They were extremely fortunate that their door was shot down right above Crusher and the running animals.
“LOOK OUT ABOVE!” cried Crusher, coming to a crashing halt as bits of door rained down. The animals, mad with terror though they were at the following fire, came to a trembling halt, for they loved their humans, and they ran back to see if they could help.
Xar and Bodkin fell into the branches of a tree, and Wish was saved by all six sprites catching bits of her clothes and breaking her fall before she finally fell into the cupped palms of Crusher.
Little Squeezjoos nearly came to an untimely end. He fell out of Wish’s hair and was too late to duck from a flying fragment of the shattered door that hit him momentarily unconscious, and he would have fallen down into the blazing undergrowth if Xar had not risked his life by reaching out way too far from the tree and saving him.
Crusher then gently extracted Xar and Bodkin from the tree and put them and Wish on the ground, telling them to climb aboard the snowcats who would carry them quicker than the giant could run.
“RUN SWIFT,” said the giant.
Bodkin and Wish and Xar leaped aboard the snowcats. “FLY!” cried Xar, and with great, terrified bounds, their soft fur blackened and raised in petrified quills, Kingcat, Nighteye, Forestheart, the wolves, and the bear leaped through the dark dusty rain that was now falling, bits of soft gray ash, and ROOOOARR! The hot roar of the fire pursued them, mixed with the noise of the Warrior hunt, the scream of the dogs, the screech of the Warrior horns, the iron sound of the beating hooves as they pounded through the burning forest.
That was the sound of the new Iron Age, that Warrior hunt.
The forest was being burned down, so that the Warriors could build their forts and their fields and their new modern world. For the Warriors argued that the modern way was the right way, surely? Time cannot run backward, could it? That would be nonsense, and Warriors do not believe in nonsense. The forest had to come down so the Warriors could move humanity forward in a civilized and forward-looking manner. The giants had to leave because they took up way too much room. The sprites had to die because their habitats were needed to make all the THINGS that Warriors need. It was regrettable, but there it was. It was all in the name of progress.
So all over the wildwoods, these hunts were being carried out, with the mad barking of dogs and the shrill crying of horns, and Warriors on horseback hunting down the giants or the shining elves or the long-haired ogres or the lumpen boggarts.
This time it was slightly different of course, for Queen Sychorax was hunting down her own daughter.
There she was, right at the front of the stampeding Warrior force, for Queen Sychorax always had to be the fastest, ramrod straight on the back of her hunting horse, crying out orders, entirely oblivious to the roar of the fire behind her.
They caught up with Crusher first.
Even with his great giant strides, he moved slower than the snowcats because he kept on stopping to reassure the trees. Calm in the chaos, he laid his giant hands on oak, on elm, on ash, on alder, on blackthorn, on beech, on hawthorn, hazel, holly, on lime and maple, on yew and poplar and willow, all the dear, soon-to-be-torchlight trees, saying, “Do not be afraid, dear trees. The forest will grow again, I promise. I will cherish your descendants… This too will pass…”