Hawissa Swynford had survived the day in Penrith. She had helped the other foresters hold the edge of the town for hours, loosing her shafts until her back and arms ached and her quiver was empty. Then she had fought with her sword, and when that broke, with a bogglin’s spear.

When the dragon came, she was terrified, but only in a vague, distant way, because she’d experienced so much terror by then that the horror was a dull ache in her head. Luck and nothing more had left her with a blistered face and no worse. Half her regiment had died and she stabbed another bogglin and tried to find time to breathe.

Swynford was an old hand, a northerner with ten years of service. When Hand and Redmede burned, she found herself the senior officer of the survivors; or at least, no one else seemed inclined to give an order.

She might have stood and died in apathy, but for seeing the Duchess Mogon drop the “Son of Ash” like a butcher might kill a pig. The sight filled her with something: spirit, vitality, and maybe hope.

“Arrows,” she spat at Collingford, one of the best of the old foresters she had left. “We need a thousand shafts.”

“If wishes were buttercakes,” he said tiredly.

“Go try,” she ordered. “Get back to the ridge. Find . . . the Green Earl. Or the Faery Lady. Someone high up who knows where the baggage is. Tell them we ain’t dead. We’re fightin’. We need shafts. Do it.”

He saluted her. Which seemed funny enough that they both laughed.

In the air west of the battle, Ash shuddered as if from a great blow. If he had had a god to curse, he would have. The risk of creating these pawns was that their deaths were a blow. Two in one day was a terrible loss. He staggered, and lost altitude.

But in the aethereal the true battle was raging, and there Ash saw and thought that he understood. There, the two legions of the will faced the two choirs from within and without, even as his creature Orley smashed gouts of power into the hermetical fabric of the shields that sustained the abbey against his attacks in the real. It was like a child throwing water at a castle, but the castle was no longer built of rock, but of ice, and the water was slowly melting the walls. Orley was drawing freely on his master’s power, reveling in the impression that it was he, and not Ash himself, who was the greatest warlock in the world.

The castle shuddered again, and again.

The will paused.

For a moment, there was a sort of silence, and the Benedictus of the choir rose slowly; the soprano voices began to rise above the strong alto; the altos began to add their Glorias to the hymn of praise . . .