Warlords and Wastrels

by Julia Knight

  The Reyes mountains in the coming winter were no place for a man with nothing, not even a pot to piss in. But the plains were full of villages, farms, fields and hedges that people owned and didn’t want him in. A man whose face scared the horses, whose right hand was now useless, who was still learning to use his left, who couldn’t do much of anything to pay his way. A man who dared not say his name because he’d betrayed the prelate, sent him mad, helped plunge the whole country into war. Who was dead, so the newssheets said, and was in any case dead inside. But the mountains were all that were left to him, no matter the stories of robbers and cut-throats and highwaymen, and even that reminder of Kass brought a sharp pain to his chest.

  Two ponies trudged past, heads down against the weather, a man bundled up in furs on one, a woman on the other. Petri’s heart gave a lurch, but it wasn’t her. Not Kass. Couldn’t be. Besides, her horse was a deadlier beast than either of those two ponies and doubtless would have taken a chunk out of his leg on the way past. If it had been her what would he have done? Slunk off into the shadows like the coward he used to be or taken out his newly forged rage on her? The old Petri was dead, but he hadn’t discovered who the new one was yet, except he seemed to boil with anger, and that hadn’t helped him much down on the plains either.

  The ponies passing him and taking a tiny side track that wound around a sharp fold in the land did show him one thing. If he squinted with his one eye through the rain, past a stand of trees, there was a light. Several lights in fact. What might be a village and maybe, if he was lucky, an inn. One or two innkeepers had taken pity on him, mistaking him for a man wounded in the battle with Ikaras in the summer, whispering with their patrons at his scars, at the accent that marked him. Not pity for long, or for much, but they’d let him sleep in a clean bed, had given him the few jobs they had that he could do to repay them rather than take their charity. Other payments once or twice that he shuddered to recall, dark and sweating and furtive, giving the last, only thing he had to give, leaving him shamed and shameful, torn and tearful, but alive to know it.

  But an inn was a good bet–and out of this freezing rain, where he’d die if he stayed much longer. He’d find something to trade, find some job he could do in return for something to eat, a dry place to sleep. Even stables were better than this. Maybe up here in the mountains things would be different.

  He turned his numb feet in their holed shoes towards the lights and lurched through the mud after the ponies, hoping only for a warm place.

  Light and warmth and the glorious half-forgotten smell of cooking food, of the meaty smell of stew, the yeast of new bread, stopped Petri dead as he stumbled in the inn door. He stood there, dripping freezing rain from his sodden cloak, and savoured it for half a heartbeat.

  All he was allowed. The room didn’t go silent, but it did fall to whispers punctuated by the loud laugh of a drunkard in the corner who hadn’t seen him yet. Petri gritted his teeth against the stares, shook out his cloak one-handed–that caused a whole new set of whispers as they saw what was left of the other hand–and swept the rain from his hair, which was just growing back and was now long enough for it to be curled over his shoulder in a way that would mark him as a man of means. Long enough, but he left it wild because he was a man of means no more. The soaked mask had slipped, and he hurried to get it back into place, but the fabric was ruined and with a pang he ripped it off.

  In his head he strode serenely towards the bar, ignoring the muttered comments of “Poor bastard” and “God’s cogs, that’s ugly” and “I feel sick” and “Should be ashamed to be out in public.” But numb feet betrayed him, made him stagger, and the need to tell them all to go fuck themselves burned behind clenched teeth.

  He curled what was left of a lip at the nearest customer, a heavyset man dressed in a thick smock and loose breeches above mud-caked boots, who flinched back into his chair. Petri didn’t blame him–he’d looked in a mirror once down on the plains and had no wish to look again. His old face was dead, like the old him.

  The lump of a man behind the makeshift bar gave him an appraising look from under a heavy brow, but shrugged. “As long as you’ve got coin I don’t give a crap about your face,” the shrug said, which was an improvement on the whispers behind Petri.

