The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,25

it, standing behind a high chair.” And someone sitting in the chair… who had it been? “I saw an old woman…” Rikke winced and pressed her hand against her left eye, burning hot, and shuddered at the memory, still faint on the inside of her lids. “And her face was stitched together with golden wire. She spoke to me…”

Isern sagged back on her haunches. “I know this woman.”

“You sure?” asked Rikke’s father.

“’Tis a distinctive look, d’you not think? She is a witch.” Isern took up the dangling necklace of runes and fingerbones she wore, tattooed knuckles whitening as she squeezed it tight. “She is a woman much loved by the moon, or perhaps much hated.” Rikke never saw Isern-i-Phail look anywhere near scared before, and it made her feel scared. Even more scared than usual. “She is a sorceress who returned from the land of the dead.”

“None escape the Great Leveller,” muttered Rikke’s father.

“None escape. But they say some few…” Isern’s voice faded to a scratchy whisper. “Are sent back.” She leaned close, hard hands gripping Rikke’s shoulders. “What did she tell you?”

“That I had to choose,” whispered Rikke, feeling cold all over.

“Choose what?”

“I don’t know.”

Isern bared her teeth, tongue stuck in the hole where one was missing. “Then we must pick a path up into the High Places. There is a forbidden cave there, beside a forbidden lake. That’s where she lives. If you can use the word about a dead woman.”

Rikke’s father stared. “Do we really want help from a corpse stitched together with golden wire?”

“Help with strange problems comes from strange people.”

“I guess.” Rikke’s father helped her up, the horribly familiar pain pulsing away behind her eyes. “You should eat something.”

Her gorge rose at the thought. “I’m not hungry.”

“You’re skin and bones, girl.”

“I just need some air. Just need to breathe.”

Isern pushed the door creaking open and bright daggers glittered along its edge, stabbing, stabbing. Rikke closed one eye altogether and the other to a slit, groaning as they helped her through the doorway. She felt weak as a newborn calf. Everything hurt. The soles of her feet. The tips of her fingers. The inside of her arse.

They helped her onto her father’s favourite bench in the overgrown garden, with the view of Uffrith’s steep streets sloping down to the glittering sea. “Oh, the sun’s a bastard,” she muttered, but she managed to smile as the salt breeze came up and kissed her clammy face. “But the wind’s a good friend.”

“Other way around where we’re going,” said Isern, dumping a sheepskin about Rikke’s shoulders. “Up into the hills.”

“Everything’s a matter of where you stand.” Rikke’s father took both her hands in his. “I have to get back to this bloody moot. If I’m not there, they’ll argue.”

“They’ll argue more if you are there. They’re like bloody children.”

“We’re all like children, Rikke. The older you get, the more you realise the grown-ups won’t suddenly walk in and set things right. You want things right, you have to put ’em right yourself.”

“With your bones and your brains, eh?”

“And your heart, Rikke. And your heart.”

She squeezed her father’s hands, so thin and crooked. “I worry they’ll wear you down.”

“Me?” He gave a smile that was convincing no one. “Never.”

“They already have.”

He smiled again. Truer this time. “That’s what it is to be chief. You make the hard choices so your people won’t have the trouble of ’em.” He glanced about at the weed-choked beds as he stood, brushing off his knees. “One day I’ll tame this bloody garden, you’ll see. You just sit in the breeze, now. Sit and rest.”

Wasn’t like she had much choice. Didn’t have the strength to do much else. She sat and listened to the gulls squawking on the rooftops and the bees busy at the garden’s first ramshackle hints of blossom. She watched the fishermen on the wharves, the women at the well, the carpenters still mending the wounds Stour Nightfall had cut into Uffrith. She wondered if her father would live to see it put right again, and the thought made her feel sad. Sad and lonely. Who’d she be when he was gone?

She closed her eyes again and felt tears prickling. She hardly dared look these days in case she saw something that wasn’t there yet. Hardly dared breathe in case she choked on years-old smoke. Isern had always told her that you cannot force the Long Eye open, but she’d tried, when Leo fought his duel against Stour Nightfall. She’d tried, and