The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,65

clipped head against the racing clouds. Turned her face this way and that. Something written there. Eleven wards, and eleven wards reversed, and eleven times eleven.

“How does it look?” she asked.

“Never mind how it looks,” said Isern, frowning. “Will it work?”

“One eye fights the other.” Caurib lifted the needle. “You must choose. You must choose now.”

Silence for a moment. Stillness for a moment. Rikke stared up at them, the cold fear spreading through her.

“Choose… an eye?”

Let Ring the Bells

Savine studied her face in the mirrors from every angle, no fewer than nine maids fluttering nervously about her: Freid with powder and brush, Metello with comb and scissors, Liddy with a mouthful of pins, May with four different colours of thread woven around her fingers. Aside from a wrinkle or two about the eyes—and unless great Euz could turn back time for her there was no help for that—she saw no opportunity for improvement.

“Perfection,” said Zuri, with the quiet pride of a painter placing the last brushstroke on a masterpiece.

“Hardly.” Savine took one last surreptitious sniff of pearl dust then carefully brushed clean the rims of her nostrils. “But as close as we’ll get under the circumstances.”

She had never worked so hard as she had in preparation for this event. There were a great many things that fell short of her standards, but then she had only been given a few days to prepare for seven hundred and fourteen guests, and at this particular wedding she was not the only bride.

Indeed, the thing that fell furthest short of her standards was the other one.

Isold dan Kaspa, soon to be Isold dan Isher, was waiting at the vast, inlaid doors, breathing faster than an untried soldier about to meet a charge of horse. She was very young and rather chinless, with a scattering of freckles across her nose and big, brown eyes that looked constantly on the point of brimming with tears.

“I… never saw such a dress,” she murmured as Liddy stooped to make some tiny adjustment to Savine’s train.

“My dear, you’re so kind. But it really was thrown together.” And it had been, in six days. By two corset-makers, a goldsmith, three dealers in pearls, an expert in working with them, and nine seamstresses going through the night by candlelight. “You look magnificent, too.”

Isold blinked down doubtfully at herself. “Do you think so?”

“I do.” Savine did not. Isold’s dress was a triumph of optimism over taste and accentuated all her worst features. But its inferiority to her own would be so utterly obvious to anyone watching there was no point in saying so.

“That’s such an unusual necklace.”

“Runes.” Savine stretched out her throat as Zuri gave an infinitesimal tweak to the way they sat. Everyone here had diamonds, after all, but these gave her a dash of the exotic. She was the least superstitious person alive, but they felt like good luck, somehow. “They were a gift from…” An old lover of my husband’s did not sound quite right, so she settled for, “A friend from the North.”

“Will your parents be here?”

A more complicated question than Isold probably realised, since one of Savine’s fathers was dead and the other not actually her father. She settled for, “Both of them.”

“You’re so lucky. I have hardly any family left. My uncle died before I was born, on campaign in the North, then my father last year, and my mother a few months after. I never had any siblings.” Leaving her, no doubt, with quite the inheritance. Savine began to divine what made her so irresistible to Lord Isher. “I only wish one of them had lived to see this…”

“I am sure they would have been proud.” And somewhat relieved to be rid of her. Savine took her gently by the shoulders. “Today you will gain a whole new family. I know your husband to be a good man.” She suspected him of being a devious scorpion. “And from the way he talks, he is very much in love with you.”

Isold blinked up at her. “Do you think so?”

Savine did not. “How could it be otherwise?” she asked, chucking Isold under the chin and making her smile. “Zuri, could one of the girls help Isold with her powder?”

“Blessed is she who gives succour to the needy, Lady Savine…”

“I’m sorry…” croaked out Isold as May attended to her face, “I don’t mean to be a burden—”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Savine. “I should be the one apologising, for stealing half of your big day. And with so