Seven days, since the Shanka first came at the walls. Seven days, and it felt like seven months. Logen hardly had a muscle that didn't ache from hard use. He was covered in a legion of bruises, a host of scratches, an army of grazes, and knocks, and burns. He had the long cut down his leg bandaged, his ribs all bound up tight from getting kicked in them, a pair of good-sized scabs under his hair, his shoulder stiff as wood from where he'd got battered with a shield, his knuckles scraped and swollen from punching at an Easterner and catching stone instead. He was one enormous sore spot.

The rest of the crowd were little better off. There was hardly a man in the whole fortress without some kind of an injury. Even Crummock's daughter had picked up a scratch from somewhere. One of Shivers' boys had lost himself a finger the day before yesterday. Little one, on his left hand. He was looking at it now, wrapped up tight in dirty, bloody cloth, wincing.

'Burns, don't it?' he said, looking up at Logen, bunching up the rest of his fingers and opening them again.

Logen should've felt sorry for him, probably. He remembered the pain, and the disappointment even worse. Hardly able to believe that you wouldn't have that finger any more, for the whole rest of your life. But he'd got no pity left for anyone beyond himself. 'It surely does,' he grunted.

'Feels like it's still there.'

'Aye.'

'Does that feeling go away?'

'In time.'

'How much time?'

'More than we've got, most likely.'

The man nodded, slow and grim. 'Aye.'

Seven days, and even the cold stone and wet wood of the fortress itself seemed to have had enough. The new parapets were crumbled and sagging, shored up as best they could be, and crumbled again. The gates were chopped to rotten firewood, daylight showing through the hacked-out gaps, boulders piled in behind. A firm knock might have brought them down. A firm knock might have brought Logen down, for that matter, the way he was feeling.

He took a mouthful of sour water from his flask. They were getting to the rank stuff at the bottom of the barrels. Low on food too, and on everything else. Hope, in particular, was in short and dwindling supply. 'Still alive,' he whispered to himself, but there wasn't much triumph in it. Even less than usual. Civilisation might not have been all to his taste, but a soft bed, a strange place to piss, and a bit of scorn from some skinny idiots didn't seem like such a bad option right then. He was busy asking himself for the thousandth time why he came back at all when he heard Crummock-i-Phail's voice behind him.

'Well, well, Bloody-Nine. You look tired, man.'

Logen frowned up. The hillman's mad blather was starting to grate on him. 'It's been hard work these past days, in case you hadn't noticed.'