A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,159

to make some sharp guesses.

Clover took a breath. ‘Aye, well, we all play the cards we’re dealt.’

‘Some of us do. Some of us kill men with better cards and play theirs instead. What’s this Stour Nightfall like as a fighter?’

‘I wouldn’t want to fight him.’

‘A sensible man does his best to avoid any fight.’

‘Any fair one.’

A pause, and they watched the folk crowd in, from the Union side and the North. Warriors, servants, women, more and more of them until there was a gabbling crowd in every direction.

‘What’s he like as a man?’ asked Shivers.

‘About what you’d expect from someone they call the Great Wolf. Certainly no better. What about Brock?’

Shivers shrugged. ‘About what you’d expect from someone they call the Young Lion. Certainly no worse.’

‘Huh. Since we’ve got all the answers, I sometimes wonder why we follow these bastards.’

The noise swelled up, cheers on one side and grumbles on the other, and Bethod’s sons came through the press, as ill-matched a pair of brothers as ever there were. Scale Ironhand, huge and fleshy and flashing with gold, all smiles. Black Calder, lean as a spear and frowning like thunder.

‘I hear a lot of talk about loyalty,’ said Shivers as the men who’d ruled the North for the best part of twenty years took their high seats above the Circle.

Clover snorted. ‘Since we’ve a dozen dead masters between us, and both had a hand in more’n one of the downfalls, I feel no shame in saying that loyalty is overrated.’

‘Helps to have someone worth being loyal to.’ The cheers and grumbles were reversed as a lean old man with long hair and a pointed face clambered stiffly onto the seats opposite.

‘The Dogman?’ He looked grey. Grey-clothed, grey-haired, grey-faced, like the life had leaked out of him to leave a wispy husk a sudden gust might whisk away. ‘The man looks a touch past his best.’

Shivers cast a lazy eye towards Scale, and back. He had a way of saying a lot with a few words. ‘Least he had one.’

‘Aye.’ Clover gave a weary sigh. ‘Got a lot o’ respect for the Dogman, as it goes. Only man won any kind of power in the North in my lifetime and stayed halfway decent. The rest – Bethod, the Bloody-Nine, Black Dow, Black Calder, well … between you and me …’ Clover scratched gently at his scar and dropped his voice very low. ‘It’s been quite the who’s-the-biggest-cunt contest, wouldn’t you say?’

Shivers slowly nodded. ‘A real arsehole’s parade.’

‘But then the arseholes tend to win, don’t they? Maybe I’m weak, but I’d rather be on the winning side, even if the losers smell sweeter.’

‘You should meet his daughter.’

‘Who, the Dogman’s?’

‘Aye. Rikke. I’ll make no promises for her odour but she’s worth talking to.’ He nodded towards the platform, where a girl was clambering over the back, all knees and elbows, to wedge herself between the Dogman and a pale, hard Union woman Clover reckoned to be the one-time Lady Governor of Angland.

She pushed her tangle of red-brown hair out of her face to show those big grey eyes and he’d no doubt it was her. The one who’d come tumbling down the hill and fallen at his feet. The one he’d let scamper off into the woods.

‘We met in passing. Struck me as two-thirds o’ nothing.’

‘Then you misjudged her.’

No doubt she was fine-looking, but more than a bit mad-looking, too, wild and twitchy with a cross painted over one eye, a fat gold ring through her nose and a mass of rattling chains around her neck like she was learning to be some hillwoman sorceress but hadn’t actually got to the spells yet.

‘You sure?’ he asked.

‘Do I look like a man prone to fancy?’

Clover gave Shivers a quick glance up and down. ‘About as little as any living. And I was long ago cured of the misapprehension that I’m right on every score.’

‘The wiser a man is, the more he stands ready to be educated.’ There was a little curl at the corner of Shivers’ mouth as he watched Rikke flapping her hands around. A hint of pride, maybe. The most feeling he’d let show the whole time they’d talked. Anyone who could coax some warmth from that face-shaped block of rock was someone worth watching, Clover reckoned.

Around the edge of the Circle, the shield-carriers were starting to form up, folk pressing in behind them, eager for the best view of the murder. ‘Let me know when you want that chat, then, Shivers,