of them fled back into the city.
Outside, the Unseelie troops, now cut off from their escape route into Elenth, began to retreat to the east, away from the city and away from the reinforcements that were hurrying to join them from the southwest. The battle had turned, and with it, the war. It all depended on the Einswrath now. It all hung on that.
An odd silence came over the battlefield. One of the odd lulls that sometimes occurred, when every combatant was silent: falling, or gathering breath, or swinging.
Something small and dark flew up into the sky. Mauritane watched it arc and begin to fall. It was headed straight for him.
He closed his eyes and said a prayer to Aba. Why not?
A horse whinnied in the distance. Mauritane opened his eyes. A black blob the size of an orange had landed on the ground twenty feet away from him.
The fighting had ceased. Everyone knew what it was; they had all heard the stories. Einswrath. They all waited to die.
But the thing just lay there. After a moment it began to sizzle, then shudder, then it melted into a black puddle and soaked into the ground.
Mauritane offered the remaining Unseelie soldiers the opportunity to surrender and they happily obliged.
An hour later, the Seelie flag hung over Elenth.
Just before sunset, while the dead were being cleared away, Mauritane walked through the field, deep in thought, looking.
It took him almost an hour to find Baron Glennet. He would have found the body sooner, but a horse had fallen on top of it. Mauritane's sword was on the ground next to him, bloody but unbroken.
Mauritane called out to a nearby private. 'Have someone send a message sprite to the City Emerald.' Mauritane wiped the blood from his sword in the grass. He wondered whose life Glennet had managed to take, and whether the Unseelie soldier he'd killed knew how lucky he'd been.
'Tell them that Baron Glennet led the charge at the battle of Elenth, and that he died a hero of the Seelie Kingdom.'
Immortality is a predicate only in the abstract.
-Prae Benesile, Thaumatical History of the Chthonic Religion
?ce Elenth was taken, the other landed Unseelie cities soon fell against the combined forces of the Seelie and the Annwni. Now unable to land troops, the Unseelie had attempted to bring one of their cities to bear above Mauritane, but Mauritane had dispatched it with one of the missiles he'd brought for that purpose. After that, the Unseelie had been forced to concede defeat. General Ma-Hora of the Unseelie Army and Mauritane signed the Treaty of Elenth two days later. The treaty ceded all three landed Unseelie cities to Queen Titania, extending the border roughly eighty miles north to the base of the Tyl mountains.
Silverdun learned all this en route to Elenth, with Ironfoot and Faella. The knowledge that the Einswrath had failed, that Sela had succeeded at whatever she'd done, was heartening, but none of them felt much like celebrating. They were exhausted and in pain, both physically and emotionally. The act of folding them back to the Chthonic temple had shattered the cynosure, meaning that they now had no way to return for Sela. Not that any of them were physically up to the task, or that any of them truly believed that Sela had survived.
Still, Silverdun had no intention of giving up on her. It was fortunate for many reasons that the war had gone as it did. To their immediate purpose, it was critical; the nearest Metropolitan Chthonic temple was located in Elenth. According to Prae Benesile, each Metropolitan maintained its own cynosure.
When they arrived in Elenth, they went directly to Mauritane's temporary headquarters in the Elenth City Building. Mauritane must have been surprised to see Faella, whom he knew only as the ingenue daughter of a mestine he'd met two years earlier, but he was as impossible to read as ever, and greeted her without comment. When their brief congratulations had ended, and they told him what had happened at Prythme, however, he did in fact raise an eyebrow. And when they explained why they were in Elenth, he grew visibly chagrined.
'That won't be easy,' he said. 'The Chthonics have been extremely accommodating to us since our arrival, and have done much to smooth relations between us and the Unseelie populace. I'm loath to ask them to allow you to go mucking around in their temple.'
'Understandable,' said Silverdun. 'Consider, however, that we have no idea what happened after we folded away. For all we know, these bound gods are dusting off their lightning bolts and preparing to annihilate all of Faerie.'
'No course in the academy on how to handle a situation like this, is there, General?' said Ironfoot.
'I'm willing to give you the benefit of the doubt,' said Mauritane. 'In
