‘Oh, hell,’ croaked Crandall. He let the hatchet clatter to the boards and held his open palms up high. ‘Now look here,’ he stammered out, ‘I’m Horald’s son. Horald the Finger!’
Javre shrugged as she stepped over Mason’s body. ‘I am new in town. One name strikes me no harder than another.’
‘My father runs things here! He gives the orders!’
Javre grinned as she stepped over Big-Coat’s corpse. ‘He does not give me orders.’
‘He’ll pay you! More money than you can count!’
Javre poked Pock-Face’s fallen knife aside with the toe of her boot. ‘I do not want it. I have simple tastes.’
Crandall’s voice grew shriller as he shrank away from her. ‘If you hurt me, he’ll catch up to you!’
Javre shrugged again as she took another step. ‘We can hope so. It would be his last mistake.’
‘Just … please!’ Crandall cringed. ‘Please! I’m begging you!’
‘It really is not me you have to beg,’ said Javre, nodding over his shoulder.
Shev whistled and Crandall turned around, surprised. He looked even more surprised when she buried the blade of Mason’s hatchet in his forehead with a sharp crack.
‘Bwurgh,’ he said, tongue hanging out, then he toppled backwards, his limp hand catching the stand and knocking it and the tin bowl flying, showering hot coals across the wall.
‘Shit,’ said Shev as flames shot up the flimsy hangings. She grabbed the water jug but its meagre contents made scarcely any difference. Fire had already spread to the next curtain, shreds of burning ash fluttering down.
‘Best vacate the premises,’ said Javre, and she took Shev under the arm with a grip that was not to be resisted and marched her smartly out through the door, leaving four dead men scattered about the burning room.
The one who’d had his hands in his pockets was leaning against the wall in the street, clutching at his own knife stuck in his thigh.
‘Wait-’ he said as Javre caught him by the collar, and with a flick of her wrist sent him reeling across the street to crash head first into a wall.
Severard was running up, staring at the building, flames already licking around the doorframe. Javre caught him and guided him away. ‘Nothing to be done. Bad choice of décor in a place with naked flames.’ As if to underscore the point, the window shattered, fire gouting into the street, and Severard ducked with his hands over his head.
‘What the hell happened?’ he moaned.
‘Went bad,’ whispered Shev, clutching at her side. ‘Went bad.’
‘You call that bad?’ Javre scraped the dirty red hair out of her battered face and grinned at the ruin of Shev’s hopes as though it looked a good enough day’s work to her. ‘I say it could have been far worse!’
‘How?’ snapped Shev. ‘How could it be fucking worse?’
‘We might both be dead.’ She gave a sharp little laugh. ‘Come out alive, it is a victory.’
‘This is what happens,’ said Severard, his eyes shining with reflected fire as the building burned brighter. ‘This is what happens when you do a kindness.’
‘Ah, stop crying, boy. Kindness brings kindness in the long run. The Goddess holds our just rewards in trust! I am Javre, by the way.’ And she clapped him on the shoulder and near knocked him over. ‘Do you have an older brother, by any chance? Fighting always gets me in the mood.’
‘What?’
‘Brothers, maybe?’
Shev clutched at her head. Felt like it was going to burst. ‘I killed Crandall,’ she whispered. ‘I bloody killed him. They’ll come after me now! They’ll never stop coming!’
‘Pffffft.’ Javre put one great, muscled, bruised arm around Shev’s shoulders. Strangely reassuring and smothering at once. ‘You should see the bastards coming after me. Now, about stealing back this sword of mine …’
The Fool Jobs
East of the Crinna, Autumn 574
Craw chewed the hard skin around his nails, just like he always did. They hurt, just like they always did. He thought to himself that he really had to stop doing that. Just like he always did.
‘Why is it,’ he muttered under his breath, and with some bitterness too, ‘I always get stuck with the fool jobs?’
