Just after dawn, a cold and lingering mist burrows a path through the highland plains, mingling with the grey smoke of burning thatch that's rising from below.

The plague-bearer places her staff of office down across a rock and sits cross-legged with a sigh, gazing out across the ridge and down towards the endless valleys that rest like squat white tumours beneath the mountain's shadow.

Behind her, Black Gruss grunts and crouches, his battered armour clanking in protest, and glares down at the frosted mud of the path.

"Three men," he says, and grimaces, "no bears. They're lancers, on horseback. Heavily armed or laden down with baggage. Riding fast through the night."

His thinning black hair is flecked with snow; he itches furiously at his scalp with one plate-coated hand, frowning.

"Of course," he says, "they could have bows."

He's no coward - although isn't that what all cowards tell themselves? - but he remembers the horse archers and their bows. He'll never forget them. The snow that muffled the clatter of their hooves, the arrows that fell through the white whirlwind in near-silence. The agonised, frightened braying of his troops as they scattered and stumbled in the crimson slush of their own comrades' blood and died. The one barbed arrow that caught between his breastplate and his codpiece, jamming his gut and making him shriek like a child.

"It's probably nothing we need to be concerning ourselves with," he says. "Not when we're so close."

He waits.

"Malory?"

The plague-bearer closes her eyes, and reaches out across the morning mists, winnowing down over the icy crags and over the still clear water that shimmers, into the sullen fields and dying harvests of a particularly cold winter, until she reaches the black smoke and the fires spreading across village rooftops and she can hear the screaming.

She opens her eyes and raises her woollen cowl.

"They're trying to stamp out something beautiful," she says.