He slipped along the wall and back through the gate, into the shadows.

“Run!” roared Stand-i’-the-Barrows, and he broke for the trees, and Scunlich loped along after. A great fighter must not only know when to fight, but when not to, and Scunlich was as proud of the few bad fights they’d got away from as the many good ones they’d won. This was a bad one, very bad, the worst.

The hillmen chased after them a way, but fell to picking over the dead for trinkets and were left behind. They sent arrows flitting after, whistling farewells, twittering into the greenwood, clicking into the trunks with their feathers fluttering. Stand-i’-the-Barrows kept up a fast pace on his long shanks and the sound of battle soon faded.

They stopped to catch their breath and listen. Gromma had an arrow in his back and sat down beside a tree, wheezing red, and did not get up.

“We were fools to trust in Black Calder!” shouted Yort. “The cunning of cunning men always runs out, and usually at the worst moment. I said so back in—”

Stand-i’-the-Barrows caught him around the neck and bore him down onto the ground and squatted over him, throttling him, beating his skull against a tree root until the blood flowed, then catching his head and twisting it right around until his neck came apart with a thick crunching.

“That was well done,” said Scunlich.

“Aye,” he said, standing up. “I wish I could take his bones.” And the others grunted their agreement. It was a worthy thought. Then Stand-

i’-the-Barrows ran on, his axe in his hand, and Scunlich ran on with him, but it seemed the further they went into the wood and the darker and dimmer and greener it grew, the fewer of them were left.

There was a chill among the trees. A damp chill and a mist clinging to the scrub so the twigs came lashing from nowhere and the brambles clutched out from the grey to snag foot and ankle and bring men down squealing in the undergrowth.

“Whence comes this mist?” hissed Stand-i’-the-Barrows, creeping forwards slowly, and it was true it seemed a thing alive, twisting between the black trunks, sticking to men in tatters.

They blundered into a clearing, Scunlich stumbling forwards with his hands stretched out like a blind man searching. A stunted tree loomed from the murk. Or no, a stump, and on the stump a figure. An old woman, bent, but something gleamed on her forehead as she looked up, and Scunlich tottered back amazed, for he saw that her face was split by a great scar, and the two halves were stitched together with golden wire.

“A devil,” he whispered. “A devil!”

The bone-pickers had gathered into a knot, no more than a dozen left where there’d been hundreds, thousands. Now they crowded close about Stand-i’-the-Barrows, back to back, drawing strength from his strength.

“Did you make this mist?” he snarled at the woman.

“I did,” she said, “and reckon it a good one.” And though she was old her voice was young, as beautiful to listen to as she was dreadful to look upon.