The village squatted in the fork of the river, a clutch of damp thatch roofs, scratty as an idiot’s hair, a man-high fence of rough-cut logs ringing it. Round wattle huts and three long halls dumped in the muck, ends of the curving wooden uprights on the biggest badly carved like dragons’ heads, or wolves’ heads, or something that was meant to make men scared but only made Craw nostalgic for decent carpentry. Smoke limped up from chimneys in muddy smears. Half-bare trees still shook browning leaves. In the distance the reedy sunlight glimmered on the rotten fens, like a thousand mirrors stretching off to the horizon. But without the romance.
Wonderful stopped scratching at the long scar through her shaved-stubble hair long enough to make a contribution. ‘Looks to me,’ she said, ‘like a confirmed shit-hole.’
‘We’re way out east of the Crinna, no?’ Craw worked a speck of skin between teeth and tongue and spat it out, wincing at the pink mark left beside his nail, way more painful than it had any right to be. ‘Nothing but hundreds of miles of shit-hole in every direction. You sure this is the place, Raubin?’
‘I’m sure. She was most specifical.’
Craw frowned. He weren’t sure if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause he was the one that brought the jobs and the jobs were usually cracked, or if he’d taken such a pronounced dislike to Raubin ’cause the man was a weasel-faced arsehole. Bit of both, maybe. ‘The word is “specific”, half-head.’
‘Got my meaning, no? Village in a fork in the river, she said, south o’ the fens, three halls, biggest one with uprights carved like fox heads.’
‘Aaaah.’ Craw snapped his fingers. ‘They’re meant to be foxes.’
‘Fox Clan, these crowd.’
‘Are they?’
‘So she said.’
‘And this thing we’ve got to bring her. What sort of a thing is it, exactly?’
‘Well, it’s a thing,’ said Raubin.
‘That much we know.’
‘Sort of … this long, I guess. She didn’t say, precisely.’
‘Unspecifical, was she?’ asked Wonderful, grinning with every tooth.
‘She said it’d have a kind of a light about it.’
‘A light?’ asked Craw. ‘What? Like a magic bloody candle?’
All Raubin could do was shrug, which weren’t a scrap of use to no one. ‘I don’t know. She said you’d know it when you saw it.’
‘Oh, nice.’ Craw hadn’t thought his mood could drop much lower. Now he knew better. ‘That’s real nice. So you want me to bet my life, and the lives o’ my crew, on knowing it when I see it?’ He shoved himself back off the rocks on his belly, out of sight of the village, clambered up and brushed the dirt from his coat, muttering darkly to himself since it was a new one and he’d been taking some trouble to keep it clean. Should’ve known that’d be a waste of effort, what with the shitty jobs he always ended up in to his neck. He started back down the slope, shaking his head, striding through the trees towards the others. A good, confident stride. A leader’s stride. It was important, Craw reckoned, for a chief to walk like he knew where he was going.
Especially when he didn’t.
Raubin hurried after him, whiny voice picking at his back. ‘She didn’t precisely say. About the thing, you know. I mean, she don’t, always. She just looks at you, with those eyes …’ He gave a shudder. ‘And says, fetch me this thing, and where from. And what with the paint, and that voice o’ hers, and that sweat o’ bloody fear you get when she looks at you …’ Another shudder, hard enough to rattle his rotten teeth. ‘I ain’t asking no questions, I can tell you that. I’m just looking to run out fast so I don’t piss myself on the spot. Run out fast, and fetch whatever thing she’s after-’
‘Well, that’s real sweet for you,’ said Craw, ‘except insofar as actually getting this thing goes.’
‘As far as getting the thing goes,’ mused Wonderful, splashes of light and shadow swimming across her bony face as she looked up into the branches, ‘the lack of detail presents serious difficulties. All manner of things in a village that size. Which one, though? Which thing, is the question.’ Seemed she was in a thoughtful mood. ‘One might say the voice, and the paint, and the aura of fear are, in the present case … self-defeating.’