The Boys of Summer

by Paradoqz

Arthur Pendragon, the once and future King of Britons opened his eyes and, without looking at his staff, kneed his horse forward. There was battle to be won, and he was a man who had never shirked his duty.

TITLE: The Boys of Summer

AUTHOR: Doqz
FANDOM: Le Morte D'Arthur
ARCHIVE: Please ask.
DISCLAIMER: Main characters mentioned belong to history . No profit is being made.

The orderly squares moved forward in the intricate dance of choreographed moves, sun gleaming on the pikeheads and the armor that had not yet had time to become dulled with dust.

The banners danced in the wind and the horns blared, the alien rhythms howling their magic into the sky.

It all seemed achingly surreal for a moment and he shut his eyes, banishing the sudden faint vertigo. Tired. Bone-deep weary and tired. How much war could a man stand, live, make? Even if he was a king.

Arthur Pendragon, the once and future King of Britons opened his eyes and, without looking at his staff, kneed his horse forward. There was battle to be won, and he was a man who had never shirked his duty.

The standard of his masters rose and dipped behind him, the pause stretching as if both armies held their collective breath. And then in the instant the eternal summer was torn by the gunfire and terror.

Galahad swallowed, the throat dry and constricted as it always was before the death began, and fought down the instinct to glance back at the King. The first burden of the command was the Great Lie of confidence. Standing still and looking good was half the job. If he started fidgeting now he'd get men killed.

But the knowledge, and the relatively well-informed confidence that they did, in fact, have a decent chance of winning didn't stop his throat from feeling like a desert salted with ash.

He thought fleetingly of Arthur again and resisted the impulse to shake his head in heart-felt negation. Some people were actually resentful of not being in the Pendragon's boots. Galahad was fairly certain he'd slit his own wrists if ever faced with the prospect.

Handling his portion of the mess was giving him enough hives. Simply imagining carrying the responsibility for all of it was enough to make him feel a faint taste of bile's acid.

Three full legions. Upwards of fifteen thousand men. Men, led by men, finally!

Now all they had to do was win.

The arquebusiers held steady, veterans all. Watching and waiting, the unblinking stare of resigned patience meeting the cannon shot that crept closer and closer to their ranks before the enemy gunners finally found the range and the reaping began in earnest.

In the distance, growing closer by the second, the ragged ranks of Winter levies screamed their triumph and joy.

"Eager fuckers, ain't they." Percy's words were muffled and vaguely slurred. Understandable enough, given that they were somehow squeezed around a monumental amount of hardtack that he was blithely stuffing into his mouth. "We'll have to cure them of that."

"How can you even eat that on the dry?" Galahad inquired absently, his eyes still running along the lines. "I heard Dickon the Ox - from the VI-th? Apparently he broke two teeth trying."

Percival shrugged, his cheeks bulging and raised his finger in a gesture indicating necessity for a minute's grace. Galahad squinted and sighed, visibly acquiescing.

Safely out of the commanders' line of sight, the guardsmen exchanged knowing grins and winks at the familiar ritual. Whatever the rumour said, things couldn't be all that bad, apparently.

Percival swallowed finally, his face turning momentarily red from the exertion and sighed with a faint relief. "It was three teeth and he bit off two inches of his tongue. If you are going to gossip, Gal, you have got to learn to do it right. Jesus!"

"Don't blaspheme."

Next to the Legate of the III-rd Legion, his dour Captain of the Pikes nodded instinctively and glared at Percival, the bright green eyes flaring like hot embers under the plain steel casque.

Percy rolled his own innocent blues back at Siegfried, meeting the glower with utterly apparent equanimity, and made a considerably ruder gesture at Galahad. "I am not blaspheming. I am praying."

A stray cannonball impacted a few feet away from the command group of the III-rd clustering on the low hilltop, the resulting small geyser sending a rain of dirt toward them.

"For what?" Narses, remarkably enough, remained utterly untouched but still checked his doublet fastidiously and frowned as he removed some imaginary speck from his shoulder.

"What for what?" Percival shot back at the eunuch, straightening and righting the ridiculous hat that had become his trademark throughout the army. From what Galahad understood there was a quiet, yet savage, run on purple dyes going on among the rankers.

The results of the experiments varied widely, and although some of them were spectacularly horrific in their own right, so far no one has been able to quite match Percival's pride and joy.

"What were you praying for?" Ganelon clarified, the grey eyes crinkling with ill-concealed amusement. Along with Narses, he was the oldest among the officers (at least notionally) and both still occasionally treated their colleagues as impetuous adolescents; to be patiently endured and unobtrusively guided.

"Who was praying?" Percival stared at the head of the hand-gunners blankly and shook his head at him solicitously. "You feeling all right, 'Elon?"

Narses snorted, Ganelon closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose tiredly, and even Siegfried turned to study the innocent-looking clouds a little more intently than perhaps was warranted.

"Hey!" The familiarly waspish voice wiped the amusement off the faces of the commanders as cleanly as those of the rankers standing guard around them. "If you idiots are done making a ridiculously obvious target of yourself, could we perhaps get on with the business at hand? In case you've forgotten we are getting a touch fucking close here."

Siegfried and Narses winced pretty much in unison and both looked vaguely uncomfortable when they noticed their agreement. Neither had ever gotten used to the Canoneer's language, but Siegfried also remained visibly put off by Narses's 'condition' and his utter lack of shame of the same.

Narses responded with the cold arrogance which, as the graduate of Constantinople's court, he could wield as a weapon of devastating skill.

"Well?"

Galahad ignored his chief artillerist with the skill born of tryingly long experience and assessed the situation again. The enemy levies had paused just out of range, not eager to chance running into the far edge of their own side's barrage.

Both the I-st and VI-th legions had already responded with their own cannons, joining them to the army's artillery. Galahad calculated coldly, the practised ear picking up the slight change in the thunder of the guns. A few second later the enemy barrage began to noticeably slack off before tapering off altogether.

He turned and fixed Nimue with a hooded look, one eyebrow fractionally raised.

She flushed, the fair skin coloring with embarrassing ease, than paled again, making the woad tattoos stand out even more.

"God's blood, Gal! You don't have to be an asshole about it!"

Percival was the only one mad enough to snicker openly and Galahad half-seriously wondered if he was entirely sober.

"So we hold to the plan, then?" Ganelon asked quickly, throwing a grateful glance at Guiscard, uncharacteristically taciturn today, who unobtrusively yet nimbly stepped between Nimue and Percy.

Galahad shrugged. "As much as we can. Obviously the gentlemen on the other side will have come up with a few plans of their own."

Siegfried snorted and, without another word, departed; making his way down to where the pikemen were sorting themselves out back into their orderly lines.

Narses sighed, somehow managing to convey centuries of weariness with his colleague. "Yes, I suppose it is time to be about it. By your leave?"

Galahad nodded with grave politeness, and the eunuch - making a slight bow to Nimue - unhurriedly followed Siegfried, to assume command of the hand-gunners.

Galahad caught Nimue's eyes, still furiously searching for Percy who was showing uncharacteristic wisdom and keeping Guiscard safely between them.

"My Lady Cannoneer?"

"What?"

"I just want to remind yo-"

"I know my damn job, Gal! You want to do it for me? We both know you have the timing of a retarded hobgoblin. Please!" Having demolished Galahad, Nimue whirled around and hopped up in place, throwing an acid glare over Guiscard's shoulder. "And you! You just wait! We'll be having a talk about this after I am done!"

