A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,128

you, you beautiful bastard, you get tired o’ pretending, my arms are always open.’ She whipped her hat off and tossed it spinning at the Kantic smoker. ‘Don’t hog that pipe, you shit! Stoke it up and give me a suck.’

Broad stood staring at her a moment longer, pulse still thudding in his skull, then let Vick steer him after the warden’s hairy buttocks and out of the courtroom. The jeers of the jury followed him but they were half-hearted. It seemed, for now, the Burners had drunk their fill of justice.

He thought he could hear the creaking of rigging as he followed Vick down the shadowy steps behind the courtroom. The sound he’d heard when he looked up at the billowing sails on the voyage to Styria. But there was no reason for that much wood and rope behind a courthouse.

‘Bloody hell,’ whispered Sarlby as they stepped out into the light.

Across the cobbled yard, between the broken windows to either side, the Burners had set up a dozen great beams, stolen from some half-built mill, maybe. From those beams, at neat intervals, bodies hung. Might’ve been a hundred. Might’ve been more. Swaying just a little with the breeze. There were men and women. There were young and old.

All equal now, all right.

‘Bloody hell,’ whispered Sarlby again.

None of the other Breakers said a word. Vick stood staring. Broad stood staring. High ideals, like the ones that’d led him to Styria. They surely can take you to some dark places.

‘There’s a few haven’t been tried yet, down in the cells.’ The warden sniffed and adjusted his dirty sock. ‘Guess you can have them, too.’

Young Men’s Folly

‘Prince Orso isn’t coming,’ said Leo, stomping up the crumbling stairway after his mother with the Dogman behind him. ‘We have to fight.’

Her only reply was a frustrated sigh as she stepped onto the moss-speckled roof of the tower. From the top there was a fine view of the valley below the ruined holdfast, the road threading along its bottom and the high fell on the far side, crowned by red bracken. Off to the west, the road met a fast-flowing stream and crossed it by an ancient-looking bridge. There must’ve been a village beyond, the houses out of sight but the smoke from their chimneys faintly smudging the sky.

Cries drifted over as the wind picked up. Thousands of men, hundreds of horses, dozens of wagons trickling down the road between the two hills and over the bridge in a glittering ribbon. The army of Angland pulling back steadily to the south and west. Just as it had been for weeks.

‘Mustred and Clensher brought two thousand men from Angland. We won’t get any more.’ Leo stepped up next to his mother, planting his fists on the crumbling parapet. ‘Hold off now … we’ll look like cowards.’

His mother gave a dry little laugh. ‘The one advantage of being a woman in command of an army is that you don’t have to worry about looking cowardly. Everyone expects it.’

‘We’ll bloody be cowards!’

The Dogman snorted. ‘Your mother was a prisoner of Black Dow, and faced him down, and didn’t only talk her own way free but saved sixty men besides. I’ll hear her given no lessons in courage, boy. There’s a world o’ difference between being scared to fight and waiting till you can win.’

‘As long as you stop waiting!’ Leo waved off in a direction he hoped was south-west, past the bridge towards Angland. The direction the Union men were retreating. Always retreating. ‘We’re no more than eighty miles from the border, and if we’re pushed all the way to the Whiteflow we’ll never push back. The Protectorate will be finished.’

He might’ve hoped for some support from the Dogman. His bloody Protectorate, wasn’t it? And he’d stood beside the Bloody-Nine, the greatest champion the world ever saw, who won eleven duels and claimed the crown of the North in the Circle!

But the old Northman only frowned into the valley, and thoughtfully rubbed at his pointed jaw, and quietly said, ‘Well, you have to be realistic. Naught lasts for ever.’

‘I understand the stakes,’ said Leo’s mother, turning from the road to frown at the dark woods to the north, fussing absently at that bald patch she had under her hair. You could see the footprint of the fortress on the hilltop below them, the walls little more than heaps of rubble, loose stones scattered down the hillside, the forest pressing in at the base. ‘If you think all