  “Battle of the Red Brook,” someone said in a voice loud enough to carry and was shushed. Red Brook–or as it had been before so many were slaughtered in it, Smith Brook–fed the Soot Town waterwheels. That battle had taken place not two months ago during the war for Reyes while a regiment of clockwork gods fought off the Ikarans at the front gate of the city. Yet there had still been other battles to fight, and people to fight them. Ikarans had assaulted the brook hoping to breach the walls by Soot Town, and Reyen guards and duellists had defended it even as red-hot blood had fallen from the sky, burning the skin and hair and eyes of Reyens and Ikarans alike. So many had died on both sides that even the ground was stained red now, so they said, and most of those who survived had scars like Petri’s.

  He’d been nowhere near Red Brook, though at times he thought it had to have been better than where he was. Most of the survivors had been Ikaran; almost all the Reyens who’d lived had been deserters, and that was where he came unstuck. But up here, so close to the border, where families were Ikaran or Reyen almost by accident, maybe he’d get away with the pretence if he kept his mouth shut, kept his accent behind clenched teeth. He’d always thought more than he spoke, but that had changed, along with a lot else. Down on the plains talk was looser and angrier, and no matter how he told himself to keep quiet, someone would say some bullshit about Eneko, or Bakar, or Kass even, and his once-even temper would explode, for all the good it did him. But up here on the edges of the mountains that had so lately been a bone of contention between Reyes and Ikaras, where laws were something you kept to if you felt like it, things were kept closer to the chest.

  “Petri? Petri Egimont, is that you?” A familiar voice came from behind him, shattering any hope he had of staying anonymous.

  “Of course it’s him, Berie, you idiot. Petri? Petri!”

  They approached on his good side, from a corner where they’d been drunkenly oblivious to his entrance. Now they moved towards him in a flurry of powder and faded silks, hair curled over their shoulders like they were still nobles and ruled Reyes. The whispers about Petri stopped, to be replaced by other words.

  “Fucking nobles, ex-nobles more like,” a man said. “More money than brains, and less use than a custard truss. Came up here because they was too scared to fight for Reyes, and now they’re stuck. I’d give ’em coin to bugger off, if I had any.”

  Berie didn’t hear or maybe pretended not to–he’d always had a talent for that. He swooped down on Petri like a pigeon after scraps, with Flashy close behind. Petri caught a whiff of fear about their movements. Too sharp, too jerky for these two, who’d raised indolence to an art form. Stuck, the man had said, and it was certain they didn’t fit in this rough inn in the middle of nowhere, with no one of their own imaginary stature. Maybe they’d run out of people to borrow money from.

  “Petri, old boy, how the hell are—”

  Petri turned to face him with what passed for a smile on his ruined mouth. Berie blanched and staggered back with a very uncharacteristic word. Flashy waved a handkerchief in front of suddenly white lips and swallowed hard.

  Nothing for it now. No hope of escaping without talking, revealing what he was, that these scars were not the scars of a hero but more likely that of a Reyen deserter. He could protest he’d been nowhere near the brook, but he’d tried that down on the plain and no one had believed him. So he cranked the smile up a notch and felt the ropes of scar tissue that ended where bare bone began bend and twist.

  “About as well as could be expected,” he said. “Under the circumstances.”

  A hiss of indrawn breath from behind, a startled curse from further off. Petri had tried but couldn’t get rid of the accent that gave away who he was, or rather what he
had once been. Rich, noble, privileged. Hated by all the men and women who’d risen against the king and his favoured few two decades ago. Time changed many things but not hatred, Petri was beginning to understand. Battle of Red Brook or not–and with this accent it would be quite clear not–he was noble, and up here in the mountains things were different. Very different.

  A glass smashed behind him, and another. Something metal clonged heavily against wood. Flashy keeled over backwards before anyone had even made a move towards him, while Berie clutched his clinking but skinny purse to himself.

  “Them tosspots been up here a while,” the voice behind said slowly. “Throwing around their cash like confetti, acting like they was still lords of the manor, giving people all the more reason to hate ’em. Didn’t peg you for one of them though, not in that get-up. So are you?”

  Petri shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “And the Battle of Red Brook?”

  Another shrug.

  “Here, isn’t Petri the name of that bloke in the newspapers? Didn’t he poison the prelate?”

  With that, a bottle flew end over end and smashed on the unconscious form of Flashy. Something shiny slashed at Petri’s good side, but he managed to dodge, barely. It wasn’t going to stay that easy, not with only half his vision and half his hands working. He whipped round and got his back to a wall–at least he cut off one avenue of attack that way. Berie screamed like a child as a rugged set of fists slammed into his face.

