‘Who’s taken his place?’

Another pause. The swimming soldiers’ laughter drifted over, then faded back into the rustling crops. ‘I have.’ Scale’s scabbed mouth hung gormlessly open. ‘They’ve taken to calling me Black Calder, now.’

‘Black … Calder.’

‘Let’s get you mounted.’ Calder led his brother over to the horses, Shivers watching them all the way.

‘Are you two on the same side now?’ asked Scale.

Shivers put a finger on his scarred cheek and pulled it down so his metal eye bulged from the socket. ‘Just keeping an eye out.’

Scale reached for the saddle-bow with his right arm, stopped himself and took it awkwardly with his left. He found one stirrup with a fishing boot and started to drag himself up. Calder hooked a hand under his knee to help him. When Calder had been a child Scale used to lift him up into the saddle. Fling him up sometimes, none too gently. How things had changed.

The three of them set off up the track. Scale slumped in the saddle, reins dangling from his limp left hand and his head nodding with each hoofbeat. Calder rode grimly beside him. Shivers followed, like a shadow. The Great Leveller, waiting at their backs. Through the fields they went, at an interminable walk, towards the gap in Clail’s Wall where Calder had faced the Union charge a few days before.

His heart was beating just as fast as it had then. The Union had pulled back behind the river that morning and Pale-as-Snow’s boys were up north behind the Heroes, but there were still eyes around. A few nervous pickers combing through the trampled barley, searching for some trifle others might have missed. Scrounging up arrowheads or buckles or anything that could turn a copper. A couple of men thrashing through the crops off to the east, one with a fishing rod over his shoulder. Strange, how quickly a battlefield turned back to being just a stretch of ground. One day every finger’s breadth of it is something men can die over. The next it’s just a path from here to there. As he looked about Calder caught Shivers’ eye and the killer lifted his chin, silently asking the question. Calder jerked his head away like a hand from a boiling pot.

He’d killed men before. He’d killed Brodd Tenways with his own sword hours after the man had saved his life. He’d ordered Forley the Weakest dead for nothing but his own vanity. Killing a man when Skarling’s Chair was the prize shouldn’t have made his hand shake on the reins, should it?

‘Why didn’t you help me, Calder?’ Scale had eased his stump out from the gap in the cloak and was frowning down at it, jaw set hard. ‘At the bridge. Why didn’t you come?’

‘I wanted to.’ Liar, liar. ‘Found out there were Union men in the woods across that stream. Right on our flank. I wanted to go but I couldn’t. I’m sorry.’ That much was true. He was sorry. For what good that did.