‘No.’ Kroy was already sitting at his desk and dipping pen in ink to write orders. ‘Halt them for the night. On these roads, in this weather, haste will do more harm than good.’

‘But, Lord Marshal, if we—’

‘I intend to rush, General, but not headlong into a defeat. We must not push the men too hard. They need to be ready.’

Mitterick jerked up his gloves. ‘Damn these damn roads!’ Gorst stood aside to let him and his staff file from the room, silently wishing he was ushering them through into a bottomless pit.

Kroy raised his brows as he wrote. ‘Sensible men … run away … from battles.’ His pen scratched neatly across the paper. ‘Someone will need to take this order to General Jalenhorm. To move with all haste to the Heroes and secure the hill, the town of Osrung, and any other crossings of the river that—’

Gorst stepped forwards. ‘I will take it.’ If there was to be action, Jalenhorm’s division would be first into it. And I will be at the front of the front rank. I will not bury the ghosts of Sipani in a headquarters.

‘There is no one I would rather entrust it to.’ Gorst grasped the order but the marshal did not release it at once. He remained looking calmly up, the folded paper a bridge between them. ‘Remember, though, that you are the king’s observer, not the king’s champion.’

I am neither. I am a glorified errand boy, here because nowhere else will have me. I am a secretary in a uniform. A filthy uniform, as it happens. I am a dead man still twitching. Ha ha! Look at the big idiot with the silly voice! Make him dance! ‘Yes, sir.’

‘Observe, then, by all means. But no more heroics, if you please. Not like the other day at Barden. A war is no place for heroics. Especially not this one.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Kroy let go of the order and turned back to peer at his map, measuring distances between stretched-out thumb and forefinger. ‘The king would never forgive me if we were to lose you.’

The king has abandoned me here, and no one will care a stray speck of piss if I am hacked apart and my brains splattered across the North. Least of all me. ‘Yes, sir.’ And Gorst strode out, through the front door and back into the rain, where he was struck by lightning.

There she was, picking her way across the boggy front yard towards him. In the midst of all that sullen mud her smiling face burned like the sun, incandescent. Delight crushed him, made his skin sing and his breath catch. The months he had spent away from her had done not the slightest good. He was as desperately, hopelessly, helplessly in love as ever.

‘Finree,’ he whispered, voice full of awe, as in some silly story a wizard might pronounce a word of power. ‘Why are you here?’ Half-expecting she would fade into nothing, a figment of his overwrought imagination.