The leader bowed even lower. “You are wise and merciful, Great Queen.”

“I like to think so.” She nodded to Shivers. “Kill ’em first, then boil ’em down to the bones, then get Flatstone to send the bones back across the Crinna. Maybe that’ll teach their kind to stay on their side of the water.”

She watched ’em dragged out, gibbering and weeping, and had a sense the faces of the warriors in the hall were changed. No scornful glances now. Eyes mostly to the floor, indeed. Her father would’ve said it’s a good thing, to show mercy. Long as you also show, when it’s needful, that you can make of your heart a stone.

Isern offered a chagga pellet, and Rikke took it and stuffed it up behind her lip. “You approve?”

“Do you hear me disapprove?” asked Isern.

And so it went. They marched in or were dragged in. Those who’d fought on one side or the other. Those who’d served her, or served Black Calder. She stuck mostly to mercy, but she made some examples, too. Enough, she judged, to keep the North orderly while she was off striking a bargain with the friends she’d turned into enemies. The day wore on and the strips of sunlight from the tall windows crept across the stone floor, from one side of Skarling’s Hall to the other, till the room was mostly empty, and the flood became a trickle, and the trickle dried up to naught.

“That everyone?” asked Rikke, sitting back.

“Just one more,” said Shivers.

A Half-Baked Loaf

Clover sat in the yard outside Skarling’s Hall and watched the nervous folk called in to receive their deservings. He watched some strut out beaming over their rewards. He watched some dragged out crestfallen over their punishments. He saw a couple noticeably not emerge at all.

Life and death, hanging on the word of Black Rikke. She held more of the North and in a tighter grip now than Black Dow at his most feared, than Black Calder at his most cunning. Who’d have guessed that, when she came tumbling through the wet woods to lie at his feet all those months ago? He gave a disbelieving little snort of laughter. Would’ve taken the Long Eye to see it coming.

Clover had seen ’em rise and fall. The leaders, the chiefs, the kings. He’d taken a hand in a few of those ups and downs himself, indeed. Bethod, and the Bloody-Nine, and Black Dow, and Scale Ironhand, and Stour Nightfall, an ever-lengthening list o’ glory and disaster. Those who served ’em, too, the fortunes of the little men rising and falling with the big men they chose to follow, like boats lifted by the tide, or dropped stranded on the sands. He glanced over at Sholla and Flick. Hoped they wouldn’t end up stranded, on account of tethering their fortunes to his.

Maybe, having spent half his life too reckless, he’d ended up playing it too safe. He’d clung to those who’d risen and could only come down, rather than had the courage to seek out those whose tide was surging in. To seek out those he actually liked, maybe. But he was still casting a shadow, at least. More’n you could say for Wonderful, or Magweer, or Downside, or all those others he’d put in the mud down the years. Still alive, as the Bloody-Nine was once so fond o’ saying. There wasn’t much else to take pride in, for a man who carried a sword. Even one who tried never to draw it.