He looked away. ‘We’ve wandered far from the subject. I am afraid I can tell you nothing of your mother’s fate. Yet I am confident, none the less, that Coll and Murillio will do all they can for her.’

‘Then you’re an even bigger fool than they are, Ganoes. By stealing her, they have sealed her doom.’

‘I didn’t know you for the melodramatic type.’

‘I am not—’

‘She is an old woman, an old, dying woman. Abyss take me, leave her alone—’

‘You are not listening!’ Silverfox hissed. ‘My mother is trapped in a nightmare – within her own mind, lost, terrified. Hunted! I have stayed closer to her than any of you realized. Far closer!’

‘Silverfox,’ Paran said quietly, ‘if she is within a nightmare, then her living has become a curse. The only true mercy is to see it ended, once and for all.’

‘No! She is my mother, damn you! And I will not abandon her!’

She wheeled her horse, drove her heels into its flanks.

Paran watched her ride off. Silverfox, what machinations have you wrapped around your mother? What is it you seek for her? Would you not tell us, please, so that we are made to understand that what we all see as betrayal is in fact something else?

Is it something else?

And these machinations – whose? Not Tattersail, surely. No, this must be Nightchill. Oh, how you’ve closed yourself to me, now. When once you reached out, incessantly, relentlessly seeking to pry open my heart. It seems that what we shared, so long ago in Pale, is as nothing.

I begin to think, now, that it was far more important to me than it was to you. Tattersail . . . you were, after all, an older woman. You’d lived your share of loves and losses. On the other hand, I’d barely lived at all.

What was, then, is no more.

Flesh and blood Bonecaster, you’ve become colder than the T’lan Imass you now command.

I suppose, then, they have indeed found a worthy master.

Beru fend us all.

Of the thirty transport barges and floating bridges the Pannions had used to cross the Catlin River, only a third remained serviceable, the others having fallen prey to the overzealous White Face Barghast during the first day of battle. Companies from Caladan Brood’s collection of mercenaries had begun efforts at salvaging the wrecks with the intention of cobbling together a few more; while a lone serviceable floating bridge and the ten surviving barges already rode the lines across the river’s expanse, loaded with troops, mounts and supplies.