They followed as he booted Boy back into motion, and he wheeled them between the Lakota and the bulk of the Boiseans, holding up their shields but not the threatening steel. Violence wavered on the brink of reality for an instant, and then Three Bears rode up to Ingolf’s side, reining in stirrup to stirrup. He rose in the saddle and shook his dripping shete at his own folk, shouting something in the fast-rising, slow-falling syllables of their language—which was mostly used for ceremony and important public announcements these days, something that probably redoubled the impact. They stopped, looked at each other sheepishly, shrugged, and pulled back.

“Thanks, cousin,” Ingolf said, looking down at his sword-hand.

It was glistening with thick red liquid, and so was the whole yard-long shete and more was spattered across his thigh and torso and some on his face, and his gauntlet was greasy where it had run down under the cuff and soaked into the leather. The harsh iron-coppery stink was everywhere, and he felt the weary disgust, the sense of let-down-ness that he always did after a fight. For a while you were just an armor-clad set of reflexes that shouted and struck, and then you had to be yourself again.

“Colonel!”

He whipped around. Mark was on a horse that was obviously not his own, and his bugle was bent nearly in half where it rested on its sling across his chest.

“You OK?” Ingolf barked.

Christ, Varda, whatever, thank You I don’t have to write that letter to Ed and Wanda. Not this time, at least!

“Nothing hurt but my bugle and my pride, Unc . . . Colonel. A springald bolt went right through Dancer’s neck and cut the saddle-girths and the next thing I knew I was lying flat on my ass. Took me a while to catch a loose horse. Where’s Major Kohler?”

“Dead,” Ingolf said, and the boy’s face struggled with shock for an instant.

“We’ve got work to do,” Ingolf said grimly. “We made the mess and now we need to clean it up.”

Mary rode up laughing a couple of hours later, cantering past the rows of Boise prisoners sitting with their hands still on their heads. Ingolf looked up at her with relief; just beyond the prisoners were the rows of wounded, and he’d been consulting with the doctors, his own and the Boisean medic squad. The dead were a little farther out, their shields over their faces and a couple of walking injured to keep the birds away.

His wife had a bright scratch across the matte green paint on her helmet, just the sort an arrowhead would make when it banged off the steel. Two inches lower and it would have punched through her face and into the brain.