She was again hefted over a shoulder and hauled like a sack while the man jogged through the woods. She stopped struggling then and burned instead at the indignity of it.

She’d been wrong about one thing. Someone else was stupid enough to be out this night. And she’d become so engrossed in watching the battle she’d completely dropped her guard.

Disgusted, she decided she deserved whatever was to come.

After a fair march she was carried into a room and dumped into a chair, which left her hip smarting. People – men – moved about, muttering. Hands patted her down, found her throwing spikes and daggers. But the search was rushed, missing one throwing knife secreted in a flap of her cloak’s collar. Impatient hands prodded up her sleeves, turned her arms this way then that, pulled open her jerkin, her padded vest, and tore the string ties at the neck of her linen undershirt. Had she not been gagged, Kiska would’ve laughed as she knew exactly what they searched for: tattoos – the real article or fake – of either the severed bird’s foot or a claw.

Finding neither, the hands pushed her clothing closed again. She heard a male voice, close: ‘Damned fools.’ The hood was yanked off, then the gag. Kiska blinked, shook her hair from her eyes. She scowled up at a sinewy, broad-shouldered man whose weathered face bore a startling pattern of burn scars from lye or boiling oil.

He stepped back, glanced to a table where the man who’d first grabbed her sat with his feet up on a chair. Kiska recognized him by his leather hauberk with its iron lozenges riveted in rows and his plain blackened iron helmet. A thin moustache hung down past his chin and scar tissue made a knob of his nose. The man shrugged. ‘Nab someone, you said. I had one of them grey-robes but she was too much trouble. Grabbed this one after that. She was eyeing the fight.’

They were at an inn. Kiska recognized it: the Southern Crescent. Men stood about, either watching her indifferently or scanning the street from windows and the door. She counted about forty.

The scarred man turned to her. ‘All right. What’s your story? Who do you work for?’

‘Who do you work for?’

The man slapped her. It felt as if a slab of iron had been smacked across her chin. She blinked back tears, shook her head, stunned more by the casual brutality of the act than the pain.

His eyes remained chillingly flat, merely judging the effectiveness of his blow. Then something caught his attention behind her and he grunted, turning away. A woman walked out from behind Kiska. Short, dark, a thread-fine tattooing of lines and spirals running from her hair line to the tip of her nose, she raised Kiska’s chin in a gesture eerily similar to that of Agayla’s. Kiska had seen the woman around. Carla? Catin?

Studying her, the woman pursed her full lips, nodded as if identifying her in turn. Kiska was shaken to see regret follow the recognition – she wouldn’t live through this; she’d been sentenced the moment the hood left her head.