A reverential sort of silence lingered for a while as the diminutive artillerist stalked off, trailed by her subordinates at a safe distance like anxious chicks following the head duck.

"I don't know about the enemy, but she certainly terrifies the crap out of me." Guiscard finally offered. "My sincere advice, Percival, is to die gloriously and quickly in the current festivities."

"Eh." Percival, Galahad noted with faint disbelief, was chewing on something again. "Cannon-pukes can't run for shit. Also, I have a cunning plan."

"Oh."

"Well, in that case..."

"We'll visit the grave."

"Only polite."

"He was a good man, Percival, was."

"Not too bright."

"But we like that in a rodelero."

"True."

Galahad cleared his throat mildly. Ganelon and Guiscard, taking the hint quickly, grinned at Percival one last malicious time and whistled for their horses.

Suddenly the Legate and his oldest friend were alone and companionably silent as the battle was joined in earnest.

The Winter militiamen were screaming again, a mournfully savage sound that carried far and pricked at one's nerve, spreading like an echo of a wound's hurt just below the skin. It was rising, thinning and rising until Galahad thought he would snap and scream his own hate and defiance back at them.

Below him the legions remained contemptuously silent, wrapped in their stoic arrogance, the old tradition that never failed to madden the enemy. Nor did it now, as the shriek suddenly hit plateau and exploded into a discordant chorus of individual challenges. And then, as if they were a hound pack unleashed, the painted, wild-haired, screaming mass threw itself at Galahad's men.

Carefully not looking back at Arthur, the Legate did then allow himself a soft sigh of relief. Not quite soft enough to avoid a sidelong, amused glance from Percival, but that was the cost of doing business.

He was the one that gambled on the levies being thrown at them first. The Pendragon was not easy to convince. It went against the tradition and the enemy did so love their traditions.

Why shouldn't they, it's been working for them for generations now...

And there was nothing specific that Galahad could bring to bear, to sway Arthur. No brilliant intelligence coup, no timely defector. Nothing but an amorphous yet pressing premonition that he finally got under the Winter's commander's skin.

The two armies have been dancing with each other for the better part of the year now. Innumerable skirmishes and a few inconclusive battles draining men but delivering no results.

And in the midst of it all Galahad finally caught the sense of the mind behind the Winter's steel. Subtle, catlike in its maliciousness, a lover of games and intricate stratagems.

"He reminds me of Mordred." he told his King quietly, reluctantly, when pressed, and the silence had fallen within the tent. And then Arthur nodded, calm and cool and broken, so broken still, the shell hardened over the unhealed bone.

On Galahad's advice they were here today, supposedly having taken the bait to march out into the plains. Having left their laboriously constructed fortifications, having played the fool and made themselves a target for the infamous Sidhe-Cavalry of the Unseelie Court.

He snorted under his breath. It looked like he was responsible for the entire mess, after all. Win or lose, all on his hunch...

The sword and javelin levies, the great mace of the Winter, the troop fairies, orcs and lesser Fae that formed the mass of the Unseelie armies were running flat out now. No semblance of order, a wild, unstoppable charge that once won them worlds and had pushed the forces of the Court of Summer back, and back again, for centuries.

"But you are not fighting Fae now..." Galahad hissed, unaware himself that the thought escaped its lips, or that behind him his guards were exchanging satisfied, grim and hungry smiles.

The first ranks of the charge were almost within the casting distance now, some of them raising their spears, others, driven into the pinnacle of a berserker rage throwing them already - at the steady lines of the legionaries or simply aside, and drawing their two-handed swords...

Galahad's eyes flickered toward the signaller standing next to him, his young-old face of an adolescent veteran intent. With an effort the Legate stopped himself. He picked his subordinates himself. They knew their jobs. Now was the time to reap the dividends, to trust them, not jog their elbows.

Flags dipped and danced along the lines and the front rank of the hand-gunners, ranged in front of the pike squares, knelt. Hundreds of men moving in practised unison like a terrible mechanism, a new way of war itself given form.

Galahad's world narrowed, the noise of the battle raging to the sides of his legion disappearing, the entirety of his being focused on the ever-narrowing space between the charging Fae and his men.

Closer and closer...

They reached the pitiful trench works now, all that Arthur's men had the time to improvise, once the Unseelie army appeared out of the mists.

The charged paused, an almost imperceptible change in the momentum as the militiamen took the time to fill the ditch with bags and bundles of twigs lashed to their backs for exactly this purpose. A second's pause, if that...

"Name of a dog, man. Now!"

And as if to answer his whispered command, the familiar, neat, stooping figure within the orderly lines of the arquebusiers raised a languid hand.

The universe exploded.

The clouds of smoke, burnished in the familiar brimstone stench, began to blossom like great malignant flowers. Soon, Galahad knew they would hide his view of the battle entirely, but not yet.

Not yet.

The second volley followed the first, the men standing behind the kneeling arquebusiers firing their guns. Then the third.

It took an average arquebusier two minutes to go through the cumbersome procedure of reloading his weapon. But there was nothing average about the men who volunteered to follow the Pendragon's standard and less about the men who trained and led them.

Narses was the first to break the entire procedure into small, simple, clearly outlined successive steps. The drill that had become the second nature to Arthur's legionnaires.

They were the best. The iron elite of the waning Summer.

The least among them had their guns ready again within sixty seconds of firing, the steady sure movements accomplished even as the death reached for them at a point of a spear.

The Winter Sidhe were screaming again. A roar of a different note now, of pain, of utter thwarted frustration as the hammer of lead and fire struck them again and again. They were still struggling forward, unbelievably. Raw, enraged courage keeping them moving into that whipping maelstrom.

Not a charge now. A slow, painstaking struggle for every inch as scores of them fell, dead and crippled. Arquebuses were not the weapons of surgical precision, the men wielding them were not the virtuosos one could find among the famed archers of the Faerie forests, who had centuries to hone their skill.

They were craftsmen, instead. Products of hard-won bloody experience in the most savage of all workshops.

Among them Narses, himself unarmed as always, gestured again; his command echoed by the trumpets and the flags.

The front rank rose and with incongruous calm stepped back, and back again through the sudden gaps in the lines behind them.

The mob, there was no other word for it, howled with sudden desperate triumph at the retreat and found some last, unfathomable dregs of will and plunged forward to turn the retreat into the rout, to take their bloodily-won revenge.

They came face to face with once-again impassively closed ranks and another volley. And another. And another.

The hand-gunners stepped back again, the process repeating itself.

Once, a lifetime ago, Galahad saw a group of Cretan archers dancing with a bull. A game of sublime skill and courage, the dancers leaping about the great, fierce animal with joyful abandon.

A celebration of youth and life. Until the knives came out and the bull began to bleed and die.

The Cretans kept it charging, kept it going until the very end - teasing it, dancing ever closer but always out of reach, instead of their flesh the beast finding only steel.

Until the bull suddenly stood still, shuddered, and slowly toppled over.

Before today Galahad would have never thought to liken Narses to a dancer of any sort.

Below the arquebusiers fired again, now into the backs of the Winter's warriors who had finally broken. The deceptively slender goblins, the green orcs dense with ropy muscle, the wild boggles and intricately tattooed boggarts were turning and clawing for a way to escape the death world they found themselves in. Spearing and stabbing into their own comrades to find escape.

The arquebusiers fired again.

And again.

Galahad turned away. Percival's face was unreadable as he bit into a sickly looking carrot. "That went pretty well. Didn't even reach the pikes..."

"Don't get cocky." Galahad grabbed the carrot from the rodelero and bit into it, suddenly desperate for the feel of something fresh. "The day is young."

