“Shit!” squeaked Leo, one arm out towards her, the other out towards the door, wanting to hold her down so she didn’t smash herself, wanting to help her and not knowing how. His first thought, much to his dismay, was to run for his mother. His second was to do as he’d been told and get Isern-i-Phail.
He flung the door open and charged across the yard, chickens scattering, between tents, past men picking at their breakfast, sharpening their weapons, moaning at the wet and the food and the state of things, staring at him as he dashed by half-naked. He saw Glaward sitting by a fire, grinning as Jurand whispered something in his ear. They both spun wide-eyed as Leo pounded up, then broke apart and he sprang between them over the flames, knocking a pot of water bouncing away.
“Sorry!”
He nearly fell as his bare foot slid on the other side, tottered a few steps and was charging on, through the Northmen’s campsite, smoky fires and the smell of cooking and someone singing in a rumbling bass as he pissed into the trees.
“Where’s Isern-i-Phail?” he screeched. “Isern-i-Phail!”
He followed a pointed hand towards a tent, hardly even knowing whose hand it was, lashed at the flap and ripped his way through.
He’d half-expected to find her bent over a cauldron, but the hillwoman was sitting in her tent in a tattered Gurkish dressing gown, her bandaged leg propped on an old crate, a smoking chagga pipe in one hand and a jug of last night’s ale in the other.
She glanced at him as he tried to catch his breath. “I rarely turn down a half-naked man first thing in the morning, but—”
“She’s having a fit!” he wheezed out.
Isern dropped the pipe in the jug with a hiss, hauled her injured leg off the crate and stiffly stood. “Show me.”
There she lay, not thrashing like she had been but still squirming and making that wheezing moan, spit around the dowel turned to froth and flecked across her twisted face. She must’ve caught her head against the wall, there was blood in her hair.
“By the dead,” grunted Isern, kneeling beside her and putting a hand on her shoulder. “Help me hold her, then!” And Leo knelt, too, one hand on Rikke’s arm and one on her knee while Isern rooted through her hair to look at the cut. It was then he realised Rikke was stark naked and he wasn’t far off.
“We were just…” Maybe Antaup could’ve pulled out an innocent explanation. He’d had the practice. But Leo had never been much of a liar and this needed a true master of the art. “We were just…”
“I am a woman of the world.” Isern-i-Phail didn’t even bother to look at him. “I can hazard a mad guess at what you were about, boy.” She leaned down over Rikke, wiping the froth away with her fingers, smoothing her hair back from her face. “Shhhh,” she breathed. Sang it, almost. “Shhhhh.”
Ever so gently she held her. Ever so softly she spoke. More gently and more softly than Leo would’ve thought that hard-faced hillwoman could have.
“Come back, Rikke. Come on back.”
Rikke gave a feeble grunt, a last flurry of twitches running through her legs and up to her shoulders. She groaned, slowly pushed the spitty dowel out of her mouth with her tongue.
“Fuck,” she croaked.
“There’s my girl!” said Isern, the edge back on her voice. Leo closed his eyes and gave a sigh of relief. She was all right. And he realised he was still gripping her tight even though she’d stopped jerking, and he let go quickly, saw the marks of his fingers pink on her arm.
Isern was already working Rikke’s trousers over her limp feet and up her legs. “Help me get her dressed.”
“Not sure I know—”
“Got her undressed, didn’t you? Same thing, d’you see, but in reverse.”
Rikke gave a long groan as she slowly sat up, clutching at her bloody head.
“What did you see?” asked Isern, wrapping Rikke’s shirt around her shoulders and squatting beside her.
“I saw a bald weaver with a purse that never emptied.” Rikke’s voice sounded strange. Rough, hollow. Not like her voice at all. It made Leo feel a little afraid, somehow. And a little excited.
“What else?” asked Isern.
“I saw an old woman whose head was stitched together with golden wire.”
“Huh. What else?”
