The man with them was clothed in leather, fur and soft skins, his eyes dark shadows above a tangle of beard. He too wore a round shield slung across his back, as all in the Order did. A single-bladed axe hung from a loop at his belt, kept company by a brace of knives. He held an unstrung bow in one hand. Keld, her huntsman. Sig only needed one look from him to know it was time. A jolt of excitement rippled through her, which surprised her.

But then, it is not every day that you track a Kadoshim to its lair.

‘Guards?’ Sig said, her voice grating like an old iron hinge.

‘Aye, there were, but the bairns saw to that,’ Keld said, patting the big head of one of the hounds.

‘All right then,’ Sig grunted, feeling the imminence of violence begin to course through her, a tremor in her bones, a wildness fluttering in her blood, and she looked at Elgin.

He pulled himself straighter in his saddle and nodded to her.

‘Aghaidh,’ Sig whispered and Hammer lumbered into motion, out of the trees and across a windswept open space towards the hill in front of them. The rising sun washed the land in pale light, making deep valleys of shadow amongst the boulders. Elgin and his three score swords followed, all proven men, handpicked from Queen Nara’s honour guard. They spread into a wide line behind Sig, Cullen and Keld.

Elgin raised his arm and signalled his warriors; a number of them peeled away to circle the hill, spread to watch for any hidden boltholes.

The ground began to slope upwards, Sig’s eyes fixed on the darker shadow ahead of her, not much more than a crease in an exposed section of the rock of the hillside.

A cave. A lair.

Keld hooked his unstrung bow onto Sig’s saddle and gave the rain-ragged clouds above a dark look – too wet to bother stringing his bow. The huntsman gave a low whistle and his hounds padded left and right, merging with the shadows.

Sig rode past a knot of hawthorn, saw boots poking from it, the stain of blood dark and slick on the grass where the guard had been dragged by Keld into cover. Hammer gave the corpse a cursory glance and sniff as she padded past it.

Only fifty paces from the crease in the rock face, then figures detached from the cave’s entrance: two, three, four of them emerging as if from the very rock itself. Their bowed heads were hooded, cloaked for the rain, one holding a spear, the others with sword hilts poking from their cloaks.