The main alliance force caught up to the van at the seventh ward.

Liv had Ghveris call a halt to their march about two hundred yards back from the fighting: close enough that she could send a charge in if it was needed, but far enough that they weren’t immediately engaged with the enemy forces. There, the Antrian set about arranging their front line so that nearly two-hundred and fifty Elden infantry stood at the front in three ranks.

Most of them were veterans of the fighting at the pass: from houses Syvä, Bælris, Keria, and Däivi. To those soldiers who had fought with Liv before were added a hundred men and women from Al’Fenthia, who’d joined the march across the desert to the plateau.

Behind the front ranks, Ghveris put their ranged troops, with sixty-five Whitehill crossbowmen on one side, and a roughly equal number from Ashford on the other. In between, Elden archers, who had done such good work on the wall against the Lucanian forces, strung their longbows.

The remaining Syvän Tundra Riders and northern knights, some from Valegard, others from Whitehill or Ashford, Liv held back with the three elders and her friends, all of whom she’d made certain were mounted, save for Ghveris. It gave her a mounted force of just over fifty well-trained warriors to use in a charge, but at Ghveris’s advice they would be held in reserve until they were needed to break an enemy line, or perform a flanking maneuver.

“I wish Keri was here,” Liv remarked, as she watched the troops her father had given her fall into place.

“Ghveris seems to have it handled,” Wren pointed out.

“I know. And I trust him,” Liv assured her. “I was just thinking of an argument he and I had – and how we settled it. That I’d take the lead on anything with a small group of people, but if we had to move troops around, he had more experience. And now we’re here without him. He spent decades chasing Ractia’s people around the north, back when no one in Lucania wanted to listen. He deserves to be here for the end.”

Ghveris lumbered over, joining the riders clustered around Liv and the elders. “The soldiers are ready,” he said. “We can charge when you wish.”

Liv shook her head. “My father’s plan was for us to let him clear the way,” she said. “We’re going to stay here until he either loses momentum, or Ractia shows herself.” After a moment’s consideration, however, she amended herself. “If you see a chance to send a volley of arrows into some of the enemy without putting our own people at risk, take it.”

“Only the longbows, then,” Ghveris said. “They are better suited to it than the crossbows.” He inclined his armored helm, turned, and marched over to the Elden archers.

“It’s hard to wait back here when he’s fighting. Trust me, I know,” Liv’s grandmother said, kneeing her horse over next to Steria, so that the two women sat their saddles nearly side by side.

“It helps that I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone seriously challenge him,” Liv admitted, raising her arm and pointing ahead, slightly off center. There, the sun glittered off the frozen scales of the ice-wyrm that her father had conjured to carry him into battle. It reared up, jaws wide, tail lashing, and faced off against one of the wyrms ridden by the Iravatans who’d gone over to Ractia’s service.

As they watched, one of the enchantments Valtteri had worked into the scales triggered. Spikes of ice grew out of dozens of scales in an instant, than launched forward fast as crossbow bolts. They ripped through the wyrm that had been threatening him, and sprays of blood erupted out the back of the enormous beast. It swayed, then toppled over to one side. The enemy warrior who’d been riding it was lost beneath the convulsing coils, and then the ice-wyrm had turned about, and Liv recognized her father’s favorite spell. A wave of frozen crystals rushed across the battlefield, burying half a dozen heavily armored mercenaries.

“They have more wyrms than I counted,” Wren grumbled. Liv could tell she was as upset at herself as at the fact the enemy was more formidable than they’d counted on. “We only ever saw two sunning themselves on the rocks. I knew she had more when we first got here, but I assumed she’d lost them somewhere along the way. They must have hidden them away in a cavern or something.”

“It won’t be enough,” Liv assured her.

Elder Aatu had brought every wyrm the remnants of House Iravata had left, and Liv’s father had kept them far to the rear, protecting them from any of the early fighting. Ractia’s forces, in the meanwhile, had lost their own at the Foundry rift, at the Hall of Ancestors, and in the defense of the lower slopes. The result was that the alliance forces actually came to this final battle with more of the creatures.

To say nothing of Silica.

The ancient wyrm had been held back to secure Feic Seria, and to keep watch over the supply lines that stretched across the high desert. She hadn’t even shown herself in the skies above the mountain slopes until now: but Valtteri had clearly decided that the time for holding back was over, and sent word for her to join them.

Now, a battle raged not only on the ground, but in the air around the summit. A dozen or more of Wren’s people swarmed around Silica like gnats trying to get at a horse. Liv could only see glimpses of what was happening up there, but it looked like the Red Shield hunters were trying to land on the ancient wyrm’s back. There, they could take a form better suited to fighting her. It was a desperate tactic, and one that relied on them somehow holding on as Silica coiled, dove, and banked through the air. The sight of a coyote impaled on the trunk of an aspen tree, where it had fallen and still occasionally twitched, gave silent testament to just how well that plan was working out for them.

