At last fullwinter has relaxed its icy grip and Eli Halfwinter, Micah and Cara are on the trail in the weald when they stumble across brothers Cody and Ethan; the brothers decide that the group will be their best chance of survival in the hostile high country and join them. In the badlands, merchant Nathaniel Lint finally sees his project, a new stockade to provide the settlers with greywyrmes to transport their worldly belongings to the weald, come to fruition, while enterprising weald traveller Garth Temple has devised a little sideline of his own, which soon attracts unwelcome attention. Thrace, Zar and Kesh have spent the winter in the abandoned wyrme galleries now that the host has left to seek sanctuary with the blueblackwyrmes. They call an assembly of kin and their wyrmes to fight the oncoming flood of kith.

This is the third and final volume in the Wyrmeweald trilogy, and while we continue to follow Eli, Micah and Thrace's stories, we are also introduced to several new characters; the result is that the book is effectively split into four separate storylines: Eli, Micah, Cody and Ethan; Thrace, Zar and the rest of the kin and their wyrmes; Nathaniel, Garth, Solomon and the settlers; and the hosts of the whitewyrmes and blueblackwyrmes. This reduces the pace quite dramatically, and while there are moments of surprise and shocking violence, I felt that too much time was spent focusing on the developing love quadrangle and not enough on exploring the moral ambiguity that was a big feature of the previous two books, though there is enough to make the reader again draw parallels between the events in the book and the real-life history of the settlement of the Americas or Australia, for example. The promised battle for the weald, when it finally did take place, was over in just a few pages and a bit of an anticlimax, considering the time it had taken to build up to it. I did think that the ending was a fitting one, though, that offered both a message of reconciliation and revenge.

Once again, the story is enhanced by Chris Riddell's distinctive and atmospheric black-and-white illustrations at the beginning of each chapter. ( )