A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,32

go was the strong thing, the wise thing, the right thing. That blood only led to more blood. But his lessons seemed far away now, meant for a warmer place. She clenched her jaw, and narrowed her eyes, and swore to herself that if she lived out the week, she’d make it her business to see Stour Nightfall fucked by a pig.

‘I’ll be honest, Wonderful,’ came the man’s voice, the one called Clover, speaking soft like he was sharing a secret, ‘I’m finding that bastard increasingly troubling.’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘Took it for an act at first, but I’m starting to think he’s everything he pretends to be.’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘Guts in a box? With herbs?’

‘Aye, I know.’

‘He’ll be king one o’ these days, will guts-in-a-box over yonder. King o’ the Northmen. Him.’

A long pause, then a weary grunt. ‘It’s a thing no right-thinking person could look forward to.’

Rikke could only agree. She thought she saw a hint of their reflections, dancing among the black branches in the water.

‘You see something down there?’

She stiffened, numb fingers curling tight around the grip of her knife. She saw the jaw muscles clench on the side of Isern’s face, blade of her spear sliding from the water, smeared with pitch so it wouldn’t catch the light.

‘What? Fish?’

‘Aye. Worth getting my rod, d’you think?’

The sound of Wonderful hawking up, then a glob of phlegm came spinning over from above and plopped into the water. ‘Nothing in this stream worth catching, I reckon.’

It Was Bad

The sun was setting when he came home, just a pink glimmer over black hills. The valley was in darkness but Broad could’ve walked the way blindfold. Knew every rut in the track, every stone in the tumbledown wall beside it.

All so familiar. But all so strange.

After two years away, you’d think a man would run headlong towards a place he loved, the people he loved, with the biggest smile his cheeks could hold. But Broad trudged slow as the condemned to the scaffold, and smiled about as much, too. The man who left had feared nothing. The one coming back was scared all the time. He hardly even knew what of. Himself, maybe.

When he saw the house, huddled among those bare trees, lamplight showing around the shutters, he had this strange urge to walk on. This strange thought he didn’t belong there any more. Not with what he’d seen. Not with what he’d done. What if he trod it in with him?

But the path leading past was a coward’s path. He clenched his aching fists. Gunnar Broad was no coward. Ask anyone.

Took all the courage he had to knock on that door, though. More than it had to climb the ladders at Borletta, or lead the charge into those pikes at Musselia, or even carry those men dying of the grip in the long winter after. But he knocked.

‘Who is it?’ Her voice, beyond the door, and it made him wince worse than the points of those pikes had. Till that moment, he’d been afraid she wouldn’t be there. That she’d have moved on. Forgotten him. Or maybe he’d been hoping she would’ve.

He could hardly find any voice at all. ‘It’s me, Liddy. It’s Gunnar.’

The door rattled open, and there she stood. She’d changed. Not near as much as he had, but she’d changed. Leaner, maybe. Harder, maybe. But when she smiled, it still lit the gloomy world, the way it always had.

‘What are you doing knocking at your own door, you big fool?’

And he just started crying. A jolting sob first that came all the way from his stomach. Then there was no stopping it. He fumbled his eye-lenses off with a trembling hand and all the tears he hadn’t shed in Styria, on account of Gunnar Broad being no coward, came burning down his crushed-up face.

Liddy stepped forward and he shrank away, hunched and hurting, arms up as if to fend her off. Like she was made of glass and might shatter in his hands. She caught him even so. Thin arms, but a hold he couldn’t break, and though she was a head shorter than him, she held his face against her chest, and kissed his head, and whispered, ‘Shhhh, now. Shhhhh.’

After a while, when his sobs started to calm, she put her hands on his cheeks and lifted his head so she was looking straight up at him, calm and serious.

‘It was bad, then, was it?’ she asked him.

‘Aye,’ he croaked out. ‘It was bad.’

She smiled. That smile