He jerked up, dumping her head onto the mattress and bringing her fully and unpleasantly awake.
“Oh, yes,” he sneered, “the Prince of Drunkards will totter to our rescue.”
“Well, not on his own.” Rikke tried to pick the sleep out of her eyes. “My father says he’s bringing five thousand men with him.”
“Five thousand whores, maybe. They say that’s how many he’s bedded.”
“How old is he? Twenty-five?” Rikke screwed her face up as she went over the sums. “If he really got going at seventeen, that’s eight years of fucking so… what… a couple every day? Provided none of ’em tempt him back for seconds. And he never has a day off. I mean, we all have moments when we’re not in the mood. Has he got ’em queueing down the palace corridors?” She gave a snort of laughter. “His cock must be sore.”
“Perhaps it’s only four thousand,” said Leo, sourly.
“More likely his reputation’s run way ahead of the truth.” Rikke raised one brow at Leo. “I hear that can happen with some young men.”
“Perhaps Crown Prince Orso’s the exception. Maybe he’ll fuck the Northmen to death for us.”
“Fine by me, if it gets the bastards to go home.”
She tried to ease him back down beside her but he wouldn’t be moved. “It’d hardly be a surprise, since he’s got a Styrian degenerate for a mother.”
“A Styrian what?”
Leo’s lip curled like it might’ve at a dead dog in bed with them. “The rumour is she lies with women.”
Rikke had never been able to understand why you’d care a shit who someone you’d never even met lay with. How few problems do you need to have before you count that among ’em? “Would’ve thought you’d understand. You spend most o’ your time with men.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well… tight-knit group, your friends, aren’t they?”
Leo frowned, not quite getting all her point yet. “We’ve known each other for years. I grew up with Jurand and Antaup. And I met Jin in Uffrith, you know that. We’re brothers-in-arms.”
“And such strong arms, too!” And she squeezed one of his. “No wonder you all enjoy a wrestle.”
“It’s good exercise, and…” His eyes went wide and he twisted away from her. “That’s disgusting!”
“Not to me.” He’d some towering opinions, all right, but rarely built on much. She quite liked digging at their foundations and watching ’em totter. “Can’t think of anything more wholesome than all those muscular male bodies, glistening with sweat, grunting and straining and slithering around together—”
“Do you have to drag everything into the gutter?”
“I don’t have to.” She caught his shoulder and pulled him back beside her. “But it is warm down here.” She tried to nuzzle up against him but he was already on to his next grievance.
“I don’t blame Orso, really.” As if that was doing the man quite a favour. “Stealing other men’s glory is what princes are for.” As if this was all about who got the glory, not who got home alive. “It’s my bloody mother I blame, for letting him get away with it!” He’d have blamed his mother for letting the rain fall. “Why can’t she just trust me?”
“Ugh,” said Rikke, rolling away to stare up at the flapping tent cloth. It was plain her favourite part of the day was fully ruined. She’d no notion why he was so keen to rush into a battle he’d most likely lose. The boy had many fine features—bravery, honesty, good humour, a fine-shaped face and an even better-shaped arse, and so constantly, reliably warm. But imagination was not a strong point. Nor was he labouring under a low opinion of himself. Maybe losing was not a thing he could conceive of. Maybe to him, every delay was just wrong-headed shits throwing themselves in the way of his certain triumph.
“… let me off the leash, I’d show these bastards something…”
The memory floated up, as it did at least once a day, of hiding under that riverbank while Stour Nightfall laughed about what he’d do to her. She thought of Uffrith in flames, and all the good folk hurt or killed, and she clenched her fists at the usual rush of fury. No one wanted that bastard dead more than she did, but even she saw they had to be patient. Whether you waited for all the help you could get seemed like no kind of question at all.
“… I’m supposed to be her son, and she treats me like—”
Rikke puffed out her cheeks and gave a sigh that made her lips flap.
“Sorry,” said Leo sulkily, “am I boring you?”
“Oh, no, no, no.” She rolled her eyes towards him. “Nothing gets a girl wet like hearing a man complain about his mother.”
