“What the fuck are you after?” Shivers hissed in his ear.

“Vengeance!” Greylock dealt him a knee in the side then flung him off.

Shivers stumbled away, finding his balance, picking his brains for some slight he’d given the man. “Vengeance? For what, you mad bastard?”

“For Uffrith!” He slapped his great foot down, feinting, and Shivers hopped back, peering over the top of his shield.

“Eh? No one got killed there!”

“You sure?”

“A couple o’ men down on the docks, but—”

“My brother! No more’n fourteen years old!”

“I had no part o’ that, you great turd! Black Dow did them killings!”

“Black Dow ain’t before me now, and I swore to my mother I’d make someone pay. You’d a big enough part for me to knock it out o’ you, fucker!” Shivers gave a girlish kind of squeak as he ducked back from another great sweep, heard men cheering around him, as keen for blood as the watchers might be at a real duel.

Vengeance, then. A double-edged blade if ever there was one. You never could tell when that bastard was going to cut you. Shivers stood, blood creeping down the side of his face from a knock he took just before, and all he could think was how fucking unfair it was. He’d tried to do the right thing, just the way his brother had always told him he should. He’d tried to be a better man. Hadn’t he? This was where good intentions put you. Right in the shit.

“But I just… I done my best!” he bellowed in Northern.

Greylock sent spit spinning through the mouth-hole of his mask. “So did my brother!” He came on, club coming down in a blur. Shivers ducked round it, jerked his shield up hard and smashed the rim under the big man’s jaw, sent him staggering back, spluttering blood.

Shivers still had his pride. That much he’d kept for himself. He was damned if he was going to be put in the mud by some great thick bastard who couldn’t tell a good man from a bad. He felt the fury boiling up his throat, the way it used to back home in the North, when the battle was joined and he was in the thick of it.

“Vengeance, is it?” he screamed. “I’ll show you fucking vengeance!”

Cosca winced as Shivers caught a blow on his shield and staggered sideways. He snarled something extremely angry-sounding in Northern, lashed at the air with his sword and missed Greylock by no more than the thickness of a finger, almost chopping deep into the onlookers on the backswing and making them shuffle nervously away.

“Amazing stuff!” someone frothed. “It looks almost real! I must hire them for my daughter’s wedding…”

It was true, the Northmen were mounting a good show. Rather too good. They circled warily, eyes fixed on each other, one of them occasionally jabbing forwards with foot or weapon. The furious, concentrated caution of men who knew the slightest slip could mean death. Shivers had his hair matted to the side of his face with blood. Greylock had a long scratch through the leather on his chest and a cut under his chin where the shield-rim had cracked him.