'Fuh,' gurgled Morveer, unable now to form words.

'Did you forget I promised you never to drink again?' The old mercenary released the knife, reached across the floor with his bloody hand, retrieved his flask, spun the cap off with a practised motion and tipped it up. White liquid splashed out across the floor. 'Goat's milk. I hear it's good for the digestion. The strongest thing I've had since we left Sipani, but it would hardly do to let everyone know it. I have a certain reputation to uphold here. Hence all the bottles.'

Cosca shoved Morveer over. The strength was rapidly fading from his limbs and he was powerless to resist. He flopped limp across Victus' corpse. He could scarcely feel his neck. The agony in his groin had faded to a dull throb. Cosca looked down at him.

'Didn't I promise you I'd stop? What kind of a man do you take me for, that I'd break my word?'

Morveer had no breath left to speak, let alone scream. The pain was fading in any case. He wondered, as he often had, how his life might have differed had he not poisoned his mother, and doomed himself to life in the orphanage. His vision was clouding, blurring, growing dark.

'I need to thank you. You see, Morveer, a man can change, given the proper encouragement. And your scorn was the very spur I needed.'

Killed by his own agent. It was the way so many great practitioners of his profession ended their lives. And on the eve of his retirement, too. He was sure there was an irony there somewhere . . .

'Do you know the best thing about all this?' Cosca's voice boomed in his ears, Cosca's grin swam above him. 'Now I can start drinking again.'

One of the mercenaries was pleading, blubbering, begging for his life. Monza sat against the cold marble slab of the tabletop and listened to him, breathing hard, sweating hard, weighing the Calvez in her hand. It would be little better than useless against the heavy armour of Orso's guards, even if she'd fancied taking on that many at once. She heard the damp squelch of a blade rammed into flesh and the pleading was cut off in a long scream and a short gurgle.

Not really a sound to give anyone confidence.

She peered round the edge of the table. She counted seven guards still standing, one ripping his spear free of a dead mercenary's chest, two turning towards her, heavy swords ready, one working an axe from Secco's split skull. Three were kneeling, busily cranking flatbows. Behind them stood the big round table on which the map of Styria was still unrolled. On the map was a crown, a ring of sparkling gold sprouting with gem-encrusted oak leaves, not unlike the one that had killed Rogont and his dream of Styria united. Beside the crown, dressed in black and with his iron-shot black hair and beard as neatly groomed as ever, stood Grand Duke Orso.

He saw her, and she saw him, and the anger boiled up, hot and comforting. One of his guards slipped a bolt into his flatbow and levelled it at her. She was about to duck behind the slab of marble when Orso held out one arm.

'Wait! Stop.' That same voice that she had never disobeyed in eight hard years. 'Is that you, Monzcarro?'

'Damn right it is!' she snarled back. 'Get ready to fucking die!' Though it looked as if she might be going first.

'I've been ready for some time,' he called out softly. 'You've seen to that. Well done! My hopes are all in ruins, thanks to you.'

'You needn't thank me!' she called. 'It was Benna I did it for!'

'Ario is dead.'

'Hah!' she barked back. 'That's what happens when I stab a worthless cunt in the neck and throw him from a window!' A flurry of twitches crawled up Orso's cheek. 'But why pick him out? There was Gobba, and Mauthis, and Ganmark, and Faithful I've slaughtered the whole crowd! Everyone who was in this room when you murdered my brother!'

'And Foscar? I've heard no word since the defeat at the fords.'

'You can stop listening!' Said with a glee she hardly felt. 'Skull smashed to pulp on a farmhouse floor!'

The anger had all gone from Orso's face and it hung terribly slack. 'You must be happy.'

'I'm not fucking sad, I'll tell you that!'

'Grand Duchess Monzcarro of Talins.' Orso tapped two fingers slowly against his palm, the sharp snaps echoing off the high ceiling. 'I congratulate you on your victory. You have what you wanted after all!'

'What I wanted?' For a moment she could hardly believe what she was hearing. 'You think I wanted this? After the battles I fought for you? The victories I won for you?' She was near shrieking, spitting with fury. She ripped her glove off with her teeth and shook her mutilated hand at him. 'I fucking wanted this? What reason did we give you to betray us? We were loyal to you! Always!'

'Loyal?' Orso gave a disbelieving gasp of his own. 'Crow your victory if you must, but don't crow your innocence to me! We both know better!'

All three flatbows were loaded and levelled now. 'We were loyal!' she screamed again, voice cracking.

'Can you deny it? That Benna met with malcontents, revolutionaries, traitors among my ungrateful subjects? That he promised them weapons? That he promised you would lead them to glory? Claim my place? Usurp me! Did you think I would not learn of it? Did you think I would stand idly by?'

