‘No. That is, I’d rather you did. Send him back, if not here, then somewhere else. Just not there.’

Arathan cleared his throat. ‘And I see that neither of you imagines that I might have a say in all this?’

Hood looked to Gothos. ‘Did the pup speak?’

‘Some semblance of speech, yes,’ Gothos said. ‘It does not mark his more admirable trait.’

Arathan said, ‘I will speak my piece, to you, Lord Hood, when the time comes – when we reach that threshold you describe. And you will hear me, sir, and make no argument against my continuing on, in your company.’

‘I will not?’

‘Not, sir, when you hear what I will say.’

‘He knows our minds, you see,’ said Gothos to Hood. ‘Being young and all.’

‘Ah, that. Yes, of course. Forgive me for forgetting.’ With that, Hood leaned back and stretched out his legs, his pose matching that of Gothos.

Arathan stared at them both.

A moment later, Gothos started tapping on the arm of his chair. Glancing over, Arathan saw Hood nodding off to sleep.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A MAN WITHOUT DAUGHTERS, SHARENAS ANKHADU REFLECTED as she studied her commander, knew little of subtlety. Vatha Urusander faced south, his back to the keep’s outer wall, the detritus from the chute leading from the kitchen heaped behind him, at the base of a wedge-shaped stain on the stone wall. He stood with his boots in scraps of rubbish. Knucklebones blushed pink, tubers black with rot, broken pottery, peels and lumps of fat too rancid to burn. Despite the late afternoon’s bitter cold, steam rose from that mound like the smoke from some hidden peat fire. There was, she decided, fecundity in what rotted, but hardly the appetizing kind.

In her absence, the list of the slain had grown. Curious, for a war as yet undeclared. She eyed her commander, wondering if she knew him at all. Aching from the long ride, she waited at a distance, her clothes spattered with mud, her hands quickly growing numb with cold beneath the soaked-through leather riding gloves.

Winter was the season of isolation. Worlds closed in, crowded up one against another. Trapped in such confines, surrounded by forbidding cold and frozen land, one could obsess on what was still to come, speaking heated words, making the season of spring into a promise of fire. She had ridden far in her exploration of the realm, through bleak wastelands, scorched forests, winding through hills silvered by snow and frost. And like anything coming in from the cold, she was rarely made a welcome guest. It did not take an ice-locked keep to forge solitude. Winter’s isolation belonged as much to the mind as to the world outside it.