It was early afternoon when Mark spotted the first hares of the day. Ironic, really, given his semi-blindness. Benjamin started winding himself up in excitement and bounded ahead to greet the two hares. Needless to say, when they saw him coming, and several dozen more rabbits behind him, they turned round and ran. There was a hole into their burrow nearby. As Peter ran to haul Benjamin back, he surmised that they had indeed arrived at the hare colony.

No sooner had the twenty-three of them stopped outside the burrow than they felt the vibrations of the thundering mammals running toward the surface. And then they appeared, five of them. The rabbits held their breath. When a rabbit looks upon a hare it is like us looking upon someone suffering from gigantism. In polite society, we would tend to be patronisingly polite and a little uncomfortable. But out in the wilds, we'd be afraid and possibly confrontational. No human child has grown up without hearing about evil giants. The same is true for rabbits.

"Stand fast, girls!" the lead hare commanded. She was female. In fact, they all were. They moved into a semi-circle around the opening in the ground, and then stopped still. The rabbits backed away from them.

"Please, we're-" Peter began.

"Silence, vagabond!" the leader spat. "If you're here to attack us, attack and be damned. If you're not here to attack, be gone and be swift about it."

"We came to talk!" Mark cried.

"Talk?!" the hares jeered.

"Murder, more like..." the leader growled. "But mark me, we won't lie down before any rabbit this day. We will defend ourselves to the uttermost and make very certain that this form of treachery will never again endanger us!"

The hares cheered with righteous anger. It was like those rabbits cheering whenever Emperor Morellius mentioned Rodney's name. There were only five hares, but when they cheered it sounded like four times as many.

"We're not the ones who want to attack you," Peter explained. "That's Emperor Morellius. Please, you're all in grave danger..."

"We know we are!" the leader snapped. "Just an hour ago we found one of our number ruthlessly slaughtered and another missing. But when the interrogation is complete, we shall know where to find him, alive or otherwise."

"Interrogation?" cried Peter. "So she is here?"

The hare looked down her nose at him and hesitated before replying. "There are two rabbits pleading their cases before our leader, Mont'mar, as we speak. One is a young natural born female. The other is a young natural born male."

"That's them!" Mark hissed.

Peter hushed him. "May we see Mont'mar?"

"You?" the lead hare scoffed. "You want to see Mont'mar? You wish to willingly submit yourself to her interrogation? You're not an assassin are you, little rabbit? There's something decidedly dodgy about you..."

"I wish to plead my case also," Peter said.

The hare glared at him. Peter could see his own reflection in her large, shiny black eyes. "Very well," she said. "But you will come alone. Your henchmen will have to retreat thirty paces and stay within our sights."

"Pete," Mark began.

Peter shut him up again with a swipe of the paw that only just narrowly missed Mark's nose. Mark didn't argue further. He knew more rested on Peter meeting this Mont'mar than just Mopsy's fate. He turned to the others and nodded. They began to move. Some of them retreated the entire thirty paces walking backward, remembering stories about the hares too well to dare turn their backs on them.

"This way," the lead hare told Peter, then she led him down into the earth. The other four hares closed in around the opening. Peter was gone. Mark sighed, an uncomfortable tingle in his belly warning him of impending doom.

As the hare led him through their colony, Peter couldn't help thinking how much nicer it would have been had it been a rabbit warren instead. The ceilings were higher; the tunnels were wider. Obviously this was because the hares were larger than the rabbits, but maybe when this was all over, the giants could be employed in a little rebuilding of the haven. But first things first...

Peter heard Mopsy's voice before he could see her. Displaying her typical respect for authority figures, she was mouthing off to her captors and giving the hares a lot of abuse about what her father would do to them when he found out they were keeping her prisoner. He wished she wouldn't do that.

Up on the surface, Mark quickly grew restless with hanging around, and his discomfort seemed to spread amongst the others. The rabbits began anxiously murmuring to each other. Mark became irritated when they kept asking him questions he wouldn't answer. No, he didn't think Peter had done the right thing. No, he didn't think Peter was all right. No, he didn't know what to do if Peter didn't return. He kept a watchful eye on the movement of the four hares.

