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As a prince I’d been taught that good opposes evil I’d been shown the good, shining in chivalric honour, and the evil hunched about its wrongness, croith horns And always I wondered where I fitted into this grand sche so grand as evil, nothing closer to good than imitation And now it seemed that the blind-eye woreat-aunt of , then surely the Silent Sister, older than randmother, was his heir?

I knuckledto knead the tiredness from them, perhaps the confusion too I blinked to clear my blurred vision Eainst the blackness of the ice plain Despite the wind, they hung there Another blink, and another, wouldn’t clear them

“Ah, hell” Through numb lips

Lanterns

They were co

TWENTY-NINE

Snorri watched the advance through a crack he’d opened in the shutters I felt the wind’s knife even at my place by the fire

“They’re coate”

“How many?” I asked

“Two dozen, a few more perhaps”

I had been expecting an ar any significant nue undertaking, and pointless if there were dead men to do the bulk of the labour But that ain about the captives They had sold the ht before, but surely if they wanted captives for digging in the ice thenIt made no sense at all—they would have killed any captives they kept and let the no sustenance

“There are no captives!” I spoke it aloud—not a whisper, not a shout, just a statement

“About fifty dead ranked behind thoseat least that’s all I can see in their lights, but it’s a tight-packed group” Snorri continued his report “There st them—I can’t tell”