They looked across the tumbled tundra. Eyes jumping from one craggy outcrop to the next, with heather and gorse and ten different kinds of grass filling the spaces between them.

“The rocks remind me of whales,” Cleric Vass said abruptly. His deep, reassuring voice broke across the grasslands and filled the hollows like slow thunder. “When they come up to breathe.”

“You ain’t ever seen whales, cleric,” Lenix said. “What would a god-talker be doing sailin’?”

“I’ve done much the likes of you could not imagine or understand, Lenix,” Cleric Vass said. “That doesn’t make it any less true.”

The sun was setting. Long shadows stretched out across the dry grassland. The country was coloured in oranges and reds, the grass turned into a sea of fire. Black shadows lay like holes cut from the world.

Fia had forgotten how much colder and how much drier it was on this side of the Foldwood. She’d not returned here, not since she’d fled all those years ago, running out across the windswept moors at the urging of none other than Redmond Marr himself.

They had travelled some ten miles inland from the Foldwood, leaving the body of Cameron Gray and those of his company to rot down and be claimed by the forest. They hadn’t even cut Gray down, just left what remained of him tied to the tree.

“I’d not do a blade the disservice of dulling its sharpness by cutting through the ropes holding that son of a bitch,” Gunn had said, when Darach Lees asked him about it.

And so the man had been left, along with the other soldiers, along with Lorna Forbes, whose story, and reason for accepting Fia’s gold and the task of escorting Gunn, would never be known.

Fia picked her way back up the slope to where the others were crouched in the scooped out hollow of the hills they had elected to pass the night in. The depression they were sheltering in was at the top of a rock-strewn tor, facing north, on the opposite side of the hill to the Foldwood. It was large enough that both horses and riders could hide there, and was ringed with great boulders that screened the light of the small fire they’d kindled from the road below. Fia knew this, because she had just traversed the slope to make certain.

Her crew had taken what supplies they needed from Gray’s small camp and then turned the horses loose. The animals had taken to the untamed meadows without so much as a backward glance. Free. Wild. Creatures made to roam the space between the storm-tossed sky and tall grass that grew high in the dry, cold air.

She had envied them as she’d watched them gallop over the meadowland, wished with every sinew of her body and fragment of her soul that she could just burst apart and be whisked away by some wild gale so that she didn’t have to bother herself with whatever future was coming down the race.

Fia’s legs brushed through the pink flowers of the cross-leaved heath that carpeted the hillside, the sweet scent of the blooms rising incongruously to mingle with the coppery tang of dried blood on her coat and shirt. The road in the valley below was silent. No sign or sound of pursuit. She paused in her climb, not really wanting to face the group; the curious and accusatory stares from some, the unsettlingly studious looks from others––as if they were appraising how much someone with her name might be worth.

“You gonna tell me, then?”

Fia spun, hand flying to the handle of her flintlock, cursing herself for getting so lost in her own head that she hadn’t even noticed she was being watched.

“Easy there, killer,” Gunn said, raising his hands. He was sitting placidly, half in and half out of the shadow cast by the light of the weak moon falling across a boulder. He’d a scrap of parchment in his hand and a stick of charcoal in the other. As Fia’s fingers uncurled from around the pistol butt, Gunn stuck out his tongue and looked up at the nail paring moon, jotted down a final word and slipped the piece of parchment into a crack in the huge rock beside him.

“Am I going to tell you what, Gunn?” Fia said shortly.

Gunn pulled his makings from his coat pocket, began to fashion himself a smoke. “Are you gonna tell me how you came to be the way you are?” he said. “Scrap the way you do, move the way you do?” Gunn asked.

Fia shrugged, feeling herself relax by inches. “I was taught things when I was younger, techniques and the like,” she said. “How to hold a blade, the location of muscles and sinews and organs, what to aim for in a person.”

“Doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that a lady would go in for.”

“Even when I was considered noble I wasn’t considered a lady,” Fia said.

“One of those wild ones, eh? I know the kind. So, that’s how you learned how to fight?”

“There wasn’t any trick to it. I was taught and I learned, and I practised with my brother, Arlen. Fighting and killing’s as easy to learn as anything else. You just got to be willing to put in the hard yards––and there ain’t any yards harder than those involved in taking life.”

Gunn grunted. Held his finger to his smoke, conjured a flame from nothing and breathed in deep. The flame snuffed itself out.

“And so,” he said, watching Fia through the smoke with his cold grey eyes, “you killed your brother?”

Fia’s initial reaction was to reach for her black dirk in the hidden fold of her coat, to spit a curse at Gunn, to walk away.

But she’d spent more than ten years pretending that she hadn’t a past to speak of. Eleven years of keeping the secret of what had happened to her brother wedged down deep inside her, somewhere between her heart and her spine.

“Yes,” she said. “I killed him. Killed Arlen. Though it was pure accident––not anythin’ like how it got put about.”

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“Why’d you run, then?” Gunn asked. “Why not tell them that they’d hung the wrong horse thief?”

“Because I was just a girl. Because I was scared shitless. Because when you’re young and more afeared than you’ve ever been in your life you don’t have the experience to know that the only way to conquer that fear and be free of it is to turn and face it down. By the time I’d stopped running long enough to hear the rumours that were circulating about what had happened, to hear the horseshit lies that Redmond had been spreading about how I’d murdered Arlen in cold blood, I didn’t think I could go back. Didn’t have the courage to face trial or the noose. Or my mother.”

Fia sat down heavily in the grass. Put a hand to the powder horn, which Arlen had given her, slung around her chest. Traced the words that had been stamped into it; Often times a man’s mind will set, Upon a thing he cannot get.

