If it had gone in a quarter of an inch higher the rib would not have deflected it, and he would have died instead of the mayor. It was not a mistake he would have made ten years ago. He was getting soft.

The city watch had come bursting through the door in answer to the man’s terrified screams, but by then Kormak had spoken the sentence and done his job despite the little girls howled protests from the cupboard in which he had locked her.

He had thrown the mayor’s severed head at the guard and cut through them while they were distracted. A dive through the window and into the cobbled streets and he was racing through the town gates while the alarm bell was still being rung. He had thought he had made a clean getaway till he heard the pounding of hooves on the road behind him later that day and known that he must flee.

The youngest boy returned and moved over to a place by the fire, kneeling, warming his hands though it was not cold outside. His sister hunkered down beside him, hands on his shoulder, looking up at Kormak with big wide eyes. They were both blonde like their parents, their hair rough cut. Their eyes were blue and innocent.

“My father says you are a soldier,” said the boy. “You must have seen many wars.”

Only one, Kormak wanted to say, and all the other wars you have ever heard of are merely part of it. Instead he said; “Yes. I have seen wars.”

“Have you killed anybody?” asked the girl.

“I have killed too many.” He was going to say too many to count but somehow the words would not come out properly. The witchroot must be getting to him.

“Have you ever killed an orc?” asked the boy.

Kormak nodded.

“He would tell you he had killed anything you ask,” said the eldest son. The sneer was there still, the fear too.

“I have killed a full grown Tyrant,” Kormak said. “I slew it at the field of Aeanar while men around me fled in terror, and crows feasted on the eyes of the fallen.”

The witchroot must have been stronger than he thought or he was more tired and slipped into a waking dream. For a moment he was back on the trampled field, dancing over the corpses, the dwarf-forged blade singing in his hand. The great orc, half again his height and many times his weight loomed over him, the scimitar of black iron, large enough to hew through a tree, poised to strike down on the neck of the fallen king.

Perhaps that day, he had been the man the boy he had once been had thought he was going to be. Perhaps, but by then he no longer believed in honor or wanted to be a hero. He had seen too much corruption and too much treachery and too much death.

He shook his head and concentrated on drinking the soup right from the bowl. It was hot, and full of potatoes and carrots, with some meat and some fat to add taste.

“Good,” he said to the wife of the house, hoping she would offer him more. She did not, so he began wiping the bowl with a chunk of bread.

“Could you kill a troll,” said the girl. There was an odd note of hope in her voice.

“Gerda,” said the woman. “It is best not to speak of such things lest the Children of the Moon hear you.”

“I was only asking, mother, and if this man could save me…”

Kormak’s heart sank. He had been half expecting this ever since he had heard the father’s words at the door. He did not want to go out into the night and face the monsters once more, but he had sworn an oath long ago, when he was still a boy and had wanted to be a hero. They had put a bright sword in his hand that day, and told him that he was one, and for a brief shining instant he had believed it was true. There were times when he thought he had lived his whole life in the long shadow cast by that one incandescent moment.

“Save you from what?” he asked.

“Something out there in the dark,” said the mother. “It took some of our cattle and we can hear it prowling in the night. Sometimes it calls to us. Telling us to send Gerda out. It says if we send her it will leave and let the rest of us live.”

Kormak stared into the fire, thinking of the other eight year old he had seen today. She had seen a monster.