‘Good.’ She moved on to the next sleeping form, and he knew that she had been oblivious of his thoughts.

Just as well. He’d had enough of their laughter.

A short time later, over a hundred armed figures were moving through the forest. Narad was among them, a few steps behind Corporal Bursa. He had drawn his sword but the hand that held it was cold. He was shivering under his clothes yet his skin was slick with sweat, and in his mind there was turmoil.

He saw his life unfurled behind him: all the times when he cut people with words, mocking all their pretensions. When he had viewed with disdain every gesture of kindness or supposed sincerity. It seemed to him now that he had been fighting a war all his life. Nothing was real enough to believe in; nothing was good enough to fight for, barring the patch of useless ground he stood upon, and the flimsy borders of his contempt.

And now he found himself in the company of murderers, just one more shadowy form threading between silent boles. Somewhere ahead slept innocent people. Assuming innocence even existed, and of that he had a lifetime of doubt gnawing the edges of his faith. No matter. Their dawn was about to be shattered in a sudden descent into violence and brutality.

He did not want this, and yet something in him hungered for what was to come, the ugliest part of himself – the outside pulled in and made still more venal, still more disgusting. Among all the soldiers in this midst, he alone bore the physical truth of what was hidden inside each and every one of them.

They had their lists, their grievances, just as he had his own.

Moving through the wood, as it drew the darkness down and around them all. There were different kinds of purity, different kinds of pain, but in the gloom every distinction was lost, made the same. He was no uglier than anyone here, they no more beautiful or handsome than he. We’re all the same.

Every cause is just when it is your own, when feelings count for something. But sometimes, among some people, feelings count for nothing at all.

This was the soldier’s gift, he supposed.

He staggered then, down to one knee, and his breakfast came back up his throat, sprayed out on to the black earth. The convulsions continued, until there was nothing left inside. Head hanging, threads of mucus and bile dangling from his twisted lips, he sensed people moving past him. Heard a few low laughs.

A gloved hand rapped him on the shoulder and the woman who’d woken him leaned down and said, ‘Rancid meat, Waft. Been fighting to keep it down all the way. Get up, stay with me, we’re almost there.’