He grinned. Say one thing for Leo, he might get sulky, but he cheered up quick. He pushed the blankets back and wriggled next to her, his hand sliding across her chest, and down her stomach, and around her backside, and onto the inside of her thigh, and giving her quite the pleasurable shiver. “What does get a girl wet?” he whispered in her ear.
“For me, it’s pretty boys with too much courage and too little patience…” Seemed the morning might not be a total loss after all. She pushed her fingers into his hair and dragged his face down towards hers, straining up to kiss him, his breath a touch fierce with the overnight smell, but—
“Leo!” came a call from outside.
“Ah, shit,” she hissed, head dropping back.
“There’s a knight herald in the camp!” Jurand’s voice, sharp with excitement.
“Bloody hell!” Leo squirmed free of Rikke despite her attempts to wrap her legs around him, jumped out of bed and started dragging his trousers on. “Might be the Closed Council!” Grinning over his shoulder as if that was just the news she’d been waiting for. “Making me lord governor!”
“Grand,” grunted Rikke, upending her boot and shaking it till the chagga pellet fell out, then wedging it behind her lip.
There was quite the mood of expectation outside, half-dressed men shuffling between the tents, still chewing their breakfasts, breath smoking as they asked for news and got no answers. Everyone was drifting one way, like leaves on a current, towards a pair of gleaming wings bobbing up ahead. The helmet of a knight herald, striding through the rain-sodden camp towards the forge Lady Finree had borrowed for her headquarters.
Leo hurried after him, pulling on his cloak, while Rikke hopped along behind with Jurand, one of her socks already full of mud.
“Is your message for me?” asked Leo. “For Lord Brock?”
Maybe not everything was about him after all. The knight herald strode on up the muddy hillside without even a sideways glance, a satchel over his shoulder stamped with the golden sun of the Union.
“Might be Prince Orso’s arrived with his men,” said Rikke hopefully, trying to get her other boot on and follow both at once.
“I wouldn’t count on it.” Jurand didn’t look at her, a jaw muscle working on the side of his face.
“You don’t like me much, do you?”
He glanced across, surprised. “Actually, I do.” And he offered her his elbow so she could stop hopping. “You’re hard not to like.”
“I am, aren’t I?” she said, finally dragging her boot on.
“I’m just… protective.” He frowned towards Leo as they set off again, still failing to get a word out of the knight herald. “We grew up together, and, well… he’s nowhere near so tough as he pretends to be.”
She snorted. “We did some growing up together, too, and believe me, I know.”
“He doesn’t have the best luck. With women.”
“Maybe I’ll be the exception.”
“Maybe.” He gave a smile that looked like it took some effort. “I just don’t want to see him get hurt.”
“Senior staff only,” growled a soldier at the door of the forge. Rikke barged Jurand with her shoulder so he lurched into the guard’s arms. While they were busy getting disentangled, she sidestepped, slipped around them and was in.
She’d never been in a council of war before but, like
fucks and funerals, her first time was something of a let-down.
The forge was stuffed with people, warm and damp from their nervous breath. Leo’s mother had her gloved fists planted on a table spread with maps, a litter of anxious officers clustered about her. Lords Mustred and Clensher were among ’em, two dour old noblemen of Angland who’d brought some reinforcements in the day before. Rikke wasn’t sure which was which, but one had a thick grey moustache, the other whiskers all around his jaw but his top lip shaved. Like they only had one whole beard between ’em.
Rikke’s father was scratching uneasily at his own silvery stubble, his War Chiefs around him. Hardbread looked concerned, as usual. Red Hat looked grim, as usual. Oxel had his usual shifty sideways squint like the knight herald was another man’s sheep he was thinking of making off with. And Shivers just looked like Shivers, which was probably the most troubling of the lot.
In fact, the least worried man in the forge was the smith who owned it, who simply looked angry to have been stopped working so a bunch of fools could argue under his steadily leaking roof. But that’s war for you. An ugly business that only leaves bad men better off. Why folk insisted on singing about great warriors all the time, Rikke couldn’t have said. Why not sing about really good fishermen, or bakers, or roofers, or some other folk who actually left the world a better place, rather than heaping up corpses and setting fire to things? Was that behaviour to encourage?
