The man who’d been carved almost in half flopped down, legs still kicking weakly at the timbers.

“You’re shot, Gorst!” yelled Leo. “You can’t stop all of us! And the damn boat’s not leaving anyway. Give up now!”

“Tell your mother…” came that high warble. “That I always held her…

in high esteem.”

Leo ground his teeth. “As if she’d care a shit. Load your bows. You lot, get down there and finish him!”

No one seemed very keen. The wharf looked like a busy day at the slaughterhouse. They edged forwards through the mess of blood and broken bodies.

“Help me,” the one with a handful of his own guts was whimpering. “Help me.”

“Throw down your arms!” shouted one of the Anglanders.

It seemed Gorst preferred to go down fighting.

He burst from behind the crates in spite of the bolts stuck in him. He slashed one man’s throat with his short steel in a spray of blood, left his long steel rammed through another’s chest, kicked a third tumbling into the water, shouldered a fourth out of his way and, with a high bellow, came pounding down the wharf, head lowered, arms pumping, short steel held overhand like a dagger.

“By the dead,” muttered Leo, dropping his cane and fumbling for his sword.

Planks rattled under Gorst’s boots. A flatbow bolt pinged off his breastplate. Another sank into the same shoulder he was already stuck in. He barely noticed, coming on faster and faster, twisted face speckled red, eyes fixed on Leo under his furiously wrinkled brows, short steel going up high.

Leo took one lurching step back, raising his sword, no idea how he’d have met that charge even with all his limbs.

Next to his ear, Jurand’s flatbow made a sharp whipping sound.

The bolt punched into Gorst’s face, under one eye.

His head snapped up. He lost all momentum.

He took one more wobbly step forward, but with no venom. His eyes had gone soft, slightly crossed.

Another flatbow bolt nailed him through the thigh. As his foot came down, the knee buckled and he toppled sideways, crashed drunkenly into a barrel and came to rest with his bolt-stuck right arm over it, one leg out in front, the other bent underneath him, his bloody short steel wedged harmlessly between two boards of the wharf beside his limp left hand.

Leo let out a long breath and slowly lowered his sword. “Get aboard,” he grunted at Glaward. “Find Orso.”

There was a red stain across Gorst’s eye above the flatbow bolt. But the other one rolled up towards Leo. It seemed, somehow, he still had that smile.

“Do you believe…” His voice sounded much like anyone else’s, whispering. “In redemption?”

“I don’t fucking care.”

“You’re young. Give it time.”

Leo groped for a cutting reply, but banter had never really been his thing, and certainly it had never been Gorst’s. Besides, the old swordsman wasn’t moving. His eyes were glassy. Words would’ve been wasted breath. They usually were.