The Wisdom of Crowds

by Joe Abercrombie

  “Tell that to those splattered to mincemeat at the bottom of the Tower of Chains,” he snapped. “Liberty is a luxury we can’t afford right now.”

  “Of course,” she said, looking down at the floor. “We have to take things at the right pace. Have to be cautious.” She looked up at him again, and she looked pale. “Have you heard from… the First of the Magi?”

  Leo frowned. “That old fool? Why would I have?”

  “In the past, he held… a great deal of influence.”

  “In the past, maybe.”

  “It was partly through his patronage that your father became Lord Governor.”

  “What?”

  His mother leaned forwards. A woman who’d fought an army of Northmen to a draw, and she looked positively scared. “Undertakings were made to him. He is not a man to simply let a debt go.”

  “Sadly, the banks all burned in the Great Change. I rather think the debts burned with them.”

  “I very much doubt he will see it that way.”

  “What do I care how he sees it?”

  His mother blinked. “Leo, you don’t understand—”

  “I have bigger problems than making wizards happy! Have you seen the state of things here?” And he waved towards the window. A burned-out stretch of the city was rolling into view, scorched windows and doorways yawning empty.

  “By the Fates,” breathed his mother, eyes wide at the sight. Leo had got used to the city’s scars, perhaps, the way he had to his own, but now he saw those fresh, too.

  “The bastards ruined everything,” he said, clenching his fist. “It can’t ever happen again. We need a strong army. A vigilant Inquisition. The Breakers and Burners are still there, in the provinces. Like bloody maggots in the guts of the nation! We need to ferret them out. Teach our enemies to fear us. The bloody Styrians, the bloody Gurkish, the bloody Old Empire.

  We have to get a grip.”

  It seemed obvious good sense to him, but his mother looked more dismayed than ever. “We have to show strength, but… surely we need friends before we look for more enemies—”

  “You know I never looked for enemies!” He turned sourly back to the window. “I just beat the ones who looked for me.”

  He did some watery smiling, some half-hearted waving, but there weren’t many people on the Middleway. If the Lady Regent had been in the carriage no doubt they’d have packed in a dozen deep. They pissed themselves for the so-called Mother of the Nation and barely spared a thought for the man who’d actually got the job done. But there it was. Being a hero had always been a thankless task. You did it because it was right, not for the prizes.

  “How is Savine?” asked his mother.

  “Very popular,” he said, grudgingly. “Have you had the bloody pamphlets up in Angland? Savine, bare-breasted in the Court of the People, shielding her babies from the spears of the Burners. Savine, duelling with Judge on the roof of the Tower of Chains and throwing her down like your bloody friend Bayaz threw down the Master Maker. Savine, bringing shelter to the orphans, bread to the starving, hope to the hopeless. The Darling of the Slums! The Mother of the Nation!” He gave a snort. “Anyone would think she ended the Great Change single-handed.”

  His mother raised one brow. “I seem to remember a few mildly exaggerated songs sung of your victories, up in the North. She has been through a lot.”

  If that was meant to make him less annoyed, it failed. “We both have,” he grunted.

  “It can be difficult, when children appear. Your father and I didn’t couple for months after you were born.”

  “Must you?”

  “Well, it’s true. You cried all the time. You’d only sleep in bed with me. It can change things, in a marriage, that’s all I’m saying.”

  “She blames me,” he said, slumping in his seat. He’d never been able to hide anything from his mother for long. “She blames me for everything. For making our son a king. For making her wildest ambitions come true. For bringing order back to the Union. For everything.”

  His mother raised the other brow. “And is it your fault?”

  “Ten breaths off the boat and you’re taking her side?”

  “It’s a marriage, Leo. There shouldn’t be sides.”

  “Feels like there are, though.” He frowned out of the window at the lonely well-wishers. “And everyone’s on hers.”

  Savine had wasted no time making herself at home in the palace she so resented Leo for providing. She’d worked her usual magic on a set of rooms even more cavernous than the ones they’d lived in before the Great Change. Rooms on the ground floor, since Leo was scarcely friendlier with stairs these days than Arch Lector Glokta used to be.