  “Petri,” he gasped when he could. “Petri, help me.”

  Petri grabbed a bowl of hot soup and flung it in the face of the nearest man. Berie would have to fight his own battles because Petri had his hand full with his own.

  The evening descended, as it so often did when people saw what was left of his face, heard his voice, into fists and chaos. It was a miracle he wasn’t dead already, but while down on the plains they seemed eager for him to bugger off out of their nice village, they drew the line at killing him, although he sometimes wished they’d get over their scruples and do it.

  It looked like he might get that wish here; the mountains were known for their scant regard for the finer points of law. This wasn’t just barroom brawling, not just thrown pint pots and brass knuckles and the cracked ribs that seemed to follow him wherever he went across the plains. The people in this inn were as hard as the rock underneath them, and had knives and swords and even a clockwork gun or two.

  Down on the plains Petri hadn’t fought back. What could he do against men and women burly from farming and brave from numbers? Not much, except curl up, live and loathe himself for doing it. He hadn’t fought anyone since he lost the use of his right hand, not drawn a sword he no longer had or thrown a punch with a left hand he was still unsure of using. Now the swords came out, the knives glinted under tables, guns clicked as they were wound, and it was fight or die.

  He tried a punch to the burly man advancing on him with a long knife in each hand, but his left hand was too slow, the punch mistimed and weak. Someone else’s hand grabbed his useless right wrist, squeezed hard enough to make him gasp, then twisted so that Petri ended on his knees with nothing to look forward to but the knives advancing on him. An image flashed in his mind–of a hot knife coming for his eye, of a voice telling him he was weak, Petri Egimont, weaker than bad steel, softer than lead before the blade had taken his eye.

  That voice, that memory, had him lunging forward, trying to break the hold on him, trying to escape that knife coming for his face. All it got him was a cracking sound in his wrist and a boot in the back that sent him sprawling, leaving him open to the knife that glittered above him.

  Weakness. You are weakness, Petri Egimont.

  It was true, and he wanted–more than he wanted his eye back, or his face back, more than he wanted to hold a sword again in a good hand or to see Kacha just one more time–he wanted that not to be true.

  He kicked out, got the man a good one on the knee that staggered him, and then Petri was up off the floor, back to the wall, wrestling for one of the knives. A knee to the man’s gut, and he had one, wobbling in a weak hand, but he had a knife and no compunction whatsoever about using it. Let them all come, every last one, and he’d show them what was pent up in his head. Let them taste it through the knife. He stabbed forward with it just as a blow connected with his cheek, leaving him reeling with a dying man falling off the end of the knife and another ready to kill him.

  A sudden silence rippled out from the doorway to the outside, and the man set on killing him backed away. Petri, unable to see what had caused the pause in the fighting, took the opportunity to shove the dead man off the knife and grip it harder, keeping himself ready in a modified duelling stance. Sod Ruffelo’s gentleperson’s rules for duelling; now it was kill or die, and with his back to the wall it became suddenly clear in his head that he had no intention of dying, not here, not like this. If he had to, he’d kill every last one in the place.

  Slow clicking boots across the flagstone floor from Petri’s blind side, a general shuffling backwards and lowering of weapons from the mob, Berie quietly sobbing somewhere. Petri turned towards the steps so that his one eye could see and came face to face with the woman whose entrance had caused such a stir.

  She was tall, half a hand taller than Petri, with corded muscles showing at cuffs and collar. Her fingers were criss-crossed with old scars, perhaps from the long knife that sat easily at her hip, or the sword, no duellist’s blade but solid nonetheless, at the other side. She looked Petri up and down, cocked her head at the mess of his eye and cheek and never even flinched. Maybe she’d never flinched in her whole life–he’d believe it of that face, with its thin sharp nose and jutting chin, a face like a hatchet ready to split wood, with its own puckered scar that ran from lip through to hairline. He let out a breath when her glance went to Berie, where he cowered under a table, one hand to a nose that was leaking blood all over his once fine clothes, the other hand clutching his now empty purse.

