West dragged himself up by one hand, seized by a sudden impulse to run. He looked over his shoulder, but there was no escape that way. A man was moving through the trees towards them. A big man with a thick beard and a sword over his shoulder, carrying a child in his arms. West blinked, trying to get some sense of scale. It was the biggest man he had ever seen, and the child was Lord Marshal Burr. The giant tossed his burden down on the ground like a bundle of sticks. Burr stared up at him, and burped.

West ground his teeth. Riding off like that, the old fool, what had he been thinking? He’d killed them both with his fucking “sometimes you just want to ride”. Makes you feel alive? Neither one of them would live out the hour.

He had to fight. Now might be his last chance. Even if he had nothing to fight with. Better to die that way than on his knees in the mud. He tried to dig the anger out. There was no end to it, when he didn’t want it. Now there was nothing. Just a desperate helplessness that weighed down every limb.

Some hero. Some fighter. It was the most he could do to keep from pissing himself. He could hit a woman alright. He could throttle his sister half to death. The memory of it still made him choke with shame and revulsion, even with his own death staring him in the face. He had thought he would make it right later. Only now there was no later. This was all there was. He felt tears in his eyes.

“Sorry,” he muttered to himself. “I’m sorry.” He closed his eyes and waited for the end.

“No need for sorry, friend, I reckon he’s been bitten harder.”

Another Northman had melted out of the woods, crouching down beside West on his haunches. Lank, matted brown hair hung around his lean face. Quick, dark eyes. Clever eyes. He cracked a wicked grin, anything but reassuring. Two rows of hard, yellow, pointed teeth. “Sit,” he said, accent so thick that West could scarcely understand him. “Sit and be still is best.”

A fourth man was standing over him and Burr. A great, broad-chested man, his wrists as thick as West’s ankles. There were grey hairs in his beard, in his tangled hair. The leader, it seemed, from the way the others made room for him. He looked down at West, slow and thoughtful, as a man might look at an ant, deciding whether or not to squash it under his boot.

“Which of ’em’s Burr, do you think?” he rumbled in Northern.

“I’m Burr,” said West. Had to protect the Lord Marshal. Had to. He clambered up without thinking, but he was still dizzy from the fall, and he had to grab hold of a branch to stop himself falling. “I’m Burr.”

The old warrior looked him up and down, slow and steady. “You?” He burst into a peal of laughter, deep and menacing as a storm in the distance. “I like that! That’s nice!” He turned to the evil-looking one. “See? I thought you said they got no guts, these Southerners?”

“It was brains I said they was short on.” The one-eared man glowered down at West the way a hungry cat looks at a bird. “And I’ve yet to see otherwise.”

“I think it’s this one.” The leader was looking down at Burr. “You Burr?” he asked in the common tongue.

The Lord Marshal looked at West, then up at the towering Northmen, then he got slowly to his feet. He straightened and brushed down his uniform, like a man preparing to die with dignity. “I’m Burr, and I’ll not entertain you. If you mean to kill us, you should do it now.” West stayed where he was. Dignity hardly seemed worth the effort now. He could almost feel the axe biting into his head already.

But the Northman with the grey in his beard only smiled. “I can see how you’d make that mistake, and we’re sorry if we’ve frayed your nerves at all, but we’re not here to kill you. We’re here to help you.” West struggled to make sense of what he was hearing.

Burr was doing the same. “To help us?”

“There’s plenty in the North who hate Bethod. There’s plenty who don’t kneel willing, and some who don’t kneel at all. That’s us. We’ve a feud with that bastard has been a long time brewing, and we mean to settle it, or die in the trying. We can’t fight him alone, but we hear you’re fighting him, so we reckoned we’d join you.”

“Join us?”

“We came a long way to do it, and from what we seen on the way you could use the help. But when we got here, your people weren’t keen to take us.”

“They was somewhat rude,” said the lean one, squatting next to West.

“They was indeed, Dogman, they was indeed. But we ain’t men to back off at a little rudeness. That’s when I hit on the notion of talking to you, chief to chief, you might say.”

Burr stared over at West. “They want to fight with us,” he said. West blinked back, still trying to come to terms with the notion that he might live out the day. The one called Dogman was holding out a sword towards him, hilt first, and grinning. It took West a moment to realise it was his own.

“Thanks,” muttered West as he fumbled with the grip.

“No bother.”

“There’s five of us,” the leader was saying, “all Named Men and veterans. We’ve fought against Bethod, and we’ve fought with him, all across the North. We know his style, few better. We can scout, we can fight, we can lay surprises, as you see. We’ll not shirk any task worth the doing, and any task that hurts Bethod is worth it to us. What do you say?”

“Well… er,” murmured Burr, rubbing his chin with his thumb. “You plainly are a most…” and he looked from one hard, dirty, scarred face to the next “…useful set of men. How could I resist an offer so graciously made?”

“Then I better make the introductions. This here is the Dogman.”

“That’s me,” growled the lean one with the pointy teeth, flashing his worrying grin again. “Good to meet.” He grabbed hold of West’s hand and squeezed it until his knuckles clicked.

Threetrees jerked his thumb sideways at the evil one with the axe and the missing ear. “This friendly fellow’s Black Dow. I’d say he gets better with time, but he don’t.” Dow turned and spat on the ground again. “The big lad is Tul Duru. They call him the Thunderhead. Then there’s Harding Grim. He’s off out there in the trees, keeping your horses off the road. Not to worry though, he’d have nothing to say.”

“And you?”

“Rudd Threetrees. Leader of this little crew, on account of our previous leader having gone back to the mud.”

“Back to the mud, I see.” Burr took a deep breath. “Well then. You can report to Colonel West. I’m sure that he can find food and quarters for you, not to mention work.”

“Me?” asked West, sword still dangling from his hand.

“Absolutely.” The Lord Marshal had the tiniest smile at the corner of his mouth. “Our new allies should fit right in with Prince Ladisla’s retinue.” West couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. Just when he had thought his situation could not be any more difficult, he had five primitives to handle.

Threetrees seemed happy enough with the outcome. “Good,” he said, slowly nodding his approval. “That’s settled then.”

“Settled,” said the Dogman, his evil smile growing wider still. The one called Black Dow gave West a long, cold stare. “Fucking Union,” he growled.