He stood up, stretched, and went to stand for a while at the front door of the cottage. It was a fine summer’s day and everything about him was as it should be: birds singing, bright flowers everywhere, the air alive with rich scents, and all manner of small creatures bustling through the hedges and long grasses. Subtly marring it, though, was the darkness of the unexpected that now lay over everything like a clinging miasma. Throughout the years since his return, he had walked down into the village, knowing that while no two days were ever the same, he would meet nothing and no one that he would not have wished to meet. That had been such a truth in his life that it had never actually occurred to him before. But now, who could say what might lie around the familiar bends in the road? One of Nilsson’s men? Oddly restrained but arrogant and unpleasant for all that, and not infrequently drunk on ale ‘freely given’ at the inn. Or some sharp-eyed stranger seeking the way to the castle? Guards returning from duty downland? Or perhaps even another column of armed men returning from a raid over the hill and bringing with them more captives.

He picked up the carved iron ring and examined it thoughtfully. The soldiers etched into its surface seemed to reproach him. They were waiting too, but they were armed and ready; at some time in the past they had seen their destiny and prepared themselves for it. He found himself making an ironical inventory of all the weapons that he knew lay in the valley: a handful of rusty swords that had accumulated over the generations from who knew what sources; an equally small handful of bows which, like the swords, were a greater danger to the users and their immediate neighbours than to any enemy they might be levelled at; and, incongruously, he seemed to remember having seen two old pikes lying in a barn somewhere, though he could not recall now whether or not they hadn’t been made into pitchforks.