s page, an older man and not the best jouster, missed his strike and died, as a great stone-headed axe caved in his helmet and pulled him from his horse, but the horse, forced to turn, put both metal-shod forefeet into its master’s killer. Neither blow was mortal for a daemon, but the two knocked the big saurian back a yard or more and cost it its balance as it fell over its dead kin. It never got to rise, as Toby pulled his horse around. The horse did the work and Toby rode out its panicked rage.

The third daemon warrior broke to the left, its heavy haunches powering it as fast as a war horse through the undergrowth. It ran for its life.

And its allies.

Gabriel Muriens slipped off his horse neatly and quickly, freeing his feet from the big iron stirrups, getting his left leg over the high war saddle and putting his breastplate against the saddle’s padded seat as he slid to the ground.

Nell—scared beyond rational thought and yet ready—took the great horse’s reins. She’d just seen more power at closer range than she’d ever seen in her life—six exchanges of levin and fire, whirling shields of pure ops and a sword of light.

Without comment she handed her master his ghiavarina. He began to walk into the woods. Nell thought he looked like a predator stalking prey.

He spared one thought for the fights further down the road, turning his entire armoured body to look into the distance, but he didn’t raise his visor, and then the point of his heavy spear and the beak of his visor rotated back into the deep woods and he went forward.