Benjamin, surprisingly enough, was also worried. Fear was something he'd not known before this adventure. Being afraid was something he always left up to others. But having to travel all that distance alone, there hadn't been anybody else to be afraid on his behalf. These feelings, therefore, were new to Benjamin, and he didn't like them one bit. Not least because every time his stomach wound itself into another knot, he felt the overwhelming urge to pee.

But Benjamin Bunny had also developed a shy bladder. This was something completely unknown amongst rabbits, as you will have seen. The more accomplished of multi-tasking rabbits can urinate or defecate without even pausing in conversation, but Benjamin couldn't even relax his muscles sufficiently were there any other rabbits in the vicinity. He felt the urge again now. He knew a few of the others were starting to wonder why he kept popping away from the group.

As he climbed the hill for the third time since Peter had disappeared, he hoped they didn't suspect him of spying. He found a weathered rock half sunk in the soil, went behind it, and was perfectly able to wee with gay abandon. But not much came out. He had felt fit to burst back down the hill, and he knew if he went back right away, no sooner had he rejoined the others, than he would need to go again. So he squatted behind the rock, out of sight, and strained hard.

Except, as he squeezed, rhythmically tightening and releasing those sphincter muscles, he realised he wasn't out of sight after all. However, it wasn't Mark and co that could see him now. It was the other rabbits coming along the hillside, the exact same route his group had come. Benjamin immediately forgot his need to go and felt a wave of excitement alleviate the fear. It was Jack. It must have been. He'd brought reinforcements! Benjamin picked himself up and bounded down the hill. When he got to the bottom, he started running circles around Mark.

"It's Jack! It's Jack!" he called excitedly.

"What? Where?" the others started asking.

"Follow me!" Benjamin sang.

Then he led them back up the hillside, away from the hares, and they stopped beside the stone. The other rabbits were still several hundred feet away, but they could see now that it was not Jack. In fact, it wasn't anybody from the haven. If it had been, Mark doubted they would be charging across the hillside toward the hares' peat bog, roaring and chanting, screaming for the taste of blood...

Peter was not having much success with Mont'mar. She was a spindly, pernickety queen who wore a garland of daisies on her head like a crown, held in place by her erect ears. She sat on a raised plinth at the back of her globular chamber so that she could tower over everybody else, which presently included Mopsy and Tom. Mopsy had been giving as good as she'd been getting when Peter arrived. Since then, he had tried several times to tell Mont'mar what was coming, little knowing with what pertinence, but each time she had the same response.

"Are you threatening me, little rabbit?"

Twice he assured her that, no, he wasn't threatening her, he was just warning her, but that led them both times in a circle. She had created a self-completing paradox of her own hare logic in which the only threat was Peter, and that if swore he wasn't a threat, then there wasn't one at all, but he if he assured her there was, then she thought it was him. The third time she came out with it, he snapped.

"Oh, fuck it, you know what, you're right," he said. "I did come here to attack you. I figured you hares were so stupid I could just walk right in here and wipe you all out. But I guess you're too smart for us. Shit. Anyway, how about you release my daughter and we call it even, eh? I'll call off the attack..."

Mont'mar was, for once, speechless.

"Hell, you're all gonna be obliterated by Emperor Morellius several hours from now anyway, but frankly I don't give a shit."

Mopsy gasped. "Daddy..."

"I don't want to hear it," Peter snapped. "I'm tired of hearing it. It's all I've been hearing since before I even arrived. Look around you, Mopsy. In a few days everything you see will be gone and everyone will be dead. That's what it's going to be like. Forget victory or freedom, when it's all over, there's just going to be devastation, destruction and death. But nobody I've met since I got here really knows nor cares, Mopsy. And that's why this isn't our war, you know. And that's why when we get out of here - if we get out of here - we're going home."

Mopsy looked at her father and began to cry.

"I've been sheltering you from the truth for so long," he whispered. "Wanting to protect you from it because I thought it would corrupt you. I wouldn't even tell you the stories about this place. I thought I could still empower you without you ever having to be afraid. Oh, I'm so stupid. I was so wrong..."