  “Your grandfather!” said Leo’s mother, one hand to her chest as she gazed up at the huge canvas of Lord Marshal Kroy glaring towards victory.

  “Where he can stand guard over his family,” said Savine, gliding forwards with her best smile. One Leo rarely saw these days.

  “Savine! You look breathtaking, as always.” They embraced while Leo stood by, grimacing at the ache in his stump. His mother held Savine out at arm’s length, taking in her clipped hair, her clothes, her scar. “And thoroughly modern, of course.”

  “I could say the same of you.”

  “But you wouldn’t dare, because it would be rank flattery.” Already they were wandering off, arm-in-arm, leaving Leo to lurch painfully across the acres of floor to a side table so he could pour himself a drink.

  “Is that necklace Osprian work?”

  “I’d forgotten how good your eye is— Oh!” Leo’s mother had frozen on the threshold of the nursery with her hands pressed to her face. “Are these…?”

  “Who else would they fucking be?” Leo wanted to snarl at her. He bit his tongue, loitering in the doorway while the ladies advanced on the cribs.

  “This is Ardee,” Savine was cooing, lifting one of the babies. “She’s just been fed, so this is the ten breaths in which she’s happy.”

  “She has your eyes,” Leo’s mother flung over her shoulder at him.

  “I hope not,” he muttered. “They’re about the only things I have that still work.”

  All his mother’s attention was on the bundle in her arms, that gormless grin on her face women get around babies, as if making a sucking sound is a heroic achievement. “Oh, she’s a weight! You forget. Can I ask…

  have your parents…?”

  “No,” said Savine. “No sign.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Leo’s mother put a hand on Savine’s arm. A touch of simple support and sympathy. A touch she never gave him. “I was very much looking forward to seeing your mother again. I always enjoyed our chats.”

  “It would be nice… to know what became of them.” Savine put her hand on top of Leo’s mother’s. Squeezed it. As if they were parent and child, and Leo was a pushy visitor getting in the way of their reunion. “But there are so many people who lost family in the Great Change. I suppose… one learns to live with the doubts. And I have a new family now.” She beamed down at the children. Leo didn’t get so much as a glance, of course. That would’ve been far too much to ask.

  “So you do.” Leo’s mother handed Ardee back and leaned over Harod’s cot. “I suppose this must be His Majesty.” He gave a panicky clutch at the air as he was picked up. It always annoyed Leo, seeing his softness. Made him want to shake the boy, tell him to be a man. The way his own father had always done.

  “You shouldn’t coddle him,” grunted Leo.

  “Surely that’s exactly what a grandmother should do,” she said, fussing and rocking and squeaking.

  Leo had always imagined he’d be a wonderful father. To a boy, of course. A little copy of himself he could give a little sword to. They’d ride and wrestle and fence together. He took a sip of his wine, but it tasted bitter. How could he do any of that now? Holding them was hard enough, with his one good arm, his one good hand. All he could do by way of playing was dangle the useless fingers of the other in their faces.


  Leo’s mother put her wrinkled nose close to Harod’s blankets. “His August Majesty has soiled himself.”

  “I understand his great-grandfather King Guslav was prone to do the same,” said Savine, and she scooped him into her arms and swept from the room.

  “I wish your father had lived to see them.” Leo’s mother dabbed at teary eyes. “He doted on you. Always saying how proud he was of his son.”

  That was the story they always told, but Leo remembered it differently. His father had never been there, and when he had been he was stiff and distant, and when Leo needed love he’d got empty sayings about being a man, and dry rot about the principles of the Union.

  He remembered waking scared in the night, and he couldn’t find the pot, so he’d pissed in the cupboard. When his father found out he had refused to speak to him for a week. As soon as he could he’d sent Leo off to Adua, then to Uffrith, where the Dogman had been more of a father to him than his own ever was.

  He wanted to say it all. To puke up his resentments. He had his mouth open to do it. But why bother? The past isn’t made of facts, not really, just stories people tell to make themselves feel better. To make themselves look better. Everyone was at it. Savine was the bloody queen of it, the Darling of the Slums herself. He wondered what myths that worm Sworbreck was already spinning about the past vile and bloody year. He took another heavy swig from his glass.

