I’m one of those hirelings, only it’s not a sword I let out. It’s Reaper, my hard-headed warhammer. Griff was one, too, and none better in this part of Abanasinia than Killer Griff.
It was wind that blew me into the Swan and Dagger, wind and the breath of winter coming. Griff was looking right at me when I came in. His eyes narrowed a bit and his lip curled in the sneer that was his smile. When he lifted his hand, a lazy wave, I went to join him.
“Sit,” he said as easily as if it had been five days since he’d seen me last and not five months.
I took the warhammer off my hip and set it on the table. When I sat, Griff poured out some ale from the jug and shoved the tankard my way. I drank long and slow, then looked around to see whether anything remaining from his meal seemed worth picking over. Nothing did; Griff had done that duck to the bone.
“Hungry, are you, Broc?”
“Not so much,” I said, looking past him to the bar where Baird Taverner stood listening to a whip-thin goblin whine and wheeze over his woes. He was a shabby thing, that goblin, his clothing naught but patches and rags, and he’d lately been in a fight with someone or something mean enough to rip off half the flesh of his pointy left ear.
“Sniveling about the price of dwarf spirits,” Griff said, squinting into the thick air and looking where I did. “It’s gone up some since last you were here. Baird’s getting twenty-five coppers for it now.”
Twenty-five. You could drown yourself in ale for twenty-five coppers, and I had nothing like that much in my pocket. Still, I might have figured the cost would rise. You don’t get dwarf spirits easily these days, what with Thorbardin shut up tight against the world and my dear mountain kin hoarding most of it for themselves. What Baird got he paid hard for, so he charged a steep price to tap a keg.
“I’ll stand you a drink,” Griff said, leaning back and gesturing to the taverner.
I stopped him. “Don’t. I can’t afford to be in your debt.”
He shrugged, as if to say I must please myself. “Where have you been, Broc? Someone told me you were dead, killed out there in the hills of Darken Wood.”
I’d heard the same tale told of me in several versions. “Did you mourn me, Griff?”
In the uneasy light of candle and hearth the scars on his face shone like cruel silver as he leaned back in his chair and yawned.
“My heart broke,” said the man whose heart sat like a stone in his chest, beating but never moved. “Good to see you again,” he added roughly as he lifted the jug and filled the tankard for me again.
I drank his health with a silent gesture, drained the tankard, and filled it a third time as he leaned across the table. That close to him, most people look away, from the scars and from his eyes. I never looked away, though sometimes when I met his eyes I saw ghosts there, peering out at me. That night, as on other nights, I thought Griff’s eyes held the ghosts of all the people he’d killed.
“Listen,” he said, the word falling heavily between us to let me know he had something to say worth hearing. He tapped Reaper’s head. “Broc, are you looking for work?”
“I’m here,” I said simply. “Me and the season. It’s not a good place when the snow falls, that wild wood yon. I’d rather be under roof.”
He took a long pull of ale and banged the tankard onto the table. “So says the Dwarf of Darken Wood. Well, I can give you work to make sure you can buy yourself the finest house in Long Ridge and stock it with dwarf spirits all the year through.”
I leaned forward, wiping ale foam from my mouth. If I had any money, I’d not be wasting it on a fine and fancy house. A room over the Swan and Dagger was enough for me, with some coin left over to buy enough dwarf spirits to warm away the winter.
“It’s a sweet job,” Griff said, hitching his chair closer to the table. He glanced right and left, then dropped his voice low. “We’ll be in and out before anyone knows what happened.”
The job was a vengeance killing down in Elm High, one of the big towns on the Whiterage River. The details were not unusuaclass="underline" a ruined daughter, a son murdered trying to defend his sister, and a father too old to do what needed to be done and rich enough to offer Griff one hundred in steel coin to fund the expedition, two hundred more when we came back with the proof of our success.
“That proof,” I said, “what would it be?”
Griff slashed his thumb across his neck. A head. Well, that’s easy enough.
“How much for me?”
“The usual.”
One-third. Over at the bar, the goblin whined some more and shoved enough coins at Baird to see his cup refilled. One-third of three hundred — a fine payday.
“Done,” I said.
In the moment I said it, Baird Taverner pointed across the smoky room to us. Griff cocked his head as the crowd at the bar shifted, then parted. A young woman stood revealed, gray eyes wide and slender hands clasped modestly before her.
Dove among the wolves, I thought.
She took a timid step forward, then clasped her hands tighter and made her step firmer. She had a gauntlet to pass of gropers and grabbers, but she managed that well enough. She had a sharp elbow, that one, and she looked as if she knew how to use her knee if she had to. Right to us she came and stood at the table. This close to her, I saw it wasn’t her hands she clasped but a small green velvet pouch kept close. By the look of it, a good deal of coin nestled in there. By the look of her, lips pressed tight and eyes anxious, that was all the coin she had.
“I’ve come to find Griff Rees,” she said, “and they tell me he is here.”
Griff said nothing, only eyed her, cool and quiet, so that she must look at one or the other of us. She did that but once, then stood in silence until at last I said, “It’s not me you’re wanting, girl. It’s that lout across the table from me.”
Her glance thanked me, and she turned to Griff. She flinched a little to see his scars, and she could not hold his eye; no shame to her for it.
“I’ve come,” she said, “to hire you, Griff Rees, for a job of work.”
“Have you now?” Griff said, drawling lazy and low. “Well, you’ve come late, mistress. I’ve just taken”-he smiled to mock-”a job of work.” He leaned back in his chair, shouted to Baird for more ale, and seemed surprised to find the young woman still there. “Did you not hear me?”
She stood tall and straight, her black hair glinting in the firelight. She said she had heard him, and she said she hoped he would give her as good a hearing. “For I’ve got the steel to pay you well.”
Griff’s dark eyes lighted. He wasn’t one for sentiment, and so the sad tale of the ruined daughter and the murdered son wouldn’t move him to dismiss this young woman if her purse proved deeper than that of the old man who couldn’t take his own revenge. He threw out his leg and hooked a chair with his foot, dragging it over to the table. She sat, looking around her uneasily, her pouch and her hands in her lap.
“I am Olwynn Haugh,” she said, “and I am a widow. My husband-” Her voice faltered. “My husband was a farmer, below in the valley. He is lately dead. I have a child, Cae, she’s but a month old, and I want to take her and go home to my father. I want to be with him before winter sets in and-”
Griff laughed, the sound like a bear shouting in the hills. “Mistress Haugh, someone has misinformed you. I don’t hire out to escort young ladies home to their fathers.” He leaned across the table, giving her full sight of his scarred face, his dark and dangerous eyes. “I travel harder roads than that.”
“And crueler,” she said, her eyes on the table, on me, on anything but his face. “I know who you are. That’s why I want to hire you to protect me on my way. My father lives in Haven, and the best road to there passes around Darken Wood.”
Well, Olwynn Haugh was no fool, that much we now knew. We’ve a long history around here in Abanasinia, one full of dark threads and some bright. In these after-days many of the doings are grim, and much of that grim work goes on in Darken Wood, home to cutthroats and thieves and people like me who aren’t so delicate about whom they kill or why as long as the pay is good.