A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,46

smashed her in the back, the bare room reeled and, to her great surprise, she found herself on hands and knees, blinking at the floor.

Spots of blood pit-pattered onto the polished wood in front of her face.

‘Oh,’ she gasped.

Her ribs throbbed with each snatched breath, sick scalding the back of her throat. Her hand was all tangled up in the basketwork of her short steel, and she flopped it drunkenly around until the sword clattered onto the floor. The backs of her fingers were all grazed. She put them to her throbbing mouth and they came away bloody. Her hand was shaking. She was shaking all over.

It hurt. Her face, her side, her pride. But it was not the pain that really shook her. It was the powerlessness. The total misjudgement of her own abilities. The curtain had been twitched aside, and she saw just how fragile she was. How fragile anyone was, compared to a sword swung in anger. The world was a different place than it had been a few moments before, and not a better one.

Gorst squatted before her, notched steels in one hand. ‘I should warn you that I was still holding back.’

She managed to nod. ‘I see.’

There was no trace of guilt on her father’s face. Constant pain, as he always liked to say, had cured him of that. ‘Fencing is one thing,’ he said. ‘Actual violence quite another. Few of us are made for it. It is healthy to be disabused of our self-deceptions every now and then, even if it hurts.’

He smiled while she wiped the blood from her nose. Savine had given up trying to understand him. Most of the time, she was the one thing he loved in a world he despised. Then, on occasion, he treated her like a rival to be crushed.

‘If you are attacked by a dangerous man who means it, my advice is to run away.’ Gorst stood, offering his broad hand. ‘I expect he will destroy himself before too long.’

When he pulled her up, her legs were jelly. ‘Thank you, Colonel Gorst. That was … a very useful lesson.’ She wanted to cry. Or her body did, at least. She would not let it. She set her aching jaw and stuck her chin up at him. ‘Same time next week?’

Her father barked out a laugh and slapped the arm of his chair. ‘That’s my girl!’

Promises

Broad lay awake, staring at the ceiling.

There was a crack, next to a yellowed blister on the limewash. Felt like he’d been staring at it all night. Staring at it as the sun crawled up over the narrow buildings, through the washing strung between them and into the narrow street, through the narrow window and into the one-room cellar they were living in.

Felt like he’d been staring at that crack for weeks. Turning things over in his mind. Fretting at them as if they were big choices he had to make. But they were big choices he’d already made, and he’d made the wrong ones, and now there was no changing them.

He took a heavy breath, felt it catch at the back of his throat. That oily scratch on the Valbeck air. That smell of shit and onions the cellar always had, no matter how Liddy scrubbed it. It was in the walls. It was in his skin.

Folk were setting off to work outside, boots tramping through the muck beyond the tiny window near the ceiling, shadows of their passing flickering on the mould-speckled wall.

‘How are your hands?’ murmured Liddy, twisting towards him on the narrow bed.

He winced as he worked the fingers. ‘Always sore in the mornings.’

Liddy took his big hand in her small ones, rubbing at his aching palm, at his throbbing knuckles. ‘May up already?’

‘She slipped out. Didn’t want to wake you.’

They lay there, she looking at him, he not daring to look at her. Not wanting to see the disappointment in her eyes. The worry. The fear. Even if it was only his own disappointment, and worry, and fear reflected back, like in a mirror.

‘It’s not fair on her,’ he whispered at that crack in the ceiling. ‘She should be having a life. Dancing, courting. Not waiting on some rich bastard.’

‘She doesn’t mind doing it. She wants to help. She’s a good girl.’

‘She’s the best thing I’ve done. She’s the only good thing I’ve done.’

‘You’ve done good, Gunnar. You’ve done lots of good.’

‘You don’t know what it was like, in Styria. What I was like—’

‘Then do good