The king’s hulking bodyguard, normally beyond expressionless, winced. “A little, Your Eminence.”
“I wish I could have given her the command in Styria,” said Savine’s father. “We might have been counting our victories now, rather than our dead. Jab, then!”
“Brock against Murcatto, that would have been something.” Savine hissed as she snapped out another flurry. “The two greatest armies in the Circle of the World, both commanded by women.”
“They’d probably have decided there were better things to spend the money on and talked the whole thing out. Then where would we be? Enough with the point, let’s see what you can do with the edge. And cut like you mean it, Savine, he’s not made of glass.”
She darted at Gorst as if to go right, switched to the left with a savage cut at head height. He dropped points and jerked away, fast as a snake in spite of his size, eyes focused on the blade as it whistled past his nose.
“Excellent,” he squeaked.
She gave her steels a little flourish. “Can Brock beat the Northmen alone?”
“She’s still gathering her forces in Angland,” said her father, “and she has the Dogman with her, but Scale Ironhand has them well outnumbered. My guess is the Protectorate will be overrun but she’ll hold the Northmen at the Whiteflow. Then, perhaps, circumstances will change here and we can swoop in next spring and reap the glory.”
“The women do the hard work and the men reap the glory. Sounds familiar.”
“Petulance is unbecoming in a swordswoman. Cut, girl. Put some blood into it.”
Savine darted around Gorst, shoes squeaking on the wooden floor, slashing away from every angle. For all he scarcely seemed to move, his steels were always in the right place to parry.
“My daughter has quick feet, eh, Gorst?”
“Very quick, Your Eminence.”
“That’ll be your mother’s dancing lessons. Sad to say, I don’t dance much myself these days.”
“A shame,” said Savine as she circled, looking for an opening, sweat tickling at her stubbled scalp. “I imagine the Closed Council could use some clever footwork. If Brock loses, you’ll look like cowards and fools.”
“Even bigger cowards and fools than we do already.”
“If she wins, she’ll gild her own reputation. And her son’s.”
“Leonault dan Brock.” Her father sneered, showing his empty gums again. “The Young Lion.”
“Who comes up with these ridiculous names?”
“Writers, I daresay. I saw lions when I was on campaign in Gurkhul. Stupid beasts. Especially the males. That’s enough. Break.”
Savine took a hard breath, pulling her padded tunic open to let some air in. She had sweated clean through her shirt. She wondered, as she scrubbed her shaved head with a towel, whether the fine gentlemen of the Solar Society would recognise her now, without powder, jewels, dress, wig. More than likely they would smell money through the sweat and swarm around her just the same.
“We could adjust your grip a little.” Her father leaned forwards, bones shifting under the pale skin of his hand as he gripped his cane to rise.
“No, no.” She stepped over to put a gentle hand on his shoulder. “You’re not hurting yourself just to show me how to grip a sword.” She took the blanket from the arm of his chair and draped it over his legs, tucked it in carefully around him. By the Fates, he felt thin. It would have been unfair to call him skin and bone. There was scarcely any skin on him.
“How are you?” she asked.
His left eye twitched. “Have you noticed the nation falling?”
“Not this morning.”
“Then I suppose I’m still alive today. You might want to check again tomorrow, though. I’ve enemies everywhere. In the palace. On the Closed Council. On the Open Council. In the fields and the factories. The Anglanders were furious with me before the war, they’re downright incandescent now. I’m hated everywhere.”
“Not here,” she said. As close to a declaration of affection as she was ever likely to utter.
“That’s more than enough for me.” He gently touched her face, fingertips cold on her sweaty cheek. “And far, far more than I deserve.”
“I suppose a few enemies are the price of one of the big chairs.”
Her father gave a snort of disgust, bitter even for him. “The moment your arse hits the wood, you realise what they’re worth. You think the Closed Council really rule? Or the king and queen? We’re all no more than dancing puppets. There to draw the eye. To take the blame.”
