What does that mean? The one thing for sure is that at that moment he didn’t want me to die. That gives me much hope. If only I could have talked to him. He ground his teeth. It will happen, and when it does, he will come back to me. If he does not – I cannot have my son fighting for my enemy. He stopped himself from thinking that . . . he would not allow it to come to that.

He reached Braith and Morcant. Rafe, a little apart, was squatting with the two hounds and looking down the waterway that had been used so effectively as an escape route. Morcant had tried to follow, hell-bent on recovering his chest of silver, but within a few hundred paces the ground became impossible to ride a horse upon, and soon after that was too treacherous to walk upon. Maybe with time, men picking their route, but not fast enough to keep the boats within sight.

‘We need to talk,’ Evnis said, the sight of Morcant’s petulant face both annoying him and focusing him.

‘We need to do more than talk,’ Morcant muttered, but Evnis pretended he hadn’t heard him and walked on towards the riverbank.

‘So. Let us decide,’ Evnis said. ‘How, exactly, are we going to kill Edana?’

‘Starve them out,’ Morcant said. ‘I’ve been building towers around the marshland, they won’t be able to leave without my seeing them. And I’ll either buy the local villages’ loyalty, or raze them to the ground. Either way they won’t be able to trade for food.’

Evnis looked at him as if he was mad.

‘They live in a marsh. It’s not farmland, where crops only come in the right season. Look in that river and you’ll see a hundred fish. They are not going to come out because they’re starving.’

Morcant scowled at him but didn’t reply.

Intelligence is not a necessary pre-requisite for skill with a blade, then.

‘We either lure them out, which I imagine will be impossible, or we go in there after them,’ Evnis said.

‘I’m going to go in there and find them,’ Braith said. ‘Then I’ll send someone back to get you.’

‘You can do that?’

‘Aye. That’s what I was going to do anyway – would’ve been easier if I’d had Halion to follow . . .’ He looked pointedly at Evnis. ‘And now Camlin knows I’m here, he won’t make life any easier for me.’ His hand drifted up to the scar between his neck and shoulder. ‘But I can still do it. It will take longer, and I’ll need a few more men – huntsmen, preferably. If that’s not possible then men who are good on their feet, quiet. Observant.’