Джо Аберкромби - A Little Hatred - Book One (The Age of Madness)

She raised her fist again but Isern caught her wrist, caught her hair, too, and wrenched her head back, made her squawk as she was pinned against the tree with fearsome strength.

‘ There’s that iron!’ Isern grinned, showing teeth blood- as well as berry-stained. ‘Perhaps it is a dagger after all. One day, we might forge a sword from it that strong men will cower at and the moon itself will smile upon.’ She let go of Rikke’s hair. ‘Now, are you warmed up and ready to dance with me westwards?’ Her eyes rolled upwards to the dangling body. ‘Or would you prefer to dance beside our friend?’

Rikke took a long, ragged breath and blew it smoking out into the chill air. Then she held up her empty hands, one now painfully throbbing across the knuckles to add to her woes. ‘I’m all packed.’

Young Heroes

‘Bastards,’ breathed Jurand, studying the valley through his eyeglass.

Leo plucked it from his hand and trained it on the ridge. Through its round window, wobbling with his own barely controlled frustration, he could see the Northmen, their spears black pinpricks against the dull sky. They hadn’t moved all morning. Maybe three score of them, thoroughly enjoying the sight of Angland’s shameful retreat. Leo thrust the eyeglass at Whitewater Jin. ‘Bastards.’

‘Aye,’ agreed Jin in his thick Northern accent, lowering the glass and thoughtfully scratching at his beard. ‘They’re some bastards, all right.’

Glaward slumped over his saddle bow with a groan. ‘Who’d have thought war could be so bloody boring?’

‘Nine-tenths of war is waiting,’ said Jurand. ‘According to Stolicus.’ As though quoting a famous source made it any easier to bear.

‘You’ve two choices in war,’ said Barniva, ‘boredom or terror, and in my experience boredom’s far preferable.’

Leo was tiring of Barniva’s experience. Of his talk of horrors the rest of them couldn’t understand. Of his frowning off at the horizon as if there were haunting memories beyond. All because he’d spent eight months on campaign in Styria, and barely left Lord Marshal Mitterick’s well-guarded command post the whole time.

‘Not everyone’s as fashionably war-weary as you.’ Leo loosened his sword in the scabbard for the hundredth time that morning then shoved it back. ‘Some of us want to see some action .’

‘Ritter saw some action.’ Barniva rubbed at his scar with a fingertip. ‘That’s all I’ll say.’

Leo frowned, wishing he had a scar of his own. ‘If war’s so terrible, why don’t you take up farming or something?’

‘I tried. I was no good at it.’ And Barniva frowned off at the horizon as if there were haunting memories beyond.

Jurand caught Leo’s eye and rolled his to the heavens, and Leo had to smother a laugh. They knew each other’s minds so well they hardly even needed words.

‘They still up there?’ Antaup reined his horse in beside them, standing in his stirrups as Jin handed him the eyeglass.

‘They’re there,’ said Leo.

‘Bastards.’ Antaup tossed back that loose lock of dark hair that always hung across his forehead and right away it flopped down again. He was the one the girls couldn’t leave alone, slick and quick and well groomed as a winning racehorse, but all of Leo’s friends were fine-looking men in their own ways. Jin was fierce as the Bloody-Nine in a fight, but when that toothy grin split his red beard and those blue eyes twinkled, it was like the sun coming out. You couldn’t deny Barniva made the brooding veteran act work for him, especially with the scar on his forehead and the white streak it had left in his hair. Then Glaward was a slab of good-humoured manliness, with the height, and the shoulders, and the stubble already thick an hour after he shaved.

As handsome a crowd of young heroes as you could hope to find. What a painting they’d make! Maybe Leo would get one commissioned. Who’d know an artist? He found himself glancing sideways.

The ladies in Ostenhorm might not see it, but Jurand was the best-looking of the pack. They might’ve called his features soft, beside Glaward’s cleft chin or Antaup’s sharp cheekbones, but Leo thought of them more as … delicate? Subtle? The slightest bit vulnerable, even? But you’d find no one tougher than Jurand in defence of his friends. The expressiveness he could pack into a glance. The little frown as he thought something through. The twitch at the corner of his lips as he leaned close to say it. And always something worth hearing. Something nobody else would’ve—

Jurand glanced sideways and Leo looked quickly away, back up towards those Northmen on the ridge.

‘Bastards,’ he said, a little hoarse.

‘And all we can do is sit here,’ grumbled Antaup, having a little rummage to unstick his balls. ‘Like caged lions.’

‘Like leashed puppies.’ Glaward wrestled the eyeglass from Antaup’s hand. ‘Where the hell have you been, anyway?’

‘Just … checking on the baggage.’

Jin snorted. ‘With a woman?’

‘Not necessarily.’ Antaup’s grin seemed to have twice as many teeth as a regulation mouth. ‘Could’ve been several. A man has to find something to stave off the despair. Who’d have thought war could be so bloody boring?’

Barniva looked up. ‘You’ve two choices in—’

‘Finish that sentence and I’ll stab you,’ said Leo.

‘Looks like we could all use a boost to morale.’ Glaward nodded towards a column of much less fine-looking men slogging along the valley bottom, clutching torn coats, tattered cloaks, threadbare blankets, spears drooping on hunched shoulders at every angle but straight.

Leo could usually rely on some cheering when the common soldiers saw him. A few shouts of, ‘The Young Lion!’ so he could shake a fist and slap a back and bellow some nonsense about the king. Now the men struggled past in silence with their eyes on the mud, and with no help yet from Midderland, even Leo was a lot less inspired by royalty than he used to be. It seemed the days of warrior-kings like Harod the Great and Casamir the Steadfast were far in the past, and supplies of patriotic bluster were running dangerously short.

‘I’d never argue with your mother on strategy,’ grunted Antaup, ‘but constant retreat is no good for men’s spirits.’

‘Taste o’ victory would soon perk ’em up,’ said Whitewater.

‘Perk us up, too.’ Glaward nudged his horse closer to Leo, dropping his voice. ‘Be easy to teach those bastards a lesson.’ And he bunched one big, veiny fist and punched at the air with it. ‘Like we did at that farm.’

Leo fiddled with the pommel of his sword, loosening it in the scabbard again. He could remember every detail of the charge. Ripping wind and thundering hooves. The axe-haft jolting in his hand. The fear-stricken faces of the enemy. The giddy joy as they broke and ran.

Jurand had that little crease of worry between his brows. ‘We’ve no idea what’s behind that ridge.’

Leo thought of Ritter’s funeral. The words by the grave. The weak-chinned wife weeping by the fireside. Men’s lives were in his hands. These men’s lives, who’d ride through fire for him. His friends. His brothers. He couldn’t stand to lose another.

‘Jurand’s right.’ He slapped his sword back, forced his hand away from the hilt. ‘We don’t know what’s behind that ridge. And mother would kill me.’

‘Ride up there, you’ll save me the trouble.’

Leo winced at that odd mix of reassurance and resentment that always came with his mother’s voice, though every time, the reassurance was less and the resentment more.

‘My Lady Governor.’ Jurand pulled his horse sideways to let her ride through next to Leo, her crowd of officers loitering on the slope.