‘Uh … uh … uh …’
‘This is hell,’ she whimpered, staring at her bedraggled reflection in the muddy, bloody puddle. ‘This is hell.’
What had she done to deserve being there? Marooned in this loveless, sunless, cultureless, comfortless place. A place salted by the tears of the righteous, as her mother used to say. Her hair plastered to her clammy head like bloody seaweed to a rotting boat. Her chafed skin on which the gooseflesh could hardly be told from the scaly chill-rash. Her nose endlessly running, rimmed with sore pink from the wiping. Her sunken stomach growling, her bruised neck throbbing, her blistered feet aching, her withered dreams crumbling, her-
‘Uh … uh … uh …’ Javre’s grunting was mounting in volume, and added to it now was a long, steady growling from Whirrun. ‘Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …’
Shev found herself wondering what exactly they were up to, slapped the side of her head as though she could knock the thought out. She should be concentrating on feeling sorry for herself! Think of all she’d lost!
The Smoke House. Well, that hadn’t been so great. Her friends in Westport. Well, she’d never had any she’d have trusted with a copper. Severard. No doubt he’d be far better off with his mother in Adua, however upset he’d been about it. Carcolf. Carcolf had betrayed her, damn it! God, those hips, though. How could you stay angry at someone with hips like that?
‘Uh … uh … uh …’
‘Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr …’
She slithered back into her shirt, which her efforts at washing had turned from simply bloody to bloody, filthy and clinging with freezing water. She shuddered with disgust as she wiped blood out of her ear, out of her nose, out of her eyebrows.
She’d tried to do small kindnesses where she could, hadn’t she? Coppers to beggars when she could afford it, and so on? And, for the rest, she’d had good reasons, hadn’t she? Or had she just made good excuses?
‘Oh, God,’ she muttered to herself, pushing the greasy-chill hair out of her face.
The horrible fact was, she’d got no worse than she deserved. Quite possibly better. If this was hell, she’d earned every bit of it. She took a deep breath and blew it out so her lips flapped.
‘Uh … uh … uh!’
‘Rrrrrrrrrrr!’
Shev hunched her shoulders, staring back towards the bridge.
She paused, heart sinking even lower than before. Right into her blistered feet.
‘You two,’ muttered Shev, slowly standing, fumbling with her shirt-buttons. ‘You two!’
‘We are …’ came Javre’s strangled voice.
‘A little …’ groaned Whirrun.
‘Busy!’
‘You may want to fucking stop!’ screeched Shev, sliding out a knife and hiding it behind her arm. She realised she’d got her buttons in the wrong holes, a great tail of flapping-wet shirt plastered to her leg. But it was a little late to smarten up. Once again, there were figures coming from the mist. From the direction of the bridge. First one. Then two. Then three women.
Tall women who walked with that same easy swagger Javre had. That swagger that said they ruled the ground they walked on. All three wore swords. All three wore sneers. All three, Shev didn’t doubt, were Templars of the Golden Order, come for Javre in the name of the High Priestess of Thond.
The first had dark hair coiled into a long braid bound with golden wire, and old eyes in a young face. The second had a great burn mark across her cheek and through her scalp, one ear missing. The third had short red hair and eyes slyly narrowed as she looked Shev up and down. ‘You’re very … wet,’ she said.
Shev swallowed. ‘It’s the North. Everything’s a bit damp.’
‘Bloody North.’ The scarred one spat. ‘No horses to be had anywhere.’
‘Not for love nor money,’ sang the red-haired one, ‘and believe me, I’ve tried both.’
‘Probably the war,’ said the dark-haired one.
‘It’s the North. There’s always a war.’
Whirrun gave a heavy sigh as he clambered from behind the rock, fastening his belt. ‘’Tis a humbling indictment of our way of life, but one I find I can’t deny.’ And he hefted the Father of Swords over his shoulder and came to stand beside Shev.
‘You aren’t nearly as funny as you think you are,’ said the scarred one.
‘Few of us indeed,’ said Shev, ‘are as funny as we think we are.’
Javre stepped out from behind the rock, and the three women all shifted nervously at the sight of her. Sneers became frowns. Hands crept towards weapons. Shev could feel the violence coming, sure as the grass grows, and she clung tight to that entirely inadequate knife of hers. All the fights she got into, she really should learn to use a sword. Or maybe a spear. She might look taller with a spear. But then you’ve got to carry the bastard around. Something with a chain, maybe, that coiled up small?
‘Javre,’ said the one with the braid.
‘Yes.’ Javre gave the women that fighter’s glance of hers. That careless glance that seemed to say she had taken all their measure in a moment and was not impressed by it.
‘You’re here, then.’
‘Where else would I be but where I am?’
The dark-haired woman raised her sharp chin. ‘Why don’t you introduce everyone?’
‘It feels like a lot of effort, when you will be gone so soon.’
‘Indulge me.’
Javre sighed. ‘This is Golyin, Fourth of the Fifteen. Once a good friend to me.’
‘Still a good friend, I like to think.’
Shev snorted. ‘Would a good friend chase another clear across the Circle of the World?’ Under her breath, she added, ‘Not to mention her good friend’s partner.’
Golyin’s eyes shifted to Shev’s, and there was a sadness in them. ‘If a good friend had sworn to. In the quiet times, perhaps, she would cry that the world was this way, and wring her hands, and ask the Goddess for guidance, but …’ She gave a heavy sigh. ‘She would do it. You must have known we would catch you eventually, Javre.’
Javre shrugged, sinews in her shoulders twitching. ‘I have never been hard to catch. It is once you catch me that your problems begin.’ She nodded towards the scarred one, who was slowly, smoothly, silently easing her way around the top of the canyon to their right. ‘She is Ahum, Eleventh of the Fifteen. Is the scar still sore?’
‘I have a soothing lotion for it,’ she said, curling her lip. ‘And I am Ninth now.’
‘Nothingth soon.’ Javre raised a brow at the red-haired one, working her way around them on the left. ‘Her I do not know.’
‘I am Sarabin Shin, Fourteenth of the Fifteen, and men call me-’
‘No one cares,’ said Javre. ‘I give you all the same two choices I gave Hanama and Birke and Weylen and the others. Go back to the High Priestess and tell her I will be no one’s slave. Not ever. Or I show you the sword.’
There was that familiar popping of joints as Javre shifted her shoulders, scraping into a wider stance and lifting the sword-shaped bundle in her left hand.
Golyin sucked her teeth. ‘You always were so overdramatic, Javre. We would rather take you back than kill you.’
Whirrun gave a little snort of laughter. ‘I could swear we just had this exact conversation.’
‘We did,’ said Javre, ‘and this one will end the same way.’
‘This woman is a murderer, an oathbreaker, a fugitive,’ said Golyin.
‘Meh.’ Whirrun shrugged. ‘Who isn’t?’
‘There is no need for you to die here, man,’ said Sarabin Shin, finding her own fighting crouch.
Whirrun shrugged again. ‘One place is as good for dying as another, and these ladies helped me with an unpleasant situation.’ He pointed out the six corpses scattered across the muddy ground with the pommel of his sword. ‘And my friend Curnden Craw always says it’s poor manners not to return a favour.’
‘You may find this situation of a different order of unpleasantness,’ said the scarred one, drawing her sword. The blade smoked in a deeply unnatural and worrying way, a frosty glitter to the white metal.