‘Tonight, in the forest beyond the field of cairns,’ she had said to him, and so here he was, though he was not quite sure why he’d come. Inquisitiveness, yes, and there had been something in her eyes and voice that suggested this was important, somehow.

What does she want with me?

‘Over here,’ a voice said in the darkness.

Bleda stopped and stared, saw a shadow detach itself from the trunk of a giant oak. It waved an arm at him.

He left the road, skidding down a gentle incline as Riv stepped out into a beam of light. It caught her fair hair, highlighting threads of gold.

‘I thought you wouldn’t come,’ she said, a vulnerability on her face, in her eyes. Her nose was swollen and red, dried blood crusting one nostril. A reminder that she had paid a price for helping him on the weapons-field earlier that day.

‘Why would I not?’ he asked, frowning. He owed her a debt of thanks.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ she shrugged. ‘Here.’

She swung a bag from her back and offered it to him. It was leather, of the kind the White-Wings used to pack their kit in when marching off on a campaign. The shape inside pushed against the leather.

‘What?’ Bleda said, fighting a frown from his forehead.

‘Just take it,’ Riv said, shaking it at him.

He did, hesitantly, then opened the drawstring and peered inside. It was hard to see, the shadows of the forest dense and heavy, light shifting about them as branches swayed high above.

‘Take it out, then,’ Riv said impatiently.

Even her voice betrays her emotions!

Bleda glanced up, saw her studying him with a deep intensity.

He reached his hand into the bag, felt something smooth, a curve. His stomach lurched as within a heartbeat his confusion turned to shock and joy, for he knew in an instant what it was.

A Sirak bow.

He drew it out of the leather bag slowly, disbelievingly, and held it before him in his hands.

Not just a Sirak bow. My bow.

And in his mind he was back in Arcona, nine years old, sitting in an open-fronted ger and watching his brother shape this same bow with a feeling in his belly close to worship.

‘Hand me the sharkskin rasp, little brother,’ Altan had said to him. ‘Now the sinew’s dry we need to take these rough edges off. Otherwise it can feel like a fistful of thorns, which won’t help when you’re aiming at a Cheren arse-wipe, eh?’

Altan had laughed and shown him how to rasp the sinew that had been glued to the bow’s back, using sharkskin they’d traded from merchants come up all the long way from Tarbesh, far, far in the hot south. Another world, Bleda had thought back then, his whole existence consisting of Arcona and the Sea of Grass.