  “What is it, Leo? You seem… sulky.”

  It was only then he realised how much he’d wanted her approval. A man who’d made himself one of the most powerful in the Circle of the World, still endlessly trying and failing to impress his mother. The Lord Regent of the Union, jealous of his own babies.

  “Isn’t this what you were always telling me to do?” he demanded. “To be shrewd? To be prudent? Isn’t this what Savine was always telling me to do? To be ruthless? To be ambitious? Then I do it and somehow I’ve let you all down!”

  “Leo, don’t be ridiculous—”

  “I saved the fucking Union!” he snarled, lifting his glass to fling it against the wall, stopping himself at the last moment so all he managed was to pour wine down his sleeve. “Isn’t this what you wanted for me? To be a hero?” He took a step towards her, twisted his iron leg and tottered sideways, gasping with pain.

  “Leo, please.” She caught him. Held him. Laid her firm hand on his face. “I know I pushed you. I know I lectured you. I know I was too hard. I’m sorry for all of that. Perhaps you’ll see now you have children of your own… being a parent… there is no plan. It’s just a set of mistakes you hardly notice making. Please believe me…” She winced at his iron leg, as if she felt the pain of it. “All I ever wanted was for you to be happy.”

  He swallowed, tears burning at the back of his nose. He found his balance again, pulled free of her, tugged his uniform straight. “I wish you’d fucking said so.”

  Every grate of cutlery, every grind of crockery, every retch of conversation felt like a nail hammered into him.

  Leo’s stump was on fire. He’d sparred earlier, if you could call it sparring when he lumbered squeakily about the circle while Jurand lied that he was getting better. He’d got frustrated, as usual, then he’d got angry, as usual, then he’d pushed himself far too hard, as usual. Now his back was throbbing, too, sending stings all the way up into his neck. He wasn’t getting better, he was getting worse.

  He frowned down at the meat on his plate the way he’d once frowned across the Circle at Stour Nightfall. An enemy he wasn’t sure he could beat. He picked up his knife, tried to cut, but pressing gently it only slithered around in the widening pool of bloody gravy. He gritted his teeth, pressed harder, but now the whole plate slid about, slopping juice onto the polished tabletop.

  “Fuck,” he hissed. “Fuck it!” He wanted to snatch his meat up and rip into the thing with his teeth. He could feel Savine’s impatience on his right. His mother’s concern on his left. He was master of the Union, and the women in his life were having to stop themselves reaching across to cut up his dinner.

  “My Lord and Lady Regent…” Solumeo Shudra leaned forwards with an oily smile. “We are most honoured by your invitation.” He was the leader of the Westport delegation, a big, dark-skinned, shaven-headed man who looked more like a priest of Gurkhul than an honest fellow of the Union. The other five were of every shape and colour. It faintly disgusted Leo that he was obliged to lap up the flattery of mongrels. But Savine said they needed Westport’s money. So much to be rebuilt.

  He’d always imagined absolute power meant doing whatever you pleased, but it was starting to look like one sordid compromise after another. He wished he was back in Uffrith, among the Northmen, where you could say what you meant and eat any way you fucking pleased and a missing limb or two won you admiration rather than pity.

  “And we are most honoured by your attendance,” said Savine, touching Leo gently on the shoulder as if they were one person, with one set of

  feelings. “We are all here to reaffirm our commitment to the Union. To reaffirm our commitment to each other.” And she smiled at Leo so warmly, so fondly, she almost had him believing it. As if love was a machine she could turn on with a lever.

  “It grieves me that leaders of the same great nation should never before have met,” said Leo’s mother. “I so look forward to getting to know you all better.”

  “As do we, Lady Governor Finree,” said the greasiest of the Westporters. Filio, his name was, or some such shit.

  “Your courage and prowess are spoken of with awe throughout the Circle of the World,” added another. Rosimiche, and from his bent nose it looked as if someone had punched him in the face once. Leo wouldn’t have minded giving it a go himself.

  “They pale compared to my son’s.” Leo’s mother showed every tooth as she smiled across at him. The falseness was strangling.

  “It is well that we have a king again,” said Filio.

  “It is well that we look towards a stable future,” said Rosimiche.

