“I’ve wed his two empty boots.’ ‘That you havena,’ said Janet, Lady of Buccleuch, lowering her voice not at all in the presence of two hundred twittering Scott relations as they gazed after their vanishing husbands. ‘They aye remember their boots. It’s their empty nightgowns that get fair monotonous.”

“If you were a dear, good little wife, Janet,’ had said Lymond, ‘you’d fall into a mortal decline that day, or at least hide his boots.’ ‘Francis Crawford, are ye daft! What ever kept a Scott from a fight? Women? Boots? If yon one were deid, he’d spend his time in Heaven sclimming up and down the Pearly Gates peppering Kerrs.”

“There’s some of them’ll be nursing a guid scratch or two on their hinder-ends this night.… Man, it was a rout.’ ‘I imagine,’ said Piero Strozzi, his dark face impassive, ‘that my lord Grey’s army would not relish their defeat either.’ ‘Oh, aye, the English,’ said Buccleuch absently. ‘We are, after all, at war with them and not with the Kerrs,’ the Marshal said mildly.”

“Only what?” I asked. I could barely hear my own voice.He turned his gaze back to me, firm and unflinching. “Only… more human.”And that was it. All the anger and sorrow vanished. There was nothing in me.Nothing at all. I was empty.“Get out,” I said.”

“A—ris—ta?” Degan asked, sounding horse. “What is it?”“A rat bit me,” she said, once again shocked by her own rasping voice.“Jasper does that if—” Gaunt coughed and hacked. After a moment, hespoke again. “If he thinks you’re dead or too weak to fight.”“Jasper?”“I call him that, but I’ve also named the stones in my cell.”“I only counted mine,” Arista said.“Two hundred and thirty-four,” Degan replied instantly.“I have two hundred and twenty-eight.”“Did you count the cracked ones as two?”“No.”

“It’s never about someone else or something else, that’s the voice of the victim. I’ve learnt to silence him and throw him gagged in the boot of my vehicle...I’m in the driver’s seat...He was a shit driver anyway!”