Maybe Black Calder had lost his edge. Happens to everyone, in the end. Folk get comfortable. Get so stuck on thinking they’re the best, the strongest, the most cunning, that when someone better, stronger, more cunning comes along they don’t even realise they’re yesterday’s bread. Not till it’s too late.

He was waiting, under the ice-fringed eaves of the hall at the top of the hill. The man who’d ruled the North for twenty years. A little greyer, maybe, than last time Clover saw him. A little more lined. But wasn’t everyone? He looked relaxed, for a man whose dreams had all come crashing down.

“Jonas Clover!” He spread his arms like he was greeting an old friend, a gesture which Clover found anything but reassuring. “Welcome to Currahome. What d’you think of the place?”

“A charming winter scene,” said Clover as he looked back down the valley, catching his breath and trying to rub the chill from his pink fingertips. “I’m climbing a lot more hills than I’d like to be at my time o’ life, mind you.”

Calder waved towards the smattering of men camped on the hillside. “You think mustering warriors was what I’d been planning for my dotage, you lazy bastard? I much preferred Carleon but my fool of a son lost it. Give him his sword back, Trapper, what are you doing?”

Trapper frowned sideways at Clover. “I thought, you know, he might try something.”

“It’s Jonas Clover, what would he try? Bad jokes? There’s probably not even a blade in the scabbard. Just a spare sausage or something.”

Clover felt a touch offended about that as he buckled his sword back on. Probably he shouldn’t have. Offence did no one any good, after all, and Calder was right. Trying anything here was the style o’ manly madness Jonas Steepfield might’ve contemplated. And look what happened to that idiot.

“Let’s get in out of the cold.” Calder turned towards the hall. “You’re a connoisseur of sword-work, you’ll enjoy this.”

As the doors were opened, the unmistakable clanging of steel on steel rang out. Blade-music, as the skalds have it, making their living setting poetic terms to the world’s horrors. Shadows danced among the carved rafters of the firelit hall, hot as a forge after the chill outside, bringing a prickle to Clover’s frost-numbed extremities. Men sat on benches, drinking, eating, oohing and ahhing at the sight of two men fighting. Or maybe training. Or one big man and a stringy lad. Seemed quite the mismatch at first, but as Clover got closer he saw it wasn’t going the way you’d expect.

During his long and undistinguished career teaching sword-work, he’d watched hundreds of boys practise with a blade, usually while wearing a look of pained disappointment. He’d seen no more’n a dozen with any high talent for the business. It wasn’t so much bravery that it took, which was reasonably common, as a lack of fear. Lack of fear that you’d get hurt, which was rare. Lack of fear that you’d hurt someone else which, strange to say, was rarer yet.