Joe Abercrombie: Half the World

“As if the truth is precious. I can find a thousand truths under every autumn leaf, Brand: everyone has their own. But you thought no further than passing the burden of your truth to me, did you? My epic thanks, preventing Gettland sliding into war with the whole Shattered Sea gives me not enough to do.”

“I thought … this was doing good.” Doing good seemed of a sudden less a burning light before him, clear as Mother Sun, and more a tricking glimmer in the murk of the Godshall.

“Whose good? Mine? Edwal’s? Yours? As we each have our own truth so we each have our own good.” Yarvi edged a little closer, spoke a little softer. “Master Hunnan may guess you shared your truth with me, what then? Have you thought on the consequences?”

They settled on Brand now, cold as a fall of fresh snow. He looked up, saw the gleam of Rauk’s eye in the shadows of the emptying hall.

“A man who gives all his thought to doing good, but no thought to the consequences …” Father Yarvi lifted his withered hand and pressed its one crooked finger into Brand’s chest. “That is a dangerous man.”

And the minister turned away, the butt of his elf staff tapping against stones polished to glass by the passage of years, leaving Brand to stare wide-eyed into the gloom, more worried than ever.

He didn’t feel like he was standing in the light at all.

Thorn sat and stared down at her filthy toes, pale as maggots in the darkness.

She had no notion why they took her boots. She was hardly going to run, chained by her left ankle to one damp-oozing wall and her right wrist to the other. She could scarcely reach the gate of her cell, let alone rip it from its hinges. Apart from picking the scabs under her broken nose till they bled, all she could do was sit and think.

Her two least favorite activities.

She heaved in a ragged breath. Gods, the place stank. The rotten straw and the rat droppings stank and the bucket they never bothered to empty stank and the mold and rusting iron stank and after two nights in there she stank worst of all.

Any other day she would’ve been swimming in the bay, fighting Mother Sea, or climbing the cliffs, fighting Father Earth, or running or rowing or practicing with her father’s old sword in the yard of their house, fighting the blade-scarred posts and pretending they were Gettland’s enemies as the splinters flew-Grom-gil-Gorm, or Styr of the Islands, or even the High King himself.

But she would swing no sword today. She was starting to think she had swung her last. It seemed a long, hard way from fair. But then, as Hunnan said, fair wasn’t a thing a warrior could rely on.

“You’ve a visitor,” said the key-keeper, a weighty lump of a woman with a dozen rattling chains about her neck and a face like a bag of axes. “But you’ll have to make it quick.” And she hauled the heavy door squealing open.

“Hild!”

This once Thorn didn’t tell her mother she’d given that name up at six years old, when she pricked her father with his own dagger and he called her “thorn.” It took all the strength she had to unfold her legs and stand, sore and tired and suddenly, pointlessly ashamed of the state she was in. Even if she hardly cared for how things looked, she knew her mother did.

When Thorn shuffled into the light her mother pressed one pale hand to her mouth. “Gods, what did they do to you?”

Thorn waved at her face, chains rattling. “This happened in the square.”

Her mother came close to the bars, eyes rimmed with weepy pink. “They say you murdered a boy.”

“It wasn’t murder.”

“You killed a boy, though?”

Thorn swallowed, dry throat clicking. “Edwal.”

“Gods,” whispered her mother again, lip trembling. “Oh, gods, Hild, why couldn’t you …”

“Be someone else?” Thorn finished for her. Someone easy, someone normal. A daughter who wanted to wield nothing weightier than a needle, dress in southern silk instead of mail and harbor no dreams beyond wearing some rich man’s key.

“I saw this coming,” said her mother, bitterly. “Ever since you went to the square. Ever since we saw your father dead, I saw this coming.”

Thorn felt her cheek twitch. “You can take comfort in how right you were.”

“You think there’s any comfort for me in this? They say they’re going to crush my only child with stones!”

Thorn felt cold then, very cold. It was an effort to take a breath. As though they were piling the rocks on her already. “Who said?”

“Everyone says.”

“Father Yarvi?” The minister spoke the law. The minister would speak the judgment.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not yet.”

Not yet, that was the limit of her hopes. Thorn felt so weak she could hardly grip the bars. She was used to wearing a brave face, however scared she was. But Death is a hard mistress to face bravely. The hardest.

“You’d best go.” The key-keeper started to pull Thorn’s mother away.

“I’ll pray,” she called, tears streaking her face. “I’ll pray to Father Peace for you!”

Thorn wanted to say, “Damn Father Peace,” but she could not find the breath. She had given up on the gods when they let her father die in spite of all her prayers, but a miracle was looking like her best chance.

“Sorry,” said the key-keeper, shouldering shut the door.

“Not near as sorry as me.” Thorn closed her eyes and let her forehead fall against the bars, squeezed hard at the pouch under her dirty shirt. The pouch that held her father’s fingerbones.

We don’t get much time, and time feeling sorry for yourself is time wasted . She kept every word he’d said close to her heart, but if there’d ever been a moment for feeling sorry for herself, this had to be the one. Hardly seemed like justice. Hardly seemed fair. But try telling Edwal about fair. However you shared out the blame, she’d killed him. Wasn’t his blood crusted up her sleeve?

She’d killed Edwal. Now they’d kill her.

She heard talking, faint beyond the door. Her mother’s voice-pleading, wheedling, weeping. Then a man’s, cold and level. She couldn’t quite catch the words, but they sounded like hard ones. She flinched as the door opened, jerking back into the darkness of her cell, and Father Yarvi stepped over the threshold.

He was a strange one. A man in a minister’s place was almost as rare as a woman in the training square. He was only a few years Thorn’s elder but he had an old eye. An eye that had seen things. They told strange stories of him. That he had sat in the Black Chair, but given it up. That he had sworn a deep-rooted oath of vengeance. That he had killed his Uncle Odem with the curved sword he always wore. They said he was cunning as Father Moon, a man rarely to be trusted and never to be crossed. And in his hands-or in his one good one, for the other was a crooked lump-her life now rested.

“Thorn Bathu,” he said. “You are named a murderer.”

All she could do was nod, her breath coming fast.

“Have you anything to say?”

Perhaps she should’ve spat her defiance. Laughed at Death. They said that was what her father did, when he lay bleeding his last at the feet of Grom-gil-Gorm. But all she wanted was to live.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she gurgled up. “Master Hunnan set three of them on me. It wasn’t murder!”

“A fine distinction to Edwal.”

True enough, she knew. She was blinking back tears, shamed at her own cowardice, but couldn’t help it. How she wished she’d never gone to the square now, and learned to smile well and count coins like her mother always wanted. But you’ll buy nothing with wishes.

“Please, Father Yarvi, give me a chance.” She looked into his calm, cold, gray-blue eyes. “I’ll take any punishment. I’ll do any penance. I swear it!”