“World’s full o’ mysteries, all right,” she muttered to herself, and shifted her chagga pellet from one side of her mouth to the other.
“My Lady Governor!” boomed out the knight herald, painfully loud in that little space, bowing low and nearly poking Shivers’ good eye out with one of the wings on his helmet. “A communication from His August Majesty!” And he whipped that satchel open, produced a scroll and shouldered through the damp press to hand it over with a showman’s flourish.
Silence, then, as Finree dan Brock broke the great red seal and began to read, stony face giving nothing away. Rikke knew her letters. Had learned the bastards at great personal pain during her horrible year in Ostenhorm. But she couldn’t make a thing out of these ones, the writing was so flourished and flounced.
“Well?” snapped Leo, eager voice harsh in the breathless silence.
“Has Prince Orso arrived?” growled Mustred. Or Clensher.
“He has not,” she said, still reading.
“Tell me he’s embarked, at least!” growled Clensher. Or maybe Mustred.
“He has not.” The lady governor’s jaw worked as she looked up. “Nor will he.” She passed the letter to Leo, noticed for the first time that his shirt was hanging out, undone, then frowned over at Rikke, whose shirt was hanging out, too, all the buttons in the wrong holes.
Rikke looked down at the ground, chewing hard at her chagga and her face on fire. Lady Finree often spoke about forging stronger connections between the Union and the North but she doubted Rikke fucking her son was quite what she’d had in mind.
“There has been a serious uprising in Valbeck,” grated out Leo’s mother. “The Breakers have seized the city. There are fears it could turn into a general revolt.”
Leo’s eyes flickered across the paper. “The crown prince has been sent to recapture the city. Even if he succeeds… he won’t be here for weeks!”
There was silence in the little forge then, but for the patter of a new shower on the roof, the plop and trickle of a leak into a bucket. Silence, while each man or woman chewed over the implications. Then everyone started shouting at once.
“By the dead,” whispered Hardbread, pulling at his sparse grey hair.
“Fucking Union!” sneered Oxel. “I told you we’re fools to trust ’em.”
“So what?” sneered Red Hat back. “You’ll kneel to Black Calder?”
Shivers just stood and looked like Shivers, which was worrying enough, and Rikke’s father rubbed at the bridge of his nose and gave a weary groan.
“Is it for this that Angland’s been near bankrupted by taxes?” fumed Mustred, or maybe Clensher.
“What’s the damn point of a king who won’t defend his kingdom?” bellowed Clensher. Or Mustred.
“This is disgusting! Outrageous! Unprecedented—”
“My lords, please!” Lady Finree held up her palms, trying to calm the uncalmable. “This does not help us!”
The only person who looked happy was the Young Lion, his smile growing wider and wider as it dawned on him what this meant.
Rikke puffed out her cheeks. “Reckon we’ll have to save ourselves.”
In the Mirror
Scale Ironhand, King of the Northmen, was at least twenty years past his best.
He’d been a great warrior, but then he’d lost his hand and had an iron one wedged onto the stump. He’d been a great War Chief, but now he was happy to follow along in the rear and eat all the spoils. Eat ’em messily, since he was missing his two front teeth as well as his hand. Clover remembered him when he’d still been a tower of brawn. Now he was a mountain of blubber, pale jowls spread over his fur collar, a tuft of grey hair sprouting from his sweat-beaded pate, his beard full of grease and his swollen cheeks full of broken veins. Two painfully skinny girls haunted his elbows with a platter and a jug and the hardest jobs in the North—making sure their king never ran out of ale.
A set of old warriors were gathered at his right side with well-polished armour but long-faded names. Scale would’ve called them his closest Named Men, his royal retinue, his king’s bodyguard. But their main purpose was to remind him of old victories, and insist he was still the man he’d been when he had half the belly and twice the hands, in spite of all the evidence.