Savine frowned. “Then who pulls the strings?”
Her father’s eyes met hers, bright and hard. “I have been asking questions all my life. I learned that some are better left unanswered.” He let his hand drop and clapped it on top of hers. The one that held her steels. “Time to work on your defence.”
“Three strikes?” asked Gorst.
Savine tossed her short steel up with her right hand and snatched it out of the air with her left. “Whatever you say.”
He shuffled at her, jabbed and cut with no real venom. It was easy for her to block the jabs, to turn the cut away with a showy flick of the wrist.
“So, if the lady governor fights the Northmen to a stalemate, what does it mean for holdings in Angland?”
“Ah!” Her father grinned. “I was wondering when we’d get to money.”
“We never left it.” She parried, and again, sidestepped a sluggish lunge. For a man renowned for his ferocity, Gorst was scarcely hitting at all. “Prices are tumbling up there. Do I sell out or get deeper in?”
“The Union will never let go of Angland. If I were a man of business, I’d be snapping up the bargains. After all, danger and opportunity—”
“Often walk hand in hand,” she finished for him, and out of the corner of her eye she caught his grin. There were few things that gave her the same satisfaction as making the Arch Lector smile. Aside from her mother, no one else could manage it. “I’ll see about borrowing a little to expand my holdings in the mines up there.” She could hardly keep the smile off her face. “There are excellent rates on offer from Valint and Balk—”
“Don’t!” barked her father, with a wince that made her feel just a little guilty. “Don’t even joke about it, Savine. Valint and Balk are vermin. Parasites. Leeches. Once they get stuck to you, there’s no getting free of them. They won’t be satisfied until they own the sun and can charge the world interest for letting it rise every morning. Promise me you’ll never take a bit from the bastards!”
“I promise. I’ll stay well away.” Though it was not always easy. Like a greedy old willow tree, the twisted roots of that particular banking house burrowed into everything. “We’re not talking about much. I already took a controlling share in the armoury in Ostenhorm at a price you would scarcely believe.”
“Swords are always a good investment,” admitted the Arch Lector as he watched her swat Gorst’s away with her own.
“I’m told these fire-tubes are the future. These cannons.”
“We had mixed results with them in Styria.”
“But they’re getting smaller all the time, more portable and more powerful.” She stepped nimbly around a limp jab. “They’ve developed an exploding cannon-stone now.”
“Explosions are always a good investment, too.”
“Especially if I can arrange a contract or two with the King’s Own.”
“Oh? Do you know anyone with influence?”
“As it happens, I have arranged a little soirée with Asil dan Roth and a few other military wives. Her husband was recently appointed Master of the King’s Armouries, I believe.”
“What good fortune,” murmured her father, drily.
Gorst’s next lunge was positively belittling. “I’m not made of glass, either,” said Savine, flicking irritably at the point of his steel. “Come at me like you mean it.”
She had been fencing all her life, after all. As a girl, she had dreamed of winning the Contest disguised
as a man, whipping off her cap to reveal her golden tresses to an ecstatic crowd. Then wigs had come into fashion and she had shaved her tresses off, which, honestly, had been a rather unprepossessing brown in any case. Then she had learned men never cheer for a woman who beats them at their own games, so she had left the fencing circle to the cocks and decided to count her victories at the bank.
She parried two efforts which were scarcely stronger than before and, this time, stepped neatly around the lazy cut that followed and gave Gorst a shove with the basketwork of her short steel. “Do you hit like a woman as well as talk like one?”
Gorst’s eye gave the faintest twitch. “Ouch!” called her father. “A touch to the lady.”
“I want to know how it feels to be attacked by a dangerous man who means it.” Savine set herself again, confident in her stance, confident in her grip, confident in her abilities. “Otherwise what’s the point?”
Gorst glanced at her father. The Arch Lector pressed his lips thoughtfully together, then gave the faintest shrug. “She is here to learn.” There was a hardness on his face she was not used to seeing. “Teach her.”
