The Trouble with Peace (The Age of Madness #2) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,83

glittering in the gloom on helms and hilts. Oxel was there, as expected, and Red Hat and Hardbread, glaring at each other almost as much as at Stour. Caul Shivers, too, though his only finery was a blood-red stone on his little finger and the only glint on him was from his metal eye. Isern-i-Phail sat on a step, slowly chewing, long spear across her knees, and as Stour strode in she made a long sucking through the hole in her teeth that spoke her scorn louder than any words.

Lots of weapons in that hall, lots of sorrow and lots of anger, and Clover made sure he knew where all the doors were. When a great man dies, those left over always take a moment working out where their loyalties are most fruitfully laid, and there’s a high risk of bloodshed in the meantime. He’d seen one funeral turn into several often enough.

The Dogman himself lay pale on the long table, scarred shield under his feet, a hint of drama from a shaft of light falling on him through the smoke-hole. A woman stood over him in the shadows, back to the door. Her red-brown hair was clipped short and it made her neck look very long and very thin, blue veins standing stark up the side.

Stour strode into the silent hall, steel toes on his boots scraping. “I just had to pay my respects!” Voice dripping contempt, not caring a shit, as usual, for anyone’s feelings but his own.

Then the woman turned, and that shaft of light caught her smile, and Stour shuffled to an uncertain halt. So did his men. A dozen warriors always keen to advertise their courage, but they all checked at the sight of her, and Clover hardly blamed ’em.

“By the dead,” muttered Greenway, taking a nervy step back and near tripping over his own sword.

“The King of the Northmen!” she raised her arms in delight. “What a joy! The gates of Uffrith stand open to you, even though last time you visited you burned the place, eh? Eh? Eh?” The last eh? hissed through her gritted teeth, spit spraying.

Rumour was the Dogman’s daughter was a witch. That she had the Long Eye. Clover hadn’t taken it too seriously. Now it was hard to doubt. She’d turned so lean her face was like a skull, skin so stretched you fancied you could see through it, scabbed and angry around her left eye, across her forehead, her cheek, the bridge of her nose. Clover wondered if, of the two of ’em, her father looked the healthier.

“What the hell happened to you?” muttered Stour, giving voice to the thoughts of everyone in the hall, most likely.

“A sorceress said she could make me more ordinary,” said Rikke. “Or she could make me less. Guess which I chose?”

She strutted closer, bony shoulders tipped back, bony chin tipped up, and the mingling of that battered face and that snake-like swagger and that friendly grin and those mad, mad eyes was really most off-putting.

“I’ve been in the High Places. Up in the mountains, beside a lake.” And she waved a hand, runes on thongs around her thin wrist clicking and clattering. “Fine views, but the water was a little chilly on the toes, eh, Isern?”

Isern-i-Phail, no doubt used to being the weirdest in just about any company, was of a sudden looking workaday by comparison. “I didn’t paddle,” she said, and spat some chagga juice across the floor.

“You should’ve. The kind of cold that burns all your doubts away. Whole business was…” And Rikke opened her eyes wide, so wide it seemed they might pop out of her pinched-in face. “Eye-opening. I see right through you, now. Right through all of you.” And she laughed, a jagged laugh, like she’d left her senses far behind her, and it didn’t help at all that she was laughing at her father’s funeral.

Stour twisted his face sideways as she came close, like he was looking into a wind. Her right eye was all swollen, many-coloured bruises on the bloated lids and a great red stain all across the white of it, pupil shrivelled to a milky pinprick. The pupil of the other yawned huge and black, and Clover saw the scabbed and angry skin around it was pricked with designs. A cobweb of black lines and letters, circles and symbols, so fine it seemed it couldn’t have been drawn by men at all. Clover never saw a thing looked so much like witch’s work,