The Trouble with Peace

by Joe Abercrombie

  “Hold her! By the dead, hold her still!”

  Something pressed across her chest. Pressed so hard she could scarcely breathe, iron fingers tight across her forehead, pinprick lights burning at her. Bright lights like blazing stars in a midnight sky.

  “How much did I drink?” she croaked out.

  “All of it, I think,” said Orso, putting down the tray. Or was it Leo? “I brought you an egg.”

  She lifted her chin a little to give him the eye. But the left eye or the right, she wasn’t sure. “Lay it yourself, did you?”

  Leo smiled. Or Orso did.

  “I miss you,” said Rikke. Said it to both of them. But she wasn’t sure whether she missed them, or she missed who she’d been when she was with them. The Rikke who’d laughed and kissed and fucked and not had to choose.

  Her face was burning. The left side of her head throbbing. Stink of herbs on the brazier, sickly sweet, so strong she could hardly breathe for it. A long, low crooning. A song in a tongue she didn’t know.

  “She’s no better, witch!”

  “I made no promises.”

  “She’s worse!”

  “Her Long Eye is stronger than I have ever seen. It fights to be free. Hear me, girl.” Caurib’s voice boomed and echoed as if from a long way off. Something slapped at her and she grunted and grumbled. “Have you ever seen a thing entire? Through time? Have you known a thing completely?”

  “An arrow,” croaked Rikke, stirring her thick tongue in her thick lips. “From its making to its end. When it flew, I pushed it away with my finger. And a sword. And a crack in the sky.”

  “What was inside?”

  “Everything.”

  She heard Caurib give a long, rustling sigh. “It’s worse than I feared. Or better than I hoped. The wards will not be enough. We must go further.”

  “Speak another riddle,” snarled Shivers, “and I will split your head in so many pieces no stitching will hold the shreds together.”

  Hard fingers gripped Rikke’s face, pulled her eyelids open, golden wire blurry in the tricking candlelight.

  “You must choose,” said Caurib. “You must choose now.”

  She could smell fire, just beyond the mouth of the cave. But she was not in a cave but her father’s hall. Burning thatch dropped from the burning rafters. Screams outside the doorway.

  She saw people at the top of a high tower beneath a bloody sunset. A line of them. A queue of them. One by one they fell. One by one they hit the ground beneath, tap, tap, tap.

  Tap, tap of the needle dipped in the ink, the needle so white and the ink so black, white as snow, black as coal, and Caurib’s soft singing and the smell of sweat and spice and sickly sweet herbs burning on the brazier. Tap, tap. Someone held her hand. Held her hand tight and Rikke squeezed it back.

  “I’m sorry,” came a whispering, choking voice, breath hot on her ear. “But it must be done.”

  A burning pain in her cheek and she snapped and snarled but could not move even a hair’s breadth. Stabbing, stabbing in her face, around her burning eye, and men spilled over a snow-patched hill, an army, while shadows swarmed across the land from the racing clouds above.

  “Yes. Hold her tight. Calm, now, calm.”

  She stood upon a wharf, rain falling, clothes clammy on her, and a ship rocked and tossed on the unquiet sea, shields on its top strake battle-scarred, oars struggling like the legs of a woodlouse tipped over as it crawled closer.

  “Time to settle some scores,” said the Nail, all shoulders and elbows and fierce grin, and behind his back he held a knife.

  “Scores have to be settled,” said Shivers, grey hair plastered to his scarred face with the rain. “But don’t expect it to feel good.” And he charged towards a gate, and men charged after him, their boots hammering on a wooden bridge, tap, tap, tap.

  Tap, tap. Like nails hammered into her forehead and she gasped and twisted and spat.

  “I can’t stand it!” she whimpered. “Let me up, I can’t stand it!”

  “You can and you will.”

  The bench had ropes around it. And on the polished-smooth cave floor salt had been scattered. Circles and lines and symbols in salt. Candles burning in the darkness. A joke of a witch’s cave.

  “Here is your couch, girl,” said Caurib.

  “Looks like a joke,” whispered Rikke as she walked towards it, stone cold under her bare feet.

