“Help me.” Hardly more than a whisper. Friendly wondered if he had imagined it. Then he saw the soldier’s eyes were wide open. His lips moved again. “Help me.”

“How?” whispered Friendly. He undid the hooks and eyes on the man’s padded jacket and, as gently as he could, stripped it from him, dragging the sleeve carefully over the oozing stumps of his severed fingers. He stuffed his clothes into the sack, then gently rolled him back over onto his face, just as he had found him.

“Good!” Cosca pointed towards a burned-out tower leaning precariously over a collapsed roof. “That way, maybe?”

“Why that way?”

“Why not that way?”

Friendly could not move. His knees were trembling. “I don’t want to go.”

“Understandable, but we should stay together.” The old mercenary turned and Friendly caught his arm, words starting to burble out of his mouth.

“I’m losing count! I can’t… I can’t think. What number are we up to, now? What… what… have I gone mad?”

“You? No, my friend.” Cosca was smiling as he clapped his hand down on Friendly’s shoulder. “You are entirely sane. This. All this!” He swept his hat off and waved it wildly around. “This is insanity!”

Mercy and Cowardice

Shivers stood at the window, one half open and the other closed, the frame around him like the frame around a painting, watching Visserine burn. There was an orange edge to his black outline from the fires out towards the city walls—down the side of his stubbly face, one heavy shoulder, one long arm, the twist of muscle at his waist and the hollow in the side of his bare arse.

If Benna had been there he’d have warned her she was taking some long chances, lately. Well, first he’d have asked who the big naked Northman was, then he’d have warned her. Putting herself in the middle of a siege, death so close she could feel it tickling at her neck. Letting her guard down even this much with a man she was meant to be paying, walking the soft line with those farmers downstairs. She was taking risks, and she felt that tingling mix of fear and excitement that a gambler can’t do without. Benna wouldn’t have liked it. But then she’d never listened to his warnings when he was alive. If the odds stand long against you, you have to take long chances, and Monza had always had a knack for picking the right ones.

Up until they killed Benna and threw her down the mountain, at least.

Shivers’ voice came out of the darkness. “How’d you come by this place, anyway?”

“My brother bought it. Long time ago.” She remembered him standing at the window, squinting into the sun, turning to her and smiling. She felt a grin tug at the corner of her own mouth, just for a moment.

Shivers didn’t turn, now, and he didn’t smile either. “You were close, eh? You and your brother.”

“We were close.”