‘Ain’t yours is it? Leave it there with Hardbread’s lad and when Hard-bread comes back he’ll decide who gets it.’
‘More’n likely it’ll be Hardbread gets it,’ muttered Yon, coming up behind with his mail draped over his shoulder.
‘Maybe it will be. But it won’t be any of us. There’s a right way of doing things.’
That got a couple of sharp breaths and something close to a groan. ‘No one thinks that way these days, Chief,’ said Scorry, leaning on his spear.
‘Look how rich some no-mark like Sutt Brittle’s made himself,’ said Brack.
‘While we scrape by on a piss-pot staple and the odd gild,’ growled Yon.
‘That’s what you’re due, and I’ll see you get a gild for yesterday’s work. But you’ll leave the bodies be. You want to be Sutt Brittle you can beg a place with Glama Golden’s lot and rob folk all day long.’ Craw wasn’t sure what was making him so prickly. He’d let it pass before. Helped himself more’n once when he was younger. Even Threetrees used to overlook his boys picking a corpse or two. But prickly he was, and now he’d chosen to stand on it he couldn’t back down. ‘What’re we?’ he snapped, ‘Named Men or pickers and thieves?’
‘Poor is what we are, Chief,’ said Yon, ‘and starting to—’
‘What the fuck?’ Wonderful slapped the coins from Drofd’s hand and sent ’em scattering into the grass. ‘When you’re Chief, Jolly Yon Cumber, you can do it your way. ’Til then, we’ll do it Craw’s. We’re Named Men. Or I am, at least – I ain’t convinced about the rest of you. Now move your fat arses before you end up bitching to the Union about your poverty.’
‘We ain’t in this for the coin,’ said Whirrun, ambling past with the Father of Swords over his shoulder.
Yon gave him a dark look. ‘You might not be, Cracknut. Some of us wouldn’t mind a little from time to time.’ But he walked off shaking his head, mail jingling, and Brack and Scorry shrugged at each other, then followed.
Wonderful leaned close to Craw. ‘Sometimes I think the more other folk don’t care a shit the more you think you’ve got to.’
‘Your point?’
‘Can’t make the world a certain way all on your own.’
‘There’s a right way of doing things,’ he snapped.
‘You sure the right way isn’t just trying to keep everyone happy and alive?’
The worst thing was that she had a point. ‘Is that where we’ve come to now?’
‘I thought that’s about where we’ve always been.’
Craw raised a brow at her. ‘You know what? That husband o’ yours really should teach you some respect.’
‘That bitch? He’s almost as scared o’ me as you lot. Let’s go!’ She pulled Drofd up by his elbow, and the dozen made their way through the gap in the wall, moving fast. Or as fast as Craw’s knees would go. They headed north down the ragged track the way they’d come and left the Heroes to the Union.
Craw worked his way through the trees, chewing at the fingernails of his sword hand. He’d already gnawed his shield hand down to his knuckles, more or less. Damn things never grew back fast enough. He’d felt less scared on the way up the Heroes at night than he did going to tell Black Dow he’d lost a hill. Can’t be right when you’re less scared of the enemy than your own Chief, can it? He wished he had some friendly company, but if there was going to be blame he wanted to shoulder it alone. He’d made the choices.
The woods were crawling with men thick as ants in the grass. Black Dow’s own Carls – veterans, cold-headed and cold-hearted and with lots of cold steel to share out. Some had plate armour like the Union wore, others strange weapons, beaked, picked and hooked for punching through steel, all manner of savage inventions new to the world that the world was more’n likely better off without. He doubted any of these would be thinking twice before robbing a few coins off the dead, or the living either.
Craw had been most of his life a fighting man, but crowds of ’em still somehow made him nervous, and the older he got the less he felt he fit. Any day now they’d spot him for a fraud. Realise that keeping his threadbare courage stitched together was harder work every morning. He winced as his teeth bit into the quick and jerked his nails away.
‘Can’t be right,’ he muttered to himself, ‘for a Named Man to be scared all the time.’
‘What?’ Craw had almost forgotten Shivers was there, he moved so silent.
‘You get scared, Shivers?’
A pause, that eye of his glinting as the sun peeped through the branches. ‘Used to. All the time.’
‘What changed?’
‘Got my eye burned out o’ my head.’
So much for calming small talk. ‘Reckon that could change your outlook.’
‘Halves it.’
Some sheep were bleating away beside the track, pressed tight into a pen much too small. Foraged, no doubt, meaning stolen, some unlucky shepherd’s livelihood vanished down the gullets and out the arses of Black Dow’s army. Behind a screen of hides, not two strides from the flock, a woman was slaughtering ’em and three more doing the skinning and gutting and hanging the carcasses, all soaked to the armpits in blood and not caring much about it either.
Two lads, probably just reached fighting age, were watching. Laughing at how stupid the sheep were, not to guess what was happening behind those hides. They didn’t see that they were in the pen, and behind a screen of songs and stories and young men’s dreams, war was waiting, soaked to the armpits and not caring. Craw saw it all well enough. So why was he still sitting meek in his pen? Might be old sheep can’t jump new fences either.
The black standard of the Protector of the North was dug into the earth outside some ivy-wrapped ruin, long ago conquered by the forest. More men busy in the clearing before it, and stirring horses tethered in long rows. A grindstone being pedalled, metal shrieking, sparks spraying. A woman hammering at a cartwheel. A smith working at a hauberk with pincers and a mouthful of mail rings. Children hurrying about with armfuls of shafts, slopping buckets on yokes, sacks of the dead knew what. A complicated business, violence, once the scale gets big enough.
A man sprawled on a stone slab, oddly at ease in the midst of all this work that made nothing, on his elbows, head tipped back, eyes closed. Body all in shadow but a chink of sun from between the branches coming down across his smirk so it was bathed in double brightness.
‘By the dead.’ Craw walked to him and stood looking down. ‘If it ain’t the prince o’ nothing much. Those women’s boots you’re wearing?’
‘Styrian leather.’ Calder’s lids drifted open a slit, that curl to his lip he’d had since a boy. ‘Curnden Craw. You still alive, you old shit?’
‘Bit of a cough, as it goes.’ He hawked up and spat phlegm onto the old stone between Calder’s fancy foot-leather. ‘Reckon I’ll survive, though. Who made the mistake o’ letting you crawl back from exile?’
Calder swung his legs off the slab. ‘None other than the great Protector himself. Guess he couldn’t beat the Union without my mighty sword-arm.’
‘What’s his plan? Cut it off and throw it at ’em?’
Calder spread his arms out wide. ‘How would I hold you then?’ And they folded each other tight. ‘Good to see you, you stupid old fool.’
‘Likewise, you lying little fuck.’
Shivers frowned from the shadows all the while. ‘You two seem tight,’ he muttered.
‘Why, I practically raised this little bastard!’ Craw scrubbed Calder’s hair with his knuckles. ‘Fed him milk from a squeezed cloth, I did.’
‘Closest thing I ever had to a mother,’ said Calder.
Shivers nodded slowly. ‘Explains a lot.’
‘We should talk.’ Calder gave Craw’s arm a squeeze. ‘I miss our talks.’