"If that schmuck comes up with one more glorious charge idea, I am going to kill him to death in the face."

Galahad rubbed his eyes tiredly, without looking up. "Why, for the love of Mary and Her Kindest Child, do you insist on drinking with Rodrigo? The man makes you utterly insufferable. Well... more so than usual, in any case."

"I am bored." Percival informed him flatly, sinking heavily into the folding chair next to the makeshift table packed with schedules and logistical equations. "I have been quite unbearably bored for almost two decades now."

"Percy, you ignorant slut!" Nimue's voice carried clearly, for a moment drowning out the din of the great camp. Percival winced visibly and appeared to shrink.

There was clearly no chance that he would be given an opportunity to finish his paperwork, Galahad thought with a somewhat unsoldierly wisp of relief for the excuse. Turning he quirked an eyebrow at his friend. "What did you do now?"

Percival gaped at him, only tiny squeaking noises escaping his wide open mouth for a long second, wide blue eyes injured and a sincere hand clasped over his heart. "ME?" He forced out finally. "Why would yo- Y'know, it's just like you, Gal. I mean, I'm..."

Galahad tilted his head, listening to the sounds of Nimue's unmistakable progress. "I figure you've got about three seconds to tell me before I feed you to her."

Percival wilted visibly. "Bully."

"Two..."

"This is so unfair!"

"And, here we..."

"Get the fuck out here, Percy! I swear by Mary, Joseph and Dagda, I am going to castrate you with your teeth and skullfuck you to death with your own gangrenous, pus-leaking prick!"

"Ahh, don't you mean, OR you are going to… er, do that stuff, dear?"

"Was I fucking TALKING TO YOU, ELON?"

"...no."

"DO YOU WANT ME TO?"

"Shit, look at the time. I got the thing with the... I am going, I am going!"

Tent's flap flew open and Nimue stalked (Galahad was fairly certain he had never seen her actually walk, run or anything BUT stalk anywhere) inside, focusing on Percival with the unerring intent of something from the deep rising for a kill.

Percy was somehow on his feet already, with a chair clutched protectively in front of his crotch. "Now, Nim, let's not overreact..."

Nimue smiled thinly, a skinning knife suddenly materializing between her fingers. "Are you implying that I am some sort of hysterical village biddy that loses her temper for no reason, Percy?"

"Uh..." The new direction of the chief gunner's attack had clearly taken Percival by surprise and he glanced at Galahad, somewhat helplessly. The Legate raised his hands in a warding gesture and shifted his stool to gain some distance.

"No..." Percy finally ventured with an uncertain care of a man testing the uncharted water.

A touch more humor leached from Nimue's 'smile' turning it into something closer to a death rictus.

Percival offered a sickly grin in return.

Nimue caressed the knife lovingly.

Percival clutched the chair harder.

Galahad bit the inside of his cheek and made 'commander glare' at the vague direction of the door-flap. The faint noise outside dropped for a brief moment before Ganelon's wagering on the likely outcome of the amputation resumed quietly but fiercely.

Nimue was circling the tent now, unhurriedly, but purposefully, Percival's face assuming an increasingly haunted expression.

"I used to be a sorceress, you know?"

"Yeah, it's all kinda coming back to me now, Nim."

Nimue shaved a sliver of her thumbnail and pursed her lips in absentminded approval of the knife's sharpness. "Dangerous profession, sorcery. Can't afford to lose your shit without purpose."

She frowned suddenly, contemplatively. "Do you suppose why they took my power away?"

Percival looked as if he was seriously considering bursting into tears. The betting outside the tent paused for another awe-filled moment and then intensified with feverish tempo. Nothing good ever followed Nimue's recollections of her exalted past.

Nim glided over Galahad's crossed legs, which he hurriedly folded out of her way. "But I think I've grown as a person since then. Don't you think I've grown, Gal?"

"You are an epitome of self-restraint and your force of will is an inspiration to us all, Chief Cannoneer." Galahad assured her with somber sincerity.

Percival spared a second to stare at him with withering contempt and the betting outside stopped for a long, slightly disbelieving pause.

"You look like you disagree, Percy." Nimue asked mildly. "You don't think I'm a calm and generally easy-going, rational sort of person?"

Percival swallowed and finally broke. "I think that you are scaring me out of my reproductive tendencies, Nim! That's what I fucking think! I'm sorry, all right! I'll make it good!"

Nimue crept closer, sinking into a hunting crouch, her mien faintly surprised. "Make what good, Sir Percival?"

"I'll get the cannons back! I swear!" Percival licked his lips, clearly thinking quickly. "I'll get you better ones! Better cannons!"

Nimue finally stopped, looking vaguely interested. "I do like better cannons..."

"You do! You like them. Who doesn't like better cannons? Black magicians and possibly Satanists! Soulless Fae! I don't even want to know such people! Better cannons are everybody's friend! And your buddy Percy is totally the one who can get them to you. And everybody gets to be not stabbed in the crotch. Win-win! Huh? Huh? It's a good deal, Nim! Gal, tell her!"

Galahad was weeping quietly now, behind his cupped hands, desperately trying to swallow the laughter bubbling in his throat. The best he could manage in response to Percival's appeal was a vague nod of his head and a snort-sob that could possibly be interpreted as assent.

"One day, Percy. Twenty four hours. Then, I come find you again."

"Deal!"

The gamblers outside the tent sighed in collectively disgusted disappointment and then, suddenly realizing that Nimue was about to join them, scattered.

By the time Galahad composed himself, and dried his eyes he was once again alone with Percy in his tent.

"What the hell did you do to her?"

Percival fiddled with his hat gloomily. "The Court was having that banquet a week ago."

Galahad was suddenly alert. Seelie nobles didn't have much a sense of humor, when it came to their mortal Janissaries getting the better of them. "Yeah?"

Percival straightened out the hat's rim between his hands, resolutely refusing to meet Galahad's eyes. "Yeah, so nobody except the Pendragon and a few other Big Boss-Kings was invited..."

"Right, and?"

"Right, and there was a lot of good shit left over, Gal." Percival's tale sped up suddenly, although he was still avoiding looking at Galahad directly. "I mean really good shit. And they were going to throw it away, but then they decided to give it to the general commissary and they did but that fat fuck in charge of it - you know how he is - he fiddled with the books, and there were two wagons that he was going to sell to the Red River Clan's majordomo on the down-low, and those uppity bastards can't even appreciate good wine, you know I speak the truth! and so I didn't think it was fair, and even Siegfried agreed, and so wekindatookittheend."

Galahad buried his face in his hands again, warding off the incipient migraine blossoming somewhere above his nose. "Let me recap. Having suborned my pike commander, you launched a raid on our allies with the aim of robbing them of two wagons of leftover wine. In the process you have enmeshed me, and the III-rd, in a vendetta with the Red River.

Along the away you have also insured that we are more or less permanently on the shit list of the logistical apparatus of the army. Is that about the long and short of it?"

"Yeah."

"Uh-huh." Galahad contemplated the pistol on his desk with a faintly longing air. "And Nimue comes into the story when?"

"Oh, yeah, I forgot about that…. Well, uh, there was this palisade around the magazine where they were stashing the booze. I sorta borrowed a couple of Nim's 6-pounders. Y'know, just to get the gates opened quickly." Percival shrugged and put on his hat, preening virtuously. "Trying to avoid unnecessary bloodshed."

"And the cannons are where now?"

Percival deflated slightly. "I didn't have a whole lot of time to plan it, y'know. They were moving the wine the next day."