'What the . . . you fucking liar !'

'Still you deny it? I would not believe it myself when they told me! My Monza? Closer to me than my own children? My Monza, betray me? With my own eyes I saw him! With my own eyes!' The echoes of his voice slowly faded, and left the hall almost silent. Only the gentle clanking of the four armoured men as they edged ever so slowly towards her. She could only stare, the realisation creeping slowly through her.

We could have our own city, Benna had said. You could be the Duchess Monzcarro of . . . wherever. Of Talins, had been his thought. We deserve to be remembered. He'd planned it himself, alone, and given her no choice. Just as he had when he betrayed Cosca. It's better this way. Just as he had when he took Hermon's gold. This is for us.

He'd always been the one with the big plans.

'Benna,' she mouthed. 'You fool.'

'You didn't know,' said Orso quietly. 'You didn't know, and now we are come to this. Your brother doomed himself, and both of us, and half of Styria besides.' A sad little chuckle bubbled out of him. 'Just when I think I know it all, life always finds a way to surprise me. You're late, Shenkt.' His eyes flicked to the side. 'Kill her.'

Monza felt a shadow fall across her, lurched around. A man had stolen up while they spoke, his soft work boots making not the slightest sound. Now he stood over her, close enough to touch. He held out his hand. There was a ring in his palm. Benna's ruby ring.

'I believe this is yours,' he said.

A pale, lean face. Not old, but deeply lined, with harsh cheekbones and eyes hungry bright in bruised sockets. Monza's eyes went wide, the chill shock of recognition washing over her like ice water.

'Kill her!' shouted Orso.

The newcomer smiled, but it was like a skull's smile, never touching his eyes. 'Kill her? After all the effort I went to keeping her alive?'

The colour had drained from her face. Indeed she looked almost as pale as she had done when he first found her, broken amongst the rubbish on the slopes of Fontezarmo. Or when she'd first woken after he pulled the stitches, and stared down in horror at her own scarred body.

'Kill her?' he asked again. 'After I carried her from the mountain? After I mended her bones and stitched her back together? After I protected her from your hirelings in Puranti?'

Shenkt turned his hand over and let the ring fall, and it bounced once and tinkled down spinning on the floor beside her twisted right hand. She did not thank him, but he had not expected thanks. It was not for her thanks that he had done it.

'Kill them both!' screamed Orso.

Shenkt was always surprised by how treacherous men could be over trifles, yet how loyal they could be when their lives were forfeit. These last few guards still fought to the death for Orso, even though his day was clearly done. Perhaps they could not comprehend that a man so great as the Grand Duke of Talins might die like any other, and all his power so easily turn to dust. Perhaps for some men obedience became a habit they could not question. Or perhaps they came to define themselves by their service to a master, and chose to take the short step into death as part of something great, rather than walk the long, hard road of life in insignificance.

If so, then Shenkt would not deny them. Slowly, slowly, he breathed in.

The drawn-out twang of the flatbow string throbbed deep in his ears. He stepped out of the path of the first bolt, let it drift under his raised arm. The aim of the next was good, right for Murcatto's throat. He plucked it from the air between finger and thumb as it crawled past, set it carefully down on a polished table as he crossed the room. He took up an idealised bust of one of Orso's forebears from beside it his grandfather, Shenkt suspected, the one who had himself been a mercenary. He flung it at the nearest flatbowman, just in the process of lowering his bow, puzzled. It caught him in the stomach, sank deep into his armour, folded him in half in a cloud of stone chips and tore him off his feet towards the far wall, legs and arms stretched out in front of him, his bow spinning high into the air. Shenkt hit the nearest man on the helmet and stove it deep into his shoulders, blood spraying from the crumpled visor, axe dropping slowly from his twisting hand. The next had an open helm, the look of surprise just forming as Shenkt's fist drove a dent into his breastplate so deep that it bent his backplate out with a groan of twisted metal. He sprang to the table, marble floor splitting under his boots as he came down. The nearest of the two remaining archers slowly raised his flatbow as though to use it as a shield. Shenkt's hand split it in half, string flailing, tore the man's helmet off and sent it hurtling up into the ceiling, his body tumbling sideways, spraying blood, to crumple against the wall in a shower of plaster. Shenkt seized hold of the other archer and tossed him out of one of the high windows, sparkling fragments tumbling down, bouncing, spinning, breaking apart, deep clangour of shattering glass making the air hum.

The last but one had his sword raised, flecks of spit floating from his twisted lips as he gave his war cry. Shenkt caught him by the wrist, hurled him upside-down across the room and into his final comrade. They were mangled together, a tangle of dented armour, crashed into a set of shelves, gilded books ripped open, loose papers spewing into the air, gently fluttering down as Shenkt breathed out, and let time find its course again.

