and she turned, beckoning Sig over to her.
‘A visitor to see us,’ Byrne said with a frown.
‘Who?’
‘A merchant from the north, Odras says. And they have asked to see you. I think I’ll come along, though. I’m curious as to who would visit the ill-tempered Sig!’
They left the weapons-field together, leaving a few hundred warriors-in-training behind them. As they stepped from the field onto a wide street, Sig paused beside a great slab of rock that rose from the ground, taller and wider than she was. The Stone of Heroes, it was called, a host of names carved into it. Sig ran her fingertips over some of them.
Gar and Brina were the first names, carved large at the top of the stone, and beneath them many hundreds more. Sig whispered some of them to the sky.
‘Dath, Akar, Kulla, Farrell, Veradis, Corban, Coralen,’ she breathed. As she said their names their faces formed in her mind’s eye, so many, many more, the names of those who had given their lives to the Order, whether they’d fallen in battle or to time and age, if they had served the Order, their names were honoured.
Her eyes came to rest upon one last name, her fingertips tracing the rune-work carved into the stone.
‘Gunil,’ she whispered, just the sound of his name bringing back so many emotions, a gossamer web spiralling through her veins, about her heart.
Sig shook her head.
A hand touching her – Byrne, a small comfort.
‘We will never forget,’ Byrne murmured beside her, then turned and walked away.
No, Gunil, I will never forget you. With a sigh Sig followed after Byrne.
The merchant was waiting in a chamber of the keep, sitting at a table with a platter of food and a cup of wine poured for him. A barrel-chested man with thick-muscled arms, more hair on them than there was on his head. He stood as Byrne and Sig entered the room, a mouth full of crumbling cheese, his eyes widening as they took in Sig’s size and musculature, hovering on the sword hilt that jutted over her shoulder.
‘When he said warrior, what he meant was monstrous killing machine,’ the man muttered.
Sig frowned. Is he touched in the head?
After the merchant had recovered from the general shock of meeting Sig, the sight of a warrior giant seeming to unman him for a moment, and then the added shock of being introduced to Byrne, leader of the fabled Order of the Bright Star, he announced himself as Asger, a merchant trader recently from Kergard, the most northern outpost of the Desolation.
‘There was nothing there but ash and rock when last I travelled the Desolation,’ Sig rumbled. She looked out of the window at the far end of the chamber, which opened out onto a view of the north. The fortress spilt down the hill towards the river Elv, dark and wide, as it curved sluggishly around the hill that Dun Seren was built upon, a hundred quays and jetties jutting out into its waters. A bridge of stone arched over the river, leading into the Desolation, now more green than the grey it had been when Sig had dwelt there. In the distance leaden clouds were massing, creeping their way south.
And bringing snow with them, no doubt.
‘It is thriving now,’ Asger said, still eyeing Sig dubiously. ‘Kergard, I mean. Since the crater became a lake the land has become green again. There are fields and farms, a wealth of furs and skins to be had from the Wild. A good life to be had, if you’re not afraid of some hard graft, and the cold, of course. Or at least, it was a good life …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Things have turned, sour,’ he said. ‘New folks, bad folks, fleeing the goings-on down south.’
‘Then why are you coming south, marching into these troubles?’ Byrne asked him.
‘There’s trouble all over, seems to me,’ Asger muttered, ‘but I didn’t like what I was seeing. Fights in the streets, friends killed, giant bear running amok. Lynchings. It all started with that bonfire in the Bonefells, and Old Bodil’s death.’ He stopped.
‘Bonfire? Like a beacon?’ Sig asked him.
‘Aye, you could say that,’ Asger said. ‘But I didn’t come here to tell you the troubles of the north; I’m sure you have enough troubles of your own to be dealing with.’
‘The Kadoshim are our trouble,’ Byrne said. ‘And they would be your trouble as much as ours, if we were not the shield that seeks to protect you from them.’
‘I’m