‘Fuck-up?’ Kosh was looking back, hot tears streaming down her cheeks. ‘How dare you! You think I was the only one they took? You think I learnt what I know from the air, from the skies? I had a family! I had parents, a sister, a brother! They took us all!’

Lemon raised a hand, her fire quenched, horror dawning in her eyes. ‘What I meant was—’

‘They killed us, one by one, drawing the words from us like guts. My father held, my mother too, my elder sister, despite the privations, the atrocities. They gave them nothing but trifles, child’s tricks. But they knew, they knew they were teased, so they cut deeper and longer. Until it was me and my brother, all that was left. I was next. So, yes! I told them things. I couldn’t watch my little brother die, watch myself be cut and scoured away like my elders, and for what? For your miserable little kingdom? Your mad king’s pretence of empire? This place, this wretched place is a sink, a bog of ruined, lost peoples, drowning in their own filth. You are a joke to us, your stupid, isolated little country, backward, worthless. A plague-soaked, damnable pit.’

Nobody spoke. Foss extended a slow hand, reaching for little Nort’s shoulder, but Kosh turned hard away from him, pressed her face into her hands and sobbed, great heaving gasps and wails, her tears dripping from her chin and splashing onto the grass beneath her. At last, as the others sat in awkward silence, she subsided, wiping at her eyes with sodden sleeves.

‘The flotilla … The blockade,’ Chel murmured. ‘It was all for you. You and your … family.’ His voice was tight and scratchy. ‘Your brother, what happened to him?’

‘What happened?’ She sniffed, rattling fluid around her head. She pointed an accusatory finger at Tarfel, who still huddled alone by the cart. ‘His brother happened to my brother. A plague upon you all.’

She stood suddenly, turning this way and that, an escape with no direction.

‘Whoa, friend,’ Foss called, moving to stand alongside her. ‘Hold a moment, please.’

‘Just let me go home! Take me back to your accursed port, let me see my people again, let them take me away from this horror, this savagery.’ Tears brimmed anew in her eyes. ‘I just want to go home, and I have no home to go to.’

Chel swallowed hard. ‘You didn’t hear? They … they didn’t tell you?’ The eyes around the fire swung to him. ‘I didn’t tell you, last night?’

Loveless was watching him, firelight sparkling in her eyes like embers. ‘What is it, cub? What else?’

He swallowed again, his throat suddenly dry, and wondered who had the last of the brandy. ‘Denirnas is … gone. Corvel’s forces. The other news from Nadej.’

‘Gone?’