'Most likely that would've been my next move. Just as well they dropped a rock on me. At least I've still got my teeth. Spent two months squealing on my back while they laid siege to the city. I only just healed in time for the fight with Threetrees, when I got the whole lot broken again, and more besides.' Logen winced at the memory, curling up the fingers of his right hand and straightening them out, remembering the pain of it, all smashed up. 'Now that really did hurt. Not as much as this, though,' and he dug his hand under his belt and pulled his shirt up. They all peered across the fire to see what he was pointing at. A small scar, really, just under his bottom rib, in the hollow beside his stomach.

'Doesn't look like much,' said Luthar.

Logen shuffled round to show them his back. 'There's the rest of it,' he said, jerking his thumb at what he knew was a much bigger mark beside his backbone. There was a long silence while they took that in.

'Right through?' murmured Longfoot.

'Right through, with a spear. In a duel, with a man called Harding Grim. Damn lucky to live, and that's a fact.'

'If it was in a duel,' murmured Bayaz, 'how did you come out alive?'

Logen licked his lips. His mouth tasted bitter. 'I beat him.'

'With a spear through you?'

'I didn't know about it until afterwards.'

Longfoot and Luthar frowned at each other. 'That would seem a difficult detail to overlook,' said the Navigator.

'You'd think so.' Logen hesitated, trying to think of a good way to put it, but there was no good way. 'There are times… well… I don't really know what I'm doing.'

A long pause. 'How do you mean?' asked Bayaz, and Logen winced. All the fragile trust he'd built over the last few weeks was in danger of crumbling round his ears, but he didn't see any choice. He'd never been much of a liar.

'When I was fourteen, I think, I argued with a friend. Can't even remember what about. I remember being angry. I remember he hit me. Then I was looking at my hands.' And he looked down at them now, pale in the darkness. 'I'd strangled him. Good and dead. I didn't remember doing it, but there was only me there, and I had his blood under my nails. I dragged him up some rocks, and I threw him off onto his head, and I said he fell out of a tree and died, and everyone believed me. His mother cried, and so on, but what could I do? That was the first time it happened.'