Luthar didn't even bother to look up. 'Why don't you keep your mind on getting us across this damn plain, and leave the swords to those who know the difference?' Logen grinned to himself. An argument between the two most arrogant men he had ever met was well worth watching, in his opinion.

'Huh,' snorted Longfoot, 'show me someone who knows the difference and I'll happily never mention blades again.' He lifted the apple to his mouth, but before he could bite into it, his hand was empty. Luthar had moved almost too fast to follow, and speared it on the glinting point of his sword. 'Give me that back!'

Luthar stood up. 'Of course,' he tossed it off the end of the blade with a practised flick of his wrist. Before Longfoot's reaching hands could close around it, Luthar had snatched his short sword from its sheath and whipped it blurring through the air. The Navigator was left juggling with the two even halves for a moment before dropping them both in the dirt.

'Damn your showing off!' he snapped.

'We can't all have your modesty,' muttered Luthar. Logen chuckled to himself while Longfoot stomped back over to the tree, staring up into the branches for another apple.

'Nice trick,' he grunted, strolling through the weeds to where Luthar was sitting. 'You're quick with those needles.'

The young man gave a modest shrug. 'It has been remarked upon.'

'Mmm.' Stabbing an apple and stabbing a man were two different things, but quickness was some kind of start. Logen looked down at Ferro's sword, turned it over in his hands, then slid it out from its wooden sheath. It was a strange weapon to his mind, grip and blade both gently curved, thicker at the end than at the hilt, sharpened only down one edge, with scarcely any point on it at all. He swung it in the air a couple of times. Strange weight, more like an axe than a sword.

'Odd-looking thing,' muttered Luthar.

Logen checked the edge with his thumb. Rough-feeling, it dragged at the skin. 'Sharp, though.'

'Don't you ever sharpen yours?'

Logen frowned. He reckoned he must have spent weeks of his life, all told, sharpening the weapons he'd carried. Every night, out on the trail, after the meal, men would sit and work at their gear, steel scraping on metal and stone, flashing in the light of the campfires. Sharpening, cleaning, polishing, tightening. His hair might have been caked with mud, his skin stiff with old sweat, his clothes riddled with lice, but his weapons had always gleamed like the new moon.