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“I live here. There are many ways to verify this fact, child.” Rue saw no point in appeasing her captors. Hot irons were never allowed to cool without being used. It was in the nature of the species—power existed to be exercised.

“Why would an old witch live…here?”

“Where should I live? A cave?”

“A witch should not be suffered to live,” growled the young man who had taken Isik’s place at the table. Rue remembered his angular face looking down at her before being hidden behind a descending boot.

“Why did you attack us?” Gressa frowned as if genuinely puzzled.

“What you should be asking, and will eventually end up asking, is what I wanted with Isik.” Rue’s patience had always been her weakest point. That was why the lesson about waiting was one she had needed so badly.

Gressa sank a fist into Rue’s belly. She had a good punch for a relatively small woman. Rue sucked up the pain and let her necromancy crackle around it.

“Why,” snarled Gressa, “did you want Isik?”

“I would have settled for his head,” Rue said. “I was going to ask him who told him to come here and who directed the sacking of Stones Corner. And when he’d given me your name I would have asked who told you to do it, and so on and so forth until I came to a person worth killing. Someone who wasn’t just earning their living. That person owes me their life. Or the wergild of seven ounces of gold.”

Gressa huffed in amusement. “I can tell you that for nothing, much good it will do you—”

“You really shouldn’t,” Rue said. “Information is power. Don’t just go giving it away.”

“Baron Mancer’s agent was the one who hired the Iron League.”

“The Iron League?” A wry smile twisted the corner of Rue’s mouth. “That’s what you call yourselves?”

Gressa narrowed her eyes. “You seem less scared of hot irons than you should be, old woman.”

Rue met Gressa’s gaze. “Seen worse. Had worse. Done worse.”

Gressa’s anger faltered, more likely at something cold in Rue’s stare than at the bravado in her words. The commander turned her back on Rue. “You’d kill Baron Mancer of the Regon Heights over a handful of dead peasants?”

“Over two dead peasants. Ambeth Potter and Jayne Clay.” Rue cricked her neck. “And Mancer doesn’t have to die. You people don’t seem to know how to listen. He could pay the seven ounces.” Wergild was a strange thing. A very old thing. The recognition that money was life. That gold could sustain a family, a whole clan, allowing many of the victim’s kin to survive when otherwise they may well have died. Blood money. The tariffs the Kindnesses used were far older than the Academy. They valued rich above poor, young above old. They put the price of a murder beyond reach of the commoner, made it a costly mistake for the landed class and a minor indiscretion for nobility.

Rue had offered the option of wergild out of habit, as if in returning to her former role as an agent of retribution she should adopt all the trappings, all the rules. But she had said it and she would stick to it. It was what it was. The goddess’s power ran through her, and while she hoped to use it she would walk within the bitch’s rules. After all, without the Morrigan’s strength in her veins Rue would die within moments, killed by the wounds she had already sustained in this self-imposed quest.

“You could always shoulder responsibility,” Rue told the mercenary. “Pay the gold over. You must have way more than that between you. Sacking all these villages. Pay up and put all this to bed. I’m too old to go marching off after Baron Mancer.”

Gressa’s lips thinned, her eyes narrowed. She looked like a woman who understood herself to be the butt of some kind of joke without yet knowing what that joke was. She shook her head, a small, sharp shake. “No. You didn’t do all this for fourteen ounces—”

“Seven.”

“This is a lie. You’re playing a bigger game and I’m going to know what it is. I’m going to break you, witch, and you’re going to tell me the truth.”

Gressa placed her hands to either side of her on the tabletop, leaning over the maps. For a long moment she held the room’s attention with her silence. She sucked air in over her teeth, favouring Rue with a slow, speculative look. “Everybody out.”

Nobody moved.

“Now!”

The mercenaries made for the door to the hall, exchanging glances, some puzzled, some annoyed.

“Berric!”

The ageing mercenary who’d hung Rue on the hook paused at the door.

“Bring me a head.”

“Sorry…what?”