He looked left and saw Oak Pew and Cully and Tippit and Francis Atcourt, and looked right and saw Toby and Bad Tom and Sauce and Mortirmir and Tancreda. Around him were all the men and women who had marched and fought, and perhaps beyond them, the ones who had died and never left the ranks.

“Let’s go kill the fucking dragon,” Michael said.

There was no cheer. They were silent as they went forward.

They climbed the hill in a single body; knights in front, then armed squires, then pages, then archers. All told, they were almost five hundred lances; two thousand men and women, and a smattering of irks, and a single bogglin.

They crested the hill from which they had watched the duel with the dragon, and the battle lay before them. The snow was falling; the wind was ripping over their shoulders and driving the snow, and they, like their fallen captain, came on the wings of the storm and it drove them in its fury.

There was half a mile of snowy battlefield between them and their prey; a field still crowded with foes. But on that day, they faced nothing; no fallen man nor irk nor daemon nor bogglin would stand, and many creatures quailed and slipped away, or ran. Because like many creatures of the Wild, the company now exerted a wave front of fear.

The wind howled. The snow fell. The company marched on, their banners streaming in the wind so that the banner bearers could scarcely hold them, and Blanche’s golden hair burst from her cap and snapped behind her as if she were a living banner.

The company rode across the great field as if riding to a pay parade.

About five hundred paces from the fallen dragon, Mortirmir raised his arms, and a huge ward sprang into being, red and white and green like the banners of the company.

Ash rolled, and breathed. And his breath was black, and it sublimated acres of snow, and struck Mortirmir’s impudent wards like a blacksmith’s hammer, and the wind howled, the wall of steam rose . . .

. . . and from the curtain of steam and snow emerged the line, unbroken, untouched, five hundred lances long; each banda covered in its own opalescent shell, as if Mortirmir, unsatisfied, was still touching up the exact colour and transparency of his wards and covers.

Ash breathed again. The ground between his claws was already black, and would not grow a crop for five generations.

Mortirmir’s wards held. They were far more than his own; as Ash focused the whole of his terminal will on the company, so Mortirmir had the support of the whole of the choir of the alliance. But he was the conductor, and he played his part with a dark delight. He might have begun throwing ops from the hilltop.

But he had no intention of denying his friends their part.