in chain or leather or just their shirts, armed with sidearms like swords and axes with a few spears thrown in, they were still the best-trained warriors in Providence. They should give a good account of themselves in the unlikely event of sudden attack.

Unlikely because Rob, thanks to the eyes and ears of his scouts and woods-runners, knew more about Count Guillaume's movements than Guilli himself did.

He rode his plodding, nodding spike-frill Little Nell along the road beside the six massive Triceratops. The monsters had filled out under his careful (and plentiful) feeding. Their tough, thick hides shone with health.

Baggage-bundles were piled high on the three-horns' backs. The durable personal belongings of the dinosaurs' attendants and fighting-crews, mostly—things that would suffer little from being cut loose and dumpednow, with it slowly dawning on Rob that he was likely to be allowed to keep his head a while yet, said head couldn't help swelling with a hearty case of I told you so.

A domesticated horror belonging to a pack set on Karyl by Duke Falk's mother, the Dowager Duchess of Hornberg, to make sure he was dead after the Battle of Hassling had bitten Karyl's sword hand clean off. When the self-proclaimed witch Aphrodite had hired him and Rob on Bogardus's behalf to come to Providence and raise an army to fight, she had performed a magic she claimed would grow it back. Skeptic to the core, Karyl openly doubted the existence both of witches and of magic.

Rob had taken a different view. And when the