Far below, the water frothed and surged. It had rained hard in the night, and now the river ran high with it, an angry flood chewing mindlessly at the base of the cliff. Cold black water and cold white spray against the cold black rock. Tiny shapes—golden yellow, burning orange, vivid purple, all the colours of fire, whisked and wandered with the mad currents, whatever way the rain washed them.

Leaves on the water, just like him.

And now it looked as if the rain would wash him south. To fight some more. To kill men who'd never heard of him. The idea of it made him want to be sick. But he'd given his word, and a man who doesn't keep his word isn't much of a man at all. That's what Logen's father used to tell him.

He'd spent a lot of long years not keeping to much of anything. His word, and the words of his father, and other men's lives, all meaning less than nothing. All the promises he'd made to his wife and to his children he'd let rot. He'd broken his word to his people, and his friends, and himself, more times than he could count. The Bloody-Nine. The most feared man in the North. A man who'd walked all his days in a circle of blood. A man who'd done nothing in all his life but evil. And all the while he'd looked at the sky and shrugged his shoulders. Blamed whoever was nearest, and told himself he'd had no choices.

Bethod was gone. Logen had vengeance, at last, but the world wasn't suddenly a better place. The world was the same, and so was he. He spread out the fingers of his left hand on the damp stone, bent and wonky from a dozen old breaks, knuckles scratched and scabbing, nails cracked and wedged under with dirt. He stared down at the familiar stump for a moment.

'Still alive,' he whispered, hardly able to believe it.

He winced at the pain in his battered ribs, groaned as he turned away from the window and back into the great hall. Bethod's throne room, and now his. The thought tugged a meagre belch of laughter out of his gut, but even that stabbed at the mass of stitches through his cheek and up the side of his face. He limped out across the wide floor, every step an ordeal. The sound of his scraping boots echoed in the high rafters, over the whispering of the river down below. Shafts of blurred light, heavy with floating dust, shone down and made criss-cross patterns across the boards. Near to Logen, on a raised-up dais, stood Skarling's Chair.