"Uh-huh."

"I miscalculated a tad on the rout of egress. We had to dump the cannons in a stream near there. But I am pretty sure we hid them pretty well. I was going to go pick them up tomorrow!"

Galahad contemplated him sadly. "I hate you like a sickness."

"Oh, quitcher bitching! I am pretty sure those sad bastards never even figured out who we were. And besides the Red River mob never liked you anyway. I am the one with the real fucking problem! Where in the nine bloody hells am I going to come up with two pieces for Nim by tomorrow? That bitch will straight cut me! She's got crazy eyes!"

"True." Galahad agreed somewhat maliciously. Percival scowled at him darkly and took his hat off again, descending into deep thought. Galahad took the window of opportunity to reluctantly resume his private hell.

He has been chewing his way through paperwork for close to a month now and there seemed no end in sight. Food, weapons, footwear, supplies to be carried along, and the magazines to be established along the route of march. Intelligence reports, inspection reports, training manuals, schedules, pay rosters...

Sometime Galahad sincerely considered asking for a demotion. Briefly, but sincerely.

There certainly would be little delay in filling his spot. The competition for a slot among the Pendragon's chosen few was fierce, and occasionally homicidal.

There had never been anything like it, after all. Win or lose, they would carve an entirely new legend before they were done. Their names would be whispered by the haughty elves and envious men alike.

The dreams of glory everlasting flared in the eyes of the volunteers, usually dooming their chances.

Arthur was not looking for heroes on this run, Galahad knew. Only for soldiers.

Fifty thousand of them. Ten full legions led by him and him alone, each of them headed by men, MEN! picked only by him.

Unprecedented. Unthinkable. Unnatural.

But desperation makes many things possible, and the Seelie have been losing for a very long time. It was thus that they accepted mortals into their armies millennia ago, hoping to stem the Winter's tide with sheer numbers.

And now fear slithered among the glittering throng yet again and new concessions were being made. Oh, there would be eyes and ears among Arthur's shiny model army, of course, and the more overt overseers as well - the entire mage cohort would be pure Fae out of necessity, and much of the artillery corps was pure kobold. The logic of the latter was as obvious as it was puerile.

The lesser Fae had little enough love for the Courts and many among the cannoneers have been dying next to the mortals for generations now. Privately Galahad was rather certain that Nimue could probably induce them to mutiny with a random scowl.

But why? And what then?

Arthur had his plans, Galahad was sure of that. Although whatever they might be, he could not yet discern. And this raid - it was still incongruous to think of it as such, given the numbers and the stakes involved - was but the first step. First and necessary step - for anything and everything was preferable to the Winter's victory.

But the Pendragon thought in the long term. As did they all these days, as they must, with their mortality changed and stretched in the service of the Seelie Court.

It had been such a terrible long time since green Britain bade him welcome. Centuries certainly, even with the time flowing molasses slow in the Faerie, slow enough for other to join him - some in a joyful reunion, others from another time and eras; uncertain of his name or clinging to it as if it was an icon.

Life, Galahad had long decided, had been much simpler in the monastery.

The theories abounded, of course. Many, perhaps most, thought this was Avalon of the old stories. A natural enough conclusion, he had to admit, when in sight of the stately, deceptively fragile-seeming towers of the Sidhe cities or among the elder woods, where the very air seemed to be alive and ancient with knowledge.

Avalon...

Cesare snorted at the suggestion and refilled his flagon. "The Promised Isle! I do so love you, Gal. This charming naïveté and optimism that you cling to with such tenacity. They bring me back to the songs of you I heard even as a child. You know you were always my favorite?"

Borgia laughed, the wide mouth barely opened and long canines gleaming, but the sound genuine and inviting, charming and utterly engaging. "Us bastards, we have to stick together, eh?"

"Avalon." He shook his head and stared at his wine. "What twaddle."

Galahad looked back him, ignoring the acid-tinged wordplay as always. "And why not? Is it any stranger than things surrounding us every day?"

Borgia smiled at him, the humor leeching out of his expression with sudden, cold speed. "Because Avalon would not have me. Look around you, mon chevalier sans peur et sans reproche. Look at your companions, old and new. This is no longer the Round Table. Even your old friends, those that have made it here are hardly the shining, brave knights of song and myth. Look around you, look at all of us - traitors and murderers all."

He laughed again, a clear and ringing sound. "Avalon? Gal, we are in Purgatory! Can't you see it?"

"Why are you here, then?" Galahad was suddenly tired and bitter with years of doubt, lashing out to hurt. "Why are you here and not in the Gehenna?"

And Cesare the child of sin and holiness, wise and vicious, understanding and unforgiving smiled back. Eyes crinkling with the secret mirth. "Because I had broken the laws of God and Men for love, of course."

He rose to leave then, taking the wine with him and patting Galahad gently on the shoulder before departing. "And after all, hell is a state of mind. Earth, Avalon, damnation or salvation - all of us carry our own hell with us."

He had sat there for hours, until night fell and alien stars danced alien dances in the sky. He sat there, thinking of nothing, until Percival found him and squatted beside his stool, silent.

Galahad asked him then, after a while. And the former wild child of the forest shrugged. "He's right, of course. I thought you knew."

Percy looked at him then, waiting with wolf's calm patience, unblinking for the inevitable question. And Galahad swallowed, the throat - dry as if he was in battle - hurting even as he asked it.

Percival never turned away, simply grinned, knowing and exasperated. "You are here because you want to be, Gal. What the fuck have you been thinking all these years? Fearing and imagining your sins? You are the best of us, you've always been. The real thing. Nothing holds you here except your own will."

Galahad wanted him to stop then, to rail and scream, to shut him up before the thought was given form, made real, let out into the world. But he didn't, waiting, watching it come.

"You are waiting for your Dad."

Galahad blinked, chasing away the memories of the long-ago night. Percival was smiling suddenly and rising from his chair, some new thought behind the blue eyes making him visibly perk up.

"Greetings to all my faithful subjects." The amiable booming voice filled Galahad's tent to the brim, followed swiftly by the great bulk of the Prince of Summer. "Working hard, I trust?"

The Legate rose quickly, making his obeisance, prompting Finvarra's annoyed grimace and a dismissive gesture. "Oh, quit it. I just escaped that bullshit up in the Citadel. Or did you think I came down here to enjoy the mud and the delightful smell of latrines?"

Finvarra's famous grin robbed the words of any sting and Galahad found himself smiling back, almost despite himself. It was hard to dislike the Prince-Consort, so much at odds with his own Court. A throwback to the simpler times, which he adamantly refuse to admit were gone. A simple and bluff fellow, congenial and expansive, a hunter and a drinker, an inveterate skirt-chaser and a gambler.

It was no wonder he and Percy got along like a house on fire. Literally, at least once that Galahad had proof of.

"Fin! You made your daring escape after all, you mad fairy bastard!"

Galahad winced and kept his mouth shut after a warning glare from the Prince. Satisfied, Finvarra nodded firmly and shouldered his ways deeper into the tent, instantly making it seem smaller despite being the very image of a tall and slender, graceful Seelie noble.

As he made progress, Galahad discerned his inevitable train, loitering outside - some younger aristocrats were already reaching for the dice cups and taunting passing soldiers into a 'friendly toss or two.' Without ever trying Finvarra had long ago managed to coalesce the more open-minded elves of the Court around himself.

He was utterly unaware of the flood of intrigue usually flowing around him. More and more, Galahad was growing to believe that firstly - it was that very trait that kept the Summer Lady besotted with her Prince; and secondly - it was probably the most intricate piece of acting, deception and illusion that Galahad had ever seen.

