“Very well,” she said. “We will come.”

She snapped orders to her household, and almost four hundred wardens rose to their feet. Their plumes were soaked, but the inlay in their beaks and the colour on their hides showed.

She herself sprinted at superhuman speed to where Harold Redmede was getting his people on their feet; sheer exhaustion and long habituation had most of the rangers asleep in the rain.

He flinched a little at her wave front of fear, but then grinned. “You comin’ with us, Your Grace?”

She yawned her beak. “If the bogglins get into our retreat at the ford,” she said, and left the sentence to hang.

“Let’s go, you villains!” Redmede called.

Men cursed; Stern Rachel continued her efforts to light her pipe, ignoring her corporal.

Next to her, Long Peter was fondling his dry bow string. “Fucking rain,” he said. “But if’n the demons are wi’ us, maybe it’s not a one-way trip.”

None of the rangers were under any illusions about their chances, covering the retreat of the army.

But they turned away from the chaos at the ford and walked back into the rain, headed west; away from safety, and into the face of the enemy.

Magister Nikos joined them on his mule. He rode along, one knee locked over the cantle of his saddle, a book open on his lap, spectacles perched on his nose. He didn’t seem to notice that the rain was gradually working on the ink.

Kwoqwethogan, Mogon’s nest brother, was the best mage she had left; he trotted alongside her for half a league as they climbed the mountain and then sprinted ahead, his heavy feet slamming onto the rocky trail and making the earth shake, until he caught up with Master Nikos.

His bronze and gold-inlaid beak was level with the grammarian’s head. The Morean closed his book carefully, latched it, and dropped it back into a saddlebag full of books.

“My lady says, our enemy will come. In person.” The warden bowed his great head. All the wardens were respectful of the grammarian; although his powers were not the strongest, the fineness of his control was without rival anywhere.

The warden mage spoke. “I am to give you my powers, and those of my sisters, too. We will not cast; we will fuel you.”

Master Nikos nodded, as if this was perfectly reasonable. It was; but even Nikos knew it was an outstanding example of cooperation and trust. “I want to take this a step further,” he said, and outlined a detailed hermetical proposal.

Kwoqwethogan flinched.

“We will always be linked,” Nikos admitted. “I don’t see another choice.”

The great warden shrugged. “You did this with Lord Kerak,” he said.

Nikos nodded. “And a little of me died when he died,” he admitted. “And now I have an overwhelming urge to catch and eat beaver.”

The adversarius mage, once an architect of the alliance with Thorn, chuckled. “Beaver are delicious,” he admitted. “And when you swim into one of the giant beaver nests and take their young . . .”