“They’ll come over the walls,” I said.

“The dead won’t.” Snorri swung his arms to loosen them. He had Sven Broke-Oar’s axe now, or rather I suspected he had reclaimed his father’s axe from the man.

“Then the Hardanger men will.” Edris would be with them. I couldn’t say why he frightened me more than the Vikings, but he did.

“I doubt they have grapples, probably not even rope. But maybe.” Snorri shrugged. “We can’t patrol the walls of this fort with two men. They would just try in three places at once. They’ll get in or they won’t. Either way they will be cold. We’ll keep watch from the gatehouse roof and decide what to do when it needs to be done.”

“But it’s dark.”

“If they come in the night, Jal, they’ll carry lights, now won’t they? The ones that can climb need to see. I don’t know what the dead see, or if they need it to be light, but the dead I saw in Eight Quays were like the dead on the mountain by Chamy-Nix. They won’t be scaling walls.”

“And the unborn?”

“Let those come.” He made a sudden lunging strike at the air with his axe.

• • •

It fell to Tuttugu and me to keep watch, one taking a turn after the other. It made no sense for either man who could still fight to freeze his arse off on the roof. Tuttugu took the first hour. I could only guess what it cost him to climb the stairs with his shattered knee. I found him huddled in his furs, blue with cold and semiconscious when I hobbled up the long spiral of steps to relieve him an hour later. Ein had to come up to help his friend down again.

I stood my turn, there in the dark with the wind howling all about and nothing to see but the glow of the bone-fire by the east tower. I’d been warm for only a few hours, but already the bitter chill outside came as a shock. I found it hard to imagine we had endured it day after day.

In the dark, as I made a slow tour of the guard wall, my mind played tricks: voices on the wind, colours in the night, faces from my past come to visit. I imagined the Silent Sister, here on the ice, her tatters flying in the wind as she made her circuit of the Black Fort, painting out her curse across its walls as she went. She should be here, that old woman. She’d brought us to this, somehow, in some way I couldn’t quite fathom. It was her fault. I’d called her evil, the blind-eye woman, a witch burning people in their homes. And yet it seemed perhaps that on each occasion it had been an unborn or some other minion of the Dead King that had been her true target. The people had just been in the way. Or bait, perhaps.