But he kept his suspicions to himself.

War was dangerous enough. Let Arthur swim the shark-infested waters of the Fae politics.

"Hi Percy! Hiya Galahad!"

"Yeah, hi Percy!"

"Ladies!"

Sometimes Percival made him feel every day of his innumerable years, Galahad thought darkly, and did his best to greet the pack of Seelie court-maidens with the proper courtesy and poise.

They curtsied and smiled back at him,warmth and beauty coming together in devastating combination. And even in the brief second that he found himself in their focus he was suddenly and painfully aware of the dirt under his fingernails, the mess that was his tent, the ink spots on his collar, fingers and sleeves, the two-days' worth of stubble and the unkempt hair.

He felt warmth suffuse his face and, as the quiet titter echoed musically through the pack, realized with sudden horror that he was actually blushing.

Percival did not even spare him a look as he moved unerringly into the midst of the throng, slapping Finvarra's back somewhat perfunctorily in passing. "Oh, my fair darlings, I missed you all! Tell me all the gossip, immediately! Who has done what and whom! Are there new duels? Death and dismemberment? Perhaps an execution or two? What color is in fashion? I have been beastly bored out here. Come, come with me, my pretties. That includes you Fin! Move your fat ass - I just so happen to be in possession of some rather good wine. If you are good you might have a taste. And hey! Somebody out there find Ganelon and Rodrigo!"

Like a miniature tornado, carrying all and sundry before him, Percival emptied Galahad's tent in seconds, the chatter and laughter swirling around him. ""Come, ladies, come - party in my house! Festivus to the bloody maximus! Galahad, you are not invited."

Galahad blinked, somewhat taken aback and faintly hurt. "Why not?" He asked, forgetting in the heat of the moment that he had never had any intention of going.

"Because you are a boring killjoy who hates fun and I don't like you any more."

"Ah." Galahad considered the offered rationale for a second then shrugged at grinning Finvarra and sat back down. "No, that's fair."

"Damn straight." Percival nodded decisively, gently freed his hand from the firmly possessive grasp of one of the court-maidens, and embraced the Prince-Consort expansively. "Say, Fin... Did I hear right that the Court's Guard just got those new cannons in? Single-weld? Oh, no reason, no reason. Just making conversation. You are still down for that little card get-together later?

It was coming. Galahad could feel it, the focus point that decided every battle. It was coming.

The air was heavy with premonition and magics unleashed by both sides. As always the mages of the Winter and the Summer negated each other, leaving the battlefield an even contest of skill, gun and blood, if not the numbers.

But then that was nothing new. Arthur's host, as great as it was, started the campaign outnumbered and grew only more so. Yet they expected that. As they did the intrigues that delayed their reinforcements and supplies. The myriad of little things that somehow went only wrong enough to bleed them but not to deny them success against the Winter.

Predictable. It would not, after all, do to have the mortals grow over proud.

But still they advanced, clawing victory after victory out of blood and horror. Ten years of campaigning to get here and now. Even if they lost, died, and were scattered - they had already won. Four field armies of the Unseelie Court lay smashed and broken in their wake, a score of the proud Fae cities taken and sacked. They set the entire border aflame and even moved it.

The Summer had not had a success of this magnitude in two generations of mortal men. Men who had delivered it at last, free men... as such things counted in the vast and strange fields of the Faerie.

Victory, paid for with more than thirty thousand dead and broken bodies left in the shallow graves along the way. But victory nevertheless. For there would be new legions now, whatever the old aristocracy might whisper into the ear of the Lady. New legions would rise out of ashes, like dragon teeth sown in the soil of Avalon.

Victory, even if they lost here and now.
As they might yet.

As they often do, in retrospect, the answer seemed obvious.Ten years of defeats, of unaccustomed humiliations and setbacks. Whatever could and had been said about the Winter Court, no one had ever accused it of stupidity.

It was only a matter of time before they began learning from their mistakes. Galahad had simply hoped it would take them longer.

The smoke, thick and poisonous now, blanketed most of the field but the winds awakened by the mage battle were rising as well, momentarily dispelling the obstruction and allowing Galahad a brief view of the unfolding slaughter.

Somehow, surpassing all understanding, the Unseelie warlord managed to rally his levies for two more charges. But the militia was broken beyond repair. Neither of the attacks reached past the now filled-in trench-works.

Galahad spat, disgusted.

It made a certain amount of sense to try it. The levies had proven themselves to be almost pointless on the modern battlefield, although a clever commander could still put them to good use as skirmishers or scouts. If he was in the Unseelie commander's boots, Galahad would have certainly tried to adapt them to counter Percival's rodeleros.

That didn't seem to fit his enemy's approach, however. Or perhaps the elf simply didn't have time. Instead he used the untrained mass of warriors as simple cannon fodder, throwing them at the Pendragon's troops to soak up the bullets and soften them for what would come next.

It made sense, the cold logic of it all had allowed Galahad to guess the enemy's strategy after all and plan for it. But to push the levies into that deathtrap again and again, even after it was clear that it would accomplish next to nothing...

Narses had broken the back of the Unseelie militia without suffering any casualties, save for a few accidental injuries. And the expenditure of the ammunition was negligible.

They were the enemy, but the waste of it all still disgusted Galahad. But then it was always hard to admit one's failure and cut the losses. In the end that arrogance cost the Unseelie that most intangible of advantages. Morale.

Three times the wild charge sped toward the outnumbered mortals, and thrice it was repulsed with no more visible effort than swatting of a fly.

The stench of death and the smell of blood filled the air. And in the midst of carnage the Pendragon pikemen and arquebusiers stood a little straighter, grinned a little wider.

And the next attack would have to wade through their own dead to come at them, to wallow in their own failure and its cost.

Morale. Such a big little thing.

Yet, morale alone was no substitute for numbers or skill. Or cunning.

The drums rolled and the horns flared their haunting song. And then earth trembled under the steady step of the only possible thing that Galahad had feared but still expected to see this day.

The drums rolled and the steel-clad Unseelie pikemen, the first of their kind, advanced like the doom of men.

Their step was slow and sure, the 16-foot shafts topped with wicked steel held rigidly by the front rank to point at their enemy, the soldiers behind them holding theirs aloft.

They advanced like a living fortress, pikes in perfectsquares with the hand-gunners and crossbowmen forming their own smaller, moving bastions at the angles of the pikemen's formation. They stepped in unison to their marching cadence, proud and terrible, sending a chill along Galahad's skin as he saw the twisted mirror image of his own creation snarling back at him.

Theyadvanced in staggered, uneven formation, each square connected by the arquebusiers and crossbowmen between them, ready to support each other. The Unseelie learned their lessons well.

They advanced.

"Well, ain't that a bitch," Percival sniffed unrepentantly and bit loudly into a peach. "I guess you were right after all."

Galahad ignored him,reaching for his spyglass and pushing the visage of the Unseelie pike-square to the back of his mind. He hunted, casting his eyes back and forth until he finally he saw it, the movement behind the chessboard advance of the Winter's pikes.

This time he didn't bother fighting the impulse, turning and looking back at Arthur. The King remained impassive and unmoving, looking calmly back at him.

Galahad's plan. It was up to him now - point of no return. They could still break the engagement and withdraw. They would pay heavily. The rearguard, whoever they might be, would probably die to a man. But they just might make it to the walls. And behind the fortifications there was no force in Faerie that could get them.

But then the reasons for leaving the camp were still valid. Dying here maybe, or starving behind the walls within a month...

