he put the heart of despair into his work and saw it as a tribute to the courage of the just.
When the two Spaniards broke enemy lines for the first time and, gliding like fish in a river, found themselves on the far side of the battalion of huge hares, they felt such jubilation that the first ball of maple passed to Alejandro really felt like the Holy Grail to him. He carried it one hundred yards or so and put it on the ground between two tea plants. Then he went on running behind a row that was shorter because of the dislocation of the initial lines. Arrows whistled and fell at random, Aelius’s side had given up on the tornadoes, and if they hadn’t been running with the wind in their ears, they would have heard the sounds of alarm all around the perimeter. Our heroes had already run a league when enemy reinforcements descended on the plantation. Alejandro passed the ball he’d just received from the forward to Jesús, and ran smack into the stomach of a wild boar. The shock dazed him and he had difficulty getting quickly back on his feet. Jesús watched with horror and shouted as the boar raised his ax; Petrus, in front of the line, turned around, and with a classic skip pass, took aim and hit the pig right in the snout. The ax fell an inch from Alejandro’s skull; shouting with relief, he rolled over and got promptly to his feet.
Opposite him, armed with a huge ax, stood a gigantic elf who didn’t look like he was in the mood for sipping tea.
“Grizzly!” shouted Paulus from the other side of the field.
The ax was raised. Alejandro plunged between the monster’s legs and felt his right shoe fly off into the air. He scrambled frantically forward, but the elf had turned around and Alejandro knew, from considerable experience, that the next strike would split his back open.
Hopelessly crawling, he waited for the blow.
Behind him, Jesús shouted again.
The blow didn’t come.
To the south, behind them, the plantation caught fire.
The rows of gray tea went up all at once. There was a huge rushing sound, a wind of flame, and the plantation began to burn. Petrus started shouting too and, tearing himself away from the spectacle, the alliance team continued to advance. The enemy, horrified, froze on the spot. They could hear a bell ringing—a bucket brigade was being formed—but the commando reached the end of the first crops without incident. They’d gone a league and a half, and had a clear path for the two remaining leagues. They distributed their last maple balls, then reached the deserted storage barns. Petrus tossed the last vegetal fireball into the bales of tea hanging in the air, where it stayed calmly swinging and vibrating among the packaged leaves. Before giving the signal for the transfer, Petrus stopped at the edge of the burning tea plantations. The sky now had a wild, tawny hue and, in the shimmering of fire, tongues of flame resembled swaying flowers.
Then they all went back to Nanzen.
At that moment, the unicorn chief of staff of the mists was gazing at Inari’s demise. From the vast fields of green tea, a hundred times more expansive than those at Ryoan, billows of smoke were rising, the likes of which they’d never seen in the mists, and she watched them rise skyward as the world of her youth vanished in the dawn. She who had observed the other world from the pavilion, who had visited the Head of the Council on human land, admired the genius of humans, their prodigious art and the hope it gave its people, knew, in the end, of nothing more beautiful than the mists rising over the front at Katsura. In these absolute, gilded dawns, as the community of elves, dusted by the ash of Hanase, whispered among themselves with every drift of mist, the voices of the living and the dead joined in a communion that no humans—and this she was sure of—could ever equal.
Embers from the fire fell at her feet. She took two steps back and felt a tear flow down her cheek.
The first phase of the last battle was over. On the horizon, thick clouds of smoke gathered and sat stagnant over the land. The atmosphere changed subtly, and everyone could hear Solon’s final address to his people.
“The plantations at Inari and Ryoan are burning,” he said. “Never before have the leaders of the