Monza caught Day’s eye as she passed, rocking gently on her seat. The blond girl lifted her brows, stripped her apple to the last fragment of stalk and flicked it away into the field. Vitari was on the back of the cart, just pulling off her coat and sprawling out on the canvas in the sunlight. “Sun’s coming out. New beginning.” She pointed across the country, one hand pressed to her chest. “And aaaaaaaw, a rainbow! You know, they say there’s an elf-glade where it touches the ground!”

Monza scowled after them. Seemed more likely they’d stumble on an elf-glade than that Morveer would make a new beginning. She trusted this sudden obedience even less than his endless carping.

“Maybe he just wants to be loved,” came Shivers’ whispery voice as they set off again.

“If men can change like that.” And Monza snapped her fingers in his face.

“That’s the only way they do change, ain’t it?” His one eye stayed on her. “If things change enough around ’em? Men are brittle, I reckon. They don’t bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.”

Burned into them, maybe. “How’s your face?” she muttered.

“Itchy.”

“Did it hurt, at the eye-maker’s?”

“On a scale between stubbing your toe and having your eye burned out, it was down near the bottom.”

“Most everything is.”

“Falling down a mountain?”

“Not that bad, as long as you lie still. It’s when you try to get up it starts to sting some.” That got a grin from him, though he was grinning a lot less than he used to. Small surprise after what he’d been through, maybe. What she’d put him through. “I suppose… I should be thanking you for saving my life, again. It’s getting to be a habit.”

“What you’re paying me for, ain’t it, Chief? Work well done is its own reward, my father always used to tell me. Fact is I’m good at it. As a fighter I’m a man you need to respect. As anything else I’m just a big shiftless fuck wasted a dozen years in the wars, with nothing to show for it but bloody dreams and one less eye than most. I’ve got my pride, still. Man’s got to be what he is, I reckon. Otherwise what is he? Just pretending, no? And who wants to spend all the time they’re given pretending to be what they ain’t?”

Good question. Luckily they crested a rise, and she was spared having to think of an answer. The remains of the Imperial road stretched away, an arrow-straight stripe of brown through the fields. Eight centuries old, and still the best road in Styria. A sad comment on the leadership since. There was a farm not far from it. A stone house of two storeys, windows shuttered, roof of red tiles turned mossy brown with age, a small stable-block beside. A waist-high wall of lichen-splattered drystone round a muddy yard, a couple of scrawny birds pecking at the dirt. Opposite the house a wooden barn, roof slumping in the middle. A weather vane in the shape of a winged snake flapped limply on its leaning turret.