There was something ever so slightly different in the way Gorst took his mark, the way he twisted his feet into the faintly creaking boards, the way he worked his great shoulders and gripped his notched steels. His flat face hardly showed emotion, but it was as if a door had opened a chink, and beyond it Savine glimpsed something monstrous.
It is easy to smile at the bull you know is chained. When you realise of a sudden the chain is off, and its horns towards you, and its hoof scraping at the dust, the bull looks an entirely different animal.
She half-opened her mouth to say, “Wait.”
“Begin.”
She had been ready for his strength. It was his speed that shocked her. He was on her before she could draw a breath. Her eyes went wide as his long steel whipped down and she had just the presence of mind to sidestep, bringing up her short steel to parry.
She had not been ready for his strength after all. The force of it numbed her arm from fingertips to shoulder, rattled the teeth in her head. She stumbled back, gasping, but his short steel was already coming at her, crashing into her long, ripping it from her numb fingers and sending it skittering across the floor. She flapped blindly with her short, all training and technique forgotten, saw a flash of metal—
His long steel thudded into her padded jacket and drove her breath out in a burning wheeze, nearly lifted her off her feet and sent her tottering sideways. A moment later, his shoulder rammed into her body. Her head snapped forward, her face crunched against something. The blunt top of his skull, maybe.
Was she in the air?
The wall smashed her in the back, the bare room reeled and, to her great surprise, she found herself on hands and knees, blinking at the floor.
Spots of blood pit-pattered onto the polished wood in front of her face.
“Oh,” she gasped.
Her ribs throbbed with each snatched breath, sick scalding the back of her throat. Her hand was all tangled up in the basketwork of her short steel, and she flopped it drunkenly around until the sword clattered onto the floor. The backs of her fingers were all grazed. She put them to her throbbing mouth and they came away bloody. Her hand was shaking. She was shaking all over.
It hurt. Her face, her side, her pride. But it was not the pain that really shook her. It was the powerlessness. The total misjudgement of her own abilities. The curtain had been twitched aside, and she saw just how fragile she was. How fragile anyone was, compared to a sword swung in anger. The world was a different place than it had been a few moments before, and not a better one.
Gorst squatted before her, notched steels in one hand. “I should warn you that I was still holding back.”
She managed to nod. “I see.”
There was no trace of guilt on her father’s face. Constant pain, as he always liked to say, had cured him of that. “Fencing is one thing,” he said. “Actual violence quite another. Few of us are made for it. It is healthy to be disabused of our self-deceptions every now and then, even if it hurts.”
He smiled while she wiped the blood from her nose. Savine had given up trying to understand him. Most of the time, she was the one thing he loved in a world he despised. Then, on occasion, he treated her like a rival to be crushed.
“If you are attacked by a dangerous man who means it, my advice is to run away.” Gorst stood, offering his broad hand. “I expect he will destroy himself before too long.”
When he pulled her up, her legs were jelly. “Thank you, Colonel Gorst. That was… a very useful lesson.” She wanted to cry. Or her body did, at least. She would not let it. She set her aching jaw and stuck her chin up at him. “Same time next week?”
Her father barked out a laugh and slapped the arm of his chair. “That’s my girl!”
Promises
Broad lay awake, staring at the ceiling.
There was a crack, next to a yellowed blister on the limewash. Felt like he’d been staring at it all night. Staring at it as the sun crawled up over the narrow buildings, through the washing strung between them and into the narrow street, through the narrow window and into the one-room cellar they were living in.
Felt like he’d been staring at that crack for weeks. Turning things over in his mind. Fretting at them as if they were big choices he had to make. But they were big choices he’d already made, and he’d made the wrong ones, and now there was no changing them.
He took a heavy breath, felt it catch at the back of his throat. That oily scratch on the Valbeck air. That smell of shit and onions the cellar always had, no matter how Liddy scrubbed it. It was in the walls. It was in his skin.
