They were whetting their points. Each good arrow was taken out and its steel point sharpened. Bodkins that would pass between the links of mail and horse-droppers that would rip the guts out of a wyvern and the new arrows, big stonebreakers on half-inch shafts for cave trolls with blunt heads like the ones used for birds but filled with lead.

“No Head’s too important for the like o’ us,” Wilful muttered. “Telling the diggers where to dig. Waste o’ time, if you ask me.”

Long Paw laughed. “Why? I like the odds—us behind twenty feet of rampart.”

“We ain’t fightin’ here,” Wilful Murder said in his hangdog voice.

“Like fuck!” Cully said. “Of course we’re fightin’ here.”

Wilful Murder wore a straw hat on his arming cap, and he pushed it back off his forehead. “Oh, is that so?”

Cuddy sighed. “I’m sure you’re going to tell us.”

“The cap’n brought up horses for every one o’ you what lost yer horses.” Wilful Murder shrugged. “Stands to reason.”

“Knights need horses,” Cully said.

Tippit smiled.

“And all the archers?” Wilful said, in exactly the voice he’d use when he rolled the pips he needed to win a game. “Why the fuck we all suddenly got horses, if’n we ain’t leaving?”

There was a pause.

Tippit cursed—one of his original, florid, somewhat terrifying curses—this one to do with seals and sex. Then he sighed. “I hate it when you make sense.”

There was no trumpet. Just after midnight, Ganfroy went from tent line to tent line and woke the knights, and the rest went the way it should have—with a lot of forgotten equipment, men missing, Oak Pew unaccountably drunk, and a great deal of cursing. The chaos was made worse by the silent intrusion of new men—militia and local knights. Lord Wayland’s retinue. The Grand Squire. They were good knights but not professional soldiers. They were moving into the places vacated by the company.

“Up past their bed times,” Wilful Murder muttered.

But it was done, and in under an hour, including the rapid serving out of rations—salt pork, bacon, peas and butter and good bread in big four-pound loaves.

Wilful Murder was unbelievably smug as they trotted into the first morning light, six miles almost due south of Gilson’s Hole.

The whole company—green in front, then the household, then the red and then the white—jogged along at a fast walk by fours down the road in the first grey light.

“Fuck, I hate rain,” muttered Tippit.

Then something changed, and the rhythm of movement changed. Birds were waking up, and the colour of the sky was lightening.

They turned. They were suddenly moving north, on a narrow road in deep woods. Some of the veterans of the spring march knew it as the West Road to Ticondaga.