Gavin looked back to the east. “The Prince of Occitan and the Count of the Borders are raising the royal army in the east,” he said. “We are not alone.”

“You are asssking me to give all I have,” Tapio said. “To sssave the world of men.”

Gavin drew himself up. He was still the Green Earl; he was far from beaten. “I have lost Ticondonaga,” he said. “When we are victorious, I will rebuild it. I pledge the Kingdom of Alba to rebuilding N’gara.”

Tapio nodded slowly. Then he raised his arms as if invoking the aid of heaven.

“It isss done,” he said.

Tamsin vanished.

“Tamsssin hasss taken our people and run,” Tapio said. “Now let usss take the time we have won, and not sssquander it.”

Gavin nodded. “Break and run,” he said.

Weary men and women clambered to their feet, and hauled their mates up; men donned packs. Bess was with the matrons; Bill Redmede missed her, but he got his pack on his shoulder. Bill wondered if it was symbolic that the Jack’s white wool cotes had grown to a colour more like summer green, and the crisp dark green cotes of the royal foresters had bleached in the sun to a colour lighter than the leaves of a summer oak, so that the two were nearly indistinguishable in the shade of the old beech trees.

“I’m tired of getting beat,” Redmede said to his brother. He was too loud; no one could hear well, and the dark sky frightened everyone.

Ser Gavin heard him, and he looked down and his smile was tired and grim. “Fight, get beat, rise up, and fight again,” he said. “That’s our job.”

Some men laughed, and some muttered darkly, but authority called; sergeants and vintners ordered men into lines or columns, and despite everything, a rear guard of Jacks and foresters and Irkish knights was formed and, as if daring fate, went back up the ridge above them.

Gavin found his heart rising. “Damn,” he said. “Damn me. We aren’t beat yet.”

Tapio nodded. “Indeed,” he said. “We mortals are not ssshort of courage. Perhapss it isss becaussse we die so fassst anyway.”

Behind a screen of rangers, the Army of the Alliance of Men and the Wild formed into columns and tramped off into the last light along the very same trail that Bill Redmede’s shattered Jacks had traversed in the other direction just a year before.

Grey Cat, the wiliest of his hunters, grinned. “Just eight days to the Cohocton Country,” he said.

Redmede took a long pull at his nearly empty canteen and spat. “I’m too fuckin’ old for this,” he said.

Gavin had a notion, as a squire brought him a horse, and he played with his stirrup leathers while he refined it.

“Where is Lady Tamsin?” he asked Tapio.

“Clossse,” Tapio replied. “She isss doing what can be done for N’gara.”