‘You’ll be stiff, tired, sluggish,’ she replied in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘If they turn on us, you’ll be damn all use.’

‘They’re not going to turn on us,’ he said, feeling the truth of her words as he rolled his neck and winced at the ache that had settled there. ‘We’re too many, and, Sigmar help me, they saw last night what we can do. Besides, we have Romilla.’

Aelyn inclined her head slightly, a gesture of tacit agreement.

‘We ought not linger,’ she said. ‘If you’re not sleeping then get up off that palette. We’ve choices to make.’

Hendrick ground his knuckles into his sore eyes, achieving little other than triggering a dull pain at the backs of their orbits. He blinked and took another breath against the tight weight he felt in his chest. He ran a hand over his bald scalp, felt a few days’ stubble rasp at his callused palm.

‘Aelyn–’ he began, but she twitched her fingers to cut him off. For a moment he saw the ghost of something like sympathy cross her sharp features. The surprise of it came close to unmanning him.

‘I know, Hendrick,’ she said. ‘It was horrible. We all lost him, but you lost the most. You will mourn. We all will. The fact remains, we have choices to make.’

‘And with Varlen gone…’ his words trailed off. It was the first time he had voiced it out loud, the first time he had made it real.

‘You alone lead our mercenary band, now. You alone lead the Swords of Sigmar,’ she finished for him. ‘So. Lead.’

Hendrick closed his eyes and ordered his thoughts. He took a tight grip upon the leash of his temper, the same temper that had propelled him and Varlen into this life in the first place. He wouldn’t let it flare now, not when it might endanger his friends.

He’d lost enough in this wretched settlement already.

‘Are you centred?’ asked Aelyn. Hendrick opened his eyes, looked at her, nodded. She returned the gesture then turned and slipped through the screens, the muted browns and greens of her waywatcher’s garb vanishing through the gold and silver curtain.

Hendrick took a firm grip of Reckoner and rose.

‘I am centred,’ he muttered, hands tightening on his hammer’s leather grip until it creaked. ‘Just pray, Sigmar, don’t let them give me cause.’

With that, he followed his second-in-command through the silk screens and out, into the settlement of Stonehallow.

Hendrick followed Aelyn down a corridor whose alcoves had been turned into small shanty-dwellings, all empty. She turned through a stone arch daubed in gaudy fire-hues, then into a high circular shaft that had once housed a corkscrew stair. The two mercenaries had to clamber up a haphazard arrangement of wood-and-metal scaffolds that had replaced its crumbled ruins, pushing up through draped curtains of red and orange silk.