  “It is well that Angland is once more inseparable from Midderland,” said Shudra.

  “Anything else would be unthinkable,” said Savine.

  “But…” And Shudra raised his brows towards the empty chairs on the opposite side of the table. “It is most regrettable that Lord Governor Skald and the other representatives of Starikland have not attended.”

  “It is,” snapped Leo, pressing his fist into the tabletop and smearing it through spilled gravy. “He was given every opportunity, and I take it as a personal affront that he—”

  “I am mediating between my son and Lord Governor Skald.” Leo’s mother laid her fingertips gently on the elbow of his ruined arm. That calming touch she always used to use on him, the one you might use on a peevish horse, though these days he felt little but a numb prickling. “The position is delicate, of course. Lord Skald’s wife Cathil is sister to our… former king. But I have no doubt that, given time, he will come around to our way of—”

  “If he doesn’t he’ll regret it,” snapped Leo, twisting his elbow away from her. His days of deferring to his mother were well and truly over. His days of deferring to anyone. And the thought of getting back in the saddle, leading men in the field, being the Young Lion again, whoever the enemy, brought on a surge of excitement. He glared across the table at Shudra and his god-bothering stooges. “Anyone who threatens the stability of the Union will regret it. Anyone. From outside. Or from inside. Do you take my meaning?”

  Shudra bowed his head. “Your Highness makes his meaning most plain.”

  “I’m a blunt soldier,” grunted Leo, shifting his grip on his knife, “and I like blunt dealing.”

  “As do I.” It was the woman who spoke. Mozolia, was she called? Tall and heavy-shouldered, frowning at Leo from under her thick black and grey brows. “Bluntly, then, it seems to us that the greatest threat to the stability of the Union currently comes from its last monarch.” Leo stiffened. He felt Savine stiffen beside him. “There are many who sti
ll feel loyalty to King Orso. He will always be a focus for discontent.”

  Leo slowly swallowed, slowly set down his knife, slowly sat forward, looking this brazen bitch right in the eye. “I’m a blunt soldier. I like blunt solutions.”

  There was an utter silence in the room. For a long moment, it seemed no one even breathed. Shudra winced slightly. Filio peered down at his meal. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the tendons stand from the back of Savine’s hand as she gripped her fork as tightly as a standard-bearer might his flagstaff.

  Leo’s mother nervously cleared her throat. “Of course… we would not want to do anything that might inflame passions—”

  “But sometimes we must,” said Leo, cutting her off dead. “A king’s just a man, in the end. Meat and bone and blood, like other men, and vulnerable to the same things. The same sharp edges. The same long drops. It’s really not so big a problem as you think.”

  Mozolia gave a satisfied grunt and turned back to her meal. Leo’s mother was less impressed. “Leo, really—”

  “No, Lady Finree, we must be hard-headed.” With all her customary precision, Savine set down her cutlery and gently put her cool hand on Leo’s. “I and my husband speak with one voice on this, as on so much. It is most regrettable, but, after all we have been through, after all the nation has been through…” Finally, she met Leo’s eye. That flinty look she used to have, when trying to convince him to be more ruthless. “I would far rather have another regret than another rebellion.”

  It was more of a relief than Leo had expected to find the old Savine beside him again. He turned his hand over and gripped hers tight. He needed her guile. He needed her popularity with the masses. The dead knew, he couldn’t do bloody everything himself.

  “What a woman,” he said, treating the delegates from Westport to a beaming smile. “I swear I’m the luckiest man in the world.” And he shoved his plate away. “Now could someone bring me something I can fucking eat?”

  Redemption

  His Highness Crown Prince Orso would, no doubt, have considered these conditions intolerable. His August Majesty King Orso had, however, become something of an authority on cells, a dungeon devotee, and honestly considered this far from the worst he had occupied. It had a bed, a table, a chair. The window was more of a barred slot, but at least it let him feel the sun on his face in the mornings. The food was passable, the temperature comfortable, the odour not oppressive. The guards, clad in the dark uniform of Angland, did not speak to him with scorn. They did not speak to him at all. In most respects, it was very much preferable to the damp cellar in which Judge had kept him. When it came to ways out, however, it was much the same.