The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,234

her forehead, she needed three hands. One to hold her bloated belly, one to hold her aching back, one to hold her throbbing head. She had no choice but to alternate between them, her shoulder aching with every step, breathing hard through her gritted teeth, while her baby quite literally kicked the piss out of her.

She cocooned herself in misery so she would not have to look right or left. So she would not have to see the scorched orchard, the trampled wheatfields, the smoke still crawling up from Stoffenbeck, pounded to ruins by cannon so meticulously cast in her own foundry.

All the while, she told herself she could not be blamed.

She had not wanted any of this, after all. She had wanted to marry Orso. More than anything. But she lost him because her mother once fucked a king. Curnsbick had been right, after Valbeck her judgement was no good. When Leo was served up to her, so handsome and celebrated and bursting with potential, just the delightful pastry her jaded palate needed, what choice did she have but to get her knife and fork out? And then, pregnant and puking and judgement even worse, what choice did she have but to marry him? And then, finding he was already balls-deep in conspiracy with Isher, what choice did she have but to join them and do everything to make a success of their preposterous scheme?

Making successes from men’s preposterous schemes was what she did, after all.

It was terribly unfair on her, when you thought about it, that she had lost everything because of who her mother fucked, by definition some time before she was born.

And then she thought of her father. Not King Jezal, the other one. The real one, blood or no blood. Sitting in his wheeled chair, tongue touching his empty gums and a brow critically raised. Perhaps after one of her arrogant overreaches in the fencing circle. Really, Savine?

“What have I done?” she whispered, and she sank down to one knee in the road.

If she had really tried, if she had truly wanted to, she could have found a way to stop this. There were a thousand moments when she could have found a way to stop this.

Instead, she had fanned the flames. Instead, she had rolled the dice. And what for? Ambition. That snake twisted tight about her innards whose hunger grew sharper the more it was fed. Whose hunger could never be satisfied.

The truth was, like all gamblers who suddenly lose big, she had only thought about what there was to win. Now she saw the scale of her loss, and it was no less than everything. And she had not only lost on her own behalf, but for thousands of others. What would it mean for Zuri? What would it mean for Broad? For Haroon and Rabik? For Liddy and May? By the Fates, what would it mean for her unborn child?

“What have I done?”

She felt Zuri’s light hand on one shoulder. “My scripture teacher would no doubt have said…” She was frowning doubtfully out across the battered battlefield. “That regret is the gateway to salvation…”

Savine gave a disbelieving snort. “Can you really still believe in God? That this is all part of some grand plan? That it means something?”

“What is the alternative?” Zuri looked at her, eyes wide. “To believe that it means nothing?”

Savine felt Broad’s heavy hand on her other shoulder. “No one makes a thing like this happen alone. We all had our hand in it.”

She slowly nodded. It would have been yet more appalling arrogance to suppose it was all her fault. She winced as she struggled to her feet, took a hard breath and, with one hand under her belly and one pressed into her back, struggled on across the wounded fields towards Stoffenbeck.

She had played her part in this.

All that remained was to pay for it.

She was not sure how long she sat there, waiting, in an agony of guilt, apprehension and, well, agony.

The pain in her head was getting no better. The pain in her bladder was most certainly getting worse. Her baby was endlessly shifting. Perhaps it was cursed with Leo’s impatience. Perhaps it was infected by her panic. Perhaps, like a rat scurrying from a foundering ship, it sensed she was going down and desperately struggled to wriggle free of her.

It must have had its mother’s instinct for self-preservation. Savine would have wriggled free of her own skin if she could.

From time to time,