‘Fuck off, princey!’

‘Right you are.’

Chel looked back at the other half-throne. Borre was drinking now, his broad back to them, a massive stack of meat flanked by equally imposing hulks. Even getting close to the half-brother was going to be a challenge, let alone causing him some kind of injury. Surely there had to be a better way than this?

He kicked Rennic. ‘Are you sure about this?’ A nod toward Borre. ‘He’s … enormous. Have you given much thought to—’

Rennic’s glance was barely even cursory. Wine stained his beard. ‘Don’t worry your pretty head, little man. We’re on top of it.’

His words did nothing to reassure. Chel looked back at Borre, and realized the surreptitious gaze of several among Borre’s table was fixed on their own. As drinking horns were refilled and drained around him, Chel saw their hard features ease, their own jugs beginning to circulate in earnest. Was this some level of competition? Were they being measured? Or was something more dangerous at play?

He turned to Rennic to raise the prospect, but the big man had eyes only for Ruumi, and likewise she for him. Not for the first time, Chel felt like an outsider, a voyeur, peering in through the window of a party to which he hadn’t been invited.

‘Fuck it,’ he muttered, and reached for the wine.

NINE

He heard it first in his dream, a starlit stroll along snow-capped mountains that had unravelled into an abattoir, the air thick with the agonized squeals of frenzied pigs. Rennic stood at the centre of the carnage, blood-soaked and aproned, sharpening a great cleaver with sweeps of a stone.

‘We’re on top of it, little man,’ he said. ‘The gods are laughing. Come and join the party.’

‘Where is she?’ he cried, panic mounting. ‘Where is she?’

Awake. Awake but the sound continued, a scream, a roaring, excruciating scream of shock, pain and outrage.

Where is she?

He was out of bed, scrabbling for the mace, fingers closing on cool wood beside his pallet. The chambers were dark, the sole light a distant torch in the outside hallway. His eyes floundered in the gloom, but already he could see movement, the great lump of Foss rising from his pallet, the scrawny stick-figure of Tarfel, huddled beneath furs, wishing the world away. ‘I told them, I told them, I told them,’ came from somewhere beneath.

Rennic’s pallet was empty.

‘Shepherd’s mercy, friends, what’s that noise?’

‘Come on!’

‘I told them, I told them—’

He’d gone three steps before the magnitude of his drunkenness hit him, a great wobbly smack across his legs that sent him skittering sideways instead of toward the doorway. Whatever hour it was, he’d not yet slept his way into the coming hangover. He shook himself, pressing the cold metal of the mace-tip to his temple, then made for the doorway with renewed intent.