Isern gave a smoky snort. “You could say that of all the North. Is there a stride of sod, anywhere ’twixt the Crinna and the Whiteflow, hasn’t been watered with blood at one time or another?”

“Not like it was here,” said Shivers. “Greatest battle the North ever saw. Black Dow had his standard on this very hill.” He pointed to the white fields below them on their right, slashed by black walls, studded with black trees. “Scale down there, still wi’ both hands, and Brodd Tenways, and Cairm Ironhead, Glama Golden, Caul Reachey over on the left, in Osrung.” As Rikke struggled up level with him he turned around and carried on climbing. “Every one of ’em back to the mud.”

“Well,” said Isern, using her spear like a walking stick, “being a War Chief is a business heaped high with both risks and rewards.”

“Lord Marshal Kroy stood on the other side,” said Shivers, “and thousands o’ Union soldiers, and your father, too. Three red days we had of it. Men struggled here with all they had for each step of ground. Died and killed for every handful of soil.” He frowned out at the crisp, quiet white, stretching away to the hazy fells all around, and shook his head like he couldn’t make it fit. “Now you’d never know. Few years passed and… it’s just fields.”

“You’ve turned talkative,” said Rikke. She couldn’t remember the last time he’d said this much in one afternoon.

“Brings it all back, I guess, being here.” Shivers stepped over the crest of the hill and onto its flat top, frowning towards the great ring of stones they called the Heroes, black against the white sky, like the prongs on a giant’s crown. “The good and the bad.”

“No trouble planting your flag here now.” And Corleth stuck Rikke’s rolled-up standard of the Long-Eye into the snow, her face all blotched pink from the cold.

One of the stones was broken halfway up, a couple more had toppled down the centuries, another sheared off and cloven by a crack, like it was dealt a blow with a mighty hammer. Rikke stepped over to the nearest and kicked the snow from her boots against its side. By the dead, it was a size. Four times a man’s height or more, topped with snow, streaked with wet, spattered with lichen, crusted with moss.

“How did they get the bastard things up here?” Her face was pinched and her chest raw from the winter but her body all sticky-hot from the climb under her cloak, so she couldn’t decide whether to draw it tight or fling it off. “Just getting myself up here was a struggle.”

“This is where Black Dow fought Calder.” Shivers was standing at the edge of the ring of stones, looking in at the snow-covered circle of tangled grass and thistle inside. “A duel to the death.”

“Aye, and you cheated,” said Isern, “and dinged Black Dow in the back of the head with that sword you’re wearing, and so Calder became Black Calder, and stole the North, and gave Skarling’s Chair to his brother to sit in, who gave it to his nephew to sit in.” She stuck her bottom lip out and scratched at her throat. “Come to think of it, all this is your fault.”