Sauce was shouting at Michael, and Michael was ignoring her.

She crested the hill, and there was the dragon. It might have shocked the breath from her, but her vision at the gate had taken away her capacity for shock, and she viewed a dragon hundreds of paces long with the calm of despair. The dragon was black; black as night; black as velvet hanging in a dark closet. The dragon breathed, and men died; or were simply unmade; Ash’s breath was a chaos of destruction, at the edges of his breath, a blue fire burned, but in the very heart of the black flame there was no light, and where it passed, the earth itself had scars and the men and horses were gone.

And Blanche thought, This is his enemy.

Behind her, the archers were cheering. They could not see the dragon, for the steep summit of the hill; but their cheers were no longer for the empress and her white horse, and she turned her head away from the pale sky and the black dragon, to the dark sky.

And against the dark sky, a golden knight burned like a second sun.

Her heart came into her mouth. Her pulse seemed to resound in the base of her throat, and her cuirass was like an iron band constricting her breathing.

“It’s the empress,” someone said, but she could not take her eyes off him. He burned like a comet, and he was above and behind the vast black wings, and then Ariosto stooped like an eagle carved in gold, and there was an incredible flash of light, and Blanche could not see. She wanted to turn her head away.

But she did not cry out. Instead, she reached into the aethereal and prayed.

Ser Michael watched the golden knight merge with the black Wyrm.

“Oh!” shouted Sauce. “Oh, oh! Get him!”

Tom Lachlan slammed an armoured fist into his palm. “Damn him,” he spat.

Michael didn’t want to watch, but he did. He watched, and all the rest of them watched. The gold and black merged, and then there was a massive flash of light; men and women and bogglins and irks across the battlefield blinked and stumbled, and then there was a massive concussion wave, and the dragon was falling, its neck seeming to trail behind it, one huge wing falling away and both wing and dragon spouting rivers of black ichor onto the snow below.

Of the golden knight there was no sign.

The earth shook as if an earthquake had hit; Lady Helewise’s chimney collapsed; barns fell across the fields, and fire-damaged walls fell.

The black Wyrm fell across thousands of men and other creatures, and they died.

But the dragon was not dead, and it raised its maimed head and breathed again, shattering the ranks of the surviving Mamluks. It began to roll itself over, to breathe into the waiting lines of Moreans.