Joe Abercrombie - Half the World

“Er …”

“Thorn Bathu scarcely spoke a word to him the whole way back. Thorn Bathu cut him off like you’d trim a blister. I tell you what, Thorn Bathu sounds something of a bloody bitch to me, after all he’s done for her and, no, I don’t much fancy making a sword for-”

“Hold it there,” snapped Thorn. “You don’t have the first clue what happened between me and your brother.”

Rin let the bellows be and glared over. “Enlighten me.”

“Well …” Last thing Thorn needed was to rip that scab off again just when there was a chance of letting it heal. She wasn’t about to admit that she made a fool’s mistake, and burned herself bad, and had to make herself not look at Brand or talk to Brand or have anything to do with Brand every moment of every day in case she burned herself again. “You got it back to front is all!”

“Strange how people are always getting the wrong idea about you. How often does that have to happen, ’fore you start thinking maybe they got the right idea?” And Rin dragged the iron from the forge and set it back on the anvil.

“You don’t know me,” growled Thorn, working up the bellows on some anger of her own. “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”

“No doubt we’ve all had our struggles,” said Rin, lifting her hammer. “But some of us get to weep over ’em in a big house our daddy paid for.”

Thorn threw up her hands at the fine new forge behind the fine home near the citadel. “Oh, I see you and Brand have barely been scraping by!”

Rin froze, then, muscles bunching across her shoulders, and her eyes flicked over, and she looked angry. So angry Thorn took a little step back, a cautious eye on that hovering hammer.

Then Rin tossed it rattling down, pulled her gloves off and flung them on the table. “Come with me.”

“My mother died when I was little.”

Rin had led them outside the walls. Downwind, where the stink of Thorlby’s rubbish wouldn’t bother the good folk of the city.

“Brand remembers her a little. I don’t.”

Some of the midden heaps were years covered over and turned to grassy mounds. Some were open and stinking, spilling bones and shells, rags and the dung of men and beasts.

“He always says she told him to do good.”

A mangy dog gave Thorn a suspicious eye, as though it considered her competition, and went back to sniffing through the rot.

“My father died fighting Grom-gil-Gorm,” muttered Thorn, trying to match ill-luck for ill-luck. Honestly, she felt a little queasy. From the look of this place, and the stink of it, and the fact she had scarcely even known it was here because her mother’s slaves had always carted their rubbish. “They laid him out in the Godshall.”

“And you got his sword.”

“Less the pommel,” grunted Thorn, trying not to breathe through her nose. “Gorm kept that.”

“You’re lucky to have something from your father.” Rin didn’t seem bothered by the stench at all. “We didn’t get much from ours. He liked a drink. Well. I say a drink. He liked ’em all. He left when Brand was nine. Gone one morning, and maybe we were better off without him.”

“Who took you in?” asked Thorn in a small voice, getting the sense she was far outclassed in the ill-luck contest.

“No one did.” Rin let that sink in a moment. “There were quite a few of us living here, back then.”

“Here?”

“You pick through. Sometimes you find something you can eat. Sometimes you find something you can sell. Winters.” Rin hunched her shoulders and gave a shiver. “Winters were hard.”

Thorn could only stand there and blink, feeling cold all over even if summer was well on the way. She’d always supposed she’d had quite the tough time growing up. Now she learned that while she raged in her fine house because her mother didn’t call her by the name she liked, there had been children picking through the dung for bones to chew. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Cause Brand didn’t say and you didn’t ask. We begged. I stole.” Rin gave a bitter little smile. “But Brand said he had to do good. So he worked. He worked at the docks and the forges. He worked anywhere folk would give him work. He worked like a dog and more than once he was beaten like one. I got sick and he got me through it and I got sick again and he got me through it again. He kept on dreaming of being a warrior, and having a place on a crew, a family always around him. So he went to the training square. He had to beg and borrow the gear, but he went. He’d work before he trained and he’d work after, and even after that if anyone needed help he’d be there to help. Do good, Brand always said, and folk’ll do good for you. He was a good boy. He’s become a good man.”

“I know that,” growled Thorn, feeling the hurt all well up fresh, sharper than ever for the guilt that welled up with it, now. “He’s the best man I know. This isn’t bloody news to me!”

Rin stared at her. “Then how could you treat him this way? If it wasn’t for him I’d be gone through the Last Door, and so would you, and this is the thanks-”

Thorn might have been wrong about a few things, and she might not have known a few others she should have, and she might have been way too wrapped up in herself to see what was right under her nose, but there was a limit on what she’d take.

“Hold on, there, Brand’s secret sister. No doubt you’ve opened my eyes wider than ever to my being a selfish arse. But me and him were oarmates. On a crew you stand with the men beside you. Yes, he was there for me, but I was there for him, and-”

“Not that! Before. When you killed that boy. Edwal.”

“What?” Thorn felt queasier still. “I remember that day well enough and all Brand did was bloody stand there.”

Rin gaped at her. “Did you two talk at all that year away?”

“Not about Edwal, I can tell you that!”

“Course you didn’t.” Rin closed her eyes and smiled as though she understood it all. “He’d never take the thanks he deserves, the stubborn fool. He didn’t tell you.”

Thorn understood nothing. “Tell me what, damn it?”

“He went to Father Yarvi.” And Rin took Thorn gently but firmly by the shoulder and let the words fall one by one. “He told him what happened on the beach. Even though he knew it’d cost him. Master Hunnan found out. So it cost him his place on the king’s raid, and his place as a warrior, and everything he’d hoped for.”

Thorn made a strange sound then. A choked-off cluck. The sound a chicken makes when its neck gets wrung.

“Brand went to Father Yarvi,” she croaked.

“Yes.”

“Brand saved my life. And lost his place for it.”

“Yes.”

“Then I mocked him over it, and treated him like a fool the whole way down the Divine and the Denied and the whole way back up again.”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t he just bloody say -” And that was when Thorn saw something gleaming just inside the collar of Rin’s vest. She reached out, hooked it with a trembling finger, and eased it into the light.

Beads. Glass beads, blue and green.

The ones Brand bought that day in the First of Cities. The ones she’d thought were for her, then for some other lover back in Thorlby. The ones she now saw were for the sister she’d never bothered to ask if he had.

Thorn made that squawking sound again, but louder.

Rin stared at her as if she’d gone mad. “What?”

“I’m such a stupid shit.”

“Eh?”

“Where is he?”

“Brand? At my house. Our house-”

“Sorry.” Thorn was already backing away. “I’ll talk to you about the sword later!” And she turned and started running for the gate.