The spinning flatbow fell, bounced from the tiles and clattered away into a corner. Grand Duke Orso stood just where he had before, beside the round table with its map of Styria, the sparkling crown sitting in its centre. His mouth fell open.

'I never leave a job half-done,' said Shenkt. 'But I was never working for you.'

Monza got to her feet, staring at the bodies tangled, scattered, twisted about the far end of the hall. Papers fluttered down like autumn leaves, from a bookcase shattered around a mass of bloody armour, cracks lancing out through the marble walls all about it.

She stepped around the upended table. Past the bodies of mercenaries and guards. Over Secco's corpse, his smeared brains gleaming in one of the long stripes of sunlight from the high windows.

Orso watched her come in silence, the great painting of him proudly claiming victory at the Battle of Etrea looming ten strides high over his shoulder. The little man and his outsized myth.

The bone-thief stood back, hands spattered with blood to the elbow, watching them. She didn't know what he had done, or how, or why. It didn't matter now.

Her boots crunched on broken glass, on splintered wood, ripped paper, shattered pottery. Everywhere black spots of blood were scattered and her soles soaked them up and left bloody footprints behind her. Like the bloody trail she'd left across Styria, to come here. To stand on the spot where they killed her brother.

She stopped, a sword's length away from Orso. Waiting, she hardly knew what for. Now the moment had come, the moment she'd strained for with every muscle, endured so much pain, spent so much money, wasted so many lives to reach, she found it hard to move. What would come after?

Orso raised his brows. He picked up the crown from the table with exaggerated care, the way a mother might pick up a newborn baby. 'This was to be mine. This almost was mine. This is what you fought for, all those years. And this is what you kept from me, in the end.' He turned it slowly around in his hands, the jewels sparkling. 'When you build your life around only one thing, love only one person, dream only one dream, you risk losing everything at a stroke. You built your life around your brother. I built mine around a crown.' He gave a heavy sigh, pursed his lips, then tossed the circle of gold aside and watched it rattle round and round on the map of Styria. 'Now look at us. Both equally wretched.'

'Not equally.' She lifted the scuffed, notched, hard-used blade of the Calvez. The blade she'd had made for Benna. 'I still have you.'

'And when you have killed me, what will you live for then?' His eyes moved from the sword to hers. 'Monza, Monza . . . what will you do without me?'

'I'll think of something.'

The point punctured his jacket with a faint pop, slid effortlessly through his chest and out of his back. He gave a gentle grunt, eyes widening, and she slid the blade free. They stood there, opposite each other, for a moment.

'Oh.' He touched one finger to dark cloth and it came away red. 'Is that all?' He looked up at her, puzzled. 'I was expecting . . . more.'

He crumpled all at once, knees dropping against the polished floor, then he toppled forwards and the side of his face thumped damply against the marble beside her boot. The one eye she could see rolled slowly towards her, and the corner of his mouth twitched into a smile. Then he was still.

Seven out of seven. It was done.

Seeds It was a winter's morning, cold and clear, and Monza's breath smoked on the air.

She stood outside the chamber where they killed her brother. On the terrace they threw her from. Her hands resting on the parapet they'd rolled her off. Above the mountainside that had broken her apart. She felt that nagging ache still up the bones of her legs, across the back of her gloved hand, down the side of her skull. She felt that prickling need for the husk-pipe that she knew would never quite fade. It was far from comfortable, staring down that long drop towards the tiny trees that had snatched at her as she fell. That was why she came here every morning.

A good leader should never be comfortable, Stolicus wrote.

The sun was climbing, now, and the bright world was full of colour. The blood had drained from the sky and left it a vivid blue, white clouds crawling high above. To the east, the forest crumbled away into a patchwork of fields squares of fallow green, rich black earth, golden-brown stubble. Her fields. Further still and the river met the grey sea, branching out in a wide delta, choked with islands. Monza could just make out the suggestion of tiny towers there, buildings, bridges, walls. Great Talins, no bigger than her thumbnail. Her city.

That idea still seemed a madman's ranting.

'Your Excellency.' Monza's chamberlain lurked in one of the high doorways, bowing so low he almost tongued the stone. The same man who'd served Orso for fifteen years, had somehow come through the sack of Fontezarmo unscathed, and now had made the transition from master to mistress with admirable smoothness. Monza had stolen Orso's city, after all, his palace, some of his clothes, even, with a few adjustments. Why not his retainers too? Who knew their jobs better?

'What is it?'