  “You will not be laughing.”

  Clip, clip, and the hair scattered across her bare feet.

  “Fucking a crown prince is no great distinction,” Orso laughed. “But being brought breakfast by one…”

  She closed her eyes, strained up towards him and he kissed her lids, kissed her forehead, kissed her cheek, and his kisses became a numb pressing, then a sharp jabbing, then a brutal stabbing, and she growled and twisted but she was so weak. Steaming waves on the shore. Footprints, burning footprints in the shingle.

  “Hold her, then, she’s twisting like a salmon!”

  “I am bloody holding her.”

  “This is fine work. It must be fine work.”

  The bench hard against her hard shoulder blades and her body rigid and trembling and the jab, jab, jabbing at her face, and she could see a wagon made of bones, rattling along behind skeleton horses. She heard Caurib clicking her tongue.

  “That one is done. That one will hold.”

  Hiss of more herbs on the brazier and her face stung and sweated and stung and she was so thirsty, so thirsty, her eye burned. A wolf ate the sun and a lion ate the wolf and a lamb ate the lion and an owl ate the lamb.

  “By the dead, it hurts,” she croaked.

  “Did she speak?”

  “She said it hurts.”

  “You can tell that just by looking, d’you see?”

  “Shut up and light that candle.”

  “Why did I ever trust you?”

  Old men gathered around a bed. A deathbed. A dead king, and her eye burned.

  “Hang a hide in the mouth of the cave to keep the wind out. Now!”

  A woman stood on a high wall. A terrible woman holding a terrible knife. A man leaned beside her on the stones, and she smiled as she raised the blade. “Break what they love,” she said, merciless, ruthless, and Rikke screamed as the needle jabbed at her face, merciless, ruthless.

  “Send him down, then.”

  “I’ve changed my mind!” she screeched, slobbering, desperate, eyes fixed on the needle, trying to twist away.

  “Too late now, girl.”

  She sat down beside Shivers, frowned across the fire at the Shanka, gathered in a half-circle, light dancing in their black eyes. One got up, and Shivers reached for his sword, but all it did was sprinkle salt on the cooking fish. A little flick of salt, with a neat flick of its crooked wrist.

  “I can’t tell what’s real and what’s a vision,” Rikke heard herself say. “I can’t tell what’s then and what’s to come. It all runs together like paints in the water.”

  She gasped at another stabbing twinge through her eye. Gasped, and retched, but there was nothing to come up. Felt like she’d puked out everything she’d ever eaten. Everything anyone had ever eaten. A great building burned. A high dome crumbled inwards, sparks showering into the sky, showering down the shingle.

  “You must make of your heart a stone,” said Isern.

  Candle flames glinted in Shivers’ metal eye. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  So cold around her feet. The lake to her calves. She saw her own reflection, a knobbly clipped head against the racing clouds. Turned her face this way and that. Something written there. Eleven wards, and eleven wards reversed, and eleven times eleven.

  “How does it look?” she asked.

  “Never mind how it looks,” said Isern, frowning. “Will it work?”

  “One eye fights the other.” Caurib lifted the needle. “You must choose. You must choose now.”

  Silence for a moment. Stillness for a moment. Rikke stared up at them, the cold fear
spreading through her.

  “Choose… an eye?”

  Let Ring the Bells

  Savine studied her face in the mirrors from every angle, no fewer than nine maids fluttering nervously about her: Freid with powder and brush, Metello with comb and scissors, Liddy with a mouthful of pins, May with four different colours of thread woven around her fingers. Aside from a wrinkle or two about the eyes—and unless great Euz could turn back time for her there was no help for that—she saw no opportunity for improvement.

  “Perfection,” said Zuri, with the quiet pride of a painter placing the last brushstroke on a masterpiece.

  “Hardly.” Savine took one last surreptitious sniff of pearl dust then carefully brushed clean the rims of her nostrils. “But as close as we’ll get under the circumstances.”

  She had never worked so hard as she had in preparation for this event. There were a great many things that fell short of her standards, but then she had only been given a few days to prepare for seven hundred and fourteen guests, and at this particular wedding she was not the only bride.

