I thought youd be used to getting less than you hoped for by now. I know that I am.
What can I say? Im a romantic. Have you come here only to puncture my dreams?
No. I do that without trying. I had in mind a drink and a conversation which did not include the subtext of my mutilated corpse.
It is hard to say at this stage what direction our conversation might take, but the drink I can promise you. She poured him a glass and he tossed it back in four long swallows. He held it out again, sucking his sweet gums.
In all seriousness, the Gurkish are no more than a week from taking Adua under siege. You should leave as soon as possible.
She filled his glass again, and then her own. Havent you noticed that half the city has had the same idea? Such flea-bitten nags not requisitioned by the army are changing hands at five hundred marks a piece. Nervous citizens are pouring out to every corner of Midderland. Columns of defenceless refugees, wandering through a mass of mud at a mile a day as the weather turns cold, laden down with everything of value they possess, easy prey for every brigand within a hundred miles.
True, Glokta had to admit as he wriggled his painful way into a chair near the fire.
And where would I go to anyway? I swear I have not a single friend or relative anywhere in Midderland. Would you have me hide in the woods, lighting fires by rubbing sticks together and hunting down squirrels with my bare hands? How the hell would I stay drunk in those circumstances? No, thank you, I will be safer here, and considerably more comfortable. I have coal for the fire and the cellar is full to capacity. I can hold out for months. She waved a floppy hand towards the wall. The Gurkish are coming from the west, and we are on the eastern side of town. I could not be safer in the palace itself, I daresay.
Perhaps she is right. Here, at least, I can keep some kind of watch over her. Very well, I bow to your reasoning. Or I would, if my back allowed it.
She settled herself opposite. And how is life in the corridors of power?
Chilly. As corridors often are. Glokta stroked his lips with a finger. I find myself in a difficult situation.
I have some experience with those.
This one is complicated.
Well then, in terms a dull wench like me might understand.
Wheres the harm? I stare death in the face already. In the terms of a dull wench, then, imagine this desperately needing certain favours, you have promised your hand in marriage to two very rich and powerful men.
Huh. One would be a fine thing.
None would be a fine thing, in this particular case. They are both old and of surpassing ugliness.
She shrugged. Ugliness is easily forgiven in the rich and powerful.
But both these suitors are prone to violent displays of jealousy. Dangerous displays, if your wanton faithlessness were to become common knowledge. You had hoped to extricate yourself from one promise or the other at some stage, but now the date of the weddings draws near, and you find that you are still considerably entangled with both. More so than ever, in fact. Your response?
She pursed her lips and took a long breath, considering it, then tossed a strand of hair theatrically over her shoulder. I would drive them both near madness with my matchless wit and smouldering beauty, then engineer a duel between the two. Whichever won would be rewarded with the ultimate prize of my hand in marriage, never suspecting I was once promised also to his rival. Since he is old, I would earnestly hope for his imminent death, leaving me a wealthy and respected widow. She grinned at him down her nose. What say you to that, sir?
Glokta blinked. I fear the metaphor has lost its relevance.
Or Ardee squinted at the ceiling, then snapped her fingers. I might use my subtle feminine wiles thrusting back her shoulders and hitching up her bust, to entrap a third man, still more powerful and wealthy. Young, and handsome, and smooth of limb as well, I suppose, since this is a metaphor. I would marry him and with his help destroy those other two, and abandon them penniless and disappointed. Ha! What think you?
Glokta felt his eyelid twitching, and he pressed one hand against it. Interesting. A third suitor, he murmured. The idea had never even occurred.
Skarlings Chair
Far below, the water frothed and surged. It had rained hard in the night, and now the river ran high with it, an angry flood chewing mindlessly at the base of the cliff. Cold black water and cold white spray against the cold black rock. Tiny shapesgolden yellow, burning orange, vivid purple, all the colours of fire, whisked and wandered with the mad currents, whatever way the rain washed them.
Leaves on the water, just like him.
And now it looked as if the rain would wash him south. To fight some more. To kill men whod never heard of him. The idea of it made him want to be sick. But hed given his word, and a man who doesnt keep his word isnt much of a man at all. Thats what Logens father used to tell him.
Hed spent a lot of long years not keeping to much of anything. His word, and the words of his father, and other mens lives, all meaning less than nothing. All the promises hed made to his wife and to his children hed let rot. Hed broken his word to his people, and his friends, and himself, more times than he could count. The Bloody-Nine. The most feared man in the North. A man whod walked all his days in a circle of blood. A man whod done nothing in all his life but evil. And all the while hed looked at the sky and shrugged his shoulders. Blamed whoever was nearest, and told himself hed had no choices.
Bethod was gone. Logen had vengeance, at last, but the world wasnt suddenly a better place. The world was the same, and so was he. He spread out the fingers of his left hand on the damp stone, bent and wonky from a dozen old breaks, knuckles scratched and scabbing, nails cracked and wedged under with dirt. He stared down at the familiar stump for a moment.
Still alive, he whispered, hardly able to believe it.
He winced at the pain in his battered ribs, groaned as he turned away from the window and back into the great hall. Bethods throne room, and now his. The thought tugged a meagre belch of laughter out of his gut, but even that stabbed at the mass of stitches through his cheek and up the side of his face. He limped out across the wide floor, every step an ordeal. The sound of his scraping boots echoed in the high rafters, over the whispering of the river down below. Shafts of blurred light, heavy with floating dust, shone down and made criss-cross patterns across the boards. Near to Logen, on a raised-up dais, stood Skarlings Chair.
The hall, and the city, and the land around it had all changed far beyond recognition, but Logen reckoned the chair itself was much the same as it had been when Skarling lived. Skarling Hoodless, greatest hero of the North. The man whod united the clans to fight against the Union, long ago. The man whod drawn the North together with words and gestures, for a few brief years, at least.
A simple seat for a simple manbig, honest chunks of old wood, faded paint around the edges, polished smooth by Skarlings sons, and grandsons, and the men whod led his clan since. Until the Bloody-Nine came knocking at the gates of Carleon. Until Bethod took the chair for his own, and pretended that he was all that Skarling had been, while he forced the North together with fire, and fear, and steel.
Well then? Logen jerked his head round, saw Black Dow leaning in the doorway, arms folded across his chest. Aint you going to sit in it?
Logen shook his head, even though his legs were aching so bad he could hardly bear to stand a moment longer. Mud always did for me to sit on. Im no hero, and Skarling was no king.