Here and there, invaders and riding deer crashed to the ground. Some lay still, others writhed and thrashed in pain. Bizogots also went down. Whatever Marcovefa was doing, she wasn’t interfering with the Rulers’ archery. Therein lay her greatest danger: one of those flying shafts might find her.

No sooner had that thought crossed Hamnet’s mind than Marcovefa caught an arrow out of the air. She kissed the tip and threw it back at the Rulers—maybe at the man who’d shot it. Hamnet was able to watch, because it glowed as it flew . . . and it flew faster than any shaft ever launched from a horn-backed bow. It caught an enemy warrior square in the chest, and he didn’t move after he slid off over his riding deer’s tail.

“How did you do that?” Hamnet shouted.

She winked at him. “Magic,” she answered, as if he didn’t know.

“Could you hit a war mammoth with an arrow like that?” he asked. In any fight between Rulers and Bizogots, the invaders had the edge because they could ride mammoths and fight from them.

Marcovefa thought about it. “Maybe,” she said at last. “Those long-nosed marmots have a lot of protection, though.” Did she mean the thick leather armor the mammoths wore or the Rulers’ ward spells? Hamnet didn’t know.

He didn’t have much time to wonder, either. The rival forces came to close quarters. Trasamund worked fearsome execution with that two-handed blade. Hamnet drew his own sword and traded cuts with an enemy warrior till their mounts carried them past each other.

Trasamund guided his horse toward a mammoth. Hamnet wondered if battle fury had driven the Three Tusk jarl out of his wits, but there was method to his madness. He sprang down from the horse and hewed at the mammoth’s left hind leg. The huge beast let out a horrid bleat of pain and toppled, hamstrung.