‘I know. I just wasn’t sure, and you’re, you know, pretty fierce. If you like the idea, then maybe . . .’

‘Why don’t you go and ask him?’ Coralen said, spying Corban on the weapons court.

‘Would you come with me?’

‘Me? Why?’

‘Because he takes your advice seriously. And you put him in a good mood.’

‘Ach, you fool,’ Coralen said, aiming a boot at Dath, feeling both angry and happy that he’d said that.

Do I?

‘Please?’

Coralen sighed. ‘Come on, then. Let’s go and talk to him now.’

‘Now?’ Dath blinked.

‘Aye. No time like the now if you want something done,’ she said, and before Dath had a chance to object she was kicking her horse into a trot. She heard him running to keep up.

They passed rows of straw targets. Cywen and the giantling Laith were standing before some, Cywen throwing knife after knife from the belts strapped diagonally across her chest, each one hitting the target flawlessly. Laith had a similar belt of leather across her torso, knives as big as daggers sheathed in it. As Coralen watched, Laith threw one of them. It slammed into the straw target and hurled it to the ground.

I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of those.

Further along, Wulf and a few score men hefting single-bladed axes were similarly practising.

His hands have healed well, Coralen noted as Wulf’s axe thunked into the head of a straw man. She remembered Tukul and with a sigh determinedly banished those memories.

The future must fill my mind now, with what is to come.

There was a dense circle of people around the stone section of the weapons court, a fair number of giants dotted amongst them, all watching Balur and Corban. Coralen’s eyes were drawn to Corban’s arm-ring, the streaks of silver in it gleaming in the pale winter daylight.

A moon had passed since that night in Drassil’s feast-hall when they had sworn their oaths to Corban, and he to them. Things had felt different since then, there was a unity amongst their disparate groups that had not been there before, and the moon had passed in a flurry of activity: forges fired, weapons and armour made, clearing more land beyond Drassil’s walls, hunting, scouting, grinding of grain, shoring of walls, and then training and preparation for the battles to come. They were beginning to feel like a real warband, not just people hurled together by the whim of war.

‘Never try and block a blow from a giant with strength alone,’ Balur was saying in his rumbling deep bass of a voice. ‘It will shatter your bones.’

I could’ve reasoned that out myself, Coralen snorted. Any weapons-master worth his pay teaches that you guide a weapon away, not meet its momentum head on. Unless the only other option is death.