“I saw a lion… and a wolf… fight in a circle of blood. They fought tooth and claw and the wolf had the best of it…” She stared up at Leo. “The wolf had the best of it… but the lion was the winner.” She caught him by the hand, staring into his face, dragging him close with a shocking strength. “The lion was the winner!”
Till that moment, Leo had been sure it was all guff. The Long Eye. Old tales and superstitions. What else could it be? But looking into Rikke’s wild, wet eyes, pupils swollen up so big there was no iris left at all but only black pits with no bottom, he felt the hairs on his neck rise and the skin on his spine tingle. Suddenly he began to doubt.
Or maybe he began to believe.
“Am I the lion?” he whispered.
But she’d closed her eyes, sagged back in the straw, her limp hand dropping from his.
“Out you go, now, boy,” said Isern, shoving his boots and his shirt into his arms.
“Am I the lion?” he called again, for some reason desperate to know.
“Lion?” Isern laughed as she pushed him out into the yard. “Ass, maybe.” And she kicked the door shut.
No Unnecessary Sentiment
“My father thinks very highly of you.”
Inquisitor Teufel’s permanently narrowed eyes swivelled from the sunny country slipping past the window to Savine, but she said nothing. To have called her hard-looking would have been an epic understatement. She appeared to be chiselled from flint. Her chin and cheekbones jutted, her nose was blunt and slightly bent with two marked creases above the bridge from constant frowning, her dark hair was shot with grey and bound back tightly as a murderer’s shackles.
Savine flashed her artfully constructed artless smile, the one people usually could not help returning. “And he’s not a man who gives praise lightly.”
Teufel acknowledged that with the faintest nod, but kept her silence. Compliments can coax more from some people than torture, and Savine had found compliments relayed from some respected third party most effective of all. But Teufel’s locks were not so easily picked. She swayed faintly with the jolting of the carriage, face as guarded as a bank vault.
Savine could not help shifting at a sudden pang. With impeccable timing, her menses were starting early, the familiar dull ache through her belly and down the backs of her thighs with an occasional sharp twinge into her arse by way of light relief. As usual, she struggled with every muscle to look perfectly relaxed and forced her grimace into an ever-brighter smile.
“He tells me you were raised in Angland,” she said, trying a different tack.
Finally, Teufel spoke, but only the minimum. “I was, my lady.” She reminded Savine of one of Curnsbick’s engines: stripped back, angular and unapologetic. No unnecessary flesh, no unnecessary ornament, and for damn sure no unnecessary sentiment.
“You worked in a coal mine.”
“I did.” And had not changed her clothes since, by the look of it. A worn shirt with sleeves rolled up to the elbows and those leather braces workmen wear. Coarse trousers tucked into tightly laced work boots, one of which was thrust defiantly out into the centre of the carriage floor, as if staking a claim to the territory. Scarcely a gesture towards femininity anywhere. Had there ever been a woman who took less care over her appearance? Savine subtly shifted her new dress in a vain attempt to move a chafing seam away from her damp armpit. She would never have admitted it but, hell, how she envied her, especially in this heat.
“Coal is changing the world,” she observed, nudging the window down to get a little more air in and swishing her fan a touch faster.
“I heard.”
“Is it changing it for the better, though?” muttered the boy, wistfully. “That’s the question.�
��
He glanced up, and a flush spread across his pale cheeks, and his big, sad, frog-like eyes flickered over to Teufel. She gave him the same calm, critical stare she gave Savine. A look that let him judge for himself whether he should have opened his mouth. The lad looked at the floor and folded his arms even tighter about himself.
They certainly made an odd couple. The woman of flint and the boy of wax. She not showing a hint of feeling, he with every emotion written right across his face. They seemed the very last people one would suspect of being agents of the Inquisition. But Savine supposed that was rather the point.
“Are you expecting trouble in Valbeck?” she asked.
“If I was,” said Vick, “I imagine your father would’ve told you not to come.”
“He did. I ignored him. And I hardly think he would be sending you if there was not at least a little trouble there. Am I right?”