'Your ministers are here. Lord Rubine, Chancellor Grulo, Chancellor Scavier, Colonel Volfier and . . . Mistress Vitari.' He cleared his throat, looking somewhat pained. 'Might I enquire whether Mistress Vitari has a specific title yet?'

'She handles those things no one with a specific title can.'

'Of course, your Excellency.'

'Bring them in.'

The heavy doors were swung open, faced with beaten copper engraved with twisting serpents. Not the works of art Orso's lion-face veneers had been, perhaps, but a great deal stronger. Monza had made sure of that. Her five visitors strutted, strode, bustled and shuffled through, their footsteps echoing around the chill marble of Orso's private audience hall. Two months in, and still she couldn't think of it as hers.

Vitari came first, with much the same dark clothes and smirk she'd worn when Monza first met her in Sipani. Volfier was next, walking stiffly in his braided uniform. Scavier and Grulo competed with each other to follow him. Old Rubine laboured along at the rear, bent under his chain of office, taking his time getting to the point, as always.

'So you still haven't got rid of it.' Vitari frowned at the vast portrait of Orso gazing down from the far wall.

'Why would I? Reminds me of my victories, and my defeats. Reminds me where I came from. And that I have no intention of going back.'

'And it is a fine painting,' observed Rubine, looking sadly about. 'Precious few remain.'

'The Thousand Swords are nothing if not thorough.' The room had lost almost everything not nailed down or carved into the mountainside. Orso's vast desk still crouched grimly at the far end, if somewhat wounded by an axe as someone had searched in vain for hidden compartments. The towering fireplace, held up by monstrous marble figures of Juvens and Kanedias, had proved impossible to remove and now contained a few flaming logs, failing utterly to warm the cavernous interior. The great round table too was still in place, the same map unrolled across it. As it had been the last day that Benna lived, but stained now in one corner with a few brown spots of Orso's blood.

Monza walked to it, wincing at a niggle through her hip, and her ministers gathered around the table in a ring just as Orso's ministers had. They say history moves in circles. 'The news?'

'Good,' said Vitari, 'if you love bad news. I hear the Baolish have crossed the river ten thousand strong and invaded Osprian territory. Muris has declared independence and gone to war with Sipani, again, while Sotorius' sons fight each other in the streets of the city.' Her finger waved over the map, carelessly spreading chaos across the continent. 'Visserine remains leaderless, a plundered shadow of her former glory. There are rumours of plague in Affoia, of a great fire in Nicante. Puranti is in uproar. Musselia is in turmoil.'

Rubine tugged unhappily at his beard. 'Woe is Styria! They say Rogont was right. The Years of Blood are at an end. The Years of Fire are just beginning. In Westport, the holy men are proclaiming the end of the world.'

Monza snorted. 'Those bastards proclaim the end of the world whenever a bird shits. Anywhere without calamities?'

'Talins?' Vitari glanced around the room. 'Though I hear the palace at Fontezarmo did suffer some light looting recently. And Borletta.'

'Borletta?' It wasn't much more than a year since Monza had told Orso, in this very hall, how she'd thoroughly looted that very city. Not to mention spiked its ruler's head above the gates.

'Duke Cantain's young niece foiled a plot by the nobles of the city to depose her. Apparently, she made such a fine speech they all threw aside their swords, fell to their knees and swore undying fealty to her on the spot. Or that's the story they're telling, at any rate.'

'Making armed men fall to their knees is a neat trick, however she managed it.' Monza remembered how Rogont won his great victory. Blades can kill men, but only words can move them, and good neighbours are the surest shelter in a storm. 'Do we have such a thing as an ambassador?'

Rubine looked around the table. 'I daresay one could be produced.'

'Produce one and send him to Borletta, with a suitable gift for the persuasive duchess and . . . offers of our sisterly affection.'

'Sisterly . . . affection?' Vitari looked like she'd found a turd in her bed. 'I didn't think that was your style.'

'My style is whatever works. I hear good neighbours are the surest shelter in a storm.'

'Them and good swords.'

'Good swords go without saying.'

Rubine was looking deeply apologetic. 'Your Excellency, your reputation is not . . . all it might be.'

'It never has been.'

'But you are widely blamed for the death of King Rogont, Chancellor Sotorius and their comrades in the League of Nine. Your lone survival was . . .'

Vitari smirked at her. 'Damnably suspicious.'

'In Talins that only makes you better loved, of course. But elsewhere . . . if Styria were not so deeply divided, it would undoubtedly be united against you.'

Grulo frowned across at Scavier. 'We need someone to blame.'

'Let's put the blame where it belongs,' said Monza, 'this once. Castor Morveer poisoned the crown, on Orso's instructions, no doubt. Let it be known. As widely as possible.'