‘Good . . . lad,’ Keld mumbled. ‘The message,’ he said, voice trailing off. His head lolled, eyes rolling.

‘The message?’ Sig prompted as she and Cullen crouched down beside Keld. His eyes snapped back into focus.

‘Out there,’ Keld said with a nod of his head to the back door. ‘He left, just before . . .’

Not again. Sig snarled, remembering the sound of a door opening and footsteps as she’d approached the cabin. ‘See to Keld,’ she ordered Cullen as she stood and ran for the rear door, bursting out into semi-darkness. A frantic glance. She saw Elgin and his warriors leaping from their horses, the ground churned to thick mud. One rider bearing down upon a fleeing acolyte. Sig’s eyes swept further out, the small hold a mass of shadowy buildings. Then movement, higher up the hill. A spark and a torch flared to life.

Sig ran down the mud-churned track that wound through a tangle of outbuildings, ever higher, burst into open ground to see a shaven-haired man shoving his torch deep into the piled bonfire. Smoke bloomed, leaking into the night, the flicker and crackle of flames as wood ignited. Tongues of fire curled skywards, an orange glow spreading through the heart of the bonfire. Sig ran at the acolyte, who saw her and drew a sword from his hip with one hand, a short axe with the other, and strode to meet her.

Steel clashed, Sig parrying the sword slashing at her throat, pivoting so that the axe whistled through air a handspan from her head, punched the pommel of her sword into the man’s face. He staggered, spitting blood and teeth, and Sig, shoving him hard in the chest, sending him stumbling back, swung her sword in a loop over her head and down low, chopping into his leg just above the knee, shearing clean through flesh and bone, trailing droplets of blood in the air that glistened like a string of red pearls in the bonfire’s glare.

The acolyte collapsed screaming, dropped his sword. Sig kicked the axe and fist it was gripped within. Bones snapped and the axe went spinning away.

‘What was your message?’ Sig snarled, but the acolyte just looked up at her, the bonfire crackling and popping into scorching life, heat rolling off it in waves. The acolyte grinned through bloody lips. Sig put one iron-shod boot upon the man’s severed leg and ground her heel, screams ringing out across the hill, louder than the hiss and crackle of flames.

‘What was the message?’ Sig growled.

The acolyte began to laugh, blood and spittle frothing through his shattered teeth and mangled lips. Sig leaned down and grabbed a fistful of his shirt, hauling him up and shaking him, but he only laughed more wildly.