‘We’ve got a problem with desertions, Rance. And not enough old Legion soldiers to ring the camp. Besides which, the deal was freedom, only to win it we’d have to serve, but given the chance we’ll take the freedom and Abyss take the serving part. I think it will all fall apart.’

‘So why make me do anything? Just let me go back to my tent—’

‘You weren’t anywhere near your tent when looking at that body,’ Wareth observed as they drew closer to the larger cluster of tents at the camp’s centre. ‘Not if you’re in the White Crag block.’

‘I was just wandering, sir. They won’t accept me, you know.’

‘Who’s the worst of your lot, Rance, for making trouble with you?’

‘There’s one. Velkatal. She dropped six babies, then left them to run wild. Four were dead before coming of age, and the other two ended up in the mines and died in them. But to hear her tell it, she was the world’s best mother.’

‘Fine. Make her your Rebble.’

Rance snorted. ‘She’d be the first to mutiny under my command.’

‘Not after I inform her that whatever your fate, she will share it.’

‘So that is how you make squad leaders. And that’s why Rebble keeps you alive.’

‘It’s how we’re making squad leaders,’ Wareth agreed. ‘But as for Rebble, he started keeping me alive back in the pit. So, I don’t know his reasons, but there was no deal made that’s changed anything. At least, not that he’s told me.’

‘You never killed a woman, did you?’

‘No. Rance, there’re all kinds of cowards out there.’

She grunted again, her only response.

* * *

Fleeing the future seemed the most sordid of acts, and yet Faror Hend felt that she was making a habit of it. Two men haunted her wake, and the one pursuing her was, to her mind, the wrong man. At night, lying sleepless on her cot, with the tent walls slumping with the weight of the ice left by her breath, she could, upon closing her eyes, see a figure, tall and spectral, emerging from a vast, lifeless plain. He was walking towards her, hunting her down, and for all the monstrosity of the image, she knew that there was no evil in him. He was simply her fate, bound in promise, inescapable.

Yet in her dreams, when at last sleep found her, she saw Spinnock Durav, a cousin too close for propriety. She saw his youth, nearly a match to her own. She saw his smile, and basked in the wit of his sly words. He offered her an image, a possibility, that burned with mockery – the cruel, sneering kind. Though he stood close, she could not reach for him. Though she longed to take him, he was like a man armoured against her every charm. She would then wake, her soul heavy and cringing with the hopelessness of her desire. He had, after all, pushed her away, confessing instead his love for Finarra Stone, and the bitter irony of that revelation still tasted like ashes in Faror’s mouth.