There was no one to ask but his own knights, and their eagerness told him what he wanted to know, so he turned, looking south for a moment. The Flow, the largest pool on the Lily Burn, lay just south of him, covering his flank. He turned east into open spruce trees, a veritable cathedral of magnificent straight trunks stripped by generations of foresters of their dead lower branches, rows and rows, with little underbrush and only a dusting of snow.

His knights began to spread out in an open line, and behind him, Aneas brought on the Galles and the rangers, and Blizzard brought the bears, silent and purposeful in the sudden snowfall. The mounted Galles, only a handful, pressed forward and joined Tapio’s knights, and the two dozen of them made more noise than all the irks, but there was no foe to contest the woods, and they began to cross their second thousand paces since they had left the trail, a long line that glittered in the pale moonlight like steel-clad ghosts crossing the snow under the ancient trees, the breath of the horses and elk like the smoke of a hundred dragons, the starlight on the golden fur of the bears and their sharp axes.

And then he could see the enemy: hundreds of irks in a shield wall, and a wash of bogglins and other creatures. They were calling to each other, and there was a golden helmet gleaming in the moonlight.

For a heartbeat, Tapio’s eyes had a feral beauty, and his features transformed in the moonlight, and his elk seemed to grow, and every spike on the great animal’s magnificent rack began to glitter with its sharpness.

Tapio reined in with nothing but his mind and the weight of his body, and his elk reared, pawing the air, and all along the line of Faery Knights, they raised their silver and ivory oliphants, and the cold night air was filled with the hunting horns of Faery, and the irks facing the scarecrows were suddenly filled with fear.

Almost five miles away, Gabriel was just embracing his brother on the top of the Albin Ridge when he heard the low, eldritch music. He looked off into the darkness a long time.

“Penrith is no longer the axis of our lines,” he said. “Tapio has entered the field.”

And Tamsin began to cry, for joy.

Gabriel looked at her. “Stop that, or I’ll be doing it in a minute,” he said.

“I’ve never seen you grin like that,” Gavin said.

Gabriel embraced him again. “We did it!” Gabriel said.

Gavin was still trying to adjust to this. “Christ. We almost lost everything yesterday. We . . . I . . .”

Gabriel was walking around the fire, shaking hands, and embracing Tamsin, and in the background, Ariosto was slurping down the entrails of a sheep, his beak raised to the heavens.

Tastes like home, he sent.