Drofd cleared his throat and gave the sword back quick. ‘Just talking about … you know. Names. How’d you come by yours?’

‘Mine?’ snapped Wonderful, narrowing her eyes at ’em. Beck didn’t rightly know what to make of a woman fighting, let alone one who led a dozen. One who was his Chief, now, even. He had to admit she scared him a little, with that hard look and that knobbly head with an old scar down one side and a fresh one down the other. Being scared by a woman might’ve shamed him once, but it hardly seemed to matter now he was scared of everything. ‘I got it giving a pair of curious young lads a wonderful kicking.’

‘She got it off Threetrees.’ Jolly Yon rolled over in his blankets and propped himself on an elbow, peering at the fire through one hardly open eye, scratching at his black and grey thatch of a beard. ‘Her family had a farm just north of Uffrith. Stop me if I’m wrong.’

‘I will,’ she said, ‘don’t worry.’

‘And when trouble started up with Bethod, some of his boys came down into that valley. So she shaved her hair.’

‘Shaved it a couple of months before. Always got in my way when I was following the plough.’

‘I stand corrected. You want to take over?’

‘You’re doing all right.’

‘No need for the shears, then, but she took up a sword, and she got a few others in the valley to do the same, and she laid an ambush for ’em.’

Wonderful’s eyes gleamed in the firelight. ‘Did I ever.’

‘And then Threetrees turned up, and me and Craw along with him, expecting to find the valley all burned out and the farmers scattered and instead he finds a dozen of Bethod’s boys hanged and a dozen more prisoner and this bloody girl watching over ’em with quite the smile. What was it he said now?’

‘Can’t say I recall,’ she grunted.

‘Wonderful strange to have a woman in charge,’ said Yon, putting on a gravelly bass. ‘We called her Wonderful Strange for a week or two, then the strange dropped off, and there you have it.’

Wonderful nodded grimly at the fire. ‘And a month later Bethod came in earnest and the valley got all burned out anyway.’

Yon shrugged. ‘Still a good ambush, though.’

‘And what about you, eh, Jolly Yon Cumber?’

Yon dragged his blankets off and sat up. ‘Ain’t much to it.’

‘Don’t be modest. Jolly was said straight in the old days, ’cause he used to be quite the joker, did Yon. Then his cock was tragically cut off in the battle at Ineward, a loss more mourned by the womenfolk of the North than all the husbands, sons and fathers killed there. Ever since then, not a single smile.’

‘A cruel lie.’ Yon pointed a thick finger across at Beck. ‘I never had a sense o’ humour. And it was just a little nick out of my thigh at Ineward. Lot of blood but no damage. Everything still working down below, don’t you worry.’