The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,55

them into your skin with a crow-bone needle and chain the Long Eye for as long as you live.”

Rikke stared at her. “I thought it was the demon that breaks all chains?”

“Yet we must chain it. With eleven wards and eleven wards reversed, and eleven times eleven. A lock strong enough to hold shut the gates of hell themselves.”

“That… doesn’t sound like something you want on your face.”

“You should eat. Then you should rest. You should drink plenty of water.”

“What’s the water for?”

“One should always drink plenty of water. The tattooing will take several days. It will be draining for you and even more so for me.”

Rikke brushed her cheek with her fingertips as she watched the smoke from the cook-fire drift across the lake. She thought of the hillmen, and the hillwomen, and those bastards from past the Crinna she’d seen sometimes with their blue painted faces. She gave one of those sorry sighs made her lips flap. “There’s just no going back from tattoos on your face, is there?”

“There has never been any going back for you.” Caurib shrugged. “Though you could always leave it, and let the visions get madder and madder until you are sucked into the darkness and your mind bursts apart into a million screaming fragments. That would save me some work.”

“Thanks for that option.” Rikke felt a bit teary, had to sniff back hard. But it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it, and all that. “Reckon I’ll go for the tattoos, then. If that’ll fix it.”

The witch gave a hiss of impatience. “Nothing is ever fixed. From the moment it is born, from the moment it is built, everything is always dying, decaying, drifting into chaos.”

“I could stand a mite less philosophising and a couple of actual answers in the conversation, if it’s all the same to you.”

“Look about you, girl. If I had all the answers, do you think I would be standing in a freezing lake with my head stitched together?”

And the witch held up her skirts and sloshed back towards the shore, leaving Rikke scared and shivering, up to her calves in the frosty water.

“Oh!” Caurib had turned back to shout at her. “And if you need to shit, make sure you do it well away from the cave!”

The King’s Justice

“Spoke to the king myself, at length.” Isher lounged on the front bench as if he was in his drawing room. “Orso’s every bit his father’s son.”

“None too bright.” The Lords’ Round was full, but Barezin hardly seemed to care if they were overheard. “And ever so easily led.”

Open disdain for not one but two kings felt a mite disloyal to Leo, especially here at the heart of government, attending a trial where a man’s life would hang in the balance. His mother would’ve been most displeased to hear it. But then, sooner or later, a man has to stop making everything about pleasing his mother.

“Last year, outside Valbeck, Crown Prince Orso presided over the summary hanging of two hundred supposed revolutionaries,” said Isher. “Without trial or process.”

“Their gibbeted bodies were used to decorate the road to Adua.” Barezin stuck his tongue out and mimed a hanging. “As a warning to other commoners.”

“Now they want to do the same to a member of the Open Council.”

“As a warning to other noblemen.”

Heugen leaned in close. “He may’ve inherited his mother’s mercy along with his father’s brains.”

Barezin’s eager whisper could scarcely contain his amusement. “He certainly got her weakness for the ladies!”

“By the dead,” breathed Leo. He found neither the Queen Dowager’s preferences nor the king’s brutality a laughing matter.

Isher shook his well-groomed white head. “At this rate, not even the best of us will be safe.”

“It’s the best who are in the most danger,” said Heugen.

Barezin grunted agreement. “Wetterlant hasn’t a bloody chance. Bet you they present no evidence at all.”

“But… why?” asked Leo, struggling to find a position on the hard bench where his leg didn’t nag at him.

“Wetterlant has no heir,” said Isher, “so his estates will be forfeit and the Crown will sweep them up. You’ll see.”

Leo stared in disbelief at the chamber’s stained-glass windows. The proudest moments of Union history. Harod the Great bringing the three kingdoms of Midderland together. Arnault the Just throwing off tyranny. Casamir the Steadfast taking law to the lawless in Angland. The Open Council lifting King Jezal to the throne, uniting behind him to defeat the Gurkish. The noble heritage his father once loved to talk of.