He turned back, snapping the spyglass closed with a soft *click.*

"Percy..."

His friend, his brother in all but blood looked back at him and smiled. A crooked, carefree, understanding smile that reached all the way to his eyes.

"I told you, dumbass. I'll back your play."

"And you?" Galahad had asked him, cold despite the warmth of the summer night. "And you, Sir Percival, what is your atonement? Why are you serving this age in Purgatory?"

And Percival looked back at Galahad uncomprehendingly, honestly perplexed that he would even have to ask. "I'll always back your play, Gal. You know that."

"Time, Percival. Time! You can get it done, I know that. But time!"

The too-innocent blue eyes flared with devil's own joy for the briefest of moments and Percy tied off the string, securing his hat come death or magestorm.

"No worries, Legate. We'll do this little thing." A shrill whistle split the air and between one second and the next Galahad was alone on his hilltop watching the chief of his rodeleros sprint down toward the battle, his adjutants in tow.

The rodeleros. Percival's own creation. Oh, the indomitable Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar helped, giving them their name, in fact. And Sertorius had his say as well. And eventually both built their own facsimiles.

But at the root they were Percival's mad dream made flesh and he stamped his spirit on them like an indelible mark of Cain.

The rodeleros, the sword and buckler men, the Pack, the light infantry par excellence, the army's jacks of all trades, Galahad's dagger hand.

Unruly troublemakers in peacetime and holy terror, answerable only to Percy, during battle.

He was among them now, having shouldered his way with impudent aplomb into the middle of the pikesquare where they were waiting for him, relaxed and tense, taut as a coiled snake, sensing their time. The rodeleros - the savage beating heart of the Pendragon's legions.

The Unseelie squares were closing the distance now, their hand-gunners engaging the legion's arquebusiers.

Percy grinned at the faces around him, absently accepting his sword belt passed from among the clustered throng. "So would do you say, boys? Let's fuck this cat and then for a beer?"

Low, wolfish laughter rippled through them and then onward into the pikemen's ranks. And then the Winter crept past the last inches of the no man's land and the call went out, the sergeants' voices drowning out the noise of war.

"PUSH OF PIKE!"

The collision seems slow and surreal, too big to really be happening, too strange to fit perception. The fixed looks of the men locked into formation, unable to dodge the death and pain reaching for them, give way to cries of hurt and horror as the spears bite their flesh.

And then the push begins in earnest, the grotesque shoving match with will and mass thrown on the scales. The pikes snap out and back again, like two great scorpions stinging each other and yet refusing to die. Grunting and screams, cursing commands, the maddening song of the drums all meld into the unspeakable cacophony of the push.

Men fall, and don't, caught on the instruments of their death like pinned insects, their killers desperately trying to free the weapons by shaking off the sometimes still shrieking bodies and themselves falling prey to enemy. New men shoulder forward to hold the line and the horror unabated.

The push of pike. The bad war.

It can last for hours, until one square breaks and then - when it does break - dies. Utter devastation follows the failure of the nerve. The veterans among the legions know it and have steeled themselves against it, the wordless growl rising like some demented spirit of battle to swirl above them, hurled as yet another weaponat the Unseelie who have dared to meet the Pendragon's chosen on their own terms.

They will die standing, die fighting,before they break.

This is but one advantage they hold over Winter. On either side of them the duel of the arquebusiers continues. Ranged between the squares they are exchanging volley after volley, pouring destruction into each other.

The Fae never equalledthe enthusiasm of their mortal adversaries when it came to adoption of the guns. Artillery or arquebusiers - the adoption of the new tools of war came slowly and reluctantly to them.

For the Unseelie it was only natural - the new war spelt doom and the end of their crowning glory, of the heavy cavalry, the Frost Guard and Children of the Hunt that had wrought their name in blood and dark fame across the breadth and length of Fairie.

And even here and now, they were outclassed, their hand-gunners less than half of their supporting troops, the crossbowmen making up the lack. In time the legions' arquebusiers would tear them apart and turn their undistracted ire on the defenceless pike men,the angle of their fire allowing them to devastate the enemy square.

In time.

For now, however, they were trapped in a deathly slugging match of their own, trading barrages and shedding men like water.

Time. The most precious commodity of all. The bloody coin of battle.

Were it possible, Galahad would have turned and signalled, freeing impatient, raging Nimue to turn her artillery, fresh and muzzled since the morning of the slaughter,against the Winter pikes. To break and cripple it, to tear its orderly ranks asunder.

It was the Pendragon cannons, their pet dragons, as much as anything else that had turned the tide in afull half of their battles since their bloody trek began.

But not today. Today Nimue would wait, their ace in the hole. Today the pikes would stand alone.

That is alone but for the rodeleros.

The hilt of the schiavona is an intricate web of metal, steel turned to art, wrapping Percival's hand like a mailed glove, the two and a half feet of killing blade atop it is an extension of his arm. It is a good sword. Popular with many of the men.

Most of the rodeleros have daggers ready as well. Long, wide knives almost the size of his own gladius. Their bucklers, those innocuous looking steel discs strapped on their wrists. Others grip them instead, using the small shields themselves as weapons. A few have sharpened the edges, a shield and sword in one...

Their chief smiles again, merry and savage, and languidly traces the brim of his hat, the schiavona hanging loosely in his grip. "Well. Let's be about it."

The familiar harsh whistle rends the air and the rodeleros' baying cry echoes in an answer. The pikemen shift, even as they die and kill, the famed iron control of the legions coming to the fore. The gaps are narrow, the visage between the grappling blocks of pikemen is horrific.

Percival laughs; the savage and joyful sound of a predator let free and his men follow, the rodeleros' charge. The loping, squatting attack that takes them under the pikes and into hell even as the legions close ranks behind them.

There's no room to stand, the mad forest of the pikes above, among them traps them. But traps the enemy as well. They slip on blood and bodies - not all of them corpses, but they charge, closing the gap. And here, in the nightmare land between the squares - it is their time.

"Remember," Galahad had told him, so serious as always, sad, his eyes distant as if watching the future unfold already. "It will be fast. So fast... So you have to be faster yet. They have to break by the time we strike. Otherwise we all die. Time, Percy. Time is everything."

He remembers and laughs again and his rodeleros love him for it. They too howl and scream their laughter and take strength from the paling faces of the Fae. And then they stab. No gentlemanly strikes, no, not for them.

Hamstring, disembowel, look for the low gaps in armor, castrate. Dodge the reoriented pikes of the far ranks, reaching for you between the men in front. Laugh. Kill.

The rodeleros' charge.

Galahad watches and prays, catching the glimpse of the blond mane that Percival stubbornly refuses to sacrifice to the utilitarian fashion of the legions. Maybe it's an illusion, a glimpse of glare. There is no way that he could really see Percy from this far away, down there in that maelstrom of violence, in his element at last.

So he turns away and prays.

The vague movement behind the Unseelie lines that had caught Galahad's attention earlier solidifies and grows, the mirage assuming form. He nods and calls for his horse. It worked. Now all they have to do is survive it.

Ten years and it all comes to this.

The Winter Court refuses to take them seriously at first. They are just men, after all. And so the dregs and refuse of the Unseelie Host are sent against them, to die with infinite surprise frozen on their faces.

Surely even the least among the Fae were more than a match for mere mortals?

That had proven them wrong. And the Winter's regard had grown, new armies were sent against them in ever growing numbers and quality. These too they met and matched, left broken and screaming behind them as the Pendragon marched grimly deeper into Winter.