  Indeed, the thing that fell furthest short of her standards was the other one.

  Isold dan Kaspa, soon to be Isold dan Isher, was waiting at the vast, inlaid doors, breathing faster than an untried soldier about to meet a charge of horse. She was very young and rather chinless, with a scattering of freckles across her nose and big, brown eyes that looked constantly on the point of brimming with tears.

  “I… never saw such a dress,” she murmured as Liddy stooped to make some tiny adjustment to Savine’s train.

  “My dear, you’re so kind. But it really was thrown together.” And it had been, in six days. By two corset-makers, a goldsmith, three dealers in pearls, an expert in working with them, and nine seamstresses going through the night by candlelight. “You look magnificent, too.”

  Isold blinked down doubtfully at herself. “Do you think so?”

  “I do.” Savine did not. Isold’s dress was a triumph of optimism over taste and accentuated all her worst features. But its inferiority to her own would be so utterly obvious to anyone watching there was no point in saying so.

  “That’s such an unusual necklace.”

  “Runes.” Savine stretched out her throat as Zuri gave an infinitesimal tweak to the way they sat. Everyone here had diamonds, after all, but these gave her a dash of the exotic. She was the least superstitious person alive, but they felt like good luck, somehow. “They were a gift from…” An old lover of my husband’s did not sound quite right, so she settled for, “A friend from the North.”

  “Will your parents be here?”

  A more complicated question than Isold probably realised, since one of Savine’s fathers was dead and the other not actually her father. She settled for, “Both of them.”

  “You’re so lucky. I have hardly any family left. My uncle died before I was born, on campaign in the North, then my father last year, and my mother a few months after. I never had any siblings.” Leaving her, no doubt, with quite the inheritance. Savine began to divine what made her so irresistible to Lord Isher. “I only wish one of them had lived to see this…”

  “I am sure they would have been proud.” And somewhat relieved to be rid of her. Savine took her gently by the shoulders. “Today you will gain a whole new family. I know your husband to be a good man.” She suspected him of being a devious scorpion. “And from the way he talks, he is very much in love with you.”

  Isold blinked up at her. “Do you think so?”

  Savine did not. “How could it be otherwise?” she asked, chucking Isold under the chin and making her smile. “Zuri, could one of the girls help Isold with her powder?”

  “Blessed is she who gives succour to the needy, Lady Savine…”

  “I’m sorry…” croaked out Isold as May attended to her face, “I don’t mean to be a burden—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Savine. “I should be the one apologising, for stealing half of your big day. And with so little notice. It has been… quite the whirlwind.”

  “It’s good to have someone to share it with.” Isold looked down at her shoes. “To take some of the attention.”

  “I understand entirely.” Though there had never been enough attention in the Circle of the World to satisfy Savine.

  “The Lords’ Round.” Isold stared at the huge doors. Beyond they could hear the vague murmur of the gathering witnesses. Almost as many as had witnessed Wetterlant’s trial. “So many people watching.”

  “Everyone who’s anyone.” Savine had spent several hours poring over the guest list with Zuri and her mother in order to make absolutely sure of it.

  “The king is here,” whispered Isold.

  Savine found her nonchalance slipping a little at that. “Yes.”

  “Do you know him?”

  “We… have met. He is a good man, regardless of what you hear.”

  “My husband-to-be doesn’t seem to think so.”

  For some reason, that caused Savine a stab of anger. “Luckily, I am not obliged to agree with Lord Isher.”

  “I am,” said Isold, in a tiny voice.

  By the Fates, her eyes were already brimming again, making her powder run. It can be pleasant to have someone weak leaning on you. It can make you feel strong. But there comes a point when they become a dead weight to carry. Savine was happy to play big sister but she drew the line at motherhood. She would have her own child to worry about soon enough.

  “You are being married to the man,” she said, less gently now, “not sold to him.”

  “I suppose.” Isold took a heavy breath. “I wish I had your… grit.”

