“Go on!” she screamed at their backs. “Back you go to your mummies, you batch o’ cowards! Not one decent set o’ bones in the lot of you! We’re well rid o’ you bloody chicken-fuckers! I never saw such a stack o’ fishy cunts! You bloody… bloody…” She’d run out of insults. Even bad ones. And the Nail and his boys had already made it to the gate of Carleon and vanished down the entrance tunnel. She was shouting herself raw at the wet air.

She realised she’d wandered halfway through the city, bare feet cold on the damp cobbles, bare legs covered in gooseflesh under her cloak, damp hair plastered to her head by the chill rain. Reckoned she must have trod in something on the way, one foot was smeared brown down the side.

“By the dead,” she muttered, hopping about while she tried to wipe it on a slippery doorstep. That was when she saw a curious crowd had built up. Townsfolk. Carls and Thralls. A couple of dirty children with a big, bedraggled dog.

“Haven’t you shits got aught better to do?” she snapped, pulling that red cloth tight about her along with such shreds of dignity as she had left. She turned back towards Skarling’s Hall with her chin in the air, doing her best to look like a screaming row half-naked in the pissing rain was just one more step in her grand plan.

Corleth, Isern and Shivers stood in the street behind her, and did not look convinced.

“I’ve heard it said a clever woman can turn enemies into allies with her quim,” mused Isern, eyes thoughtfully narrowed. “Yours seems to work the other way around.”

“Very funny.” Rikke pushed past her and strode back up the hill. “The Nail had his mind set on going after Calder now. If you can call it a mind. Bastard wouldn’t be argued down. Now, mark you! With winter coming on!”

“I warned her about getting cocky,” muttered Isern from the side of her mouth. “Maybe I should’ve warned her about getting cock.”

“We’ll make do fine without him!” Rikke roared it at the town in general. “A fucking carrot can do the same job!”

Shivers raised his one good brow. “Doubt we’ll beat Black Calder with a carrot,” he said.

“We will not beat him with vegetables of any kind,” said Isern as they stepped back through the gate in Bethod’s great wall. “For that we will need men, and my guess is the Nail will be taking his cousins and his uncles and his friends back to the West Valleys with him.”

“We’ll be short-handed if Calder comes knocking.”

“When he comes knocking.”

“All right, all right!” snapped Rikke, stumbling on the mud-heavy hem of her cloak and having to pull it up clumsily above her ankles. “Might be I got a little carried away. But we managed before he turned up, eh, Isern?”

Isern considered her, jaw muscles squirming as she chewed a chagga pellet. “When we were running for our lives through a freezing forest, d’you mean?”