Johnis winced. The stadium fell silent except for a few clacking sticks.

Billos stood his ground, stunned, ball gripped in his left fist.

Seeing Billos hurt, Jackov dove in for the kill.

“Head butt!” Darsal screamed.

Instead of dodging, as Johnis expected him to, Billos tossed the football in Darsal’s direction, lowered his head, and stepped into the onrushing opponent.

But Jackov sidestepped Billos’s helmeted head and snatched the flying ball from the air before it reached Darsal.

Billos flew past him, hit the ground, and rolled to his feet.

Before Jackov could head for the goal line, Silvie grabbed his right ear from behind. She yanked back, slamming the boy on his back.

Then twenty-four bodies dove at the loose ball. They were all so bunched up, so tangled and intertwined, that no one had room to swing, much less take the time required to think through any strategy.

And the ball was lost in that pile.

Thomas paced like a lion and let them fight, but he wasn’t happy. And no wonder: a fight like this with the Horde would get them all killed.

Some said the only way the Forest Dwellers could survive would be to make peace with the Horde, but they said it in a whisper because such cowardly talk could get a person killed. Only traitors would dare say it publicly.

But watching the mess on the field, Johnis wasn’t sure a battle led by any of these sixteen- or seventeen-year-old fawns would be better than surrender. They looked like one huge ball of hair themselves.

Something shot out from the pile and bounced across the grass toward the sideline. It was the ball of Horde hair, the football.

All would have been fine if the ball had stopped on the field. But it didn’t. It kept rolling. Toward Johnis.

He was sure it would stop as it passed Thomas, but it kept rolling.

Still toward Johnis.

Every eye in the stadium followed the lumpy brown sphere. Johnis glanced up at Thomas and saw that his eyes, too, were on the ball. When he looked back down, the football had stopped. At his feet.

One look at the field and Johnis saw that the fighting had only intensified.

“Fools will get us all killed,” his father said, bending to pick up the ball. He grabbed it with a thick, cracked fist, lifted it, then stopped.

“Throw it out,” Johnis said. “Hurry!”

Instead, his father dropped the ball. It bounced once and landed on Johnis’s left foot, where it rested.

“What are you doing?” Johnis asked, glancing up at his father. But Ramos’s eyes were on Thomas.

Johnis looked down at the ball. A picture that had haunted his dreams flashed through his mind: an image of ten huge Horde warriors—“Scabs,” as the Forest Guard called them—killing his mother. This was their hair! It made him suddenly sick. He froze.