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facing? Whatever the reason, they would be angry and ready for a battle. Would their discipline hold?
    The Pargunese appeared, still marching in straight ranks, their dark blue cloaks almost black against the snow, their helmets rising to a spike. The outer rows all around the formation carried their tall, narrow Pargunese shields to the outside. Heavy shields, with a spike on the bottom to let them be braced on the ground during an engagement. On this side, the west, that meant shields hung on the sword-hand shoulder, their pikes in the left hand … unless they had that many heart-handed men, they’d find it hard to fight that way, though it gave them some protection from sniping.
    Behind the main formation rode their mounted troops, now down to eleven from twenty, all in heavier armor, all with a longer spear braced upright in a socket and a shorter pair of javelins. Although they outnumbered his troops, they looked surprisingly small against the backdrop of the forest across the gap. He could see the entire formation at once.
    Once again Kieri wondered why they were still advancing. They had to know they were marching away from reinforcement, away from their supplies … losing troops daily. Most armies lost heart when their numbers dropped so far. These looked almost—almost enchanted.
    Kieri reached out to the taig and felt the malice of the Pargunese but no more than that. He could not tell if that meant no enchantment or if it was the taig’s own suffering that clouded its communication.
    When the front line reached the mark he’d set, one of the rangers blew a horn. The Pargunese faltered a moment, but one of their officers yelled, and they marched on.
    A second horn call. Fifty archers on the west side—Royal Archers and Halverics both—rose and sent flights of arrows into the Pargunese formation. The formation shrank visibly as men fell. The Pargunese officers bellowed: “Hold, you fishbait! They’ve clumped—we can take them if we stick together—shields—form for charge!”
    Exactly what Kieri had hoped. The Pargunese were all yelling now, insults only Kieri and a few others understood. They faced right, held their shields up at an angle, and charged at the woods. Frustrated, tired, hungry men in a foreign land, after days of being picked off by ones and twos, they wanted a fight.
    A third horn call now, as Kieri signaled. From the east, the far side of the scathefire track, his other fifty archers emerged and shot directly into the Pargunese rear. Kieri could not see how many fell but knew that most of the rear rank and at least some of the next would be sorely wounded if not killed. The compact Pargunese formation—originally ten files of twenty-four—had now lost almost fifty of its original strength.
    “Reform! Pin-pig!” It was the only workable formation for a unit beset by archery in multiple directions. Kieri watched as the Pargunese struggled, losing more every moment, to back and turn into the circle, bristling with pikes, shields locked together for protection. The officers had all dismounted, turning their horses loose, and were in the center of the pin-pig, their long spears sticking up like flag standards. After a moment of stillness, he saw the covering shield quiver, opening small holes near the center of the formation.
    “Dropping volley,” he said to the nearest Royal Archer. “Cover.” They knelt and put up their shields.
    Kieri looked past the clumped Pargunese and saw that his unit on the far side was still standing in the open, bows bent. “Back!” he yelled. “ ’Ware volley.” But the bolts were already in the air, including those rattling on branches overhead. Kieri looked down, trusting his helm and shield to protect him. Only one of his people was hit, the bolt piercing his helmet and killing him instantly. The Pargunese shields overlapped again, clattering like shutters.
    “They’re short of bolts,” Kieri said.
    “Or they want us to think so,” one of