“Screw it,” Chelsea muttered under her breath. “I am not going to die today without doing this. Wait!” she called out before David could touch the sword.

He scarcely had time to turn around before Chelsea grabbed his face and pulled him down, pressing her lips firmly to his. Laurel saw the moment more like a snapshot than an actual event. Chelsea. Kissing David. Not a moment of romance and seduction – rather of desperation and bravado. Still, Chelsea was kissing Laurel’s boyfriend.

He’s not my boyfriend, Laurel told herself. She looked down and forced back her weird jealousy. When she looked up again, the moment had passed.

Chelsea spun away from David, avoiding everyone’s eyes – especially Laurel’s – her face burning red.

David gaped open-mouthed for a moment before he composed himself and grabbed Excalibur, shouldering it, and turned to trail after Tamani.

He, too, avoided Laurel’s eyes.

The dust was already clearing when they arrived at the breach, and all the trolls in sight were heavily armed. Laurel had expected Klea’s soldiers to be carrying guns, but guns was far too simple a word for these weapons. They were semiautomatics, assault rifles, machine guns, the kind Laurel had only seen in movies. Sentries had pinned some of the trolls down in the gap as they tried to escape – arrow-riddled bodies outside the wall lay crumpled in testament to the archers” vigilance – but the remaining trolls were waiting for the faeries to give up their cover, to step away from the safety of the stone walls and bring the fight to them.

David scarcely hesitated before doing exactly what the trolls obviously wanted; he raised Excalibur and strode right through the hole in the wall. The first gun-toting troll spotted him and opened fire as Tamani pulled Chelsea and Laurel down behind a smooth-barked aspen, but not before Laurel saw David reflexively duck his head and raise an arm to shield himself from the assault. A second troll’s gun joined the first, staccato bursts like a string of firecrackers assaulting Laurel’s ears even louder than the shriek that escaped her throat.

She forced herself to peek around the tree at David, who was, she saw with relief, still standing. He studied his limbs and touched his face before holding Excalibur out in front of him and taking it in from point to hilt. Then he reached down and picked something up off the ground.

It took Laurel a moment to realise that the vaguely oblong metal bead in David’s hand was a bullet. He stood there, deaf to the fray, staring at that misshapen bit of metal, awe blossoming over his face.

“Yes, the sword works!” Tamani shouted over the gunfire, flinching back as a bullet notched the tree near his face. “Now can you please kill some trolls?”

Shaking his head as if to clear his thoughts, David turned and charged his assailants. Several of them grinned menacingly; David looked like a child with a stick getting ready to try to beat up an oncoming freight train.

But when he clumsily swung his enchanted blade it cleaved the closest troll in two.

Laurel wasn’t sure exactly what she had been expecting, but she most certainly had not been expecting the troll to fall to the ground in two cleanly severed pieces.

It didn’t seem to be quite what David expected either. He stopped and stared at the bleeding corpse at his feet. The other trolls howled and attacked, their fists, knives, and clubs failing to so much as jostle David. With a jerky motion that looked more reflexive than purposeful, David brought the sword up again, and another troll fell to the ground in bloodied pieces.

“Snicker-snack,” Chelsea whispered, awestruck.

With the corpses of two trolls at his feet, David was again stunned into inaction. Laurel could see his chest heaving as he stared at the carnage.

“David!” Tamani’s voice was sharp, but Laurel thought she detected concern, as well. The remaining trolls had recovered from their shock and raised their weapons again.

Snapping to attention, David’s eyebrows furrowed. He lunged forward, slicing one troll’s enormous gun in two, separating another from its weapon by taking off its hands. His swings grew ferocious, indiscriminately cleaving metal and flesh alike with all the effort it might take to carve gelatin with a steak knife.

As David made a gap in the onslaught, Tamani stepped out of the protective cover of the trees. “Get some sentries into this breach!” he shouted. “Anyone without a weapon, I want you stacking rocks!”

The sentries were successfully cutting down many of the trolls that came pouring through the gateway, but many wasn’t enough; the sentries were losing ground. Fighting had broken out in a dozen places throughout the Garden, and the archers on the walls were rushing to and fro in an effort to keep the trolls contained without wounding the sentries on the ground.

“There’s too many,” David called, shaking his head. “I won’t be able to get to all of them before they break down more of the wall.”

“Then let’s at least stem the tide,” Tamani said. “If you can keep any more from making it through the gateway, maybe—”

But his words were cut off as a group of six or seven trolls emerged from the trees, making a run for the breach. Before anyone on the wall could react, however, thick roots erupted from the ground, spraying black earth into the air. They waved menacingly, and for a moment Laurel was afraid Yuki had arrived to finish them all off, but then the roots swept backwards, throwing the trolls against the trees, where their howls of anger turned to cries of pain.

“I agree,” Jamison said, approaching from the direction of the Garden entrance. Somewhere along the way he’d rejoined his Am Fear-faire, who were ready to fight beside him. “If David can defend the gate itself, I believe the sentries can clear the Garden.”