Gate Sergeant Raskan tugged free his boot and held it up to examine its sole. He had a way of walking that wore down the heels from the back end, and it was there that the glued layers of leather started their fraying. Seeing the first signs of just that, he swore under his breath. ‘Barely half a year old, these ones. They just don’t make ’em like they used to.’

Rint, a Bordersword of seven hard years, stood across from Raskan, leaning against the keep wall. Arms folded, he had the bearing of a boar about to drive a sow into the woods. On the man’s feet, Raskan sourly observed, were worn moccasins of thick, tough henen hide. Commanding Rint and the other three Borderswords wasn’t going to be easy, the gate sergeant reflected. Earning their respect was likely to be even harder. True, the two leaned one against t’other, but without respect, command faltered every time, whereas it wasn’t always the same the other way round. Proof enough that titles and ranks which used to be earned were now coins on dirty scales, and even Raskan’s lowly posting came from being cousin to Ivis, and he knew he might not be up to any of this.

‘’Sall those cobbles you’re walking,’ Ville said from where he sat at ease near the steps leading down to the sunken trench flanking the gate ramp. ‘Soft ground don’t wear you out the same. Seen plenty of road-marching soldiers back in the border wars, arriving with ruined knees and shin splints. If we was meant to walk on stone we’d have cloven hoofs like rock-goats.’

‘But that’s what hard-soled boots are,’ Galak chimed in next to Ville. ‘Hoofs for road-clompers. Just hobnail ’em or shoe ’em like a horse gets shoed.’

‘Hobnails damage the pavestones,’ Raskan countered, ‘and plenty of times a day my tasks take me into the houses.’

‘They should last the trip,’ Rint said, his weathered face seaming into a faint smile.

Raskan studied the man for a moment. ‘Been west then, have you?’

‘Not far. None of us have. Nothing out there in the Solitude, not this side of the divide, anyway.’

The fourth and last of the Borderswords assigned to him now arrived. Feren was Rint’s sister, maybe a few years older. Wiry where her brother was solid and if anything slightly taller, she had archer’s wrists with a coiled copper string-guard on the left one that she never took off – or so went the rumour – and a way of walking somewhere between a cat and a wolf, as if the idea of hunting and stalking stayed close to the surface at all times. There was a tilt to her eyes that hinted of blood from somewhere east of the Blackwood, but it must have been thin since her brother showed little of that.