Juan Chang stood next to one of Baba Yaga's stony feet and waited with the fur-belly and Molly. Down the hill, the Hales ran out of their manors with sabers in hand and half-tied breastplates bouncing off their chests. “After their losses at the Haunted City,” Juan Chang said, “I expect there will only be fifty, maybe sixty Hale blades left to face the Populists once I give the nobles time to muster.”

  “You can see some of them down there,” Molly said. “Why don't you attack them now?”

  “If I did that, then at best I'd scatter them and we'd have to sweep across the entire enclave seeking them out. At worst, we might force them into the sort of guerrilla tactics that I don't want to have to fight against. I'll give them time to muster, then we can take them all at once. They may even see that there's no hope of victory for them and decide to surrender.”

  “It's a sound plan,” the General whispered in Molly's ear. “But they won't give up without a fight.”

  While the Hales scrambled to muster, the Hale Guard arrived. They ran along the wall behind Baba Yaga with Garrick Jayce at the front of their formation. It appeared he'd brought nearly all two-hundred-and-fifty men that Hassam said remained under Jayce's command. They carried no flag of surrender, but Juan Chang understood their lack of a traditional white flag – it would just get them killed by vengeful, witch-sped nobles before they could reach the protection of the Populist ranks. He ordered a lieutenant and fifty of his men to take their surrender and their witch-grown thorn-spitters.

  The Populists streaked through the Hale Guard and stripped them of their rifles in seconds, leaving them in a great pile under Baba Yaga. Juan Chang turned his attention back to the nobles. What he saw happening in the distance chilled him.

  Man-sized figures too small to be full-grown nobles joined the armor-clad ranks and swelled them to nearly half the size of Juan Chang's army. The Hales still had no chance of victory, but the thought of his men being forced to cut down the nobles' children was sickening. At the very front of the assembling nobles he saw a tall figure strutting up and down the line, facing them with his saber held high. It could only be Vargas Hale.

  “This may be an ugly battle,” Teddy Da said.

  “Can they all fight?” Molly asked.

  “They can all die,” the General said in her ear.

  Far beyond the nobles, a herd appeared in the distance. It was a river of creatures led by a single rider standing in the saddle atop a massive steed, and the sound of all their hooves and paws beating the earth rumbled the air.

  The rider at the head of the charge led the beasts around the assembled, defiant Hales, and they rolled up the hill towards Baba Yaga like rampaging flood waters. There were hounds the size of ponies, their snarling jaws dripping wet with blood-hunger. Behind them were queer creatures stitched together from so many natural forms that it was difficult to tell which single, animal they owed the bulk of their original shape to. Those chimeras stood upright and traveled in great, bounding leaps off their rear legs. Their heads were between a rabbit and a horse, and they had no jaws to speak of, but at the end of their long arms were single, hook-like claws. There were apes too, as big-toothed and as large as the Coral Castle's Barbaries, but not witch-sped. At the rear were a hundred of the nightmare bloodhounds. Molly remembered them. They ran on shortened front legs, reverse-jointed rear legs, with their rumps up high. There were four-legged wagons, carriages, and bone-shell chariots, too. Among them were the gigantic war-horses of the Hales.

  “None of those creatures are witch-sped,” Teddy Da said. “Some of them don't even look made to fight. They make a lot of noise, but they're not much of a threat.”

  “Their threat isn't in their teeth or their claws,” the General told Molly. “I hope Chang knows that.”

  “Whether they're witch-sped or they have teeth doesn't matter,” Juan Chang said. The ghostly General smiled. “They're not meant to kill us. Not directly. They're meant to drive into our ranks and split us so that Vargas Hale's last stand army can swarm on a small portion of us instead of engaging our whole army at once.”

  “And how do we counter that?” Molly asked both Generals. Juan Chang answered.

  “We'll meet the charging beasts before they can split us in two and go straight through them together,” he said. “Straight through them to the Hales.” Molly saw the the General nod his ghostly approval. Then, Juan Chang calmly said to his bugler, “Call a full charge,” and the horn filled the battlefield with his command.

