The Heroes

Now move your fat arses before you end up bitching to the Union about your poverty.’
    ‘We ain’t in this for the coin,’ said Whirrun, ambling past with the Father of Swords over his shoulder.
    Yon gave him a dark look. ‘You might not be, Cracknut. Some of us wouldn’t mind a little from time to time.’ But he walked off shaking his head, mail jingling, and Brack and Scorry shrugged at each other, then followed.
    Wonderful leaned close to Craw. ‘Sometimes I think the more other folk don’t care a shit the more you think you’ve got to.’
    ‘Your point?’
    ‘Can’t make the world a certain way all on your own.’
    ‘There’s a right way of doing things,’ he snapped.
    ‘You sure the right way isn’t just trying to keep everyone happy and alive?’
    The worst thing was that she had a point. ‘Is that where we’ve come to now?’
    ‘I thought that’s about where we’ve always been.’
    Craw raised a brow at her. ‘You know what? That husband o’ yours really should teach you some respect.’
    ‘That bitch? He’s almost as scared o’ me as you lot. Let’s go!’ She pulled Drofd up by his elbow, and the dozen made their way through the gap in the wall, moving fast. Or as fast as Craw’s knees would go. They headed north down the ragged track the way they’d come and left the Heroes to the Union.
    Craw worked his way through the trees, chewing at the fingernails of his sword hand. He’d already gnawed his shield hand down to his knuckles, more or less. Damn things never grew back fast enough. He’d felt less scared on the way up the Heroes at night than he did going to tell Black Dow he’d lost a hill. Can’t be right when you’re less scared of the enemy than your own Chief, can it? He wished he had some friendly company, but if there was going to be blame he wanted to shoulder it alone. He’d made the choices.
    The woods were crawling with men thick as ants in the grass. Black Dow’s own Carls – veterans, cold-headed and cold-hearted and with lots of cold steel to share out. Some had plate armour like the Union wore, others strange weapons, beaked, picked and hooked for punching through steel, all manner of savage inventions new to the world that the world was more’n likely better off without. He doubted any of these would be thinking twice before robbing a few coins off the dead, or the living either.
    Craw had been most of his life a fighting man, but crowds of ’em still somehow made him nervous, and the older he got the less he felt he fit. Any day now they’d spot him for a fraud. Realise that keeping his threadbare courage stitched together was harder work every morning. He winced as his teeth bit into the quick and jerked his nails away.
    ‘Can’t be right,’ he muttered to himself, ‘for a Named Man to be scared all the time.’
    ‘What?’ Craw had almost forgotten Shivers was there, he moved so silent.
    ‘You get scared, Shivers?’
    A pause, that eye of his glinting as the sun peeped through the branches. ‘Used to. All the time.’
    ‘What changed?’
    ‘Got my eye burned out o’ my head.’
    So much for calming small talk. ‘Reckon that could change your outlook.’
    ‘Halves it.’
    Some sheep were bleating away beside the track, pressed tight into a pen much too small. Foraged, no doubt, meaning stolen, some unlucky shepherd’s livelihood vanished down the gullets and out the arses of Black Dow’s army. Behind a screen of hides, not two strides from the flock, a woman was slaughtering ’em and three more doing the skinning and gutting and hanging the carcasses, all soaked to the armpits in blood and not caring much about it either.
    Two lads, probably just reached fighting age, were watching. Laughing at how stupid the sheep were, not to guess what was happening behind those hides. They didn’t see that they were in the pen, and behind a screen of songs and stories and young men’s dreams, war was waiting, soaked to the armpits and not caring. Craw saw it all well enough. So why was he still sitting meek in his pen? Might be old sheep can’t jump new fences either.
    The black standard of the Protector of the North was dug into the earth outside some ivy-wrapped ruin, long ago conquered by the forest. More men busy in the clearing before it, and stirring horses tethered in long rows. A grindstone being pedalled, metal shrieking, sparks spraying. A woman hammering at a cartwheel. A smith working at a hauberk with pincers and a mouthful of