  “Well now,” the woman said in a cracked husky voice like morning crows. “It looks like we’ve got a problem, doesn’t it? These two–” one hand lazily indicated the sobbing Berie and the prostrate Flashy, who appeared to have lost his boots “–are the ones I’ve come for. I told you to leave them be until I got here and then we could all have a share. That’s the deal.”

  Almost everyone looked to the lump behind the bar, who still had a large chunk of wood in one hand, which he hastily put away when the woman glanced his way with a questioning eyebrow.

  Given the man looked like he could bend steel with his teeth, the contrite “Yes, m’m” he came out with was the last thing Petri expected. “Well, not the one with no face, m’m.”

  The woman looked Petri’s way again, and a cold shiver itched across his back at the appraising nature of her stare, as though assessing the value of everything he wore and him too. She turned back, dismissing him from her thoughts, and speared the barman with a look.

  “Sorry, m’m.” His lips twisted, and he shuffled his feet like a five-year-old caught stealing sweets before he whacked the gawping pot boy next to him into pulling Berie out from under the table while another propped Flashy up in a chair.

  Berie resisted half-heartedly as the pot boy made him face the woman. Whatever she’d been after him for–and given the general lawlessness of the region coupled with Berie’s habit of flashing his money about, it wasn’t hard to guess–he wasn’t looking a very good prospect, what with all the blood and tears and torn clothes, not to mention the empty purse.

  The woman tutted under her breath, and a small shower of coins, which had presumably recently belonged to Berie, cascaded onto the floor at her feet as the inn’s patrons shuffled and coughed and gave her what they’d stolen.

  “Better,” she said, and two men who’d been lurking, unseen by Petri, behind her went to pick up the money while delivering menacing looks to all and sundry. “And don’t forget, you and this miserable inn are here under my sufferance. We ha
ve an agreement, and I expect you to stick to it.”

  She turned away from the barman and his muttered “Yes, m’m, sorry, m’m” and back to Petri. He gripped the knife and tried to figure his best way out. The door was on his blind side though, and any chance of being subtle had been lost with that eye.

  “And who is this wretched little shit?” she asked the crowd.

  They fell over themselves to tell her he was Petri Egimont–you know, that bloke what poisoned the prelate–it was in the papers from Reyes.

  Her interest perked up. “Really? Isn’t he supposed to be dead? Doesn’t seem to have worked out so well for him anyway.” Then to him, “Is it true? Are you this Petri? A man trained in the duellists’ guild, if I recall. Did you poison the prelate?”

  He screwed his courage into the knife in his hand, screwed all that pent-up rage and fear too. If he failed here, there was nowhere else to go. If he failed here… He was sick of failing, sick of being a coward, of people looking at him like a freak. “Maybe,” he said, and she raised another eyebrow at the accent. “Who the hells are you and why should I care?”

  Unexpectedly she laughed at that. “I am what you might call lady of this manor. In a manner of speaking. Valentian, at your service. And why should you care? You look like you need a job, someone to feed you, clothe you. I might be that person. In return, I get a duellist, someone with a guild education. My lads and lasses–” she indicated the men collecting Berie’s money “–they’re good boys and girls, and we do well enough in our own small way. But with a duellist to teach them we could be so much more. We could live rather than merely exist.”

  “Highwaymen?”

  “Oh, not so high class as that. More sort of freebooters. My boys and girls need feeding is all. We don’t take too much, and nothing that’ll be much missed. A sheep here, some coin there. A couple of places, like here, we have a little arrangement that keeps these fine upstanding if drunken gentlemen from being dragged to the Shrive, in return for letting us know about likely-looking donors to our cause. We keep our heads down and don’t cause enough trouble for the guards to bother with as a rule. Safer that way.” She looked him up and down again and nodded to herself. “You look like shit; your sword hand is useless, and your left is weak, but there’s something under that layer of crap. I can see by how you hold that knife, the way you stand, that you know what you’re about. We’d never get someone guild trained else, not without kidnap, and how would we manage to kidnap a duellist without the guild coming down on our heads? Now here you are, guild trained, supposedly dead, and in dire need of a job and a bath. Barman! Quick as you can, or quicker. Give this man a good meal and as much beer as he wants.”