Folk were setting off to work outside, boots tramping through the muck beyond the tiny window near the ceiling, shadows of their passing flickering on the mould-speckled wall.
“How are your hands?” murmured Liddy, twisting towards him on the narrow bed.
He winced as he worked the fingers. “Always sore in the mornings.”
Liddy took his big hand in her small ones, rubbing at his aching palm, at his throbbing knuckles. “May up already?”
“She slipped out. Didn’t want to wake you.”
They lay there, she looking at him, he not daring to look at her. Not wanting to see the disappointment in her eyes. The worry. The fear. Even if it was only his own disappointment, and worry, and fear reflected back, like in a mirror.
“It’s not fair on her,” he whispered at that crack in the ceiling. “She should be having a life. Dancing, courting. Not waiting on some rich bastard.”
“She doesn’t mind doing it. She wants to help. She’s a good girl.”
“She’s the best thing I’ve done. She’s the only good thing I’ve done.”
“You’ve done good, Gunnar. You’ve done lots of good.”
“You don’t know what it was like, in Styria. What I was like—”
“Then do good now.” An edge of impatience in her voice, and she gave his hand one last squeeze and let it go. “You can’t change what’s past, can you? Only what’s next.”
He wanted to argue but couldn’t find a crack in her obvious good sense. He lay there sullen, listening to the shuffle of boots and the yammer of angry voices and a girl at the crossroads yelling out bad news for coppers. A bread riot in Holsthorm, and a plot to burn a mill in Keln, and unrest in every corner of Midderland, and war. War in the North.
“It’s my fault,” he muttered. Couldn’t find a way to attack Liddy, so he ambushed himself. “I should never have gone to war.”
“I let you go. I let the farm go.”
“The farm was done anyway. That life was done. Would’ve been better for you and May if I’d never come back.”
She put her hand on his cheek, firm. Turned his head so she was looking him straight in the face. “Don’t ever say that, Gunnar. Don’t ever say that.”
“I killed ’em, Liddy,” he whispered. “I killed ’em.
”
She said nothing. What could she say?
“I fucked it all,” he said. “In one moment. Is there a thing I can’t ruin?”
“There’s nothing can’t be ruined in a moment,” said Liddy. “It all hangs by a thread, all the time. We’ve got to look forward now. That’s what you do. You move on.”
“I’ll put it right,” he said. “I’ll find work here.”
“I know you will.” She forced out a smile. Looked like it took a lot of effort, but she forced it out. “You’re a good man, Gunnar.”
He winced at that, felt the pain of tears at the back of his nose. “No more violence,” he said, voice thick and throaty. “I promise, Liddy.” He realised he’d clenched his fists, forced them to open. “From now on I’ll stay out of trouble.”
“Gunnar,” she murmured, soft and serious, “you should only make promises you know you can keep.”
A little sprinkle of dust came floating down onto their bed. Along the street at the foundry, the engines were starting up, making the whole room tremble.
Wasn’t until he got around the corner Broad even realised what he was queueing for.
Cadman’s Ales was printed in gilded paint above the sliding warehouse doors, the bang and clatter of work booming from inside. A brewery. He’d spent half his time in Styria drunk and the rest aiming to get drunk. He’d promised no trouble, and he knew that for him, every bottle had trouble at the bottom.
Still, temptation was never far away in Valbeck. Every other building had a tap-house or a jerry-shop or a still in it, licensed or otherwise, whores and thieves and beggars buzzing around them like flies at a midden, and if you couldn’t make it as far as next door to drown your misery, there were boys running the streets with barrels on their backs who’d bring the beer to you.
A brewery was a poor omen, far as Broad’s promise to stay clear of trouble was concerned. But he’d seen no good omens in Valbeck, and he needed work. So he pulled his coat closed and hunched his shoulders against the thin rain that fell black out of the murky sky like ink, and shuffled forward another half-step.
A Little Hatred Page 12