Until they were finally given the ultimate mark of honor, until the Unseelie knights had ridden against them. Themselves survivors of the age of battles, led by scarred Captains and the Court's own warlord, however, they felt no hurry. Immortal patience met Arthur's need and the two deadlocked.

The men marched and the Fae circled, refusing to give battle, a thousand pinpricks bleeding the Pendragon's army instead. A raid on the supply train, a massacre of a struggler column. Jab and fade, jab and fade.

Whatever the inducement, the Unseelie warlord refused to take a stand.
Why bother? If all he had to do was wait…

But, veterans or not, he was riding with the Frost Guard, the victors of the war that had lasted millennia. The arrogant and glorious throng. They were not so very different from their Summer brethren at the last - on this the Pendragon bet and so had sweetened the bait.

Time and again the legions' own cavalry was detached and left to hold the cities and the surrounding country. Time and again the cannoneers stayed behind as well.

Time and again, until the blood boiled in the proud Unseelie veins and their patience failed, and they had ridden against the impudent mortal enemy in truth to put the legend and the glory of the Pendragon to bloody, final, conclusive end.

Oh, they prepared well. Learning the lessons given and ranging mortal's own creation against them. But the Unseelie pike squares, the Winter's hedgehogs, were still new and untried, and when you came right down to it - still just infantry.

No. The Seelie slavemen host would fall like so many others to the Winter's glory, its elite. The newfangled hedgehogs would grapple with the legions, fixing them in place, immobilizing and occupying the terribly efficient mortal units. They would buy time, the precious time for the cavalry to strike.

As they were striking now, like a menacing dark storm gathering force, curving past the flank of the battle lines, flinging themselves in all of their terrible and beautiful glory at the legions intent on the enemy in front of them.

Just as Galahad intended.

It worked. Now all they had to do was survive it.

He nodded and Guiscard glanced back at him, checking the wheellock mechanism of his carbine, his horse - like himself - festooned with pistols to a comical effect. "Time?"

"Time."

And they were off, he and his light cavalry, speeding toward the charge they had no chance of stopping. Practically unarmored, a grotesque contrast to the Unseelie knights that were coming at full speed toward the Legions now, their lances couched and their war-wail burning the air.

Galahad moistened his lip and checked his own armor, Ganelon grinning darkly beside him. "Don't trust me on my own, Gal?"

"Obviously." Galahad retorted drily and then his world narrowed to the steel tunnel of the helmet's visor. "Also I feel like giving into nostalgia today. I used to be a knight, y'know?"

"No! You shittin' me? Looked like such a nice boy, too..."

They rode laughing to their death, the lancers of the legions, the once-knights who traded much of their glittering armor for mobility, who ridiculously - in comparison what faced them - were still termed the heavy cavalry.

Timing. Time and timing.

Nimue judged it perfectly as always, her barrage striking the Unseelie horse at the peak of their charge. And then again, and again walking with merciless step down their ranks away from the edges of their formation just as Guiscard's ululating pistoleers met it.

The seeming chaos of their counter charge had masked the same iron discipline that was the hallmark of the Pendragon's force. They had no chance of meeting the Fae knights full on, nor were they full enough to try.

Like stream meeting rock they flowed around it, an impossibly elegant maneuver, so out of place in this place of carnage. The horn sounded and they fired as one, the thunder of their pistols sounding laughably soft amidst the destruction wrought by Nimue's dragons.

Another volley, as they turned, still together, still dancing. Once more, the Parthian shot as they wheeled away on both sides of the grimly charging Unseelie cavaliers to speed past them and come together somewhere in the distance.

The cannons were still roaring when Ganelon's hussars met the Unseelie pride on the blood fields. Lances splintered and sabers met swords as men were punched out of the saddles with the inhuman force. Death reigned and the Frost Guard screamed in orgiastic release as they finally saw an enemy they could strike.

The pride and glory of Winter. The weight of centuries' tradition and catalogue of hard-won victories rode with them. Here, on this day, tasted by fire and steel as never before, they certainly proved true to their legend.

If he had not see it himself, the horror blooming before his very eyes, Galahad would not have credited the story.

They never even slowed.

Nimue wreaked chaos among their ranks, and Guiscard reaped his share. But they were the Winter's Frost and their charge never checked.

They met Ganelon's hussars at full charge and smashed through them with contemptuous ease, riding over and through the screaming mass of men and beasts. Nothing between them and the death of legions, now.

Time. It's hard to keep track in battle, strange things happen to your perception. Minutes and hours speed by, seconds stretch. You mind deceives you, trapping you in the sweet horror of the battle madness, an endless, speeding loop.

Time. Time was important.

Percival stabbed and fell back, breathing hard. He was armored light, all rodeleros were, many disdaining even the brigantine, the tough, metal-studded leather jerkin that was now threatening to drown him in sweat.

He breathed, that random gift that separated killers from the dead keeping him calm and focused even now.

Time.
They were eating away at the Unseelie square but it was taking too long. The fuckers were steadier than he had hoped. They could die like men, he'd give them that.

Time.
He promised Galahad with the reckless sureness that everyone expected from him and they had spent hours figuring the angles. It had to be done and so it could be done.

But fucking how?

He had the answer, had clawed it out eventually and had laughed at the idea even then in the quiet gloom of his tent, the girl laying next to him murmuring an indistinct complaint and turning over to hug him tighter.

Time. Fucking time and fucking bloody Galahad.

Shit, he was really hoping to avoid this.

"On me!"

In seconds a cage of two surrounded him, warding off the pikes, Bors and One-Eye steady as always giving him... fuck, giving time. Well, they practiced the fool thing enough…

The dragon's egg slid easily into his hands out of the pouch and after another second's thought he halved the already short fuse.

In for a penny…

The witch-light flared and the fuse caught.

"Alllley-ooop!"

The throw was ungraceful, both hands launching the grenade out of the squatted stoop. But elegance bought you no yams, Percy thought, and tore his eyes from the arch of the egg as it reached the apex and began to fall.

The seconds stretched. Four, three, two…

*WHOMP*

The expected blast was dull and muffled, somewhere behind the frontline of the Sidhe square and Percy exploded himself, even as the pikes shuddered and slid about him, the Unseelie Fae jerked into momentary chaos within the narrow corner of their square.

Miniscule.

But then all he ever needed, all he ever asked, was just room enough to stand…

"STEP!"

Bors and One-Eye crouched, the broad backs slanting and he was running, running and then leaping, sword akimbo. Flying, swooping down and drunk with it.

Fuck me, it's going to work…

And then he was there, the small accidental vacuum of grisly horror concentrate. Surrounded by nonplussed Unseelie pikemen just recovering from the shock of the grenade's blast.

He could not resist. It never even occurred to him. And so his lips quirked into an expression that was not a smile, and he tipped his beautiful hat. "Oh, you silly bastards. Now y'all are proper fucked."

And then he laughed, because that was what he did.

The grizzled orc with only one ear was the first to react, the time snapping back into itself. Dropping his pike he swore, vile and savage words still slithering musically into the air, and grabbed for his short sword. He never made it, still looking puzzled as he raised his hands to feel the throat opened by Percival's lazy looking slash.

The rest of the them reacted too by then and he was still laughing as he went to meet them, alone against the first Sidhe square for a brief shining moment. He danced, a whirling killing dervish, the swords snaking in and out, rending, biting, killing, the line collapsing around him turning, seeking him out.

Time.

Somewhere behind him it froze and then abruptly a viciously exultant shriek grew, rose and crescended, the killing song of the rodeleros howled triumphantly to the summer sky as they surged, suddenly and as one, into the breach.

