“And what if it goes like you say?” rumbled Tul, “what happens then? Apart from we give Bethod our heads?”

“Oh, I like my head where it is, big lad. We draw him on, north by north, that’s what the forest told me. There’s a place up in the mountains, a place well loved by the moon. A strong valley, and watched over by the dead of my family, and the dead of my people, and the dead of the mountains, all the way back until when the world was made.”

Dogman scratched his head. “A fortress in the mountains?”

“A strong, high place. High and strong enough for a few to hold off a many until help were to arrive. We lure him on up into the valley, and your Union friends follow up at a lazy distance. Far enough that his witch don’t see ’em coming, she’s so busy looking at us. Then, while he’s all caught up in trying to snuff us out for good and all, the Southerners creep up behind, and—” He slapped his palms together with an echoing crack. “We squash him between us, the sheep-fucking bastard!”

“Sheep-fucker!” cursed the girl, kicking at the hammer on the ground.

They all looked at each other for a moment. Dogman didn’t much like the sound of this for a plan. He didn’t much like the notion of trusting their lives to the say-so o’ this crazy hillman. But it sounded like some kind of a chance. Enough that he couldn’t just say no, however much he’d have liked to. “We got to talk on this.”

“Course you do, my new best friends, course you do. Don’t take too long about it though, eh?” Crummock grinned wide. “I been down from the High Places for way too long, and the rest o’ my beautiful children, and my beautiful wives, and the beautiful mountains themselves will all of them be missing me. Think on the sunny side o’ this. If Bethod don’t follow, you get a few nights sat up in the High Places as the summer dies, warming yourselves at my fire, and listening to my songs, and watching the sun going down over the mountains. That sound so bad? Does it?”

“You thinking of listening to that mad bastard?” muttered Tul, once they’d got out of earshot. “Witches and wizards and all that bloody rubbish? He makes it up as he goes along!”

Logen scratched his face. “He’s nowhere near as mad as he sounds. He’s held out against Bethod all these years. The only one who has. Twelve winters is it now, he’s been hiding, and raiding, and keeping one foot ahead? Up in the mountains maybe, but still. He’d have to be slippery as fishes and tough as iron to make that work.”

“You trust him, then?” asked Dogman.

“Trust him?” Logen snorted. “Shit, no. But his feud with Bethod’s deeper even than ours is. He’s right about that witch, I seen her, and I seen some other things this past year… if he says she’ll see us, I reckon I believe him. If she doesn’t, and Bethod don’t come, well, nothing lost is there?”

Dogman had that empty feeling, worse’n ever. He looked over at Crummock, sitting on a rock with his children round him, and the madman smiled back a mouthful of yellow teeth. Hardly the man you’d want to hang all your hopes on, but Dogman could feel the wind changing. “We’d be taking one bastard of a risk,” he muttered. “What if Bethod caught up to us and got his way?”

“We move fast, then, don’t we!” growled Dow. “It’s a war. Taking risks is what you do if you reckon on winning!”

“Uh,” grunted Grim.

Tul nodded his big head. “We’ve got to do something. I didn’t come here to watch Bethod sit on a hill. He needs to be got down.”

“Got down where we can set to work on him!” hissed Dow.

“But it’s your choice.” Logen clapped his hand down on the Dogman’s shoulder. “You’re the chief.”

He was the chief. He remembered them deciding on it, gathered round Threetrees’ grave. Dogman had to admit, he’d much rather have told Crummock to fuck himself, then turned round and headed back, and told West they never found a thing except woods. But once you’ve got a task, you get it done. That’s what Threetrees would’ve said.

Dogman gave a long sigh, that feeling in his gut bubbling up so high he was right on the point of puking. “Alright. But this plan ain’t going to get us anything but dead unless the Union are ready to do their part, and in good time too. We’ll take it to Furious, and let their chief Burr know what we’re about.”

“Furious?” asked Logen.

Tul grinned. “Long story.”

Flowers and Plaudits

Jezal still did not have the slightest idea why it was necessary for him to wear his best uniform. The damn thing was stiff as a board and creaking with braid. It had been designed for standing to attention in rather than riding, and, as a result, dug painfully into his stomach with every movement of his horse. But Bayaz had insisted, and it was surprisingly difficult to say no to the old fool, whether Jezal was supposed to be in command of this expedition or not. It had seemed easier, in the end, just to do as he was told. So he rode at the head of the long column in some discomfort, constantly tugging at his tunic and sweating profusely in the bright sun. The one consolation was that he got to breathe fresh air. Everyone else had to eat his dust.

To further add to his pain, Bayaz was intent on continuing the themes that had made Jezal so very bored all the way to the edge of the World and back.

“…it is vital for a king to maintain the good opinion of his subjects. And it is not so very hard to do. The lowly have small ambitions, and are satisfied with small indulgences. They need not get fair treatment. They need only think that they do…”

Jezal found that after a while he could ignore the droning of the old man’s voice, in the same way that one could ignore the barking of an old dog that barked all the time. He slumped into his saddle and allowed his thoughts to wander. And where else would they find their way, but to Ardee?

He had landed himself in quite a pickle, alright. Out on the plain, things had seemed so very simple. Get home, marry her, happily ever after. Now, back in Adua, back among the powerful, and back in his old habits, they grew more complicated by the day. The possibility of damage to his reputation and his prospects were issues that could not simply be dismissed. He was a Colonel in the King’s Own, and that meant certain standards to uphold.

“… Harod the Great always had respect for the common man. More than once, it was the secret of his victories over his peers…”

And then Ardee herself was so much more complicated in person than she had been as a silent memory. Nine parts witty, clever, fearless, attractive. One part a mean and destructive drunk. Every moment with her was a lottery, but perhaps it was that sense of danger that struck the sparks when they touched, made his skin tingle and his mouth go dry… his skin was tingling now, even at the thought. He had never felt like this about a woman before, not ever. Surely it was love. It had to be. But was love enough? How long would it last? Marriage, after all, was forever, and forever was a very long time.

An indefinite extension of their current not-so secret romance would have been his preferred choice, but that bastard Glokta had stuck his ruined foot through that possibility. Anvils, and sacks, and canals. Jezal remembered that white monster shoving his bag over a prisoner’s head on a public thoroughfare, and shuddered at the thought. But he had to admit that the cripple was right. Jezal’s visits were not good for that girl’s reputation. One should treat others the way one would want to be treated, he supposed, just as Ninefingers had once said. But it certainly was a damned inconvenience.

“…are you even listening, my boy?”

“Eh? Er… yes, of course. Harod the Great, and so forth. The high respect he had for the common man.”

“Appeared to have,” grumbled Bayaz. “And he knew how to take a lesson too.”

They were getting close to Adua now, passing out of the farmland and through one of the huddles of shacks, impromptu dwellings, cheap inns and cheaper brothels that had grown up around each of the city’s gates, huddling about the road, each one almost a town in its own right. Up into the long shadow of Casamir’s Wall, the outermost of the city’s lines of defence. A dour guardsmen stood on either side of the high archway, gates marked with the Golden sun of the Union standing open. They passed through the darkness and out into the light. Jezal blinked.