A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,166

drink. The more they get, the more they need, until too much is never enough.

Scale was loving it almost as much as his nephew, shaking his iron hand at the Circle and roaring, ‘Play with him!’ The admiration of one cock for another. Seemed to sting an effort from Brock, who lumbered in, sluggish from the bleeding, took a clumsy swing you could see coming ten strides off. Stour flicked it away with a contemptuous sneer, could’ve chopped Brock across the back but chose to let him stumble by.

‘Finish him, damn it!’ snarled Black Calder, as disgusted by his son’s display as his brother was delighted by it.

Stour could’ve finished Brock five times now but he was enjoying hooking him so much, he kept letting him wriggle free so he could hook him again. Clover thought that ill-advised, to say the least. You take no risks in the Circle and give no chances, not with all you’ve got and all you’ll ever have in the balance. It only takes a little twist of fate to land you back in the mud, and fate can be a twisty little bastard.

No one knew that better than Clover.

Rikke’s head spun, sight swam, stomach churned as she stared down into the Circle. Her left eye was hot, burning in her head. She forced it open wider, staring, staring.

Leo bent, clumsy, hunched around the wound in his side, blood-streaked top to toe. Stour looked quicker than ever, surer than ever, prancing, dancing, only a short step from blowing kisses to the audience.

Rikke saw ghosts of swords and spears above the crowd. Of flags shifting with a wind that wasn’t there. The battle yesterday? A battle yet to come? By the dead, she wanted to be sick. Her head was pulsing. The cold sweat tickled at her scalp, trickled down her face, but she didn’t dare shift her eyes. Didn’t dare blink. Didn’t dare break the spell.

There were ghosts in the Circle, too. Shimmering and shifting. Ghosts of Leo and of Stour. Ghosts of hands and feet and faces. Ghosts of swords.

Leo winced as Stour’s blade caught him across the belly. Not a killing blow. Just a kiss. A slash that spotted the shields beside him with blood. Leo stumbled, fell to his knees, sword slipping from his hand into the grass.

‘No,’ whispered Leo’s mother, tears running down her cheeks as she closed her eyes.

Nightfall turned slowly around in the middle of the Circle, stretching out the victory, sucking up the glory, and he looked over his shoulder at Rikke, and he winked.

By the dead, her eye was on fire. Like it might burn right out of her head.

Stour turned away from her, raising his arm.

She saw his sword.

But she saw it with the Long Eye.

And for an instant, like the water flooding in when the dam bursts, the absolute knowing of that sword flooded into her.

She saw the ore of its iron, ripped from the cold earth, made steel in the flame-spurting furnace and poured white-hot into the mould.

She saw Watersmeet the smith swing his hammer, face lit orange by sparks at each blow, his children working the bellows, his mother Drenna puffing plumes of chagga smoke from her pipe as she tugged at the binding on the grip.

She saw it gifted to Stour on his tenth birthday, Black Calder setting his hand on the smiling boy’s shoulder and saying, ‘In war, it’s the winning counts. The rest is for fools to sing about.’

She saw it in the Great Wolf’s scabbard, whipped free as the duel began, cut and thrust, the Circle full of the bright ribbons of its passing.

She saw it swung in a shining blur at neck height, Stour’s teeth bared in a triumphant snarl. A great, heedless, showy sweep fit to take a man’s head right from his shoulders.

She knew with utter certainty where that sword would be, always, but she didn’t feel the joy she had when she knew the arrow, that day in the wet woods. For beyond Stour’s bright sword she saw a crack in the sky, and beyond that crack a black pit yawned, a pit with no bottom and no end and no beginning in which there was a knowing not of a sword or an arrow but of everything. A knowing so vast and terrible that the merest splinter of it might rip her mind apart.

Leo dragged himself to his knees, groggy, bloody, clawing his own blade from the grass.

Rikke tottered up with him, moaning, gasping,