Weasel quick, mad rush of the professionals killers given their chance. And then he was not alone any more and they were inside and the killing began in earnest.

Behind them somewhere a million miles and years away the legion gasped and held its breath. And then the sentence of death spilled out, inevitable, inexorable like that bitch of Fate herself.

They bruk the square!

The Winter's army flinched, shuddered and began the long work of dying.

Time. It's hard to keep track in battle, strange things happen to your perception. Minutes and hours speed by, seconds stretch. You mind deceives you, trapping you in the sweet horror of the battle madness, an endless, speeding loop.

Time. Time was important.

Percival stabbed and fell back, breathing hard, almost taking Siegfried's arm at the shoulder by mistake when the Captain of the Pikes reached for him. "Whoops. Sorry about that."

The Norseman regarded him impassively. "Well done."

"Yeah, well. That's how we do." Percival caught his breath and blinked. He was not entirely sure when the legion charged nor when the pikemen overtook him. But somehow he wasn't on the frontline any more.

"Okay, then. Kooky. Hey – gimme a step."

Siegfried moved forward and then fell back as One-Eye, the right arm hanging limp and useless, snarled wordlessly at him. Percy rolled his andsuddenly swore. "I lost my fucking hat! Shit!"

Siegfried stared at him and the rodelero fought of the temptation to stick out his tongue at him. Instead he clambered onto One-Eye's shoulders, Bors giving him a hand.

He took in the panorama. "Huh."

Siegfried stared up at him. "What?"

Percy took another second to take in the devastation.

The crumbled Sidhe square falling in upon itself and bleeding, just as he had promised. The chaos of victory as the order collapsed and pikemen mixed with arquebusiers, the guns clubbing, the pikes abandoned for swords. Bloody anarchy that could never be reformed in time.

The broken charge of Ganelon's hussars, swept away like sand castles by the rising sand. Guiscard's pistoleers reformed and looking as if they were about to do something remarkably stupid like trying to take on the Frost Guard head-on.

The thundering ride of Winter's glory, with nothing between them and him except Nimue's salvos.

He twisted, hoping to catch one last glimpse of the witch. And for a moment thought he did, her pale hair the only mark singling her out, herself back with soot and grime and backblast, urging her cannoneers on.

Her cannons - and his, he grinned, thinking - barking again and again. The steady metronomic beat of death as they hammered into the Unseelie knights at the rate no one else could have expected, plunging death into the spelt-armor clad elite of Winter.

Nim was earning her pay today.

"Well?" Siegfried demanded, finally impatient.

"They are going to carry it home." Percival observed with the disinterested sort of air of a man condemned to death, and leapt down.

"The charge of the Frost Guard can knock down the walls of Tir Na Nog."

The power and invincibility of the Unseelie knights had been the byword of the Faerie for longer then civilizations lived. They always brought their charge home. Once unleashed, the dogs of Winter were never stopped.

They underestimated the mortals. The spies have told the truth, the information was checked and checked again. The Pendragon's artillery was squandered among the garrisons along with much of what passed for the legions' cavalry.

The numbers did not lie. And the plan was good. The mortals had no choice but to respond to the Unseelie barrages at the start of the battle, expending the precious ammunition and wearing the cannons they had not replaced in a decade.

The Winter Court had never had enough artillery to match the Seelie, nor skill. But in this time and place the numbers finally favored them. Enough, at least to exhaust the legions' cursed dragons before they could be turned against the knights.

But somehow, someone held back. Somehow, someone was tearing into the Guard now, striking them from afar again and again. Only a few of the cannons but, the rate, the thrice damned rate of fire!

The rain of death fell and the elite of the Unseelie fell to it.

But they were Guard and they would not be stopped.

They could see the chaotic maelstrom at the center of the human lines now. They were close. And once they broke it they would slaughter the cannoneers at wheel and then charge again and again taking the other legions, still grappling with the Unseelie hedgehogs in the flank.

Here, now, today the legions would die and the Pendragon would die with them.

And so they gritted their teeth, and steeled themselves as the cannons roared and struck them with the barbed whips of unbearable fury.

The bore it for they were Guard, and they would not be stopped.

But they did slow…

The idea was ridiculous in the face of it. They did not laugh, of course, because he was who he was.

But it was clear that the entire concept was insane. Some things are just not done. Can never work.

It would all end in tears.

From the Captains to the whores everyone knew that it was insanity and would never work. They would all die.

But they took the King's shilling, and he was Arthur, and they would die for him. With him, because he said he would stand with them. But then he was Arthur and of course he would.

Sod it all for a game of soldiers, everyone had to die sometime. Even in Avalon.
They just wished it not so ridiculously pointless, that's all.

But they were his picked men. His Praetorians. He drilled with them and he ran with them and he carried the pike. And then they drilled again. Before going for another run. And one more march. And then a drill, to break the monotony.

Again and again. Merciless, unmovable, constant as death. Day after day, all day. In rain and under the stinging sun. Over and over.

It was an insane idea. Stupid-ass fucktarded concept. It would all end in tears.
But they'd take some of the fairy bastards with them. Sure as fate, sure as death.

They marched and fought sometime. The last resort of the legions. The Praetorians, his picked men, the mad bastards of the last resort, the ones he called when it all went to the pot.

The fought and died and always drilled for that one day.

Insane, and it would never work, and the man was clearly unhinged, even if he was a King.

They were all dead men.

Ten years. A decade of blood and triumph. A decade of war. And drill. Until he came to them and smiled. And told that this was it and took a pike and stood in the ranks with them.

Fuck.

They were all going to die. It was obvious.

It just wasn't done.

Infantry just didn't charge cavalry!

But he was who he was and he asked them to stand with him, and of course they would. Fuck it. He was Arthur and they were his picked men, the Praetorians.

And all they had going against them were some pussy damn elves.

Cakewalk.

"What the fuck just happened?"

Siegfried looked like Percy imagined he himself felt. Which was problematic. He suspected that this whole pole-axed bull look didn't suit him.

The Norseman was gaping, the grim demeanour giving way for once to honest, utter, perfect shock. "They can't do that! Pikes can't charge against the armored horse! Everyone knows that!"

Percival punched then. Without holding back and not in jest, a vicious, underhanded strike, right in the kidneys. "Shut the fuck up before they think better of it, you German moron!"

Not that it would make much difference now. It was beautiful.

They paused, just briefly, those glorious murder machines, the pride of Winter. Paused just for a second, slowed to dress their ranks, to shake off Nim's damage. And then the unthinkable took form.

The Praetorians gathered speed like something out of a dream. They caught the Guard perfectly, a text-book flank attack, slamming into the knights like a maddened bull. It was beautiful.

They pushed them right into the III-rd, trapped them against the mad scramble of the dying Unseelie hedgehog. No room to run, to charge again, to maneuver. No room for anything but dying.

Dying even now, the horses and men screaming, the dream of ages dying along with them. The charge of the Frost Guard stopped and broken at last.

By men.

He should be there, it came distantly to him and Percival looked down. His sword and his entire right arm were covered to the wrist in the wetly living dark red glove. He squinted and shook his head.

He should be down there. Perfect place for the rodeleros. Disembowelling horses, rending flesh, ranging through the melee, riding the edge of chaos.

His home.

Siegfried finished coughing and straightened painfully glaring at him, but over the hissy fit, it looked like.

Percival grinned and whistled, shrill and unrepentant. "On me! Let's go find our asshole Legate, then. Oh – and my hat!"