‘Can’t be right,’ he muttered to himself, ‘for a Named Man to be scared all the time.’

‘What?’ Craw had almost forgotten Shivers was there, he moved so silent.

‘You get scared, Shivers?’

A pause, that eye of his glinting as the sun peeped through the branches. ‘Used to. All the time.’

‘What changed?’

‘Got my eye burned out o’ my head.’

So much for calming small talk. ‘Reckon that could change your outlook.’

‘Halves it.’

Some sheep were bleating away beside the track, pressed tight into a pen much too small. Foraged, no doubt, meaning stolen, some unlucky shepherd’s livelihood vanished down the gullets and out the arses of Black Dow’s army. Behind a screen of hides, not two strides from the flock, a woman was slaughtering ’em and three more doing the skinning and gutting and hanging the carcasses, all soaked to the armpits in blood and not caring much about it either.

Two lads, probably just reached fighting age, were watching. Laughing at how stupid the sheep were, not to guess what was happening behind those hides. They didn’t see that they were in the pen, and behind a screen of songs and stories and young men’s dreams, war was waiting, soaked to the armpits and not caring. Craw saw it all well enough. So why was he still sitting meek in his pen? Might be old sheep can’t jump new fences either.

The black standard of the Protector of the North was dug into the earth outside some ivy-wrapped ruin, long ago conquered by the forest. More men busy in the clearing before it, and stirring horses tethered in long rows. A grindstone being pedalled, metal shrieking, sparks spraying. A woman hammering at a cartwheel. A smith working at a hauberk with pincers and a mouthful of mail rings. Children hurrying about with armfuls of shafts, slopping buckets on yokes, sacks of the dead knew what. A complicated business, violence, once the scale gets big enough.

A man sprawled on a stone slab, oddly at ease in the midst of all this work that made nothing, on his elbows, head tipped back, eyes closed. Body all in shadow but a chink of sun from between the branches coming down across his smirk so it was bathed in double brightness.

‘By the dead.’ Craw walked to him and stood looking down. ‘If it ain’t the prince o’ nothing much. Those women’s boots you’re wearing?’

‘Styrian leather.’ Calder’s lids drifted open a slit, that curl to his lip he’d had since a boy. ‘Curnden Craw. You still alive, you old shit?’

‘Bit of a cough, as it goes.’ He hawked up and spat phlegm onto the old stone between Calder’s fancy foot-leather. ‘Reckon I’ll survive, though. Who made the mistake o’ letting you crawl back from exile?’

Calder swung his legs off the slab. ‘None other than the great Protector himself. Guess he couldn’t beat the Union without my mighty sword-arm.’

‘What’s his plan? Cut it off and throw it at ’em?’