  *****

  Molly saw the single rider leading the copper-blood herd bring them straight into the charging Populists. It was the woman who'd marched out of the Haunted City with Vargas Hale. Before she fell, pierced with Populist sabers, Molly saw her cry out, but couldn't hear her last words.

  To all the witch-sped blades, the stampeding copper-blood creatures were a garden of barely moving, freakish forms, impossibly balanced on single paws and hooves or even posed in midair. Molly ran through the thick of them, darting through the narrow spaces to get at the Hales beyond. To the left and right Populist sabers slashed and stabbed as they ran and all drove their way deeper through the copper-blood herd.

  After the huge hounds in the front and the queer, hook-clawed beasts that jumped above her and hung in the air, after the black-haired apes, in the midst of the twisted bloodhounds and the running wagons, she saw charging Hale blades enter the fray. Instead of waiting for the Populists to emerge from the stampede and overwhelm them with numbers, they charged into the rear of the thundering herd themselves to meet the Populists in a place where they could press an advantage.

  Enormous beasts were everywhere, and though they were too slow to be any real danger, they blocked Molly's view and restricted her movements to tight alleys walled by blue-blooded flesh and bone. Molly understood Vargas Hale's strategy when she saw the strongest of the noble blades surge up those alleys to engage the less experienced Populists in a place where the rebels couldn't easily bring their numbers to bear. They were forced to fight the nobles one-on-one. Experience would decide who won those fights, and the Hales had more of it.

  Molly was glad she was small. For her, the spaces between the beasts weren't as confining. She was glad Teddy Da was small too, because as Molly met the first of the Hale blades, the fur-belly was beside her, and his claws struck so relentlessly and so quickly that Hale after Hale either fell under their ceaseless strikes or occupied themselves so completely trying to parry them that Molly easily found a path for her blade. Together, Molly and the bear cut their way through the melee.

  Through the legs of a tall, riderless chariot, Molly saw red-cloaked Juan Chang's hunting knife fell whatever nobles charged down the narrow spaces between the beasts and threw themselves at him, but she saw several of his men fall, stuck with noble sabers to die under the hooves of the wagons, chariots, and war-horses.

  The small number of truly skilled fencers Vargas Hale sent first took a heavy toll on the Populists, and they killed far more than their number among the beasts before the Populists pushed through to where the stampede thinned. There Juan Chang's men could finally assert their numerical advantage, and then the Hales had to face three or more of them apiece. They quickly fell to the Populists' numbers. There were only a handful of the experienced Hale blades left around Vargas Hale when Juan Chang's men found him, desperate and wild-eyed in his thin ring of bodyguards. Molly could see from a single glimpse of his face that he knew his advantage was gone and that the battle was already lost.

  Vargas Hale fell back. His flanks were protected by the noble boys behind him. The adolescents were as tall as Juan Chang's men, but Molly saw how the tips of their weapons wavered and quavered with the shaking of their hands as they waited for the battle-mad Populists to harvest them.

  Vargas Hale and his bodyguards retreated into them, and they put the unblooded youths between them and the Populists. Molly thought that Juan Chang would cry, “Hold!” and stop the battle. She thought she'd hear the bugle any second telling the Populists to stop the fight and spare the nobles' children. She was shocked to see the Populists continue forward without pause and cut the shaking youths down like weeds in their path.

  The Populists didn't stop until they'd cut their way through Vargas Hale's bodyguards and six musketeers held the points of their sabers to his throat. Molly was glad when, above the near-deafening din of the hurley-burley, she finally heard Vargas Hale's voice cry, “Hold!” He had to shout it many times for all of them to hear him. Fights that had begun continued to their end, but after the last few fell, she saw that the battle among the beasts had finally come to a halt.

  The Populists cheered, and Molly tried not to look down at the eternally youthful faces of the last Hales to fall.

  The Populists and the Former Hale Guard threw manure at the surviving Hales as they marched them out of their enclave, disarmed and dispossessed. The nobles headed South in a miserable, defeated, hunch-shouldered column. When Molly asked Juan Chang what would happen to them, he said he knew the Hales had a treaty with the Lee family, but he still gave them even odds of being sheltered or slaughtered by their noble neighbors.