Vick did not even blink. There really was no rattling the woman. “Are you expecting trouble?” she asked, answering a question with another.
“I find it’s always wise to expect it. I own a share in a textile mill in the city.”
“Among other things.”
“Among other things. I have a partner there, one Colonel Vallimir.”
“Once commander of the King’s Own First Regiment. Too inflexible to work under Mitterick. Is he flexible enough to work under you?”
Apparently, Vick not only knew her own business, but everybody else’s. “Where would be the fun in bending flexible people to your whims?” asked Savine. “And partners are useful. Someone to oversee operations. Someone to share the risks.”
“Someone to take the blame.”
“You should go into business.”
“Not sure I’m ruthless enough. I’ll stick with the Inquisition.”
Savine rewarded that with her exhaustively practised spontaneous laugh. “The mill was losing money. Troubles with the workers, I expect. I always used to say that textiles are for wearing, not investing in.” She flicked an infinitesimal speck of dust from the embroidered cuff of her travelling jacket. “There are lots of ex-soldiers among the weavers, violent men prone to grudges. When the guilds were broken up, they were left rudderless, injured in their pockets and their pride.”
“What changed your mind?”
“The usual. I realised how much money was to be made. And now, of a sudden, I find my mill is in profit.”
“Which is a wonderful thing, of course,” said Lisbit, who never had anything worth saying but could never stop saying it anyway, and to make matters worse was saying it in an ever more affected accent since she was made temporary companion. At this rate, Savine would have throttled her before they reached Valbeck, let alone by the time Zuri returned from the South.
“Which is a wonderful thing,” said Savine. “But profits so fast and so large make me… suspicious.”
“You should go into the Inquisition.”
“In this corset? I hardly think so.”
Now Teufel smiled. Just a little curl at the corner of her mouth. Considered, like every expression of hers. As though she had been over her budget and decided she could afford one.
“You don’t give much away, do you?” said Savine.
That smile curled up a little more. “Comes from not having much, maybe.”
It was not mockery, exactly. They simply both knew that Teufel had seen things, suffered things, overcome things that Savine would never have to. Would never dare to. She needed no wigs or powder to hide behind. She sat safe in the certainty that she was carved from fire-toughened wood, and could break Savine in half with those veined coal miner’s hands if she pleased.
Savine found she was shifting a little to hide her sword. She wished she had not worn it. How absurd an affectation it seemed, sitting opposite someone who cut people for a living.
Vick sat with her leg stretched out. The old niggle in her hip was acting up, and every bump in the road sent a jolt through the carriage and a jab of pain from her knee right to her back, but she wasn’t about to squirm for a comfortable position she knew she’d never find.
Savine dan Glokta looked serenely comfortable, one leg carelessly crossed over the other, the shiny toe of one immaculate boot showing beneath the embroidered hem of a dress that probably cost more than the carriage, and the carriage was an expensive one. Vick had never seen a woman who took more trouble about her appearance, and she’d once spent a horrible half-hour lurking at the back of one of Queen Terez’s functions.
Not a hair of Savine’s eyebrows, not a thread of her clothes, not a speck of her powder was out of place, even in the heat. All so porcelain-perfect it was a surprise whenever she moved, talked, breathed like ordinary humans. She wore a ridiculous little sword with jewels on the hilt. She wore a tiny, pointless hat fastened with a crystal pin. She fluttered a fan made from fillets of iridescent seashell gracefully back and forth, back and forth. She had a nest of golden braids which only a dunce could’ve imagined was her real hair. Or anyone’s real hair. Had there been any justice in the world, she would’ve looked absurd. But Vick knew well there was no justice, and she looked spectacular.
Might Vick have looked like that herself, if her father hadn’t been taken by the Inquisition? If her family hadn’t been sent to Angland along with him? Might she have been sitting there, in a wig that took a month to weave, tapping the toe of those wonderful, horrible boots, as smugly satisfied with herself as a cat by the kitchen fire?
Vick learned long ago that might have is a game with no winners. Few games do have winners, in the end.
