Shouting drifted through the cracks in the boards above his head, sometimes a distant scream, making him jump and sending fear jolting through him. His hand searched out the shaft of the hatchet Trigg had given him and he pulled it from his belt, gripping it tight, imagined becoming a grown warrior and standing on the wall besides Gramm, the man who was risking all to help him.

The warband had been sighted in the pale blush of sunset, approaching from the south-west. It hadn’t taken long to see Jael’s banner held above them. Gramm had ordered the gates barred; everyone from the houses beyond the hold’s wall was herded inside, and every warrior in the hold dressed in his war gear and manned the walls. Eighty men in all. Haelan had climbed the wall and hidden in the shadows by the gate tower, waiting along with Gramm and his men.

The warband had reached the gates soon after sunset, three hundred strong at least. A tall warrior approached the gates in gleaming mail and a horsehair plume trailing from his helmet.

‘I am Ulfilas ben Arik, come in the name of Jael, King of Isiltir,’ the warrior cried out, his warband gathering like a storm cloud behind him, bristling with iron and malice.

‘Give up the child. I know he is in there. Give him up, and be rewarded by your King with more silver than you could spend in a lifetime. Continue to protect him and every last one of you will be dead by this time on the morrow.’ His horse had fidgeted, stamping and dancing on the spot. He’d turned it in a tight circle. ‘Talk on it; I will return soon.’

‘You can have my answer now,’ Gramm yelled, looking more like a giant than a man in his war gear of leather and mail, a great axe clenched in his fists. ‘Jael’s no king of mine, and you can tell him from me to shove his silver up his arse.’

Chaos had erupted then, spears flying, Jael’s men attacking the gates with an iron-shod ram. Gramm’s men on the wall had hurled spears and rocks down upon them, a great cauldron of oil heating over a fire-pit above the gates. Gramm had been yelling orders and suddenly spied Haelan crouching in the shadows.

‘To the cellars with you,’ he’d growled at Haelan. ‘One stray spear and you make all this worthless.’ The look on his face had both scared Haelan and made him feel ashamed and so he’d gone running for the cellars, an old healer giving him a candle, opening the trapdoor for him and shutting him in.