Overhead, like a moving cloud of death, Avaia descended, and with her, grey and black, darkening the sky, came at least three hundred of her brood. The swans of Maugrim came down from the unrelenting heavens and the lios alfar were blotted by darkness and began to die.

The urgach in white screamed again, this time in brutal triumph, and the slaug turned a second time, leaving the lios to the swans and the emboldened svarts, and the Dalrei were beleaguered again by overmastering numbers.

Hacking his way east toward where Ivor—still riding, still wielding his blade—had also regained the river, Dave saw Barth and Navon fighting side by side near the Aven. Then he saw the huge leader of the urgach come up to them and a warning shout tore from his raw throat. The babies in the wood, Tore’s babies and his own, the ones they had guarded together. The sword of the giant urgach crashed in an arc that seemed to bruise the very air. It cut through Barth’s neck as through a flower stem, and Dave saw the boy’s head fly free and blood fountain before it fell into the trampled mud by Adein. The same sword stroke descending sliced heavily, brutally, into Navon’s side, and he saw the boy slide from his horse even as he heard a terrifying sound.

He realized that he had made the sound. His own side was sticky with blood. He saw Tore, wild-eyed with hate, surge past him toward the urgach in white. He tried to keep up. Three svarts barred his way. He killed two with his axe and heard the other’s head crack open under the hooves of his black horse.

He glanced north and saw the lios battling Avaia and the swans. There were not enough. There had never been enough. They had come out from Daniloth because they would not stand by and watch the Dalrei die. And now they were dying too.

“Oh, Cernan,” he heard someone say, in despair. Cechtar’s voice. “This hour knows our name!”

Dave followed the big Rider’s glance to the east. And saw. The wolves were coming. Both north and south of the river. And leading them was a giant animal, black with a splash of silver between his ears, and he knew from what he had been told that this was Galadan of the andain, lieutenant to Maugrim. It was true. The hour knew their name.

He heard his name. From within.

Not the summoning of death as the Dalrei believed; not the call of the final hour. Absurdly, the inner voice he heard sounded like Kevin Laine’s. Dave, he heard again. You idiot. Do it now!

And on the thought, he reached down and, bringing Owein’s Horn to his lips, he sounded it then with all the strength that was left in him.