The vanguard’s ground forces were engaged as well, embroiled with the enemy lines. Whipping lashes of thorned vines, curling up above the fighting, let Liv see where Kerian infantry pressed forward against the mass of cultists who’d been armed with whatever weapons could be found. Little more effective than the peasant levies Bennet had brought north to face Whitehill, their only advantage, Liv reflected, was likely in their fanaticism and religious devotion.

There were two hundred infanty from Soltheris, as well, and Liv got to see the spells of House Kalleis for the first time, if only from a distance. She recognized the word instantly, because she’d seen Cassandra Banks use it at Coral Bay, during their classes together and at king tides.

Ved, the word of water, was better suited to fighting at sea, but the Elden warriors used the same trick that Liv did when she made ice, drawing ambient moisture from the air around them. Many, she could see, carried waterskins, from which they drew the liquid necessary for their spells. Lashes of water caught enemy soldiers and tossed them aside; where the Kalleisians had room to work, they flooded the mouths and throats of their enemies with water, drowning them on their feet.

All of which was not to say that Ractia’s forces simply collapsed, of course.

Ranks of Antrian war-machines had fallen back in the face of the allied advance, but unlike soldiers of flesh and blood, they felt neither fear nor pain. Dozens of them had been pushed into a sort of fragmented ‘u’ shape, trying to maintain their standard two-rank formations. With the alliance wyrm-riders and infantry pushing into the heart of Ractia’s forces, however, the Antrians simply didn’t have the numbers to form up into one line: they simply had too much ground to cover. None of them were as intelligent as Ghveris, and so they failed to adapt to the changing circumstances.

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Where eight or ten of the Antrians grouped together, they joined their mana shields and alternated fire by rank, cutting down alliance soldiers with the sharp, rattling bark of their shoulder mounted weapons. But their units were simply to small and isolated to actually hold back the van. Instead, they were treated like boulders in the middle of a river in spring flood, with Valtteri’s troops rushing around their flanks.

“Do you see any of her commanders?” Liv asked Wren.

“I’ve been watching for Aariv this entire time,” Arjun said. “But I haven’t seen him yet.”

“I haven’t seen any of them,” Wren added. “Manfred might be behind those lines of mercenaries – it’s hard to tell from this distance, especially given the fact he wears full plate. I suppose that Iravatan woman –”

“Seija.” Miina supplied the name, then shrugged when Liv and her friends turned to look at her. “We’re roughly the same age, within a decade or so. I don’t know her well, but I’ve met her.”

“Well, she could be on one of those wyrms,” Wren said. “It’s hard to tell. When I was here Calevis was in charge of the Iravatans, and she must have been one of his subordinates. I’m not sure I’d recognize her on sight.”

Miina, however, was shaking her head. “You can’t miss the lance she’s got,” Liv’s cousin explained. “It’s enchanted. Similar to Keri’s spear, except it’s even longer. Made for charging on the back of a wyrm. She isn’t there yet.”

“Which makes me wonder where they are,” Liv mused. “If they leave things for too much longer, their lines will break. Look, some of the cultists are already running.” She raised her arm and pointed one finger toward the right flank, where half a dozen men and women, not even wearing armor, had thrown down their spears, turned their backs, and now ran up the slope.

“Held back to fight at the side of their goddess, perhaps,” Elder Aira speculated, from where she sat on her saddle, just behind Liv and her friends. “She fought the last war. She would know better than to go into battle alone, without a guard to watch her back. Even gods can be overwhelmed by numbers, eventually.”

“Which means we’re waiting for them to hit us with their best,” Liv muttered.

The hardest part was knowing that, because he was the one leading the charge, it would be upon her father that blow eventually fell. It wasn’t often that Liv felt slow: she knew that she was intelligent, but for all the training she’d had in history, law, spellcraft, and a dozen other things, Keri really had been right that warfare was a glaring hole in her education. Otherwise, she would have realized why Valtteri took the vanguard himself, and left her to command the main part of their forces. He wanted to take the worst of the enemy counterattack on himself, to protect her from it.

And he was doing a wonderful job of drawing attention – practically begging for Ractia’s forces to send someone to deal with him. Liv hoped that her father was far enough ahead of her to be in the shoals, because if he wasn’t drawing on mana from the rift, he must have been burning through his reserves at an incredible rate.

Mercenaries froze from the inside out. Blades of ice coalesced in midair, then swept through the ranks of fleeing cultists. Antrians were ground between surging waves of growing crystals until the steel plates of their armor buckled, deforming and collapsing under the pressure. When a knot of Iravatan infantry broke through the allied lines, making a desperate charge in an attempt to decapitate their enemies’ leadership, ice erupted from Valtteri in every direction, great jagged spears of it, and smaller shards, almost as if someone had dropped a rock into still water, sending a circular splash in every direction.

