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Movement.

On top of one of the castle turrets.

A figure making stiff, halting progress across the damaged roof up there.

A man, searching for a vantage point, a direct view of the scaffold.

A man with a rifle.

I directed my gaze back on Cy. Kept my expression as straight as I could. Poker face on.

"No, you go right ahead," I said. "Spill it all. I know you're dying to. Explain to everyone how clever you are and how stupid I've been."

Bergelmir gave a growl. "Must we do this? The day's wasting, and I yearn to plunge this blade into the killer of my wife."

"Just a few minutes more," Mrs Keener said to him soothingly. "My boy Cy hoodwinked Gid in fine style, and it's only right he gets his chance to gloat."

"Yeah," Cy agreed. "Why not? So I made myself your right-hand man, Gid. Your sidekick. Robin to your Batman. We had those chats about my childhood and my poor old granddad getting irradiated and losing his memory. Which, by the way, was all true. I might have embellished the tough-upbringing stuff a little, for added authenticity. But the basics is all real."

"You were never in the army, though, were you?"

"Nope, that I did make up," he admitted.

"You referred to your granddad as a squaddie. That should have tipped me off. No one who's actually been a squarebasher uses the word squaddie. Only the tabloids do."

I darted a glance to the castle. The man with the rifle was settling himself down on a flattish section of the roof, taking a sniper's prone stance. Nobody but me appeared to have noticed him. The crowd had their backs to the castle, and their attention, anyway, was focused on the drama unfolding on the scaffold. And everyone on the scaffold had their attention focused on me and Cy.

How long this state of affairs would continue was unclear, but I would try and keep it going long enough for the rifle man to line up his shot and take it.

I knew who he was now. I'd recognised him by the white bandage around his head.

Heimdall.

Risen from his sickbed. Recovered from the injuries inflicted on him from afar by Jormungand. Tooled up and out for blood.

He'd been overlooked. Mrs Keener had presumed he was out of action for the duration and had not bothered to post a guard over the field hospital. She'd been overconfident. It was a lapse, and now she was going to pay the penalty.

"Okay, so I did slip up there," Cy said. "But not too badly, and in every other respect I was flawless. Starting the firefight in Utgard, that was my first big win. Chopsticks died, and your plans for an alliance with the frosties were scuppered."

"You could have got yourself killed too, though," I said.

"No chance. Mrs Keener had given me an emergency code phrase, something I could say that'd let the frost giants know I was under Loki's protection so they wouldn't touch me. An oath sworn on Ymir's bones. Whenever a frost giant hears 'by Ymir's bones,' he's got to pay attention and respond."

"It's true," said Bergelmir. "A jotun must always attend carefully to any plea that invokes my father."

"Then by Ymir's bones, cut me down from here," I said.

"Within limits," Bergelmir added with a grim laugh.

"That was my Get Out Of Jail Free card," Cy said. "Only, I didn't have to play it because Sleipnir turned up in the nick of time. Chopsticks's death started the rot. You were rattled, and the other guys began to wonder about your leadership abilities. So I just had to keep needling and gnawing at them. Poor old Backdoor was the easiest to get a rise out of. Closet racist. You learn to recognise the type. They don't need to say anything. You can just tell. I knew he'd blurt out something nasty eventually, and I knew it would piss you off and drive a wedge further between the two of you. You already had him in the frame for what happened to Chopsticks. Now you were completely convinced he was the bad banana in the bunch. It meant you were constantly looking over your shoulder at him and your head wasn't fully in the game."

My arms had begun to ache from taking the weight of