‘Go on, lad, Glyn’s good at keeping secrets.’

‘Said when you come for Dun Crin, and he knows you will, that he wants to talk to you.’

Evnis felt a rising hope.

‘Did he now? Did he say what about?’

‘He said he wants to talk to you about the God-War, the Seven Treasures, and the necklace of Nemain.’

Evnis was stunned to silence, almost took a step back at that.

‘Someone is coming,’ Glyn said into the silence, looking back up the hill. ‘I think it’s Morcant.’

It was, the young warrior striding with his usual grace and arrogance, a handful of warriors behind him.

More peacocks, like their master, though with lesser plumage.

‘What news?’ Morcant asked as he approached.

How is it that he even makes a question sound arrogant?

‘Edana and her rabble have been found. We will set out on the morrow,’ Evnis said, trying to sound as indifferent as possible.

‘Good,’ Morcant said, rubbing his hands together. ‘I’m overdue a good fight.’

Evnis sat near the head of a long barge, thirty warriors about him. It was early, the sun not yet burning off morning’s mist, wisps of it curling about the river, coiling up and over the side of the barge. Evnis shivered.

Morcant sat in the boat behind him, looking every bit the hero in his black and gold war-gear.

How I despise him.

And behind Morcant the boats of their small fleet were filling; fifty vessels, bought, stolen, built, not all of them as big as the one he was sitting in, but they carried over five hundred men between them.

More than enough to crush this rebellion.

The sensible voice in his head told him to wait for the extra men to arrive from Dun Carreg, a few hundred at least. Enough to make the outcome of this conflict a foregone conclusion. He knew that this was riskier, but had justified it, claiming that they must strike hard and fast now, before Edana’s rabble grew, and that if they did not strike now there would be a high risk of Edana’s rebels just moving base, and then they would never find them.

So it has to be now, Evnis had argued.

Good arguments, and true, to a point. But they are not the reason I am ordering an immediate strike.

I need to see my son, and resolve this once and for all.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-EIGHT

CORBAN

Corban woke to a knocking at his door. For a moment he did not know where he was. Then he remembered.

Drassil. And today we fight.