  Savine was far from sure that grittiness was the quality most sought for in a bride. She took Isold by her limp little hands. “Act as if everything is going exactly according to your plans. As if you are the most confident person in the world. As if you never had a doubt in your life.” Savine forced her shoulders back, her chin up and faced the door. “It works for me.”

  “Does it?” asked Isold. “Really?”

  Savine paused a moment, mouth half-open. Then she slipped the box of pearl dust from her sleeve and offered it out. “There’s always this.”

  “Ready, my friend?” asked Isher.

  Leo forced a watery smile towards High Justice Bruckel, standing by to officiate, his robes trimmed with so much fur he looked like a giant, disapproving badger. “Can’t wait.”

  Leo had always reckoned himself the bravest man in any company. They called him the Young Lion, after all. But standing here, on the marble floor of the Lords’ Round, well dressed, well fed, well attended and in no danger of violent death, he was terrified.

  There are different kinds of courage, maybe, and the kind that lets you fling yourself into a thicket of spears has nothing to do with the kind that lets you stand smiling in front of a thousand people and give your life to a woman you hardly know.

  He wished his friends were there. His real friends. Antaup, with his endless chatter about women, and Glaward, with his endless chatter about weapons, and Whitewater Jin with his beard and his belly laugh, and good old Jurand, most of all. Jurand, with his caution and good sense. Jurand, with his endless patience and support. Jurand, with the fine shape of his jaw, and his hair falling in that artless mess, and the perfect definition of his lips… Leo shook himself. He even wished he could hear Barniva wax on about the horrors of war one more time but, as if to prove his own point, the poor bastard had got himself killed. In a war.

  And none of them were invited anyway. There had been no time to send for them. Leo had come to Adua to attend Lord Isher’s wedding and make new friends. Not to make an enemy of the king and get bloody married himself.

  He felt another surge of nerves. Could you call it cowardice? He found he was glancing about for some route of escape, more little rabbit than Young Lion. He caught sight of his mother, who gave him an encouraging nod. Then Lady Ardee, who gave him an encouraging wink. Then her husband the Arch Lector
, who gave him a bitter glare which entirely undid all the ladies’ support. Finally, King Orso, slouching on his cushions in the middle of the front row, jaw angrily clenched.

  Leo turned his back on them, mouthing the over-rehearsed apology Savine had arranged for him to give later. “Your Majesty, I’m a soldier, not a courtier. A simple soldier. I can only apologise. I let my passions get the better of me. No excuse. Will never happen again—”

  “Please rise!” bellowed Bruckel.

  There was a rustling as the hundreds of witnesses stood, an echoing fanfare from the gallery garlanded with spring flowers, and a mighty creaking as the doors were heaved open and the two brides stepped into the light.

  Whenever Leo saw Savine she was somehow more than he remembered, but now, in ten thousand marks or more of Suljuk silk, Osprian lace and pearls from the distant Thousand Isles, advancing so proudly, so gracefully, so dauntlessly down the aisle, he couldn’t take his eyes away.

  No one could. The future Lady Isher was a simpering little girl by comparison, the blushing maid beside the peerless empress. Savine was doing her best not to outpace her, to hold her hand, to show her off to best advantage, but poor Isold was utterly upstaged at her own wedding.

  It didn’t help that she appeared to be constantly suppressing an urge to sneeze.

  It was as if all these people were the setting of the ring in which Savine was the jewel. As if the Lords’ Round had been built especially for this moment. Perhaps you can borrow courage from someone else. As Savine joined him at the High Table, Leo’s doubts were wiped away. With her at his side, there was nothing he couldn’t do. He was the Young Lion again.

  She gave him a look up and down, nodded approvingly and raised one perfectly plucked brow. “You came, then?”

  “Are you joking?” Leo turned to the high justice and gave him a grin worthy of a famous hero. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  The spring sun shone on the park, turning every dewdrop to a diamond. Dappled shade danced on the manicured lawns under trees that had been ancient in Casamir’s reign. A gentle breeze brought only the slightest scratch in the throat from the chimneys that towered over the Agriont on every side. Everything crisp and bright and ready to burst forth with new possibilities.