The east wind whipped the flames west.

“And now he comes,” Nikos intoned.

In the west, Ash rose into the air. Men with no hermetical skill whatsoever could feel him on the air; his presence was oppressive, like the stench of a corpse. Before he was fully visible in the clouds, he extinguished the fire; in time to save it from imperiling his attack, but not before the fire and the hermetical force behind it had created a cleared zone of almost two hundred paces in depth.

Golden globes of power rose over the mountainside.

Off to the east, Gavin and Tamsin and Ser Gregario rode back and forth, soaked to the skin, forcing men and irks and soaking wet Golden Bears and desperate wagoners across the fords. And as the last wagon came up the south bank, Gavin ordered his ballistas assembled, and then waved at Ser Gregario.

“All the chivalry,” he said. “Ready at the water’s edge.”

Gregario snapped an armoured fist to his visor. “Yes, my lord earl,” he said.

Loomsack Mountain—Ash

Ash’s troubles only seemed to multiply. Everything annoyed him; he was delighted to have an enemy under his claws. But days of conflict, herding his retreating foes before him, had also taught him a respect for their magisters, and as soon as the golden globes snapped into the real, Ash turned in the air and considered his options.

As always, it was a matter of balancing his flow of potentia. Far to the east, his monsters had destroyed the human fleet in Havre; yet his spies told him that far off in the Middle Sea, there were more and more of the great wooden round ships gathering. Ash could not leave hold of his serpents yet, the more so as, when the ancient things took losses, the survivors were even less willing to take risks. Ash had time to wish he had made alliance with the deep kraken, who now seemed to have made common cause with Lot instead. And the outright destruction of one of his Antica Terra rivals was a mixed blessing; the rebel was dead, and what that suggested about the power of these upstart humans only underlined why he had begun by promising their extermination to his fence-sitting relatives. And perhaps most disturbingly, Lot’s fall had not broken the alliance of Man and Wild. Ash, who seldom doubted, wondered if Lot was truly dead; his foe was wily and some of his workings seemed to still have teeth.

Worst of all, Ash had begun to wonder if dismissing Mortirmir and the human mages in Antica Terra had been entirely wise.

And the will was rising.