The Heroes

more beautiful. Looked as if she’d had a clump of hair torn from her head, the rest matted with clot on one side. A big bruise at the corner of her mouth. One sleeve of her dirty dress ripped and brown with dry blood. She shed no tears, though, not her.
    ‘You all right?’ asked Craw.
    She glanced over her shoulder at the shambling column, and its crutches, and stretchers, and pain-screwed faces. ‘I could be worse.’
    ‘Guess so.’
    ‘Are you all right?’
    ‘Eh?’
    She pointed at his face and he touched the stitched cut on his cheek. He’d forgotten all about it until then. ‘What do you know, I could be worse myself.’
    ‘Just out of interest – if I wasn’t all right, what could you do about it?’ Craw opened his mouth, then realised he didn’t have much of an answer. ‘Don’t know. A kind word, maybe?’
    The girl looked around at the ruined square they were crossing, the wounded men propped against the wall of a house on the north side, the wounded men following them. ‘Kind words wouldn’t seem to be worth much in the midst of this.’
    Craw slowly nodded. ‘What else have we got, though?’
    He stopped maybe a dozen paces from the north end of the bridge, Shivers walking up beside him. That narrow path of stone flags stretched off ahead, a pair of torches burning at the far end. No sign of men, but Craw was sure as sure the black buildings beyond the far bank were crammed full of the bastards, all with flatbows and tickly trigger-hands. Wasn’t that big a bridge, but it looked a hell of a march across right then. An awful lot of steps, and at every footfall he might get an arrow in his fruits. Still, waiting about wasn’t going to make that any less likely. More, in fact, since it was getting darker every moment.
    So he hawked up some snot, made ready to spit it, realised the girl was watching him and swallowed it instead. Then he shrugged his shield off his shoulder and set it down by the wall, dragged his sword out from his belt and handed it to Shivers. ‘You wait here with the rest, I’ll go across and see if there’s someone around with an ear for reason.’
    ‘All right.’
    ‘And if I get shot … weep for me.’
    Shivers gave a solemn nod. ‘A river.’
    Craw held his hands up high and started walking. Didn’t seem that long ago he was doing more or less the same thing up the side of the Heroes. Walking into the wolf’s den, armed with nothing but a nervy smile and an overwhelming need to shit.
    ‘Doing the right thing,’ he muttered under his breath. Playing peacemaker. Threetrees would’ve been proud. Which was a great comfort, because when he got shot in the neck he could use a dead man’s pride to pull the arrow out, couldn’t he? ‘Too bloody old for this.’ By the dead, he should be retired. Smiling at the water with his pipe and his day’s work behind him. ‘The right thing,’ he whispered again. Would’ve been nice if, just one time, the right thing could’ve been the safe thing too. But Craw guessed life wasn’t really set up that way.
    ‘That’s far enough!’ came a voice in Northern.
    Craw stopped, all kinds of lonely out there in the gloom, water chattering away underneath him. ‘Couldn’t agree more, friend! Just need to talk!’
    ‘Last time we talked it didn’t come out too well for anyone concerned.’ Someone was walking up from the other end of the bridge, a torch in his hand, orange light on a craggy cheek, a ragged beard, a hard-set mouth with a pair of split lips.
    Craw found he was grinning as the man stopped an arm’s length away. He reckoned his chances at living through the night just took a leap for the better. ‘Hardbread, ’less I’m mistook all over the place.’ In spite of the factthey’d been struggling to kill each other not a week before, it felt more like greeting an old friend than an old enemy. ‘What the hell are you doing over here?’
    ‘Lot o’ the Dogman’s boys hereabouts. Stranger-Come-Knocking and his Crinna bastards showed up without an invite, and we been guiding ’em politely to the door. Some messed-up allies your Chief makes, don’t he.’
    Craw looked over towards some Union soldiers who’d gathered in the torchlight at the south end of the bridge. ‘I could say the same o’ yours.’
    ‘Aye, well. Those are the times. What can I do for you, Craw?’
    ‘I got some prisoners Black Dow wants handed back.’
    ‘Hardbread looked profoundly doubtful. ‘When did Dow start handing