  Molly heard Vargas Hale vow he'd return, and Juan Chang's men laughed at him and threw more manure.

  Chapter Five

  The Stitchlife Guard

  Baba Yaga dug the graves. Her long legs stretched out and clawed at the earth, and each stroke was a salute that carved out a place for a dead musketeer to rest. When she was done, there was a wide circle of open graves around her, and Juan Chang's men carried their dead up the hill for burial. As Teddy Da stood next to Molly and watched the bodies being lifted and lowered into the earth, she heard the bear's stomach rumble. “Don't look at me like that,” he said. “I can't help it.” Molly hoped he wouldn't dig any of the bodies up and eat them or at least if he did, then he'd dig up one of the nobles from the mass-grave at the base of the wall where they'd been unceremoniously dumped and buried.

  Juan Chang's speech was brief. He said this was the first of many victories to come and thanked the dead for their sacrifice. The spirits of his men were so high that they would have cheered him no matter what he said, but when he called for them to honor their dead with a celebration of their victory, the roar from them was loud enough to be heard by the noble Waltons to the West and in the home of the Lees to the South. Then, without any prohibitions, Juan Chang loosed them on the enclave. They cheered him again and turned to the Hales' manor houses – their finery, their stocked kitchens and pantries, and the cool, underground cellars filled with wine and mead.

  The Populists and the guardsmen both swept over the closest of the manors like ants, and rather than push their way through the looting crowd for food, Molly and Teddy Da walked deeper into the enclave. As they walked past pillared, witch-bone manors and gardens where the bushes were shaped like animals, her mind twisted itself on the dissonance between what she knew of Vora Mbuntu and what she saw around her. This was where Vora came from, and it didn't make sense to Molly. To her, Vora Mbuntu was a Stitchlife who lived in a cellar cave under the crumbled ruins and dedicated every moment to perfecting Sugar Music, her gift to the People. This place was grand and luxurious beyond what Molly could imagine. Palaces were everywhere, and there were so many of them and so few Hales that it seemed like each one of them might have had a palace of their own.

  “Here we go,” Teddy Da said as they approached the front of a beautiful, pillar-fronted mansion with faint blue stains around its cracks. “I think we're the first to set foot in this one.”

  “Do all the nobles live like this?” Molly asked, but the fur-belly was already up the stairs, past the columns, and through the open front door. She followed him into a circular entrance hall where curving, twin staircases led to the floors above. He sniffed the air, looked over his shoulder, and said, “This way. I can smell it. Roasted and sweet.” Then he walked through a doorway that looked like it was framed in lush, white ivy, but Molly knew it was witch-bone.

  Inside was a room with furniture and finery the likes of which she'd never seen. Every chair was a throne. The bear sniffed the air again and let his nose lead him. Molly followed him down hallways covered in life-sized figures that seemed to grow out of the walls. It was as if an entire battle and every single blade had been turned to bone and flattened to the wall. She thought one of the soldiers leading a charge with a saber in one hand and a severed head in the other looked like the General.

  The bear stopped outside a room filled with stacks of shining, smooth plates and bowls. From the doorway on the opposite side, three women dressed in aprons and white hats ran through the room in panicked flight. The first of them stopped in her tracks when she saw the bear, and the other two ran into her. Their mouths opened and closed soundlessly before all three of them turned and fled through another open doorway on the right.

  “Servants,” Teddy Da said. “I knew we were close to the kitchen.”

  Molly heard angry voices beyond the doorway where the women had appeared. “Go and find another fancy house,” one said. “This is ours.”

  “We're the ones who fought for it. We're the ones who died for it. You and everyone else who bent over for the nobles can starve for all we care. You're lucky we didn't kill you. We could, too. Before you blinked twice. Before you even knew it.”

