‘Aye. Sig taught me that.’ Olin smiled, a hesitant twitch of his lips. ‘Ah, but it feels good to be able to talk to you of her. To talk of the past. I feel like a weight has been lifted. I should have told you sooner.’

Aye, you should.

The thud of footsteps: Hildith and Ulf thumping up the stairs to them, Ulf favouring his injured leg, Asger the market trader at his side.

‘You all right, lad?’ Hildith asked Drem.

‘Thanks to you.’ Drem nodded.

‘Might have to agree with you,’ she said, grinning. ‘Think you might owe me one, there.’

‘I do,’ Drem said.

‘We both do,’ Olin added. ‘All of you.’ He looked to Ulf and Asger.

‘You should come with us,’ Ulf said. ‘On this bear-hunt. So I can keep an eye on you. And you’re not bad when it comes to tracking, I’ve heard . . .’

‘What about them?’ Olin nodded at the group of trappers who had tried to hang them.

‘They’re coming too. We’ll have a line, you at one end, them at the other, me, Hildith and our lads in between. You’ll never be closer than half a league.’ Ulf tugged on his greying beard, looking around the hold. ‘Don’t like the thought of you two here, alone.’

Neither do I, thought Drem. Don’t really like the thought of wandering around in a forest with them, either. But sometimes it’s safer when you can see your enemy.

Olin frowned. ‘We’ll come,’ he said.

‘And when we get back,’ Hildith said, ‘we do need to ask you two some questions about Calder. You were seen at his forge through the dead of night, seen leaving Kergard at dawn.’

‘I paid Calder to use his forge,’ Olin said. ‘Had some ironwork to do. He was supposed to meet us at Kergard’s gates at dawn. He wasn’t there, we left.’ Olin shrugged.

‘Huh,’ Ulf grunted. ‘Doesn’t explain what he was doing out here in the arse-end of the Wild, though.’

‘Or what looks like a knife-wound in his corpse,’ Hildith added.

‘That’s jumping to conclusions,’ Ulf said. ‘Calder could have fallen on something sharp, even his own blade if he was trying to defend himself.’ Ulf shrugged. ‘There’s questions, and there’ll be plenty of time to answer them, but for now we know a bear’s out there, and we need to kill it, before it attacks again. So, we’ll get that job done first, eh?’

‘Agreed,’ Hildith grunted.