“Wish I had some answers. Truth is, though…” He leaned close to whisper in her ear. “I spent most o’ my life stumbling from one fuck-up to another.”

She glanced at his ruined face. “You’d never know to look at you.” And she found she was fussing with her necklace and forced her hand away from it with a grunt of frustration. “Just sometimes… I wish I was still someone of no importance.”

“You’ve always been of importance to me.” She felt the weight of Shivers’ hand on her shoulder and was grateful for it. “There’s only one thing I can tell you for sure. Whatever comes, I’ll be here.”

She put her own hand on top of his, and took a deep breath, and puffed it out in a smoky sigh. They stood together in the entrance of Skarling’s Hall, watching the meltwater drip, drip, drip from the archway.

Thaw

Drip, drip, drip. Cold water, onto Clover’s head, his shoulders, his back, working its way through every seam, trickling, tickling against his sore and clammy skin.

“Bloody dripping,” he muttered, frowning up at the branches, but rain was just one more of life’s buffets he was powerless to prevent.

“Guess we could move out from under the trees,” muttered Flick.

“Aye, but then we’d have the mud to deal with.” Clover shook his head and scraped a smear of dirt from his trousers with his thumbnail. Wasted effort, since they’d be spattered afresh before you knew it. “Bloody mud. Worst thing about war.”

“Worse’n the death?” asked Sholla, who’d been busy for the past hour at least with her endless quest to cut the thinnest slice of cheese imaginable.

“Death is but an occasional hazard. Mud is a constant.” And Clover rubbed that bit of dirt thoughtfully between thumb and forefinger. “Strange, isn’t it? Soil and water are both good things. Things you can’t live without. But mix the two and add an army, you’ve got a nightmare.”

It’d been a cold winter, snow banked up man tall in the High Places. With the weather tilting warmer, seemed the world was melting. Water dripped from the trees. Dripped from the eaves of Currahome’s sodden houses. Seeped through the boggy grass and gathered in the streams and swole ’em to dirty rivers. Downside came squelching over, knocking melting snow from the brambles.

“Where have you been?” asked Clover.

“There’s two things I enjoy, fucking and killing. I can’t do the one, so I’ve been at the other.”

Sholla didn’t look up from her cheese-cutting. “And did your hand enjoy it as much as you did?”

Clover chuckled. Flick chuckled. Downside frowned as he worked it through, then he worked it out, and frowned more. Didn’t say anything, though. No doubt he could’ve twisted Sholla’s head off in a wrestling match, but he knew that in a battle of wits she was much the better armed.

“By the dead, boy,” grunted Clover as Flick nudged him in the ribs, “you’ve got the sharpest damn elbows in the North—” Then he saw the worry. Black Calder, stalking over with a grim crowd of Named Men, all striving to look mighty while they tiptoed through the winter muck.