“Ah.” For some reason, Calder had the ghost of a smile at the last. He leaned forwards and spoke so softly only she could hear. “So you don’t see everything.”

The blade fell. There was a sharp crack, blood sprayed up in dark streaks and Calder flopped face down on the dirty grass.

There was a long silence, after the great noise of the battle. Every eye fixed on the bubbling wound in the back of Black Calder’s head. Shivers stood frowning down in the midst of those staring faces, the sword that had been the Bloody-Nine’s in his fist, that dull, grey blade with the one silver letter dashed and speckled with blood.

Then Scenn-i-Phail lifted high his hammer, which looked to have some hair stuck to the scarred head. “This was well done!” he roared.

“Truly the girl is beloved o’ the moon!” said his brother Scofen, laughing and waving his axe.

“Black Calder ruled the North.” Isern slapped a hard hand down on Rikke’s shoulder. “She who beat him should do the same. The children of Crummock-i-Phail stand with Black Rikke!”

“And I!” roared the Nail, before Rikke could get a word in, stepping up out of the crowd, so spattered head to toe with blood it looked like he’d gone swimming in it. “I stand with Black Rikke!”

“And I,” grunted Hardbread, clambering with some effort onto the little knoll. He gave a burp and thumped at his breastbone, peering down at Calder’s corpse. “Your father would’ve been proud.”

Rikke blinked at them. Calder had stolen the name from Black Dow, that day on the Heroes. Seemed now she’d stolen it from him.

“Black Rikke!” men were shouting all around, even some who’d been Calder’s men until the sword fell. They had to be someone else’s men now, after all. “Black Rikke!” All competing to shout it loudest, as though having a girl with a tattooed face in charge who used to shit herself in the streets of Uffrith was their fondest dream. “Black Rikke!” As though this had been what everyone wanted all along. What they’d expected.

Shivers carefully wiped his sword with a rag, sunlight glinting on his metal eye. “Looks like you win,” he said.

Rikke looked from that little hill across the churned-up battlefield, then down at Calder’s corpse. She felt no satisfaction in it.

Well, maybe just a bit.

PART IX

“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”

Karl Marx

Ready for a Fight

“Tight enough,” gasped Savine, fists clenched on the table, and she heard Freid grunt with effort as she knotted the laces.

Someone had daubed the words We Will Burn the Past above the fireplace and taken an axe to the wallpaper, but as prison cells went, she supposed it could have been a great deal worse. A room in the palace where some minor visiting dignitary could have gently aged as they waited on His Majesty’s pleasure. One could almost have mistaken it for the dressing chamber of a lady of fashion. Except for the crooked bars bodged into the window frames and the sense of barely contained mortal terror.