Grim sat opposite, trimming some straight sticks to use as arrow shafts. There'd still been the slightest glimmer of dusk in the sky when they'd sat down together. Now it was dark as pitch but for the dusty stars, and neither one of them had said a word the whole time. That was Harding Grim for you, and it suited Logen well enough. A comfortable silence was much preferable to a worrisome conversation, but nothing lasts forever.

The sound of angry footsteps came out of the darkness and Black Dow stalked up to the fire, Tul and Crummock just behind him. He had a frown on his face black enough to have earned his name, and a dirty bandage round his forearm, a long streak of dark blood dried into it.

'Pick up a cut, did you?' asked Logen.

'Bah!' Dow dropped down beside the fire. 'Nothing but a scratch. Fucking Flatheads! I'll burn the lot of 'em!'

'How about the rest of you?'

Tul grinned. 'My palms are terrible chafed from hefting rocks, but I'm a tough bastard. I'll live through it.'

'And I still find myself miserably idle,' said Crummock, 'with my children looking to my weapons, and cutting arrows from the dead. Good work for children, that, gets 'em comfortable round a corpse. The moon's keen to see me fight, though, so she is, and so am I.'

Logen sucked at his teeth. 'You'll get your chance, Crummock, I'd not worry about that. Bethod's got plenty for everyone, I reckon.'

'I never seen Flatheads come on like that,' Dow was musing. 'Right at a well-manned wall with no ladders, no tools. It ain't too clever, your Flathead, but it ain't stupid either. They like ambushes. They like cover, and hiding, and creeping around. They can be mad fearless, when they have to be, but to come on like that, by choice? Not natural.'

Crummock chuckled, a great raspy rumbling. 'Shanka fighting for one set of men against another ain't natural either. These aren't natural times. Might be Bethod's witch has worked some charm to get 'em all stirred up. Cooked herself a chant and a ritual to fill those things with hate of us.'

'Danced naked round a green fire and all the rest, I don't doubt,' said Tul.

'The moon will see us right, my friends, don't worry yourself on that score!' Crummock rattled the bones around his neck. 'The moon loves us all, and we cannot die while there's—'

'Tell it to those as went back to the mud today.' Logen jerked his head over towards the fresh dug graves at the back of the fortress. There was no seeing them in the darkness, but they were there. A score or so long humps of turned and pressed-down earth.

But the big hillman only smiled. 'I'd call them the happy ones, though, wouldn't you? Least they all get their own beds, don't they? We'll be lucky if we don't go in pits for a dozen each once the work gets hot. There'll be nowhere for the living to sleep otherwise. Pits for a score! Don't tell me you ain't seen that before, or dug the holes your own sweet self.'