Coming up into the High Places again, and the air felt crisp and clear, sharp and familiar in Logen's throat. Their march had begun gently as they came up through the woods, a rise you'd hardly notice. Then the trees thinned out and their path took them up a valley between grassy fells, cracked with trickling streams, patched with sedge and gorse. Now the valley had narrowed to a gorge, hemmed in on both sides with slopes of bare rock and crumbling scree, getting always steeper. Above them, on either side of that gorge, two great crags rose up. Beyond, the hazy hints of mountain peaks—grey, and light grey, and even lighter grey, melted in the distance into the heavy grey sky.

The sun was out, and meaning business, and it was hot to walk in, bright to squint into. They were all weary from climbing, and worrying, and looking behind them for Bethod. Four hundred Carls, maybe, and as many painted-face hillmen, all spread out in a great long column, cursing and spitting, boots crunching and sliding in the dry dirt and the loose stones. Crummock's daughter was struggling up ahead of Logen, bent double under the weight of her father's hammer, hair round her face dark with sweat. Logen's own daughter would have been older than that, by now. If she hadn't been killed by the Shanka, along with her mother and her brothers. That thought gave Logen a hollow, guilty feeling. A bad one.

'You want a hand with that mallet, girl?'

'No I fucking don't!' she screamed at him, then dropped it off her shoulder and dragged it away up the slope by the handle, scowling at him all the way, the hammer's head clattering along and leaving a groove in the stony soil. Logen blinked after her. Seemed his touch with the women went all the way down to ones ten years old.

Crummock came up behind him, fingerbones swinging round his neck. 'Fierce, ah? Y'ave to be fierce, to get on in my family!' He leaned close and gave a wink. 'And she's the fiercest of the lot, that little bitch. If I'm honest, she's my favourite.' He shook his head as he watched her dragging at that hammer. 'She'll make some poor bastard one hell of a wife one day. We're here, in case you were wondering.'

'Eh?' Logen wiped sweat from his face, frowning as he stared about. 'Where's the—'

Then he realised. Crummock's fortress, if you could call it that, was right ahead of them.