The firepit was banked high, the tables crammed with warriors, the stolen hall sweaty as a forge and noisy as a battle, women kicking and cursing as they shoved through the press with platters of meat. Clover sat with Wonderful at Black Calder’s table, in the shadows further from the firepit. There was less gold over here, and less laughter, and less ale, but a lot more power. Scale Ironhand might wear the king’s chain, but everyone who mattered knew it was his brother who made the king’s choices.
Calder had an odd guest today, though. A small man in travel-worn clothes who carried no weapon but a staff he’d left leaning against the wall. As strange a thing in this hall bristling with blades as a hen playing among foxes. Clover had seen Black Calder entertain some strange, proud, grand guests. Styrians, and Union men, and dark-skinned Southerners drawn into his spider’s web of schemes. But he never saw him treat anyone with as much respect as this nothing-looking little unarmed man.
“He’ll be along, Master Sulfur,” said Calder, laying a humble hand on the tabletop between them. “You can depend on it.”
“You have never given me cause to doubt,” said Sulfur. “Yet.” And he gave that hand a familiar pat.
Calder swallowed and drew his hand back. “A shame your master couldn’t be here.”
“Oh, indeed.” Sulfur smiled about at the grease-smeared, ale-spattered gathering. “He does love sophisticated conversation. But, sadly, he is detained in the West.”
“Nothing serious, I hope?”
“A disagreement with two other members of our order. His brother Zacharus and his sister Cawneil have… their own ways of seeing things.”
“Families, eh?” grunted Calder, frowning at his brother. “Our best friends and our worst enemies.” And there was a clatter as the doors were heaved open.
Stour Nightfall swaggered in with chin hefted high and sword slung low, oozing so much scorn it was a wonder he didn’t tramp through the firepit and dare the flames to burn him. The warriors at his back swept the benches with fighters’ contempt as the hall fell silent. Magweer aimed a baleful glare at Clover, and Clover saluted him with a piece of half-eaten meat.
“You come late?” rumbled Scale, sucking the last shreds from a bone and tossing it down for his dogs to fight over. “To dine with your king?”
The old king a
nd his old cunts glowered at the young heir and his young cunts, naught praiseworthy on either side but all jealous of what the others had even so. Matching groups, in many ways; Clover could almost see each warrior squaring up to his counterpart. The mean one, the handsome one, the one who hardly spoke, the one who spoke too much.
“Like looking in a mirror,” he muttered.
“A mirror that makes you old,” said Wonderful.
“I come whenever it fucking pleases me.” Stour hoisted his sneer up from the king’s impressive collection of stripped bones to the king’s fat face. “After all… my guess was… you’d be dining…a while.”
The chill moment stretched a little longer, then Scale broke out in a roar of wheezy laughter and struggled with an effort to his feet, almost upending the table as he caught it with his mighty belly. “Tell me of your victories, Nephew!” And he spread his arms wide, iron hand dangling limp from the end of the withered right one.
Stour gave that wolf grin as he danced around the table. “None to sing of lately, Uncle,” and he flung his arms around the king, and they clapped each other on the back with a great show of manly affection. “This Union bitch and this Dogman coward are still fighting over who can run away from me fastest.”
“Ha! Keep pushing ’em, boy, keep pushing ’em! Don’t give those bastards a chance to breathe!” Scale jabbed weakly with his iron hand as if it was an army, while he drained his cup with the other and held it out for more.
“He should get himself a bigger cup,” murmured Clover.
“Maybe two,” said Wonderful. “He could empty one while his servants filled the other. The poor girls would never have to stop pouring.”
The Great Wolf was still bemoaning the lack of murder. “At this rate, they’ll fall back beyond the Whiteflow and we’ll win without ever drawing our swords.”
Scale clapped Stour on the shoulder so hard he nearly knocked him over the table. “You’re like a fighting dog, can’t wait to slip the leash! So was I, once. So was I.” And the King of the Northmen stared off into the firepit, eyes shining with reflected fire, and drained his cup again, and held it out again, and made the girl shrug back her long braid and dart forward with the jug. Again.
A Little Hatred Page 29