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“A fucking head. A fresh one. Quickly!” Gressa sounded nervous. As the door closed behind the last of her men she glanced up at Rue. “You drove me to this.”

“To what?”

Gressa ignored the question and went to rummage in the saddle bags tossed against the far wall. “Pray he leaves you to me and the hot irons.”

She removed a small leather-wrapped bundle from one of the bags, bringing it to the table gingerly, in both hands, as if worried it might burst into flame. Slowly, she unwound the bindings to reveal what looked like a bone, one of the longer ones from within a hand, but jet black. Rue recognized it instantly as the source of the power she’d sensed earlier. Trying to intimidate this woman with necromancy had been a mistake.

Shouts and screams rang out in the middle distance, along with the raucous cawing of a crow.

Berric returned carrying a head, holding it by one ear since its thinning hair looked insufficient. Blood still dripped from the severed neck. “It was the killing that was to be fresh?” the mercenary asked. “Not the person. There’s still children out there if—”

“Yes, the killing.” Gressa took the head off him by the other ear and waved Berric away.

She set her trophy on the table and turned it to face Rue, who found herself looking into the vacant eyes of Sebrin Weaver, father of five, and son to the late Senna. Unlike his mother, Sebrin had been friendly if rather dull. His children had loved him, though.

“Right…” Gressa picked up the black bone at one extreme, between finger and thumb. With trepidation she used the bone to strike Sebrin’s forehead, one sharp tap, two, a third.

“What! What is it?” Sebrin’s lips moved, and frown lines ploughed across the dead forehead as the eyes cast about, left and right. “Where is this?” The eyes fixed on Gressa. “And who are you?”

The voice echoed painfully in Rue’s skull although the head, lacking both lungs and quite likely vocal cords too, could force no actual sound past its bloody teeth.

“Well now, you ain’t Sebrin.” Rue knew that for a certainty. The live Sebrin would have been incoherent with fear, and the dead one raging. Whatever had installed itself in the farmer’s skull was merely annoyed.

“And who’s she?” the head demanded.

Gressa, her stare jumping between the head and the finger bone, which seemed to be vibrating in her grasp, appeared to be sharing the head’s struggle to make a noise, but finally swallowed and found her voice. “I-I’m Gressa Saramant, third captain of the Iron League, Baron.”

“Never heard of you, where’s that Ossot fellow?”

“First Captain Ossot died in the frosts, Baron. Died of his wounds.”

“Wounds? They’re peasants, for gods’ sake!”

“Saddle sores. An infection. Blood soured. I…uh…I took charge of his effects until a new first captain—”

“Why am I here?” The baron wrinkled Sebrin’s nose. “Wherever ‘here’ is. It looks like a shabby, oversized privy. Who’s the old hag?”

“The prisoner is a Kindness who has killed seven of my command—”

“Eight,” Rue corrected.

“—and wounded several others. She has also…uh…raised the dead. She claims to be seeking a wergild of fourteen ounces—”

“It’s seven,” Rue interrupted again.

“Seven ounces of gold for the villagers we killed.”

“Just two of them. Jayne Clay and Ambeth Po—”

“This elderly peasant killed seven Iron League mercenaries?” The baron—presumably the same Baron Mancer that Rue had been told about earlier—studied Rue with eyes he didn’t own.

“Ten if you count the two in Stones Corner. And she’s ashamed it was so few,” Rue said.

The head’s eyes widened. “She can hear me?”

Rue had been waiting for her moment and took it. Surprise, even if caused by something wholly unrelated, has a paralysing effect. She reached out with all the necromantic muscle remaining to her, attempting to get beneath the skin of the severed head, past its watery eyes, and into the brain, where the baron nested like a macabre cuckoo.

“Fuck…” The pain splitting her forehead surely had to be worse than Gressa’s promised irons. She had no chance of evicting the baron, and still less of exercising any sort of control over him. Wherever the bone came from, its enchantment was far stronger than hers, certainly in this narrow function.