“If it was in a duel,” murmured Bayaz, “how did you come out alive?”
Logen licked his lips. His mouth tasted bitter. “I beat him.”
“With a spear through you?”
“I didn’t know about it until afterwards.”
Longfoot and Luthar frowned at each other. “That would seem a difficult detail to overlook,” said the Navigator.
“You’d think so.” Logen hesitated, trying to think of a good way to put it, but there was no good way. “There are times… well… I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
A long pause. “How do you mean?” asked Bayaz, and Logen winced. All the fragile trust he’d built over the last few weeks was in danger of crumbling round his ears, but he didn’t see any choice. He’d never been much of a liar.
“When I was fourteen, I think, I argued with a friend. Can’t even remember what about. I remember being angry. I remember he hit me. Then I was looking at my hands.” And he looked down at them now, pale in the darkness. “I’d strangled him. Good and dead. I didn’t remember doing it, but there was only me there, and I had his blood under my nails. I dragged him up some rocks, and I threw him off onto his head, and I said he fell out of a tree and died, and everyone believed me. His mother cried, and so on, but what could I do? That was the first time it happened.”
Logen felt the eyes of the group all fixed on him. “Few years later I nearly killed my father. Stabbed him while we were eating. Don’t know why. Don’t know why at all. He healed, luckily.”
He felt Longfoot easing nervously away, and he hardly blamed him. “That was when the Shanka started coming more often. So my father sent me south, over the mountains, to look for help. So I found Bethod, and he offered me help if I’d fight for him. I was happy to do it, fool that I was, but the fighting went on, and on. The things I did in those wars… the things they told me I did.” He took a long breath. “Well. I’d killed friends. You should have seen what I did to enemies. To begin with I enjoyed it. I loved to sit at the top of the fire, to look at men and see their fear, to have no man dare to meet my eye, but it got worse. And worse. There came one winter that I didn’t know who I was, or what I was doing most of the time. Sometimes I’d see it happening, but I couldn’t change it. No one knew who I’d kill next. They were all shitting themselves, even Bethod, and no one more scared of me than I was.”
They all sat for a while in gaping silence. The ruined building had been seeming like some kind of comfort after all that dead and empty space on the plain, but it didn’t any more. The empty windows yawned like wounds. The empty doorways gaped like graves. The silence dragged on, and on, and then Longfoot cleared his throat. “So, for the sake of argument, do you think it’s possible that, perhaps without intending to, you might kill one of us?”
“It’s more likely I’d kill all of you than one.”
Bayaz was frowning. “Forgive me if I feel less than entirely reassured.”
“I wish at least that you had mentioned this earlier!” snapped Longfoot. “It is the type of information a travelling companion should share! I hardly think that—”
“Leave him be,” growled Ferro.
“But we need to know—”
“Shut your mouth, stargazing fool. You’re all a long way from perfect.” She scowled over at Longfoot. “Some of you make a lot of words and are nowhere near when the trouble starts.” She frowned at Luthar. “Some of you are a lot less use than you think you are.” She glared at Bayaz. “And some of you keep a lot of secrets, then fall asleep at bad times and leave the rest of us stranded in the middle of nowhere. So he’s a killer. So fucking what? Suited you well enough when the killing needed doing.”
“I only wanted to—”
“Shut your mouth, I said.” Longfoot blinked for a moment, then did as he was told.
Logen stared across the fire at Ferro. The very last place he’d ever have hoped to get a good word. Out of all of them, only she’d seen it happen. Only she knew what he really meant. And still she’d spoken up for him. She saw him looking, and she scowled and shrank back into her corner, but that didn’t change anything. He felt himself smile.
“What about you, then?” Bayaz was looking at Ferro as well, touching one finger to his lip as though thinking.
“What about me?”
“You say you don’t like secrets. We have all spoken of our scars. I bored the group with my old stories, and the Bloody-Nine thrilled us with his.” The Magus tapped his bony face, full of hard shadows from the fire. “How did you get yours?”
A pause. “I bet you made whoever gave you that suffer, eh?” said Luthar, a trace of laughter in his voice.
Longfoot started to chuckle. “Oh indeed! I daresay he came to a sharp end! I dread to think of the—”
“I did it,” said Ferro.
Such laughter as there was sputtered and died, the smiles faded as they took that in. “Eh?” said Logen.
“What, pink, you fucking deaf? I did it to myself.”
“Why?”
“Hah!” she barked, glaring at him across the fire. “You don’t know what it is, to be owned! When I was twelve years old I was sold to a man called Susman.” And she spat on the ground and snarled something in her own tongue. Logen didn’t reckon it was a compliment. “He owned a place where girls were trained, then sold on at a profit.”
“Trained to do what?” asked Luthar.
“What do you think, fool? To fuck.”
“Ah,” he squeaked, swallowing and looking at the ground again.
“Two years I was there. Two years, before I stole a knife. I did not know then, how to kill. So I hurt my owner the best way I could. I cut myself, right to the bone. By the time they got the blade away from me I had cut my price down to a quarter.” She grinned fiercely at the fire as if it had been her proudest day. “You should have heard him squeal, the bastard!”
Logen stared. Longfoot gaped. Even the First of the Magi looked shocked. “You scarred yourself?”
“What of it?” Silence again. The wind blew up and swirled around inside the ruin, hissing in the chinks between the stones and making the flames flicker and dance. No one had much left to say after that.
Furious
The snow drifted down, white specks swirling in the empty air beyond the cliffs edge, turning the green pines, the black rocks, the brown river below into grey ghosts.
West could hardly believe that as a child he had looked forward to the coming of snow every year. That he had been delighted to wake up and see the world coated in white. That it could have held a mystery, and a wonder, and a joy. Now the sight of the flakes settling on Cathil’s hair, on Ladisla’s coat, on West’s own filthy trouser leg, filled him with horror. More gripping cold, more chafing wet, more crushing effort to move. He rubbed his pale hands together, sniffed and frowned up at the sky, willing himself not to slide into misery.
“Have to make the best of things,” he whispered, the words croaking in his raw throat and smoking thick in the cold. “Have to.” He thought of warm summer in the Agriont. Blossom blowing from the trees in the squares. Birds twittering on the shoulders of smiling statues. Sunlight pouring through leafy branches in the park. It did not help. He sniffed back runny snot, tried yet again to worm his hands up into his uniform sleeves, but they were never quite long enough. He gripped the frayed hems with his pale fingers. Would he ever be warm again?
He felt Pike’s hand on his shoulder. “Something’s up,” murmured the convict. He pointed at the Northmen, squatting in a group, muttering urgently to each other.
West stared wearily over at them. He had only just got nearly comfortable and it was difficult to take an interest in anything beyond his own pain. He slowly unfolded his aching legs, heard his cold knees click as he got up, shook himself, tried to slap the tiredness out of his body. He started shuffling towards the Northmen, bent over like an old man, arms wrapped round himself for warmth. Before he got there the meeting had already broken up. Another decision made without any need for his opinion.