I’m still shaking off the shivers in my guts when I step up to my door, so I don’t notice the shadows coming round the side of the house. One slips between me and the door, one blocks the road, just like rogue cut-throats. Which is what they must be. Black Fingers’s men sent to finish what he began.

Only a little while ago, I was wishing for death to take me, but now that it’s come knocking, I want none of it. The cut-throat in the road is a thick man with a kerchief across his lower face. He raises a short sword. Without thought, I barrel into the second cut-throat standing at my door. His own sword’s in his hand, but still at his side. Though I’m smaller than him, he stumbles back. The shoddy doorframe gives way, and the two of us fall through, landing hard in the main room of my house.

I scramble off the second cut-throat as quick as I can. He’s scrambling too, his breath coming heavy.

‘Stick her!’ yells the first cut-throat through his kerchief. He’s blocking the doorway. The second cut-throat is back on his feet a few paces from me. He raises his blade. I dart towards the back door, but he cuts over in front of it before I get there. I stumble back towards the hearth. A cut-throat at each door. I’m trapped.

I grab wildly behind me. My hand finds the old pot. I fling it at the second cut-throat, but he ducks easily.

‘Stick her!’ the first cut-throat yells again from the doorway, and the second cut-throat takes a step towards me.

As I shrink back in the corner waiting for his blow, my foot treads on something. Suddenly there’s movement behind me. I cry out in startlement, but I’m not the only one making noise.

‘What the fug is that?’ the second cut-throat cries. He raises his sword, but in protection not attack.

I wheel around to see a misshapen horror rising inches from me. Black, looming eyes. A sunken hole for a nose. A wrinkled maw with shattered teeth. Brida.

‘It’s the very devil,’ whispers the first cut-throat from the doorway.

Brida’s ragged shawl falls from her body. The low hearth light flickers across her sunken pit of a shoulder. She raises the shaft of bone that finishes one arm and aims it at me. ‘She cursed me,’ comes Brida’s little voice. ‘I was once a man like you. I came to do her harm, but she cursed me so. Look at my man parts now.’ Brida lifts her skirt to show her cunny.

The second cut-throat begins to pray. Brida staggers towards him on legs wet with weeping sores. ‘If you harm the sin eater, you will share my curse.’