‘Ours,’ she said, looking him right in the eye.

‘This ain’t right.’

‘Straight edge, eh?’ She slowly nodded, and her eyes looked tired. ‘Well. Good luck with that. You’ll need it.’

Flood looked a patch guilty, but he wasn’t giving aught back. Scorry had a little smile as he dropped his shield on the grass and sank cross-legged onto it, humming some tune in which noble deeds were done. Yon was frowning as he rooted through the purse, working out how much he’d got.

‘What would Craw have made o’ this?’ muttered Beck.

Wonderful shrugged. ‘Who cares? Craw’s gone. We got to make our own choices.’

‘Aye.’ Beck looked from one face to another. ‘Aye.’ And he walked off.

‘Where you going?’ Flood called after him.

He didn’t answer.

He passed by one of the Heroes, shoulder brushing the ancient rock, and kept moving. He hopped over the drystone wall, heading north down the hillside, shook the shield off his arm and left it in the long grass. Men stood about, talking fast. Arguing. One pulled a knife, another backing off, hands up. Panic spreading along with the news. Panic and anger, fear and delight.

‘What happened?’ someone asked him, grabbing at his cloak. ‘Did Dow win?’

Beck shook his hand off. ‘I don’t know.’ He strode on, almost breaking into a run, down the hill and away. He only knew one thing. This life weren’t for him. The songs might be full of heroes, but the only ones here were stones.

The Currents of History

Finree had gone where the wounded lay, to do what women were supposed to do when a battle ended. To soothe parched throats with water tipped to desperate lips. To bind wounds with bandages torn from the hems of their dresses. To calm the dying with soft singing that reminded them of Mother.

Instead of which she stood staring. Appalled by the mindless chorus of weeping, whining, desperate slobbering. By the flies, and the shit, and the blood-soaked sheets. By the calmness of the nurses, floating among the human wreckage as serene as white ghosts. Appalled more than anything else by the numbers. Laid out in ranks on pallets or sheets or cold ground. Companies of them. Battalions.

‘There are more than a dozen,’ a young surgeon told her.

‘There are scores,’ she croaked back, struggling not to cover her mouth at the stink.

‘No. More than a dozen of these tents. Do you know how to change a dressing?’

If there was such a thing as a romantic wound there was no room for them here. Every peeled-back bandage a grotesque striptease with some fresh oozing nightmare beneath. A hacked-open arse, a caved-in jaw with most of the teeth and half the tongue gone, a hand neatly split leaving only thumb and forefinger, a punctured belly leaking piss. One man had been cut across the back of the neck and could not move, only lie on his face, breath softly wheezing. His eyes followed her as she passed and the look in them made her cold all over. Bodies skinned, burned, ripped open at strange angles, their secret insides laid open to the world in awful violation. Wounds that would ruin men as long as they lived. Ruin those who loved them.