‘Ten? Twelve?’ she whispered, but her memory was from twenty years before and she sounded uncertain. I wondered how Gunnald Gunnaldson, if he still lived, manned his ship, which, if Aldwyn was right, must have benches for at least twenty rowers. Presumably he hired men for each voyage or, more likely, used slaves. Finan and I had been slaves aboard just such a ship, chained to the benches and scarred by the whips.

The other two guards now stood beside the door of the larger building, lounging there with bored expressions. One yawned. I strolled along the line of children with Serpent-Breath still in my hand. ‘This one should be valuable,’ I said, stopping beside a tall, thin girl who had straggly brown hair framing a freckled face. ‘She’ll be pretty if you clean her up.’

‘Let me look.’ The lank-haired man walked towards me and I brought Serpent-Breath up and lunged her into his throat and I kept pushing her as his blood brightened the dawn, and one small boy screamed in fright before Aldwyn silenced him with a hand, then the boy just watched wide-eyed as the dying man went backwards, hands fumbling at the blade in his torn gullet, and his bowels opening to foul the morning with his stench. He went down hard onto the red-slicked stones and I wrenched the blade left and right, opening the savage cut, and pressed again until the blade jarred against his spine. Blood was still pulsing, spurting, but each spurt was smaller, the gurgling noise of his dying fading with each gasping breath, and by the time his twitching stopped my men had crossed the yard and had butchered one guard and captured the other. We had killed two and seized the third without making too much noise, but then some of the smaller children started wailing.

‘Quiet!’ I snarled at them. They went silent in terror. I glanced up as a movement caught my eye and wondered if it had been the shutter on the small window, which appeared to be open a crack. Had it been like that before? Then a kite launched itself from the high gable and flew westwards. Maybe that bird was all I had seen moving. An omen? Alaina ran and buried herself in Benedetta’s skirt. I pulled Serpent-Breath free and wiped her tip on the dead man’s jerkin. Aldwyn was grinning at me, excited by the death, but the grin vanished when he saw my glowering face that was spattered by the dead man’s blood. ‘Finan,’ I said, and pointed to the shed.

He took two men, dragged the door open, and went inside. ‘A stable,’ he reported a moment later. ‘Two horses, nothing else.’

‘Take the children in there,’ I told Benedetta. ‘Shut the door, wait till I send for you.’

‘Remember your promise,’ she said.

‘Promise?’

‘To let me kill Gunnald!’

I walked her to the stable. ‘I have not forgotten,’ I said.

‘Make sure he is alive,’ she said bitterly, ‘when you send for me.’