Mont'mar cleared her throat and was about to speak when suddenly there were raised, urgent voices in the tunnel. Peter felt the thundering vibrations of a hare charging down the passage. It was Bo'bil. She burst in with Mark.

"It's started!" Mark wheezed.

"What?!" Peter and Mont'mar cried together.

"Rabbits!" Bo'bil wailed. "Twenty, or thirty, or fifty, or a hundred of them, coming down the hill straight for us!"

"You lied!" Mont'mar spat at Peter.

"It's Morellius!" Mark gulped.

"They're early..." Peter muttered.

"You lied!" Mont'mar said again.

"I didn't lie!" Peter hollered in her face. "I was wrong! I'm always wrong, haven't you picked up on that yet? I'm a fuck up! I fuck up! That's what I do! And now I'm going to get my own daughter killed because of it!"

"We're all going to die!" Mont'mar cried.

"There are twenty others like these on the surface, mistress," said Bo'bil.

"Yes? Yes! You can help us! Save us!"

"No," said Peter. "We're not going to die for you."

Mont'mar and Bo'bil began to panic.

"Pete, we'll never make it alone," Mark told him. "Only together are any of us going to survive this. There are too many of them..."

"Release my daughter," Peter demanded.

"No! You'll abandon us!" said Mont'mar.

"Release her, and we'll fight with you."

"No, first you fight for us," Mont'mar decided. "And if we win, I'll release her then. You have my word, as heir to the grand duchy..."

Peter thought for a moment. "All right."

"I want to fight too!" Mopsy cried.

"No." Peter shook his head. "You do what she says, Mopsy. It's only fair. You are collateral, after all." Then he gave her a knowing look.

"Oh, I see. You're still sheltering me..."

He didn't answer her. He just glowered.

"Have someone guard her," he told Mont'mar.

Then Mark and Bo'bil led the way back to the surface. The colony had woken up and all the hares were heading above ground. Peter had never seen the like. If this had been a rabbit warren, there would be rabbits hopping in all directions, running into each other and panicking. But the hares moved with purpose, displaying that same sense of extra-awareness Tom had observed earlier.

Being caught in the middle of the hares made the rabbits particularly conscious of how small they were in comparison. Some of the hares were so tall that they didn't even see Peter and co scampering around their feet. More than once, Tom was squashed up against a wall, sent flying and had to catch up. But eventually they broke the surface, and there it was a different story. The hares had lost their composure. Now they had started to panic like rabbits.

"That's not many," Tom said without thinking.

"What?!" cried Mont'mar. "We're doomed!"

But Peter knew what Tom meant. There was a horde of rabbits not a minute away from the edge of the peat bog, but there couldn't have been more than fifty or sixty of them. Peter had expected more, as well. But then, Morellius wouldn't have expected Peter and his platoon, so had every reason to be overly confident. And therein was sown the seed of his defeat, thought Peter.

"Right," he said, turning to Mont'mar. "I have an idea. I want you to get everybody back underground. Then I want you to post-"

"We will not hide!" Mont'mar declared.

"No, you don't understand," Peter said. "Up here, they have the tactical advantage. They can, and will, come at us en masse. Down there, in the tunnels, we can force them to come at us one at a time."

"And we can pick them off..."

"Yes! Precisely so!"

Mont'mar's eyes flared with excitement. "Okay, down into the tunnels!" she called. "Everybody! I want every way into this burrow covered. Leave no entrance unguarded. No hare is more important than victory. Fight to kill!"

So the hares poured back into the burrow. United by a new sense of communal purpose, they went without a sound. Peter, Mark, Tom, Mont'mar and Bo'bil remained on the surface until everyone else was gone. The rabbit horde had just crossed over onto the peat bog. They were so close now that Peter recognised Rodney, who he didn't know by name, but had seen with Boxer that time.

The five of them ran back into the burrow and waited anxiously at the bottom of the run-up, with Bo'bil and Mark up front, and Mont'mar behind. The burrow was silent. Throughout the dark tunnels, the hares and their new allies sat poised just inside the many, many entry holes, peering up at the daylight, waiting for the silhouette of some crazed killer to burst into view.