That particular spell left a ring of bleeding corpses scattered on the ground around him.

But if Liv’s father was absolutely determined to make himself such a threat that, finally, he could not be ignored, he succeeded.

Three wyrms barreled down from the heights, one of the three noticeably smaller than the other two. Upon each was a rider, two of which were wearing armor. Of those two, one, the slighter, wielded a long lance; the other wore a shield on one arm, and carried a warhammer, perfectly shaped to punch through steel plate, in his other hand.

Liv recognized two of them from Coral Bay.

“There they are,” she said. “That’s Aariv and Manfred.”

“Seija’s the third rider,” Miina stated.

“The one Manfred is riding has red eyes,” Arjun said. “Wren, is that –”

“My father,” the huntress confirmed. “And the smallest will be Ractia’s son.”

Ractia’s forces parted before the downhill charge of the three wyrms. The Antrians and mercenaries moved in an orderly fashion, their training clear in the way they maneuvered, but the cultists simply threw themselves aside, desperate not to be trampled or crushed by the coils of the wyrms.

Manfred leaned over the side of, swung his warhammer, and caught an Elden woman square in the chest, lifting her off the ground. Her body crumped around the blow, her helm flying off to reveal the dark braids characteristic of Kerian heritage. Her body hit the ground and rolled like a log, fetching up against a heap of corpses. Liv had a moment to see that her torso had been caved in, before worse happened.

Aariv threw himself off the smallest of the wyrms, thrusting both hands down toward the ground while he was in midair. The old man was surprisingly nimble, and Liv saw, from the glint of metal, that they’d replaced his ruined arm with the limb of an Antrian, just like they’d done with Calevis at the Foundry Rift. Jets of fire erupted from the Dakruiman man’s hands, splashing against the ground and propelling him high into the air. Corpses and living soldiers alike burned in his wake as he threw himself up above the battlefield.

Seija charged her wyrm right toward Elder Aatu, taking his mount from the side with her lance before he could wheel and face her. A great, gaping wound spread from the place where the lance had pierced wyrm-scales, and Liv recognized that it had been enchanted using the same word of power that Cade’s family had preserved for generations.

The smallest of the wyrms, no longer burdened with a rider, dove into the Soltheris infantry, sinking its fangs into the leg of one Elden warrior, lifting him off his feet, and shaking him back and forth before tossing his body aside. If Noghis’s wyrm form had the same venom as the real creatures, Liv knew the man would never get back to his feet.

Wren’s father, however drove directly for Valtteri. The ice-wyrm reared back to face its red-eyed counterpart, and Manfred swung his warhammer at Liv’s father. For just a moment, she felt as if her heart had been wrapped in ice, or perhaps become a stone and fallen down through her chest to her belly.

A fist of ice erupted out of Valtteri’s outstretched hand, carrying Manfred off the red-eyed wyrm’s back and thirty feet across the battlefield, over the heads of allied and Ractian forces alike. The mercenary’s armored form vanished in the chaos of armored men and women striving against each other, and Liv didn’t know whether he was dead or alive.

When the hand of ice pivoted, fingers outstretched, to reach for the red-eyed wyrm’s thick neck, however, it found nothing substantial, but instead splashed through viscous blood. Then even the blood disappeared, contracting into something smaller, and Liv lost track of it until a jaguar tacked her father off the back of his conjured mount.

Before Valtteri could hit the ground, a chute of ice caught him, and both he and the jaguar first rolled end over end, then slid along the curve. It froze out in front of them as they descended, then slip, taking Liv’s father off to one side along a sweeping turn, while dumping the jaguar off onto the heads of the soldiers fighting below.

The ice-wyrm struck then, plunging its head forward, jaws open, directly for the falling cat. Again, Wren’s father exploded into blood, and then when the wyrm’s jaws had passed, reformed into a shape that Liv had never seen before.

Nighthawk Wind Dancer was one part enormous man, well-muscled, bare-chested, with a spear in his hand. His eyes were red, his hair dark and falling not in the neat, intricate braids that Liv’s father favored, but in thick, matted locks. But as much of the human that there might be in this form he now wore, there was an equal part of the bat.

His ears were delicate and pointed, twitching at every sound. Rather than a human mouth and nose, there was a chiropteran snout, complete with sharp, predatory teeth. His skin was covered with short fur, and his arms twice as long as his legs. From wrist to torso, the wing-membrane of a bat stretched, only grown to many times the natural size. With a single beat, he rose up into the air, spear whistling as he brought it around to press the attack against Liv’s father.

Liv drew her wand. She’d watched Henry and Julianne die in front of her – there was no world in which she was going to allow that to happen to her father, when she had the power to stop it.

“I promised we’d hold back until the vanguard was stalled,” she said, loud enough for not only her friends, but all the elders to hear, as well. “Here it is. Ghveris, order the charge.”