It was so fast that Long Paw had to start his rising cut, left to right, while the thing was still coming over the back of the last mare, four paces away.

The red-black thing loosed a scarlet bolt as it leapt. The steel and wood buckler in Long Paw’s left hand took the bolt, and became slag, and heat burned Long Paw’s hand right through the steel gauntlet under the buckler, burning two fingers off his hand and scorching the rest.

His cut severed a reaching, taloned hand and his point went unerringly into the thing’s sucker face even as its sword cut the last four inches off his own . . . a late parry with a magical sword. His blade went right through it—no shock of bone—and the whole weight of the thing slammed him off his feet.

He fell back, and hit his head. He didn’t go out, but the burning hot, rubbery weight of it pushed him to action—talons screamed across his thigh, and he felt the poison hit him.

His volition started to leak out of him.

Donna Beatrice slammed her dagger into its whipcord-thin back. She’d killed chickens and she’d killed sheep and her arm was sure; even facing something that defied reason, her hand did its task. She severed its spinal cord. She was screaming like a banshee, but her knife was sure. Its sword clattered to the ground.

Long Paw felt it go, because for almost a full second, it had been him. It was a terrible emptying; one moment he burned with power, and the next he was an empty vessel.

Long Paw lay in the mud, staring up at the rain-laden sky.

Donna Beatrice continued to stab the dead thing for quite some time. Her blows landed with meaty sounds. She was still screaming at the top of her lungs.

The horses were racing around the inside of the walls as if the little orchard were a race course.

Long Paw wasn’t sure who he was. And then he was a little sure, and then a little more.

Brown vaulted the wall of the enclosure and almost died under the hooves of M’bub Ali’s stallion. Brown rolled and then leaped and managed to get clear of a wild-eyed mare.

He looked for a moment at the thing. The Etruscan woman was kneeling by Long Paw, and she was thrusting, dagger reversed in both hands, over and over into the thing’s back.

Long Paw’s sword was through its head.

And as fast as Donna Beatrice stabbed it, the wounds healed. He had thought her maddened, but she was merely panicked, and nonetheless doing what she could; the talons were hacked away.

Brown reached into his shirt, leaned down, and plunged ten inches of witchbane into the creature.

It spasmed.

He left it there.

The wounds stopped closing.