His cry elicited howls from the main house, rising gleefully into the crepuscular air. Hearing them, Ristand swore under his breath and drew his sword. ‘I rescind my vote,’ he snapped. ‘You hear me, sergeant? I vote the other way. That makes it a majority. I’m not getting my feet chewed off.’

‘Ristand! Just go and arrange the guard postings, will you? The vote’s done with. We’re here now. Besides, I was only humouring all of you, about that majority stuff. I’m sergeant, highest rank left among us. It’s my decision.’

‘Cock curdling liar! Tit bag whore! I knew it!’

‘Go, you’re embarrassing us all.’

Ristand snarled and set off back to the others waiting by the gate.

Wiping at her brow, Savarro drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Apologies, milord. Husbands, what can you do?’

* * *

Four trackers were on her trail, two of them moving up alongside her. Sharenas Ankhadu caught glimpses of them through the crazed lattice of leafless branches and twigs to either side. The remaining pair had drawn up behind her on the track.

She was exhausted, and the day’s light would not fade in time to make any difference in her attempts to evade these hunters. Before dusk’s arrival she knew that blades would clash, shattering the silence of the frozen forest.

It would be an ignominious end, filled with bitter frustration and fraught with pathos. A proper scene, highlighting the sheer indecency of civil war. Soldiers I fought alongside – now we close with murder in our eyes, weapons unsheathed.

Where, in all this, was the life I wanted? The victory of peace whispered so many promises. Kagamandra, we should have fled. Together, into the west, the lands of the Azathanai, or even the Dog-Runners. We should have damned the legacy of peace – you with your promised wife you did not love, me with a future empty of passion. Peace should have won us more. It should have won us a softening of all that was harsh and hard within us, an easing of the ferocity we all saw as necessary weapons in war.

Instead, too many of us turned fierce eyes upon these plain trappings, these quiet chambers. Too many of us still gripped bared iron, even as we walked into realms of peace, filled with the hope of living peaceful lives.

We were contemptuous of such lives, such living. It was beneath us warriors, us harbingers of blood and death. We could see in their eyes – in the eyes of loved ones, estranged friends, husbands and wives – that they knew nothing. Nothing of what truly mattered, what truly counted. They were shallow, ignorant of depravity’s depths. We saw them as fools, and then, as our souls hardened in our self-made isolation, we saw them as victims, no different from enemies upon the field of battle.