Aneas Muriens returned the gesture.

Nita Qwan was enjoying the rare embrace of the Faery Knight. Tapio rarely displayed emotion to the children of men, but today, at the edge of battle, a century of rangers and a handful of Outwallers seemed like a gift from his gods of fortune.

Blizzard looked as if he might have to allow himself to be provoked by the accession of so many strangers in his innermost holding, but Lily, who had followed the rangers through a hundred leagues of forest, would not hear of it.

“There is no, rrr, owning!” she insisted. “It is this, mmmm, owning, that makes men so greedy. Let us not bear, grrrrk, its taint!”

Blizzard watched them crossing his marsh; now almost a thousand nonbears. It had just started to snow, a light dusting of snow falling thickly enough to obscure the head of the column.

He shook his great white head. “They will come here, rerak! With their ploughs and their swords. I have heard, rrrgrrr. They say they will beat swords into, grrrrr, ploughshares. I say, arrrr, to a bear, rrrr, one form of conquest for another!”

Lily shrugged. “They are dangerous, Blizzard. Their smell makes me, grrrrr, deep in my throat. They killed my mother.” She touched her snout to his. “They are, geerrrak, dangerous allies. But if we, mmmm, hide in our, rrrr, woods and try to, rrrr, fight the world, we will be warming, arrrr, floors across the world, our, grrrr! hides for rugs.”

“They killed your, grrrr, mother, young one? And you, arrrrr, you walk the woods with them?” The older bear nuzzled her.

She grunted, turning away from his advances. “I, grrrr, end the war! Not revenge, and not, mmm, a mating with you, old bear.” She laughed a bear laugh at his surprise, and she put a paw on him. “Listen. Grrr! Some men killed my mother. Grrr! Other men let me go. The world is not simple. Let us help these human love us. Arrrrgrrr?”

Blizzard swiped a paw at her. “So much, grrr, talk, from one so, grrr, young,” he said. And when she loped away, he said, “And, rrrr, beautiful,” and ran a hirsute thumb over the razor-sharp blade of his great axe.

The Army of the Alliance cut west, into the setting sun and the darkening sky. Now, almost three full weeks since the battle of N’gara, the whole sky seemed to mourn the fall of the Irkish citadel and the ruin of their hopes. The setting sun made the western sky into a blazing quilt of reds and oranges and long trails of brilliant whites, like dangling threads, and under all a pall of dark orange like a looming storm. It would, under ordinary conditions, have been a terrifying sky.

Most of the men and women of the alliance were used to it.