Calder swallowed, trying not to let his fear show even though his skin was all prickling. ‘I think I have the gist.’

‘Good lad.’ Dow worked his hips about as he finished lacing up, then grinned around like a fox grins at a chicken coop left open. ‘I’d hate to hurt your wife, she’s a pretty little thing. Not so pretty as you, o’ course.’

Calder hid his fury under another smirk. ‘Who is?’

He strode between the grinning Carls and out into the evening, all the while thinking about how he was going to kill Black Dow, and take back what was stolen from his father.

What War?

‘Beautiful, ain’t it?’ said Agrick, big grin across his freckled face.

‘Is it?’ muttered Craw. He’d been thinking about the ground, and how he might use it, and how an enemy might do the same.

An old habit. It had been the better half of Bethod’s talk, when they were on campaign. The ground, and how to make a weapon of it.

The hill the Heroes stood on was ground an idiot could’ve seen the value of. It sprouted alone from the flat valley, so much alone and so oddly smooth a shape it seemed almost a thing man-made. Two spurs swelled from it – one pushing west with a single needle of rock raised up on end which folk had named Skarling’s Finger, one to the southeast, a ring of smaller stones on top they called the Children.

The river wound through the valley’s shallow bottom, skirting golden barley fields to the west, losing itself in a bog riddled with mirror-pools, then under the crumbling bridge Scorry Tiptoe was watching which was called, with a stubborn lack of imagination, the Old Bridge. The water flowed on fast around the foot of the hill, flaring out in sparkling shallows streaked with shingle. Somewhere down there among the scraggy brush and driftwood Brack was fishing. Or, more likely, sleeping.

On the far side of the river, off to the south, Black Fell rose up. A rough-heaped mass of yellow grass and brown bracken, stained with scree and creased with white-watered gills. To the east Osrung straddled the river, a cluster of houses around a bridge and a big mill, huddled inside a high fence. Smoke drifted from chimneys, into the bright blue and off to nowhere. All normal, and nothing to remark upon, and no sign whatever of the Union, or Hardbread, or any of the Dogman’s boys.

Hard to believe there was any war at all.

But then in Craw’s experience, and he’d plenty, wars were made from ninety-nine parts boredom, usually in the cold and damp, hungry and ill, often hauling a great weight of metal uphill, to one part arse-opening terror. Made him wonder yet again why the hell he ever got into the black business, and why the hell he still hadn’t got out. Talent for it, or a lack of talent for aught else. Or maybe he’d just gone with the wind and the wind had blown him here. He peered up, shreds of cloud shifting across the deep sky, now one memory, now another.