“His was the first life you ever took?” Gunn said after he had smoked in silence for a while.

Fia nodded.

“The first person you ever saw die?”

Fia nodded again. Looked out at the monochrome landscape stretching north and east and west around them. Heard the heather sighing just as it had done on the day that her old life ended and her road life began.

“It’s quite a life, ain’t it?” Gunn said.

“Yes, it is.”

“A life that can leave us with hearts as brittle as winter leaves.”

The two of them looked out over the cold, heartless, beautiful plains.

“And after? How’d you feel after?” Gunn asked.

Fia shook her head.

“Like a doll or something. Like something that aches for its heart.”

Gunn nodded his head.

Fia had been so preoccupied with the revelation of her own secret that she had plumb forgotten the enigmatic chat that had passed between Gunn and Gray.

“You told me that you’d enlighten me as to what your beef with Gray was if we survived that scrape with him and his soldiery,” Fia said. “Must’ve been quite something for you to be able to carve him apart like you did.”

Gunn’s eyes were unreadable in the deep shadows. “I did, didn’t I?” he said.

His hand moved up to his face and the tip of his roll-up glowed, bathing the worn, not totally unappealing, features in a brief hellish glare. Something glinted as the light of the roll-up died. Something metallic: a simple silver pendant that had been hammered into the shape of a star.

“Belonged to my daughter,” Gunn said, touching the pendant. “Mae, her name was. There’s nothin’ fancy about it or anythin’, but it was hers. Just a trinket that her mother found in the hills one day and gave to her when she was still little enough to be riding in front of me when we went out musterin’. We couldn’t ever afford somethin’ pretty like this, bein’ but cattle farmers back west in Aldinfang.”

Gunn looked at the pendant and then tucked it down his shirt front again.

“She’s dead,” Fia said matter-of-factly. “That’s why you asked me if we’ll ever see the dead again one day.”

“Yeah, she’s dead. Same as her mother,” Gunn said, hunkering back further into the shadows. “We were out on the coast, ‘bout a day’s ride from the tribeland capital at Eljengrund, where the grass wasn’t so bad and there was fishing to be done in the winter, when Cameron Gray and a bunch of Frekirie riders passed through our hamlet.”

Something shone in the shadows that cloaked Gunn’s head. Fia thought it might have been a tooth as the longrider smiled to himself.

“Anyways, Gray passed through with his troops, sent on some inter-tribeland mission of diplomacy or some shit by your half-brother, Viscount Marr, I later learned. They stopped to water the horses and the men in our township, a little nothin’ village called Jafnan Bay. I guess they got to waterin’ a little bit too much, those soldiers of his, because the next thing I know they’ve busted into my cabin and put the place to the torch. Killed my wife in front of my eyes––no further away from me than I am from you. Took it in turns to defile my daughter. Took their time over it. Out in the yard. Lit by our home as it burned. Then they killed her too. Left me to burn in the house that ceased bein’ a home that very second, with my dead wife and my dead daughter. Only I broke my bonds and made it out. House went up and took my family with it.”

Gunn exhaled smoke and flicked his spent roll-up into the night. “Held up my first tax wagon the next day,” he said. “Started killin’ any soldiers that helped the Countesses and Counts keep their squeeze on us. Disrupting things as much as I could so that the soldiers from all six tribelands were kept busy keepin’ their eyes peeled for me and my crew. Waitin’ for Cameron Gray to cross my path again.”

Fia licked her lips. “Well,” she said, “I can see why you wanted the bastard dead.”

Gunn tilted back his head and looked at Fia, while she took off her hat and ran her fingers through her greasy hair.

“So?” he said.

“So what?”

“Are you gonna tell me what happened with your brother, or are you just goin’ to sit there thinking about tellin’ me what happened with your brother?”

“What’re we doing, swapping sad stories?”

Gunn snorted, picked a bit of baccy off his tongue and flicked it away. “Ain’t nothin’ special about sad stories on Fallaros,” he said. “Most everyone has one. Most everyone looks whole, but is broken all to hell on the inside. I’ve done no end of rotten shit in my life, Fia Marr. I’ve been the widower of more women than I can count. I’ve stolen, lied, deceived and threatened the troops of noblemen all across this isle of ours.”

Gunn leaned forward suddenly then, so that his face was illuminated by the weak light of the moon.

“I’m what the Counts and Countesses call a bad man,” he said. “A man of the worst kind, maybe. Sayin’ that, with what better person is there to share the most terrible thing you’ve ever done?”

Fia considered the man slouched against the rock opposite her. Murderer. Thief. Brigand. He’d a lot of brands burned into him, but Fia had started to wonder if his reputation was as black as it deserved to be.

“Why would you even care?” she asked.

Gunn shrugged. “The world’s heartless, maybe,” he said. “And the past’s a cold place, but sometimes the ear of someone who you know has walked a similar path can make it a more bearable one.”

“I’ve never had cause to tell anyone the story. Not a single soul since it happened.”

Gunn reached for his makings again.

“Words ain’t much good unless they’re spoken, Miss Marr. More often than not, sooner or later, they do harm if you keep ‘em locked away.”

“Is that why you write your words down?”

Gunn snorted softly. “When I’m writin’ I ain’t thinkin’ of the words, I’m thinkin’ of who the words are written about. That’s why I write ‘em down.”

Fia bit her lip and stared out at the countryside that was at once alien and familiar.

“To hell with it,” she said, “I guess someone better hear the truth. We could all be dead tomorrow.”

And she began.