“Three.” The smith held up the appropriate number of fingers as if Snorri hadn’t been speaking the Empire Tongue.

“He’s robbing you! Three silvers for what’s basically a farm implement?”

But Snorri paid over the coins. “Never haggle over a weapon’s price. Buy or don’t buy. Save the arguments for when you own it!”

“We’ll have to get you a sword,” I said. “When funds allow.”

Snorri shook his head. “An axe for me. Swords trick you into thinking you can defend. With an axe all you can do is attack. That’s what my father named me. Snorri. It means ‘attack.’” He lifted the axe above his head. “Men think they can defend against me—but when I knock, they open.”

• • •

“What the hell are unborn?” It took three days for me to ask the question. We’d come riding into the town of Pentacost, covering about a hundred miles from the border. Snorri still rode like a log, but fortunately he also endured like a log and hadn’t murmured a word of complaint. Rain found us on the road and poured on our heads for the last ten miles, so we came dripping from the stables and now sat at the centre of our own little lakes, steaming gently before an empty hearth in the King of Rhone tavern.

“You don’t know?” Snorri raised wet eyebrows at that and plastered his hair farther up his forehead, shaking the excess water from his fingers.

“No.” I’m often like that. I have a bad habit of blanking unpleasantness from my mind—something I’ve done since I was a child. Genuine surprise is a great help when faced with an unwelcome duty. Of course, when it’s the paying of debts you’re forgetting, that can lead to broken fingers. And worse. I guess it’s a form of lying—lying to oneself. And I’m very good at falsehoods. They often say the best liars half-believe their lies—which makes me the very best because if I repeat a lie often enough I can end up believing it entirely, no half measures involved! “No, I don’t know.”

During our travels, mainly down dull and muddy tracks and past innumerable dreadful little farms, I’d spent a lot of time reminiscing to myself about Cherri’s charms and Lula’s pleasing sense of exploration, but of the incident at the graves . . . nothing, just a brief memory of Cherri riding to the rescue. A dozen times I’d pictured the bouncing of her breasts as she’d thundered past. It took a three-hour soaking at the end of a three-day ride for the unborn to at last surface with a nagging insistence that finally made me ask. The truth could scarcely be worse than what my imagination had begun to suggest. I hoped.

“How can you not know?” Snorri demanded. He didn’t thump the table, but I knew he wanted to.

Snorri proved the ideal travelling companion for a man like me who didn’t want to dwell on past mistakes and the like. As far as Snorri was concerned all his goals, ambitions, loves, and dangers lay ahead—anything in our wake, Red March and all its peoples, Grandmother and her Silent Sister, the unborn, all these things of the South, were to be left behind, outpaced, no longer of concern or consequence.