But it was Tom Lachlan, Bad Tom, who feared nothing, who shouldered into the grim wounds and cut deeper. He pushed past Michael, and entered into the dragon’s black flesh; the burning ichor fell on him, and he cut with the blade he’d taken from another dragon, and he roared “Lachlan for Aa!” with each cut.

And Sauce, for once, followed his lead; her cuts were neat, precise, and chunks of the dragon’s neck fell at her feet, and Gavin was by her, and Michael pushed in with them, opening the hole like a sailor flensing a whale. Michael’s spear burrowed into the dragon’s side, as a stream of magicked arrows rolled from Cully’s fingers, and even in a wind like a hurricane and a wall of snow the great bows loosed and spat, and the shafts, arcane and deadly, plunged deep into the flailing thing’s hide.

Perhaps it was Urk of Mogon who first struck one of the great red eyes. Or perhaps it was Tippit or No Head or Long Paw. But by the time that Tom Lachlan was swinging his sword like a woman splitting wood, by the time that Michael was black with ichor, his hands burned raw even under the weight of twenty amulets, by the time that Philip de Beause was shoulders deep in the very flesh of the dragon, and Gavin was almost drowning in black blood, it was blind, and it had ceased to cast. Gouts of fire and ops struck it; the last tatters of its defences fell away, never to recover, and it was naked to its enemies, and now they were without mercy.

The whole line of the company pressed forward into the black shield.

A vast rainbow of light began to rise from the valley of the Lilly Burn, and float like a child’s dream of a cloud across the battlefield. Thousands of faeries; perhaps millions of them. Their fury of colours and lights swirled amid the storm.

Blanche was walking with the banners, and Francis Atcourt clearly wanted to go forward, to strike a blow, and she drew her own sword. She looked over her shoulder, and there was another figure in armour pushing at her shoulder, and she went forward again, into the black shield. Arrows flew over her, and she didn’t have a helmet, and she was empty of fear, terror, joy, or even the lust for revenge.

“Keep pushing!” said the shrill voice behind her.

Blanche glanced back and saw Clarissa, the Queen of Arles, flushed, and with her shoulder in Blanche’s back.

Blanche had a sword in her hand. She went forward with the line. No one tried to stop her, and when the black shields parted, she went forward with the banners, and her lithe sword, marked deeply with Mortirmir’s M, slashed a strip off the black hide with eight hundred other swords.