Riven is still smiling as he makes another move, but Thomas sees it coming and steps inside. He takes the sting out of the blow with the tail of his own staff and then manages a glancing rake across Riven’s fingers.

Both step back.

Riven’s smile has gone. Thomas can smell his own blood.

Riven comes at him again, a flurry of feints, then two blows. Thomas stops the first but is too slow with the second. Riven brings his staff up under Thomas’s arm and in a practised move he turns him, stamps on his clog and smashes the heel of his hand into Thomas’s throat.

Thomas sags, drops his staff, and for a moment he cannot breathe for the pain. He falls backwards but lands with a jolt that rouses him in time to duck. Riven’s staff passes over his ear. Thomas snatches it and uses Riven’s strength to right himself, jerking Riven off balance. In one move he collects his staff from the mud and swings it around in a short sweep that Riven does not see it through his half-closed eye. It catches Riven behind the knee and he leaps backwards with the pain.

‘Not bad, Brother Monk,’ Riven says, ‘but this has gone on long enough, hasn’t it?’

He makes a feint that Thomas sees, then another that he does not, and then the full weight of his staff whirls around in a blurring arc and crashes across Thomas’s skull as he tries to duck.

He is face down in the mud again and with the pain comes the blood. It is hot and blinding. He gets to his knees and wipes the blood with his sleeve in time to see Riven come at him again. He manages to parry the first blow and evade the next, but then he takes a short arm punch that rattles his teeth. He feels sluggish and his sight blurs.

The fight is leaving him and Riven is circling him, ready for the end.

He blinks the blood from his eyes, triggering another attack, a rolling series of blows that would have killed, but this time Thomas trips on his sodden cassock, drops on one knee, and ducks his head as Riven’s staff passes over. Then he lunges. Again Riven is blinded in the malfunctioning eye and Thomas gets through the mêlée of Riven’s pumping arms and into the soft area below his sternum. He feels the contact, doughy and soft. He rams the staff up.

Riven stops, gasps. His eyes bulge, then swim, then roll. He staggers, falling back, tipping on his heels, powerless. He drops his quarterstaff and thumps to ground and lies there with his tongue out; his face is grey-green, his breath a groaning wheeze.

Thomas gets to his feet and pulls his muddy cassock down.