Everyone could hear them coming. The rabbit horde was so loud that Mont'mar thought it must have doubled in size. The rabbits were all chanting something, but either they were all chanting something different, or none of them were keeping in time with each other. It didn't matter. Their attackers were out of their heads, in a frenzy. The hares could expect no mercy.

Despite knowing they were coming, it still made the five of them jump when two rabbits suddenly charged down the hole and didn't stop. When they saw there were natural borns waiting for them, however, everybody just stopped, stood still, was silent, and looked at each other for a moment.

And then it just got crazy.

Mark and Tom got stuck into one whilst Bo'bil jumped on another. Peter and Mont'mar scratched its eyes out and then Bo'bil crushed its throat. No sooner had they turned their attentions to the one fighting Mark and Tom than three more rabbits charged through the opening. It was one-on-one, with Tom stuck between the one he had been fighting (now fighting Mark alone, and winning) and one of the new arrivals. Everyone was going for each other's eyes.

Suddenly a fifth rabbit leapt down the hole and knocked Tom clean off his feet. The pair of them tumbled right into Mont'mar, who spun round and slashed it straight across the neck. It folded, dead, at her feet. With a war cry to match any the rabbits were making, she kicked her way over it and laid into the rabbit who was getting too lucky with Mark. Poor Mark, only one eye, he was becoming a popular target. Another rabbit appeared and went straight for him too. Mont'mar took them both on, biting one and smashing one against the wall.

Having suffocated his latest opponent, Peter stopped for breath. He only had time to think how the queen was acting far from regal before another two rabbits came into the tunnel. Peter and Tom took them both on. But fighting was getting to be difficult. The bodies were piling up. Whilst Mont'mar had ordered all exits covered, that didn't mean Rodney's horde would use them all.

To Bo'bil, it seemed like the five of them were getting the brunt of the assault, as yet another attacker came rushing down the slope to join the fray, his eyes rolling back into his head and hate spilling from his lips. She clawed her way to him and they began striking each other, ducking and weaving. She caught him in the mouth. He brought his paws up with a wail. When she pushed him toward the wall, he went with her, and when she smashed him against it, his jaw broke. But she picked him up and swung him again. This time his legs took the impact.

One of the rabbits was trying to get away. It was one of those that had tried to pick on Mark. He thought somebody else had killed it, but it had just been dazed for a few moments. Both hind legs were bent and broken in numerous places, but it was trying to drag itself back up to the surface with its forepaws. Mark growled and leapt on top of it. The air spluttered from its lungs and the creature's ribs were broken beneath Mark's bulk. Mark lunged and bit its neck, pulling back as it squealed beneath him until the skin tore. Blood flowed. It was dead.

And then, all of a sudden, there was silence.

"Is... that it?" Tom said between gasps.

Peter wasn't so sure. They all stopped to listen. There was still fighting going on in the burrow somewhere, but no more rabbits appeared at their hole.

As they caught their breath, they surveyed the damage. They themselves had only superficial injuries, but there were a total of eight enemy corpses. Mont'mar snorted jubilantly, then Bo'bil went to check if anymore were coming.

"Looks like it's over," she said when she came back.

"Right," said Mont'mar. "Let's go help the others."

Mopsy spent the entire battle in Mont'mar's regal chamber, sitting on the queen's throne-like plinth and listening to the muffled sounds of the fighting all around. Mont'mar had sent a weedy male hare to guard her, but he looked anxious to get away and join the war. Mopsy could certainly sympathise.

"Why don't you go?" she kept asking him.

"N-no," he would say. "I must guard you."

"Your people could be dying!" she cried dramatically. "And what would it matter, then? They'll come in here and kill both of us! But up there, you could be the one to make the difference, and stop that happening..."

"D'you think?" he would ask, unsure, but just when she thought she had convinced him, he would go and remember his orders!

"Okay, okay," Mopsy said quickly, having an idea. "How about you go and join the battle... and I come with you? That way, you'd still be guarding me, but you get to fight, as well! Hey, maybe I could even help..."

That did it. The guard led the way, stopping briefly outside the chamber only to pick one of three lucrative directions he could go. Chances were there was a battle waiting for him at the end of each one. He bounded away and Mopsy had to run hard to even keep in sight of him. After all that procrastination back in the regal chamber, he seemed to have abandoned his responsibilities after all.

