‘And I swear all the time, but you don’t see me packing up for the armpit of the world. Oh, one more thing,’ she said, delving into her pack. ‘I want you to take this. It wouldn’t do for the first sworn to a prince to be gallivanting around the countryside unarmed, would it?’

She produced the confessor’s mace she’d sported in the cells, its heavy metal head cracked and lost; it was now little more than a steel-tipped wooden baton. Somehow it felt right in his hand.

‘Thank you, Sab. It’s perfect.’

She offered him a bright, beaming smile. ‘I’m proud of you, Bear. I’ll tell Mother and our sisters that you’re doing well. That you’d have made Father proud too.’

He hugged her then, and wept silent tears in the cold beneath the broken tree.

***

‘She’s eating again. Voluntarily.’ Lemon nudged Chel and gave a pointed look toward where Brecki sat, wolfing down her share of Foss’s breakfast makings one-handed. ‘I swear to the ancestors, wee bear, she means to stitch us up.’

‘She’s rediscovered her appetite,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Rediscovered her purpose, more like, which is fucking us over.’

‘However you slice it, it’s one pendulous cock of a trek from here to the coast.’ Loveless was drawing on the snowy earth, dragging the burnt end of a branch in a semblance of a map. ‘We’re looking at weeks on foot, maybe a month. We’ll need supplies and equipment for the duration, plus what follows. And the weather will only get worse, especially that far south.’

Eka watched from the group’s edge, firelight glittering in her lone eye. ‘I know somewhere you can get mules and packs for the trip, but you’ll need coin. A lot of it.’

Rennic waved a hand. ‘Appreciate the offer but we’re a little, uh, between contracts as things stand.’

Lemon coughed. ‘Aye, well, as it happens, we maybe have a little coin,’ she said. ‘A modest pile.’

Rennic’s gaze slid to her, thick brows lowered.

‘We do?’

Lemon looked uncomfortable. ‘Could be I, uh, came into possession of some discarded silver.’

‘When?’

‘At the tower.’

‘At the fucking tow— When?’

She put up her hands. ‘When I was bezzing about trying to pluck your good self from the roaring flames, keeping my head down.’ She swallowed. ‘You know, from the smoke. A girl can hardly be blamed if folk departed were spilling their purses at her feet!’

No one spoke for a moment. Rennic’s jaw flexed in calculation.

‘Robbing the dead is a new one for you, Lem,’ Loveless said, voice playful. ‘What happened to pennies for the ferryman?’

‘Aye, right,’ Lemon scoffed, ‘like you wouldn’t have sullied yourself in my clod-hoppers. Rather slog all the way south in the buff, would you?’