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.

The day after Cornfields, Ash returned to the skies. He stayed well back from the fighting, but his eldritch powers were far beyond anything the rangers could muster, and his observational skills made ambush even more difficult. There was a rumour that Ash was wounded; that he had a gash that dripped gore, visible a mile away. It was a good rumour, and it gave folk heart; unlike the rumour that there were ten thousand dead of a new plague in Harndon and Liviapolis, where horned men and fungal spores were defeating the best efforts of human magery.

Or so it was said.

The Redmedes gave their people a day of rest; the grammarian spent it laying primed traps with the great Duchess of the West, Mogon. The alliance, despite everything, seemed to have the initiative in the woods; the grammarian used it to hide his devices, and when next Ash’s horde surged forward, their movements were constantly punctuated by bursts of fire. By noon, the woods north of the Cohocton were afire for three miles, and the wind blew from the east, and Ash had to come in person and quench the fires before his whole horde disintegrated.

That night, Tamsin cloaked the whole alliance army again and it marched all night, twenty-two leagues, all the way to the fords, where, so long ago, Bill Redmede had found enough Outwaller corn to keep his starving rangers alive. Behind them, the sky was black from the volcanoes burning in the west at N’gara, and darker still from the forest fires burning north of the river.

The fords were a set of rapids in the Cohocton, where the Black ran in from the north, and where, just a mile downstream and one great, flame-coloured ridge east, the West Kanata came down from the high Adnacrags. Autumn had touched the woods with fire; the woods were orange and gold and pale green.

Gavin Muriens sat his riding horse at the edge of the Ford, the shallows between the two rapids, and pointed with his little axe at the far side.

Mogon shook her proud head. “If we cross, we concede the north bank to Ash,” she said.

“So what?” Gavin said. “Ten leagues east of here there’s a village—Redesdale-on-the-wall. After Redesdale there’s a road. On a road we can fly.”

“It’s not much of a road,” Tapio said. “I looked at it in the spring.”