said. "Oh, I do. Mattio, where do we claim our weapons?"
"There." Mattio pointed southeast to a small nearby field where tall stalks of corn were growing, in defiance of what should have been the season. "Come. They will be at your stream very soon."
Baerd did not speak. He followed Mattio's lead. Elena and Donar went with them. Other men and women were in that field of corn already and Baerd saw that they were reaching down to pluck a stalk to be their weapon in the night. It was uncanny, incredible, but he was beginning to take a part of the measure of this place, to understand the magic that was at work here, and a corner of his mind, which worked outside and around the stern logic of day, grasped that the tall yellow grain that was so endangered was the only weapon possible tonight. They would fight for the fields with grain in their hands.
He stepped in among the others in that cornfield, careful of where he walked, and he bent down and grasped a stalk for himself. It came free easily, even willingly to his hand in that green night. He walked out on to fallow ground again and hefted it in his hand and swung it cautiously, and he saw that already the stalk had stiffened like metal forged. It sliced through the air with a keen whistling sound. He tested it with a finger and drew blood. The stalk had grown as sharp as any blade he'd ever held, and as true to his hand, and it was many-edged like the fabled blades of Quileia, centuries ago.
He looked away to the west. The Ygrathens were descending the nearest of the hills. He could see the glint of their weapons under the moon. This is not a dream, he told himself. Not a dream.
Donar was beside him, grim and unwavering. Mattio stood beyond, a passionate defiance in his face. Men and women were gathering behind them and all around, and all of them held corn swords in their hands, and all of them looked the same: stern and resolute and unafraid.
"Shall we go?" Donar said then, turning to look out upon them all. "Shall we go and fight them for the fields and for our people? Will you come with me now to the Ember war?"
"For the fields!" the Night Walkers cried, and raised their living swords aloft to the sky.
What Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar cried he cried only in his heart and not aloud, but he went forward with all of them, a stalk of corn like a long blade in his hand, to do battle under the pale green moon of that enchanted place.
When the Others fell, scaly and grey, blind and crawling with maggots, there was never any blood. Elena understood why that was so, Donar had told her years ago: blood meant life, and their foes tonight were the enemies, the opposite, of any kind of life. When they fell to the corn swords nothing flowed from them, nothing seeped away into the earth.－－網－文－檔－下－載－與－在－線－閱－讀－
There were so many of them. There always were, swirling in a grey mass like slugs, pouring down out of the hills and swarming into the stream where Donar and Mattio and Baerd had come to make their stand.
Elena prepared herself to fight, amid the loud, whirling, green-tinted chaos of the night. She was frightened, but she knew she could deal with that. She remembered how deathly afraid she'd been in her first Ember war, wondering how she, she who could scarcely have even lifted a sword in the daytime world, could possibly battle such hideous creatures as the nightmare ones she saw.
But Donar and Verzar had assuaged her fears: here in this green night of magic it was the soul and the spirit that mattered, here it was courage and desire that shaped and drove the bodies in which they found themselves. Elena felt so much stronger on the Ember Nights, so much more lithe and quick. That had frightened her, too, the first time and even afterward: under this green moon she was someone who could kill. It was a realization she had to deal with, an adjustment to be made. They all did, to one degree or another. None of them were exactly what they were under the sun or the two moons of home. Donar's body o