The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,5

out of her daughter’s arms and flung it back down on the ground. “Should of drowned it when she brung it in,” she muttered. And to Molo Tanhide she said, “Bring your daughter inside, and I’ll sew her up.”

“Thank you, Dam Catrin,” Molo says, “but I’ll sew her my own self.” And he did, careful enough that you could barely see the scar. Only a little pucker where the missing finger used to be. The rest of Demar’s hand healed up well enough, though it had a kind of a stippled look to it, like sacking-cloth, where all them thin, sharp teeth had bit into her.

A year passed, without any apology or make-right to the Tanhides from Rampart Hold, nor no public check for Lari. Then one day when we was out playing we passed a little stoneberry bush that had rooted inside the fence and not been burned out yet. “Them berries is all but ripe,” Lari says. “Lightning would of et the lot of them.” Then she gives Demar a look, and says, “If your daddy hadn’t of killed him.”

Demar only shrugged her shoulders, but Haijon was red-faced. “Her daddy done what had got to be done,” he told his sister, looking as solemn-stern as their mother in that moment.

“He could of cut her hand off,” Lari said, “and left Lightning alive. A maimed hand’s not good for nothing anyway.”

Lari was knowed to be mean from time to time, but it was probably being checked by Haijon in front of all of us that made her so stupid mean that day. Haijon took a step towards her, like he was going to hit her, but Demar got in first. She drawed back her right hand, the one with just the three fingers on it, and she smacked Lari Vennastin in the head so hard that Lari spun round before she fell down.

“Well now,” she says. “It seems like a maimed hand is still good for one thing, Lari. It’s good for to play spinning top.”

After that, we called Demar Spinner. And she liked the name, and took it to herself, though her father’s name being Tanhide chimed kind of strange with it. “I won’t have that name for long,” she said, when Veso Shepherd tried to make a joke out of it. “I’ll be Spinner Waiting soon enough.”

For our fourteenth year was upon us. It was almost time for us to be who we was going to be. Which I’ll tell right soon, I promise, after only one more stepping sideways to talk about how we lived. It was a long time ago after all, and you might not have the sense of it.

4

Everything that lives hates us, it sometimes seems. Or at least they come after us like they hate us. Things we want to eat fight back, hard as they can, and oftentimes win. Things that want to eat us is thousands strong, so many of them that we only got names for the ones that live closest to us. And the trees got their own ways to hurt us, blunt or subtle according to their several natures.

There’s shunned men too, that live in the deep forest and catch and kill us when they can. Nobody knowed back then who they was, whether they was just the faceless that had been throwed out of other villages or if they had got a village of their own that was hid somewhere, but they were monstrous cruel and worse than any beast.

Against these things, we of Mythen Rood, like every settlement of humankind, put up walls, hollowed out stake-blinds, set sentries, tried every way we could to pitch our own hate against the world’s hate, giving back as good or bad as we got. We digged ourselves in and weathered it, for what else was there to do?

Each season brung its own terrors down on us. In Winter, the cold could freeze your fingers off if you weren’t wary, and snow fell on top of snow until you couldn’t make your way without web-spreads or walkers. The snow was mostly just water set hard, but sometimes it had silver in it and that was dangerous. If you drunk snow-melt and didn’t sieve out the silver first, it could make you sick in your stomach. Old ones and babies could even die of it.

In Spring the snow thawed, which was a mercy, but sometimes – maybe one time in four or five – it would be a choker Spring,