‘Only this: for all that they have done, there is no excuse. None. Justification sloughs off each and every deed. Nothing holds, nothing hides. Deceit is impossible. They have taken lives! Not just in this battle, but in all the battles they ever fought – the ones that sent them to the mines, the ones that wounded so many, the ones that made so many people – loved ones – suffer for what they’d done! This is why the iron mourned, you see. It knew what was coming.’ He leaned forward once more, his eyes wide. ‘Take a man or a woman, strip away all the lies they tell themselves, until they stand naked unto themselves, their souls utterly exposed. Then, make them soldiers. Tell them to kill. Do you see? No armour can defend them. No sword can be other than what it is – a length of sharpened iron that steals lives. Now,’ he added in a hoarse whisper, ‘see them walk from the field of battle. See their faces, there beneath the helms. See their eyes. I tell you, Wreneck, you cannot imagine the anguish writ there. You cannot. Nor can I. And yet, and yet I see it. I see it! ’

They sat in silence for a time, unmoving, although it seemed that waves of pain struck the old man, making his face twist. Wreneck looked away from the distress. He scanned the lead soldiers lying in the ditch. In his mind he heard the wails of the wounded and the dying. He saw soldiers reel from the field, and just as the lord had described, there was something shattered in their eyes. While elsewhere others shouted in brittle triumph, as if each was somehow trapped into doing something they thought they were supposed to do. That pleasure. The satisfaction.

But the old man had spoken of relief. The wonder of it, and the quivering disbelief, to have survived by luck what took down so many. He remembered his own failure, yet again, lying on the ground outside the estate, curling up round the wounds in his body.

The sad thing was, he now knew, the dying still had things to do, things to say. The dying still had faces they wanted to look upon one more time. Pleasures they wanted to reach for, holding tight. The dying longed for all the embraces that would never find them, and theirs was a world of sorrow.

He thought he could hear the grieving swords of the Hust, the moaning helms and keening hauberks. They crowded each and every soldier of the Hust as they filed from the valley, in lines ragged and broken, with many helping their injured comrades. The iron gave voice to exhaustion, and all the things lost on this day.

For a moment, his will to go on faltered. When adults stumbled this badly, what was the point in looking up to them?

‘Wreneck.’