All told, they had almost eighteen thousand to face Ash’s million or so creatures. Or odds of roughly fifty to one. Gavin told his allies and his own more human officers that they were fighting for ancient N’gara, to show the irks that men and women could be trusted. But in his heart, Gavin was fighting because his brother had laid out a strategy and expected him to implement it, part of a plan so vast that Gavin could not imagine it would succeed. And yet, despite everything, he trusted his brother.

Gavin trotted his riding horse back up the central ride, the Serpent’s Hill, and dismounted. His page took his riding horse while his squire brought up his charger. A young man he’d never seen before handed him a cup of hippocras and he drank it while he considered the odds. They had to fight; that much had been made clear by his brother Gabriel all spring and summer. Every fight would bleed Ash, and only by fighting for every member of the alliance; the irks, the Jacks, the people of Alba and Morea; only by showing all of them that they could be defended would the alliance be preserved. This was not a war that could be won in an afternoon; Gilson’s Hole proved that. It was a war that might continue for generations.

In Gavin’s ear, Lord Kerak said, “Ready.”

While Gavin had reviewed his dispositions, the battle had begun. The tide of bogglins had rolled across the swamps and the dyke and causeway; had come forward like a seeping tide and splashed against the carefully sited earthen walls, the coppiced trees and “natural” stone features of the Dykesdale ridge.

The tide came in for an hour. Gavin watched, issuing no orders. There was nothing he could do but watch, but he stood as Ser Edward launched a counterattack that cleared the lower line of the center when the Brogat levies wavered. Tens of thousands of bogglins were used as filler by the creatures behind them, trampled to death and then walked over in the swamps.

The fog began to burn off. Off to the north, some low-level workings began to flay the waves of bogglins.

They broke. The tide flowed back; the waves receded into the swamps and ten thousand more bogglins drowned.

Gavin considered a second cup of hippocras and wondered what the hell his brother was doing, wherever he was.

Kerak spoke again from the aether. “Now he sets his will on the bogglins. Now they come again.”