’Twins?’ asked Quell.

She swung a vicious glare back at him. ‘Oh, funny.’

‘Anyway,’ added Quell, ‘I’m pretty sure that’s not how things like that work- ’

‘How would you know? No, me and Sweetest and Faint, we’re out of here as soon as we can get our gear together-you can collect us somewhere down the road. This damned village can go to Hood, with Bedusk Pall Kovuss Agape in the lead. They’re damned wreckers anyway, and if anybody deserves cursing to damnation, it’s them.’

‘I wouldn’t disagree there,’ said Mappo.

‘Stop trying to get under my skirt, Trell.’

‘What? I wasn’t-’

Quell cut in with a snort. ‘You don’t wear skirts, Witch. Though if you did, it’d be so much easier-’

Now she spun round. ‘What would be, Quell?’

He’d halted and now backed up. ‘Sorry, did I think that out loud?’

‘You think the curse on this village is bad, you just wait and see what I can come up with!’

‘All right, we take your point, Precious. Relax. You three just go, right? We’ll get the carriage fixed up and find you, just like you said.’

She whirled about once more and resumed her march.

Gruntle saw the three in the street, closing fast on the entrance to the tavern. He shouted to catch their attention and hurried over.

‘Master Quell, your driver is a heap of broken bones back there, but he’s still breathing.’

‘Well, he should have let go of the damned reins,’ Quell said in a growl. ‘And now I got to do healing and that takes time. That’s just great-how am I supposed to fix the carriage? Why can’t anybody else do anything useful a round here? You, Witch-go and heal Glanno-’

‘I can’t do that! Oh, I can set splints and spit on wounds to chase infection away, but it’s sounding as if he needs a whole lot more than that. Right, Gruntle?’

The tattooed warrior shrugged. ‘Probably. ‘

‘Don’t even try,’ she snarled at him, and then stalked into the tavern,

Gruntle stared alter her. ‘What did she mean? Try what?’

‘Getting under her skirt,’ said Quell.

‘But she doesn’t wear-’

‘That’s not the point,’ the wizard cut in. ‘You’re thinking like a man. That’s your mistake. It’s all our mistakes, in fact. It’s why we’re standing out here, three men, no women. If we’d gone and said, why, Precious, we wouldn’t even think of it, you know what she’d say then? “What’s wrong with me? Am I too ugly or something?” and we’d be in trouble all over again!’

Gruntle glanced bemusedly at Mappo, who, rather cryptically, simply nodded.

Quell straightened his still-wet clothes. ‘Lead me to him, then, Gruntle.’

At one end of the corral there was a stable and next to it, a loading platform built of weathered planks that marked one end of a huge, solidly built warehouse. Tula and Amby had helped Glanno sit up, and Cartographer, cut loose from the wheel, was staggering in circles as he plucked and scraped manure off his face, neck, and rotted clothes.

Glanno had reached the eleventh love of his life, some woman named Herboo Nast, ‘… who wore a fox round her neck-not just its fur, you understand, the actual animal, paws trussed up in berbraided silk, gamuzzled in leather, but it was the beast’s eyes I remember most-that look. Panic, like it’d just realized it was trapped in its worst nightlymare. Not that she wasn’t good-looking, in that goatlike way of hers-you know, those long curly hairs that show up under their chin after a certain age-did I mention how I liked my women experientialled? I do. I most certainly do. I wanna see decades and decades of miserable livin’ in their eyes, so that when I arrive, why, it’s like a fresh spring rain on a withered daisy. Which one was I talking about? Fox, goat, panic, trussed up, right, Herboo Nast-’

He stopped then, so abruptly that neither Tula nor Amby noticed the sudden, ominous silence, and just kept on with the smiles and nods with which they had accompanied Glanno’s monologue, and they were still smiling and nodding when the figure that had appeared on the warehouse loading platform-the one whose arrival had so thoroughly stunned Glanno Tarp’s flapping tongue-walked up to halt directly in front of all three, as the horses bolted for the most distant corner of the corral in a drumroll of hoofs.

‘No losses so far and that’s good,’ said Quell as he and Gruntle walked towards the corral.