The Heroes

still smiled, but his eyes were hard as flints. ‘I would hate to bring you pain by seeing him hanged.’
    An awkward silence. She glanced at Colonel Brint, then at Lord Governor Meed, wondering if either of them might offer some support for Hal in reward for his unstinting loyalty. Brint at least had the decency to look guilty. Meed looked positively delighted. ‘You will find no more loyal man in his Majesty’s whole army,’ she managed to grate out.
    ‘I am all delight. Loyalty is a fine thing in an army. Victory is another.’ Bayaz frowned about at the assembled officers. ‘Not the best of days, gentlemen. A long way from the best of days.’
    ‘General Jalenhorm overreached himself,’ said Mitterick, out of turn and with little empathy, behaviour entirely characteristic of the man. ‘He should never have been so damn spread out—’
    ‘General Jalenhorm acted under my orders,’ snapped Marshal Kroy, leaving Mitterick to subside into a grumpy silence. ‘We overreached, yes, and the Northmen surprised us …’
    Your tea.’ A cup was insinuated into Finree’s hand and the eyes of Bayaz’ servant met hers. Odd-coloured eyes, one blue, one green. ‘I am sure your husband is as loyal, honest and hard-working as ever a man could be,’ he murmured, a most unservile curl to the corner of his mouth, as if they shared some private joke. She did not see what, but the man had already oozed back, pot in hand, to charge Bayaz’ cup. Finree wrinkled her lip, checked she was unobserved and furtively tossed the contents of hers down the wall.
    ‘…our choices were most limited,’ her father was saying, ‘given the great need for haste impressed upon us by the Closed Council—’
    Bayaz cut him off. ‘The need for haste is a fact of our situation, Marshal Kroy, a fact no less compelling for being a political imperative rather than a physical.’ He slurped tea through pursed lips, but the room was held so silent for the duration one could have heard a flea jump. Finree wished she understood the trick, and could rely on her every facile utterance being given rapt attention, rather than endlessly chewing on her usual diet of sidelinings, humourings and brushings-off. ‘If a mason builds a wall upon a slope and it collapses, he can hardly complain that it would have stood a thousand years if only he had been given level ground to work with.’ Bayaz slurped again, again in utter silence. ‘In war, the ground is never level.’
    Finree felt an almost physical pressure to jump to her father’s defence, as if there was a wasp down her back that had to be smashed, but she bit her tongue. Taunting Meed was one thing. Taunting the First of the Magi quite another.
    ‘It was not my intention to offer excuses,’ said her father stiffly. ‘For the failure I take all the responsibility, for the losses I take all the blame.’
    ‘Your willingness to shoulder the blame does you much credit but us little good.’ Bayaz sighed as if reproving a naughty grandson. ‘But let us learn the lessons, gentlemen. Let us put yesterday’s defeats behind us, and look to tomorrow’s victories.’ Everyone nodded as though they had never heard anything so profound, even Finree’s father. Here was power.
    She could not remember ever coming to dislike anyone so much, or admire anyone so much, in so short a time.
    Dow’s meet was held around a big fire-pit in the centre of the Heroes, shimmering with heat, hissing and fizzing with the drizzle. There was an edgy feel about the gathering, somewhere between a wedding and a hanging. Firelight and shadow make men look like devils, and Craw had seen ’em make men act like devils more’n once. They all were there – Reachey, Tenways, Scale and Calder, Ironhead, Splitfoot and a couple score Named Men besides. The biggest names and the hardest faces in the North, less a few up in the hills and a few more with the other side.
    Looked like Glama Golden had got in the fight. Looked like someone had used his face for an anvil. His left cheek was one big welt, mouthsplit and bloated, blooms of bruise already spreading. Ironhead smirked across the ring of leering faces like he’d never seen a thing so pretty as Golden’s broken nose. They had bad blood between ’em, those two, so bad it poisoned everything around.
    ‘What the hell are you doing here, old man?’ murmured Calder as Craw jostled into place beside him.
    ‘Damned if I know. My eyes ain’t all they used to be.’ Craw