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

‘Do you have to drag everything into the gutter?’

‘I don’t have to.’ She caught his shoulder and pulled him back beside her. ‘But it is warm down here.’ She tried to nuzzle up against him but he was already on to his next grievance.

‘I don’t blame Orso, really.’ As if that was doing the man quite a favour. ‘Stealing other men’s glory is what princes are for.’ As if this was all about who got the glory, not who got home alive. ‘It’s my bloody mother I blame, for letting him get away with it!’ He’d have blamed his mother for letting the rain fall. ‘Why can’t she just trust me?’

‘Ugh,’ said Rikke, rolling away to stare up at the flapping tent cloth. It was plain her favourite part of the day was fully ruined. She’d no notion why he was so keen to rush into a battle he’d most likely lose. The boy had many fine features – bravery, honesty, good humour, a fine-shaped face and an even better-shaped arse, and so constantly, reliably warm . But imagination was not a strong point. Nor was he labouring under a low opinion of himself. Maybe losing was not a thing he could conceive of. Maybe to him, every delay was just wrong-headed shits throwing themselves in the way of his certain triumph.

‘… let me off the leash, I’d show these bastards something …’

The memory floated up, as it did at least once a day, of hiding under that riverbank while Stour Nightfall laughed about what he’d do to her. She thought of Uffrith in flames, and all the good folk hurt or killed, and she clenched her fists at the usual rush of fury. No one wanted that bastard dead more than she did, but even she saw they had to be patient. Whether you waited for all the help you could get seemed like no kind of question at all.

‘… I’m supposed to be her son, and she treats me like—’

Rikke puffed out her cheeks and gave a sigh that made her lips flap.

‘Sorry,’ said Leo sulkily, ‘am I boring you?’

‘Oh, no, no, no.’ She rolled her eyes towards him. ‘Nothing gets a girl wet like hearing a man complain about his mother.’

He grinned. Say one thing for Leo, he might get sulky, but he cheered up quick. He pushed the blankets back and wriggled next to her, his hand sliding across her chest, and down her stomach, and around her backside, and onto the inside of her thigh, and giving her quite the pleasurable shiver. ‘What does get a girl wet?’ he whispered in her ear.

‘For me, it’s pretty boys with too much courage and too little patience …’ Seemed the morning might not be a total loss after all. She pushed her fingers into his hair and dragged his face down towards hers, straining up to kiss him, his breath a touch fierce with the overnight smell, but—

‘Leo!’ came a call from outside.

‘Ah, shit,’ she hissed, head dropping back.

‘There’s a knight herald in the camp!’ Jurand’s voice, sharp with excitement.

‘Bloody hell!’ Leo squirmed free of Rikke despite her attempts to wrap her legs around him, jumped out of bed and started dragging his trousers on. ‘Might be the Closed Council!’ Grinning over his shoulder as if that was just the news she’d been waiting for. ‘Making me lord governor!’

‘Grand,’ grunted Rikke, upending her boot and shaking it till the chagga pellet fell out, then wedging it behind her lip.

There was quite the mood of expectation outside, half-dressed men shuffling between the tents, still chewing their breakfasts, breath smoking as they asked for news and got no answers. Everyone was drifting one way, like leaves on a current, towards a pair of gleaming wings bobbing up ahead. The helmet of a knight herald, striding through the rain-sodden camp towards the forge Lady Finree had borrowed for her headquarters.

Leo hurried after him, pulling on his cloak, while Rikke hopped along behind with Jurand, one of her socks already full of mud.

‘Is your message for me?’ asked Leo. ‘For Lord Brock?’

Maybe not everything was about him after all. The knight herald strode on up the muddy hillside without even a sideways glance, a satchel over his shoulder stamped with the golden sun of the Union.

‘Might be Prince Orso’s arrived with his men,’ said Rikke hopefully, trying to get her other boot on and follow both at once.

‘I wouldn’t count on it.’ Jurand didn’t look at her, a jaw muscle working on the side of his face.

‘You don’t like me much, do you?’

He glanced across, surprised. ‘Actually, I do.’ And he offered her his elbow so she could stop hopping. ‘You’re hard not to like.’

‘I am, aren’t I?’ she said, finally dragging her boot on.

‘I’m just … protective.’ He frowned towards Leo as they set off again, still failing to get a word out of the knight herald. ‘We grew up together, and, well … he’s nowhere near so tough as he pretends to be.’

She snorted. ‘We did some growing up together, too, and believe me, I know.’

‘He doesn’t have the best luck. With women.’

‘Maybe I’ll be the exception.’

‘Maybe.’ He gave a smile that looked like it took some effort. ‘I just don’t want to see him get hurt.’

‘Senior staff only,’ growled a soldier at the door of the forge. Rikke barged Jurand with her shoulder so he lurched into the guard’s arms. While they were busy getting disentangled, she sidestepped, slipped around them and was in.

She’d never been in a council of war before but, like fucks and funerals, her first time was something of a let-down.

The forge was stuffed with people, warm and damp from their nervous breath. Leo’s mother had her gloved fists planted on a table spread with maps, a litter of anxious officers clustered about her. Lords Mustred and Clensher were among ’em, two dour old noblemen of Angland who’d brought some reinforcements in the day before. Rikke wasn’t sure which was which, but one had a thick grey moustache, the other whiskers all around his jaw but his top lip shaved. Like they only had one whole beard between ’em.

Rikke’s father was scratching uneasily at his own silvery stubble, his War Chiefs around him. Hardbread looked concerned, as usual. Red Hat looked grim, as usual. Oxel had his usual shifty sideways squint like the knight herald was another man’s sheep he was thinking of making off with. And Shivers just looked like Shivers, which was probably the most troubling of the lot.

In fact, the least worried man in the forge was the smith who owned it, who simply looked angry to have been stopped working so a bunch of fools could argue under his steadily leaking roof. But that’s war for you. An ugly business that only leaves bad men better off. Why folk insisted on singing about great warriors all the time, Rikke couldn’t have said. Why not sing about really good fishermen, or bakers, or roofers, or some other folk who actually left the world a better place, rather than heaping up corpses and setting fire to things? Was that behaviour to encourage?

‘World’s full o’ mysteries, all right,’ she muttered to herself, and shifted her chagga pellet from one side of her mouth to the other.

‘My Lady Governor!’ boomed out the knight herald, painfully loud in that little space, bowing low and nearly poking Shivers’ good eye out with one of the wings on his helmet. ‘A communication from His August Majesty!’ And he whipped that satchel open, produced a scroll and shouldered through the damp press to hand it over with a showman’s flourish.

Silence, then, as Finree dan Brock broke the great red seal and began to read, stony face giving nothing away. Rikke knew her letters. Had learned the bastards at great personal pain during her horrible year in Ostenhorm. But she couldn’t make a thing out of these ones, the writing was so flourished and flounced.