He flinched, first, with a little gasp, like he’d been bee-stung. He stared at her, wet eyes wide, slack face all red-speckled from the bubbling wound.

“Blith,” he said, drooling blood down his dirty shirt.

Rikke looked up at Shivers, and her hand was shaking but her voice was steady. “Send him down, then.”

“Right y’are.” And Shivers took one step and shoved the Great Wolf over the parapet.

Clover had been there, when the Bloody-Nine fought the Feared. Before he won the name Steepfield, even. Long before he lost it. He’d held a shield at the duel. He’d watched Bethod flung from the walls. Now he watched Bethod’s grandson flung from about the same place, and crash down in about the same place, crumpled in the wet grass where the Circle had been marked out that day.

Blood spattered Stand-i’-the-Barrows’ horse, but it hardly even twitched. Probably good and used to flying gore. Stour lay with his arms spread wide as if greeting his father, but with his head twisted all the way around, his ruined legs buckled under him and his blood spilling black into the green grass. Till a few moments ago he’d been the future of the North. Now he was mud. A stern lesson for anyone harbouring high ambitions.

Calder stared down, mouth hanging open, then up at the gatehouse, where Rikke and Shivers were black figures against the bright sky.

“Kill them!” he screamed, face twisting. “Kill them all!”

If anyone had asked him, Clover would’ve said there was less than no chance this’d be settled with talk. But you never realise how much hope you’re holding till it gets knifed and thrown off a roof.

“See you soon!” Rikke shrieked after them, stabbing at the sky with her bloody dagger. So maybe she wasn’t clever, and had seen nothing with her Long Eye at all, but was just the maddest of the whole crowd, and had doomed herself and everyone who followed her. Probably Clover, too, who’d done nothing but try to steer a safe course through a tempest of other men’s making.

He’d had trouble controlling his horse at a walk. At a bone-rattling gallop away from the walls in the midst of a couple of dozen other barging, scraping, eye-rolling beasts he was helpless. He barely clung on, gripping with his aching legs, reins flapping everywhere. There were arrows falling around them, flickering down into the grass. His shoulders were itching, sure he was about to get a shaft right in the back. One of Stand-i’-the-Barrows’ savages did, long hair tangled around his painted face as he toppled screaming from his horse. There’s the big problem with bones as armour. They don’t bloody work.

Clover had never been more grateful to reach a treeline in his life, managed to slow his horse by dragging on the reins, then nearly set it trotting back towards the walls, probably would’ve if Sholla hadn’t grabbed the bridle. He slithered from the saddle and stood there with his hands on his trembling knees, just breathing.