‘Deep east. Don’t know where. It’s hard to be precise when you’ve got a language and a speech barrier, eh?’ He sighed, all his rage spent, his tears yet to come. ‘She was a leader, a general, but her side lost. I know that much. She was banished, sent to wander, mutilated, humiliated. But she overcame. She always overcame.’

He took another swig, deep and burning, then offered it to Loveless. She demurred again, looking pained, and Rennic took another swallow. Their rolling arguments had passed like a storm in the night. Whisper’s loss had sucked the air from their fire, but in its absence neither seemed to know how to look at the other.

‘Someone once told me,’ Rennic said, ‘growing up is watching your heroes die, and trying to live up to their image once they’re gone. Thought at my time of life, I was done with that. I was wrong.’

He raised the brandy in toast.

‘Her name was Kwayedza, and she was a hero.’

Her name was Kwayedza, and she was a hero.

Foss said the prayers and the final refrain.

While we speak their names, they ride with us still.

‘She said something,’ Chel said, his gaze lost in the fire, the memory returning with a sudden sting. ‘You know, at the end. Told me to remember.’

Rennic looked up, resharpened. ‘What? What did she say?’

Chel made the series of gestures, slow and clumsy with unpractised fingers. ‘The first two, I know – look, mine …’

‘Are you sure? Are you certain? Do it again.’

Chel nodded, and repeated the gestures. ‘What? What did she say?’

Loveless looked over at him, uncertainty and discomfort warring against grief across her face. ‘She said, “find my children”.’

Rennic stared back into the fire. ‘Then once this is over, that is what we will do.’ With that, he stood and marched to the clearing’s edge, resuming his solitary contemplation, his clinging clothes still only half-dried. Loveless watched him go, brows narrowed, tight lines beneath her eyes.

Chel looked around the fire. ‘Should we … I don’t know, be mourning?’

‘We don’t mourn.’ Loveless didn’t even look at him. ‘We give the circle. We add the tales to our stock. We move on. We don’t have the time. The luxury.’ She paused, then met his gaze with a look of unexpected tenderness. ‘Cub,’ she said in a low voice, ‘what did happen? In the courtyard?’

Chel clutched his knees to his chest and shuffled closer to the fire, still feeling the evening’s chill despite the grumbling glow of his burns. He knew he must have told them something in their flight from the Bridge House, gabbled an explanation, but his memories were sketchy, and he’d clearly fallen short. He clenched his eyes shut. It was too soon to relive it all. He opted to summarize.