Syr Ydrik rode down one of the adversariae, the great wardens, with his engorged purple crest. Hearing the stag hooves, the shaman whirled and loosed a bolt of aethereal fire from the haft of his stone-bladed axe, and Ydrik’s lance of gold was shivered and unmade. But the old irk leaned out from his high saddle, already taking the long, slim axe off the cantle, and with his left hand he gathered potentia. His axe batted aside his opponent’s next working, and his next, as the stag surged under him; the wave front of his fear passed through the warden’s and then his savage counter filled the shaman’s defences with fire, and his axe crashed down; no random blow counting on strength, it cut a steady line, turning the stone axe by so little that the warden never knew the blow that sent half his skull to the ground ahead of the collapse of his body.

Syr Ydrik pivoted his tired stag and he reared it, and whirled his axe over his head, and the rangers cheered. He subsumed his dead foe, drawing the thing’s power to himself.

War in the Wild.

And then they picked up their wounded and ran for the main army, twelve miles away.

They moved quickly and silently in the pouring rain, and the sound of the rain covered them. The rangers were all grey with fatigue; even the dark-skinned men and women looked grey in the early light.

It was their sixth day of the little war; chewing on the enemy’s flanks, worrying him like dogs on a boar, trying to distract the flankers, trying to kill the high-value monsters on whom Ash’s battle plans must depend. It was a very personal war, less about high strategy and more about training, toughness, dogged determination, stamina, pain tolerance, food, and sleep. About how well a man performed when he couldn’t think or see; about how well a woman knew where her dirk was when her mind would no longer obey her; about remembering to keep your bowstring dry when you hadn’t eaten in two days or slept in three.

For Harald Redmede, it was about picking battles and battlefields, and never making a mistake. Because one mistake and they’d all be dead; no one had the energy for a heroic last stand. The Redmedes planned the swamp ambush, and the attack at the place they all called Bogglin Gully, and brilliant, one-sided massacre of a whole clan of wardens at Cornfields, when Ash’s creatures attempted to collapse the alliance rear guard. One Redmede commanded; the other was already searching for the next battlefield, the next ambush, the next massacre site.

And each day the risks changed, and grew; Gavin Muriens had warned the Redmedes that they were training Ash’s army, and it was true; the enemy kept better watch, they covered their flanks, they were far more cautious in pursuit. After Cornfields, the enemy mounted wardens on some hastenoch, whether or not the tentacled trolls were under compulsion, and with this monstrous cavalry, they covered their main body; no match for the irk knights, but capable and able to call on sorcerous support from their shamans.