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flanks of their horses.
    The Forest Guard began to fall.
    Thomas sensed it as much as saw it. Two. Four. Then ten, twenty, forty. More.
    Thomas broke form and galloped down the line. The obstruction from fallen horses and men was enough. To his alarm he saw that more of his men had fallen than he’d first thought. He had to get them back!
    He snatched up the horn at his belt and blasted the signal for retreat. Immediately his men fled, on horse, on foot, sprinting past him as if they’d been firmly defeated.
    Thomas held his horse steady for a moment. The Scabs, hardly used to such wholesale retreat, paused, apparently confused by the sudden turn of events.
    As planned.
    The number of his men among the dead, however, was not planned. Maybe two hundred!
    For the first time that day, Thomas felt the razored finger of panic slice across his chest. He whirled his horse and tore after his fighters.
    He cleared the line of boulders in one long bound, slipped from his horse, and dropped to one knee in time to see the first barrage of arrows from the cliff arc silently into the Horde.
    Now a new kind of chaos ensued. Horses reared and Scabs screamed and the dead piled high where they fell. The Horde army was temporarily trapped by a dam made of its own warriors.
    â€œOur losses are high,” Mikil said beside him, breathing hard. “Three hundred.”
    â€œThree hundred!” He looked at his second. Her face was red with blood and her eyes shone with an unusual glare of defiance. Fatalism. “We’ll need more than bodies and boulders to hold them back,” she said. She spit to the side.
    Thomas scanned the cliffs. The archers were still sending arrows down onto the trapped army. As soon as the enemy cleared the bodies and marched fresh horses up, twenty catapults along each cliff would begin to shower the Horde with boulders.
    Then it would begin again. Another head-on attack by Thomas, followed by more arrows, followed by more boulders. He quickly did the math. At this rate they might be able to hold off the army for five rounds.
    Mikil voiced his thoughts. “Even if we hold them off until nightfall, they’ll march over us tomorrow.”
    The sky cleared of arrows. Boulders began to fall. Thomas had been working on the counterweight catapults for years without perfecting them. They were still useless on flat ground, but they did heave big rocks far enough over a cliff to make good use of gravity. Two-foot boulders made terrible projectiles.
    A dull thump preceded the ground’s tremor.
    â€œIt won’t be enough,” Mikil said. “We’d have to bring the whole cliff down on them.”
    â€œWe need to slow the pace!” Thomas said. “Next time on foot only, and draw the battle out by withdrawing quickly. Pass the word. Fight defensively!”
    The boulders stopped falling and the Horde cleared more bodies. Thomas led his fighters in another frontal assault twenty minutes later.
    This time they played with the enemy, using the Marduk fighting method that Rachelle and Thomas had developed and perfected over the years. It was a refinement of the aerial combat that Tanis had practiced in the colored forest. The Forest Guard knew it well and could play with a dozen Scabs under the right circumstances.
    But here in crowded quarters with so many bodies and blades, their mobility was limited. They fought hard for thirty minutes and killed nearly a thousand.
    This time they lost half of their force.
    At this rate the Horde would be through their lines in an hour. The Desert Dwellers would stop for the night as was their custom, but Mikil was right. Even if the Guard could hold them off that long, Thomas’s warriors would be finished in the morning. The Horde would reach his undefended Middle Forest in under one day. Rachelle. The children. Thirty thousand defenseless civilians would be slaughtered.
    Thomas searched the cliffs. Elyon, give me strength. The chill he’d