“Do you have those sweets, Lisbit?” asked Savine.
Lisbit, who was only slightly less well groomed than her mistress, slipped a polished box from her travelling bag. Perfume wafted out as she revealed no more than a dozen little sugared fruits, nestling in crushed paper. Vick’s mouth flooded with spit. When you’ve starved, food comes to touch a special place, and you can never quite go back.
“Can I tempt you?” murmured Savine.
Vick glanced from her overpriced sweets to her overpriced smile. In the camps, everything had a cost, and usually with painful interest, too. Looking into Savine dan Glokta’s eyes, hard and shiny as the eyes of an expensive doll, Vick doubted you could find a more merciless creditor if you scoured the whole of Angland.
Owing one Glokta was far too many. “Not for me.”
“I entirely understand. Can’t eat them myself.” Savine sighed as she arched her back, pushing one hand into her impossibly slender side. “I’m like a weight of sausage meat squeezed into a half-weight skin already.”
It wasn’t mockery, exactly. They just both knew that Savine had more manners, money and beauty in one quim hair than Vick could’ve dug from her whole acquaintance. She sat safe on invisible cushions of power and privilege, knowing she could buy and sell Vick on a whim.
Savine offered the box to Tallow. “How about you, young man?”
A blotchy flush spread across his cheeks. As if a goddess had floated from the heavens to offer him eternal life. “I…” He glanced at Vick. “Can I take one?”
“If Lady Savine says you can take one, you can take one.”
Savine smiled wider than ever. “You can take one.”
He reached out with a trembling hand, prised one from the fancy paper, then sat staring at it.
“That sweet probably cost more than your shoes,” said Vick.
Tallow lifted up one dirty boot, its creased tongue hanging out like a thirsty dog’s. “They were free. Got ’em off a dead man.” And he stuffed the sweet in his mouth. “Oh.” His eyes went even wider. “Oh.” He closed them, and chewed, and melted into his seat.
“Good?” asked Lisbit.
“Like sunshine,” he mumbled.
“You really should say thank you.”
“Don’t worry.” Savine hid it well, but Vick noticed the twitch of annoyance on her face. She offered the box again. “You’re sure?”
“Not for
me,” said Vick. “But you’re very kind.”
“I doubt everyone would agree.”
“If everyone agreed, I’d be out of a job.” Vick forced herself not to wince as she drew in her outstretched leg and slid the window all the way down. “Pull up!” she called to the driver. “We’ll go on foot from here.”
“It’s true one must be careful who one is seen with.” Savine opened her eyes very wide as the carriage rattled to a halt. “My mother likes to tell me a lady’s reputation is all she has. Ironic, really. Her reputation is dismal.”
“Sometimes you don’t value a thing till you’ve thrown it away,” muttered Vick.
Valbeck was hidden behind the hills to the north as she hopped down into the rutted mud, but she could see the smoke from the city’s thousands of chimneys, spreading on the breeze to make a great dark smudge across the sky. Maybe she could smell it, too. Just an acrid tickle at the back of her throat.
“Is that all your luggage?” asked Savine as Tallow dragged their stained bags down from the mass of boxes on the roof.
“We travel light,” said Vick, pulling on her battered coat and giving her shoulders the labourer’s hunch that went with it.
“I envy you that. It sometimes seems I can’t leave the house without a dozen trunks and a hat stand.”
“Wealth can be quite a burden, eh?”
“You’ve no idea,” said Savine as Lisbit swung the door shut.
“Thanks for the sweet, my lady,” croaked out Tallow.
“Such wonderful manners deserve a reward.” And Savine tossed the box through the window.
Tallow gave a little gasp as he caught it, fumbled it, managed to stop it falling and finally clasped it tight to his chest. “Don’t know what to say,” he breathed.
Savine smiled. Open, and easy, and full of opulently polished pearly teeth. “Then silence is probably your best option.” It nearly always was, in Vick’s opinion. Savine touched her fan to the brim of her perfect little hat. “Happy hunting.”
A Little Hatred Page 21