  The two grumbling men who walked out next still wore enough of their uniforms for Molly to know them as former Guardsmen. They didn't scream, but when they saw the bear and the twin-horned girl, still covered in streaks of copper and iron blood, they fled just as quickly as the servants.

  Teddy Da crossed the finery-filled room to the kitchen. A pair of Juan Chang's men stood over half a pig and jars of spilled food. The bear crossed the polished floor so quietly on his padded paws that they didn't notice him standing in the doorway until the smell of the food so close made his stomach rumble like a soft growl. Their mouths fell open when they saw him, and the food they'd been chewing nearly fell out.

  After they fled, Molly asked, “Do things always belong to the strongest?” Between bites of pig and pickled beets, she added, “Is it like that everywhere?” The bear shrugged and kept eating.

  “I was willing to share,” Teddy Da said with his mouth full of meat.

  When Molly explored upstairs, she found a room full of dolls and lace and fine, child-sized dresses. She tested the cloth of one between her fingers and thumb. It was made of the same impossibly smooth, shiny fabric that the Waltons had worn. She tried it on over the plain, wasp-spun dress that Vora had made for her. Teddy Da appeared in the doorway with a mead cask in his paws, and when he saw her, he said that she should keep it, but as she looked at herself in the long mirror framed in beautiful, witch-bone ivy, she felt like a thief.

  She left the fancy dress inside the fancy house, and as they left, more of Juan Chang's men entered to fill their bellies full and drink the wine cellar. A clinking sound called her attention to one of the Hale family's wagons walking past, half-filled with wine bottles rolling around its white bone bed. The men around it all had open bottles in their hands, and by the sway of their walk and the slur of their happy conversation, she could tell they were well along in their celebration.

  They walked deeper into the enclave, and Molly saw that even the witches were enjoying all the fine things to take now that the Hales were gone. Four of them walked out the wide and tall doors of what looked like stables set next to an immense, domed cage even bigger than any of the manors they'd seen. The giant cage was filled with birds. The witches had taken one of the hoof-footed wagons, too. Theirs was filled with cages, and each of them contained a small, hooded raptor, clinging to a perch that swayed with the steps of the wagon. As the witches passed, they waved to Molly and the bear, and Molly forced a smile.

  *****

  Juan Chang found Corina in her chamber, and the air there was filled with a honeycomb sweetness that drew him to her immediately. He was surprised when she took the cask from him, unsheathed the long-bladed hunting knife from his belt, used it to pry out the cork, and drank. As she gulped, mead spilled out the sides of her mouth and down her neck. When she finally lowered the cask, she said, “I can see why you like it.” She smiled, and he swam in it. “I watched you from the tower,” she said. “Watched your red-cloak charge up the middle of the stampede, cutting down the Hales. I never had even a moment of fear for you. I knew you'd come back to me. I just thought a witch-sped man would be faster about it.”

  Hours later, Juan Chang lay awake thinking about the next battle. The Waltons and the Lees were the Hales' noble neighbors, and their enclaves were both roughly equidistant from the Hales'. One of them would be next. It almost didn't matter which of them they marched on first. What mattered more was when. Sooner was better than later, of course; better to attack before they had time to prepare. Even more important was the state of his men. If they stayed here too long, then his men would become attached to the luxuries of the enclave and forget the urgency of their mission.

  Juan Chang saw it unfolding in his mind's eye. The common men that had served the other noble families as their Guard would join his army like the Hale Guard had. With care, caution, and guile, his army could march across the land and grow stronger with each encounter. The Stitchlifes could speed the Guardsmen, too. They were already trained. The Hales had been weakened opponents, but not so much that the other families would be able to offer significantly more resistance than the Hales had. None of the noble families had over a hundred trained blades, and even with the toll Vargas Hale had taken, the Populists had well over twice that. The Waltons and the Lees and the rest of the noble families still had their golems, but Corina's witchery would capture them grain by grain, and their sands would become part of Baba Yaga. The walking castle-keep's full potential as a weapon of war hadn't even been fully explored. One by one, all of the noble families would fall to the Populist Army, but Juan Chang knew the time to act was now, while the fires of victory still burned in his men.