"Wait!" Mopsy eventually called, after turning two consecutive corners and finding he was around neither. She could still feel the vibrations of him running just ahead, though. He was leading her deeper into the colony.

When she finally had to stop lest she collapse from breathlessness, she had already accepted she was lost and alone. It only took a few moments to catch her breath then she headed along to the next corner. The best thing she could do was find the nearest upward passage and follow it toward the surface. Sooner or later she had to run into something resembling a vicious skirmish...

But she had counted on it being later.

She went round the next corner and stopped short. Her guard was at the far end of the tunnel, with his head to the ground, either listening for a nearby fight he could join, or waiting for her to catch up. She ran to him.

"Hey, why'd you run off?" she snapped.

Except, as she quickly discovered, he didn't have his head to the ground, after all. It wasn't so much a case of his ear being pressed against the floor as it was a case of his decapitated head resting on its side. Mopsy gasped.

His tongue stuck out. His eyes still looked wet and alive. Blood still trickled out of his neck wound, congealing black in his fur. A single tendon continued to attach his head to the rest of his body, but it was stretched too far, and as Mopsy stood over in horror, it snapped, splattering her with blood.

She'd only been separated from him for a minute. That meant his attackers were nearby. There were only two directions they could have come, and one of them she'd used herself. Turning round, she ran back along the tunnel. Before she even reached the end she heard the voices behind her. Daring to glance back as she swung around the corner, she saw the rabbit horde in pursuit.

Peter and Mont'mar had joined the battle for Benjamin's exit. When they had arrived, things were about to go disastrously, with only one rabbit defending the hole against two attackers. That rabbit, however, wasn't Benjamin. He'd survived this long solely by virtue of the fact that a dead hare had fallen on top of him and hidden him from view. Mark and Tom hauled the corpse off, then the seven took on the two. The invaders were swiftly dispatched, and then there was a lull.

"We're winning!" Benjamin sang.

"Bo'bil, go check," Mont'mar rasped.

Bo'bil crept up to the surface and poked her head out. When she came back, she looked slightly confused. "There's nobody there..."

"We beat them all?" Peter frowned.

"We must have," Mont'mar said.

If only. At the bottom of the slope that led to the surface the tunnel split into two, and it was at the end of the narrower of these two subdivides that a mismatched group of rabbits and hares suddenly appeared. And what a sorry display! The rabbits were tripping over themselves and the hares were trampling over them, and everyone in the group was shouting, but nobody could be understood.

"One at a time! One at a time!" Mont'mar cried.

"Quick! They're behind us!" someone said.

"We've been breached!" cried another.

"We didn't stand a chance!"

"They picked us off one at a time!"

"Using our own tactics against us..." Mark growled.

Suddenly, Mopsy appeared at the end of the other tunnel, the wider of the two subdivides. She was running full pelt toward them, and the rabbit horde was even closer behind her. She didn't even stop before calling out.

"Move it! Run! They're right behind me!"

But there was only one place left to go.

"They're driving us onto the surface!" said Peter.

As if they needed to be told.

NOTES:
The longest chapter so far, clocking in at over 4100 words. I was thinking of chopping it in two somewhere in the middle, but I've been coming to realise that shorter chapters can kill pacing, which is especially important in action chapters, as the remaining (anticipated) eight chapters largely consist of. Still, it could have probably done with being 500 words shorter. The first draft was quite sloppily written and this isn't a terrific improvement, though at least I'm noticing what's going wrong.

This chapter is notable for crossing the 100,000 word mark. The 100,000th word is "up", as in the sentence: "The bodies were piling up." Quite appropriate, I thought.

Bo'bil's little speech, "We will defend ourselves to the uttermost and make very certain that this form of treachery will never again endanger us!" is a line lifted directly from Roosevelt's post-Pearl Harbor address in 1941. And, incidentally, whilst Bo'bil would obviously appear to be derived from Bilbo, I swear I only noticed that when I was cutting and pasting this. Honestly. Mont'mar is named for the Parisian district of Montmartre, made notorious by the Moulin Rouge.