Joe Abercrombie - Half the World

“I bloody hate people ,” she muttered, snatching another loaf from Safrit’s hand.

It was hardly the good thing to say but for once Brand couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Don’t worry.” He dragged his blanket over one shoulder and turned his back on her. “They feel much the same about you.”

Thorn’s nose twitched at the smell of cooking. She blinked awake, and knew right off something was odd. She could scarcely remember the last time she had woken without the tender help of Skifr’s boot.

Perhaps the old witch had a heart after all.

She had dreamt a dog was licking at the side of her head, and she tried to shake the memory off as she rolled from her blankets. Maybe dreams were messages from the gods, but she was damned if she could sieve the meaning from that one. Koll was hunched at the water’s edge, grumbling as he washed the pots out.

“Morning,” she said, giving an almighty stretch and almost enjoying the long ache through her arms and across her back. The first few days she’d hardly been able to move in the mornings from the rowing and the training together, but she was hardening to the work now, getting tough as rope and timber.

Koll glanced up and his eyes went wide. “Er …”

“I know. Skifr let me sleep.” She grinned across the river. For the first time, Divine seemed an apt name for it. The year was wearing on and Mother Sun was bright and hot already, birds twittering in the forest and insects floating lazy over the water. The trailing branches of the trees about the bank were heavy with white flowers and Thorn took a long, blossom-scented breath in through her nose and let it sigh away. “I’ve a feeling it’ll be a fine day.” And she ruffled Koll’s hair, turned around, and almost walked into Brand.

He stared at her, that helpless look of his splattered all over his face. “Thorn, your-”

“Go and die.” Half the night she’d been lying awake thinking of harsh things to say to him, but when the moment came that was the best she could manage. She shouldered past and over to the embers of the fire where the crew were gathered.

“Eat well,” Rulf was saying. “Might be later today we’ll reach the tall hauls. You’ll need all the strength you’ve got and more besides when we carry … the …” He trailed off, staring, as Thorn walked up, grabbing a spare a bowl and peering into the pot.

“No need to stop for me,” she said. They were all staring at her and it was starting to make her nervous.

Then Odda chuckled, spluttering food. “She looks like a brush with half the bristles plucked!”

“A lamb half-sheared,” said Dosduvoi.

“A willow with half the branches lopped,” murmured Fror.

“I like that one,” said Odda. “That has poetry. You should speak more.”

“You should speak less, but things are as they are.”

A breeze floated up from the river, strangely cold against the side of Thorn’s head, and she frowned down, and saw her shoulder was covered in hair. She touched one hand to her scalp, afraid of what she might find. On the right side her hair was muddled into its usual incompetent braid. The left was shaved to patchy stubble, her fingertips trembling as they brushed the unfamiliar knobbles of her skull.

“You sleep on your right.” Skifr leaned past her shoulder, plucking a piece of meat from the pot between long thumb and forefinger. “I did the best I could without waking you. You look so peaceful when you sleep.”

Thorn stared at her. “You said you wouldn’t make me do it!”

“Which is why I did it.” And the old woman smiled as though she’d done Thorn quite the favor.

So much for the witch having a heart, and the fine day too. Thorn hardly knew then whether she wanted to weep, scream, or bite Skifr’s face. In the end all she could do was stalk off toward the river, the crew’s laughter ringing in her ears, clenching her teeth and clutching at her half-tangled, half-bald head.

Her mother’s most treasured possession was a little mirror set in silver. Thorn always teased her that she loved it because she was so vain, but knew really it was because it had been a gift from her father, brought back long ago from the First of Cities. Thorn had always hated to look at herself in it. Her face too long and her cheeks too hollow, her nose too sharp and her eyes too angry. But she would happily have traded that reflection for the lopsided mockery that peered from the still water at the river’s edge now.

She remembered her mother singing softly as she combed Thorn’s hair, her father smiling as he watched them. She remembered the laughter and the warmth of arms about her. Her family. Her home. She gripped the pouch she wore and thought what a pitiful thing it was to carry your father’s fingerbones around your neck. But it was all she had left. She bitterly shook her head as she stared at her ruined reflection and another appeared behind her-tall and lean and colorless.

“Why did you bring me out here?” she asked, slapping both reflections angrily from the water.

“To make allies of our enemies,” said Father Yarvi. “To bring help to Gettland.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve no touch for making friends.”

“We all have our shortcomings.”

“Why bring me, then? Why pay Skifr to teach me?”

The minister squatted beside her. “Do you trust me, Thorn?”

“Yes. You saved my life.” Though looking into his pale blue eyes she wondered how far one should trust a deep-cunning man. “And I swore an oath. What choice do I have?”

“None. So trust me.” He glanced up at the wreckage of her hair. “It might take a little getting used to, but I think it suits you. Strange and fierce. One of a kind.”

She snorted. “It’s unusual, that I’ll grant you.”

“Some of us are unusual. I always thought you were happy to stand out. You seem to thrive on mockery like a flower on dung.”

“Harder work than it seems,” she muttered. “Always finding a brave face.”

“That I know, believe me.”

They stayed there, beside the water, for a while, in silence.

“Would you help me shave the other side?”

“I say leave it.”

“Like this? Why?”

Yarvi nodded over toward the crew. “Because damn them, that’s why.”

“Damn them,” muttered Thorn, scooping up water with her hand and pushing back the hair she still had. She had to admit she was getting a taste for the idea. Leaving it half-shaved, strange and fierce, a challenge to everyone who looked at her. “Damn them.” And she snorted up a laugh.

“It’s not as though you’ll be the only odd-looking one on this crew. And anyway,” Yarvi brushed some of the clippings gently from her shoulder with his withered hand, “hair grows back.”

That was a tough day’s work at the oar, fighting an angry current as the Divine narrowed and its banks steepened, Rulf frowning as he nudged the ship between rocks frothing with white water. That evening, as the sunset flared pink over the forested hills, they reached the tall hauls.

There was a strange village at the shore where no two houses were the same. Some built of timber, some of stone, some from turf like the barrows of dead heroes. It was home to folk of the Shattered Sea who had stopped on the way south, and folk from Kalyiv and the empire who had stopped on the way north, and folk from the forest tribes and the Horse People too who must have stuck on journeys east or west. Seeds blown from half the world away and chosen by some weird luck to put their roots down here.

Whatever their clothes and their customs, though, however sharp they had grown at spinning coins from passing crews, Father Yarvi had the Golden Queen’s blood in his veins and knew the best way to fleece them. He bargained with each in their own tongue, baffled them now with charming smiles and now with stony blankness, until he had them bickering over the chance to offer him the lowest prices. When he finally rented eight great bearded oxen from the village’s headwoman, he left her blinking down bewildered at the few coins in her palm.