‘Keep your distance, you whoreson. I’ll gut you and leave you to rot here. It’ll be self-defence, and the Englishman will believe me. He trusts me now. Not you. You scum.’ Spittle rained from his toothless gums.

‘Keep your voice down. What’s happened, you old fool?’

‘Fool, is it? Blackstone told me what you said about me.’

‘Put down the knife and we’ll talk,’ Ariz told him, stepping closer, hand outstretched.

‘No! Stay where you are. You told him I was drunk, but he’s no fool. He thinks you took the lead on the path. I am not to blame. Not me.’

Ariz sighed; his arm lowered, he took another step. ‘You are an old fool,’ he said without malice. ‘Blackstone is playing with you. He was trying to find out if we lied.’

‘I kept my mouth shut! I said nothing! You blamed me.’

Ariz’s innocent gesture of opening his palms to appeal to the old man brought him another step closer. ‘There is no blame. Don’t you understand? He is testing you. Us. I have not spoken to him. He has not asked me anything.’

A cloud of doubt shrouded Santos’s eyes and in that moment Ariz lunged, seized his wrist and clubbed him with his fist on the side of the head. The drunkard’s legs folded. Ariz held the older man with little effort, knee pressed into his chest, the old man’s knife seized and held at his throat. Santos, the wind knocked out of him, wheezed and spluttered from Ariz’s weight. Once he saw the older man was incapable, Ariz raised his weight from his chest. ‘Tell me everything Blackstone said to you.’

Santos propped himself against a tree and related Blackstone’s instructions.

‘Then he hasn’t changed the route?’ said Ariz.

Santos shook his head and coughed the phlegm from his wheezing chest. ‘Not until we clear the track, then we go across to the mountains.’

‘Then we’re safe. All Blackstone did was to put the fear of God into you in case you had been drinking. He used words I never said to provoke you. He’s a sly bastard, the Englishman. See it for what it is: he was searching for lies and never found any.’

‘But if anything goes wrong I die first. I am the one who’s leading them into the ambush.’

‘You’ll be safe enough. You know the place: you stop and tell them you need to check the road ahead. Now that Blackstone is halving his force we will be safer. Tibalt and de Hayle’s men will overwhelm them.’ Ariz stood and tossed the knife down next to Santos. ‘Hold your nerve and we live to spend our money.’

‘Just kill the boy,’ said Santos as he got to his feet. ‘Kill him and then ride hard for Tibalt.’