'I'm a king, now.' He snorted. 'King of the Northmen, would you believe it?' He was thinking she'd laugh in his face, but she just stood, listening to the wall. 'Me and Luthar, both. A pair of kings. Can you think of two more worthless bastards to put crowns on, eh?' No answer.

Logen licked his lips. No choice but to get straight to it, maybe. 'Ferro. The way things turned out. The way we… left it.' He took a step towards her, and another. 'I wish I hadn't… I don't know…' He put one hand on her shoulder. 'Ferro, I'm trying to tell you—'

She turned, quickly, plastered her hand over his mouth. 'Shhhhh.' She grabbed his shirt and pulled him down, down onto his knees. She pressed her ear against the tiles, eyes moving back and forward as if she was listening for something. 'Do you hear that?' She let go of him and pushed herself into the corner. 'There! Do you hear them?'

He reached out, slowly, and touched the back of her neck, ran his rough fingertips over her skin. She shook him off with a jerk of her shoulders, and he felt his face twist. Perhaps that good thing between them had been only in his mind, and never in hers. Perhaps he had wanted it so badly that he had let himself imagine it.

He stood up, cleared his dry throat. 'Never mind. I'll come back later, maybe.' She was still on her knees, her head against the floor. She did not even watch him leave.

Logen Ninefingers was no stranger to death. He'd walked among it all his days. He'd watched the bodies burned by the score after the battle at Carleon, long ago. He'd seen them buried by the hundred up in the nameless valley in the High Places. He'd walked on a hill of men's bones under ruined Aulcus.

But even the Bloody-Nine, even the most feared man in the North, had never looked on anything like this.

Bodies were stacked beside the wide avenue in heaps, chest-high. Sagging mounds of corpses, on and on. Hundreds upon hundreds. Too many for him to guess at the numbers. Someone had made an effort at covering them, but not that great an effort. The dead give no thanks for it, after all. Ragged sheets flapped in the breeze, weighted down with broken wood, limp hands and feet hanging out from underneath.

At this end of the road a few statues still stood. Once-proud kings and their advisers, stone faces and bodies scarred and pitted, stared sadly down at the bloody waste heaped round their feet. Enough of them for Logen to recognise that this truly was the Kingsway, and that he hadn't somehow stumbled into the land of the dead.