The Blacktongue Thief

17 Spoils of Battle

I spent the next moments spitting on my shirt and rubbing the ear sigil from Norrigal’s palm. She was breathing, and when she came to, I spoke to her quietly. She didn’t remember what happened at first, but it soon came back.

“I’m such a fool. Mistress is always telling me I try to do too much too soon and that it’ll be the death of me.”

“Hard to argue with. You burned the shyte out of us and knocked yourself out with noise. But if your staff hadn’t busted the teeth out of that axe-woman, she’d have had the top of my head off and then took the birder in the back. We’d have all gone to the worming vaults instead of those three had you not acted. It was a near thing, and you played your part. I suspect you’ve got more surprises in you yet.”

She took my hand then and said, “Maybe I do,” in a way that could have meant several things. I decided not to get my hopes up and realized they were up already. For a heartbeat, I felt bad even thinking about all that on a killing ground, but how’s that gather-song go?

Samnyr wasn’t done playing yet; Galva was finishing off the face-bit flail-woman now. She spoke to her first, though.

“Kiss her hand, and thank her for her favor, to take you in battle. So go her most beloved.”

“No, please!”

“I cannot refuse you this gift.”

“Wait! Wait!”

“Quiet now.”

It was just about then my stabbed shoulder started to ache, though it was nothing next to the way it would feel the following day—I’d been hurt enough to know pain’s calendar. When she’d come back to herself, Norrigal ministered to me, packing my stab with yarrow and rubbing at the edges of it with ointment. Aside from bruises and the bird-hole in her chest, the Spanth was unhurt, which seemed ridiculous.

“Didn’t even bite your damn lip, did you?”

She shook her head.

“You shouldn’t be so lucky,” I said. “You’re stealing it from the rest of us.”

“You shouldn’t be so slow. The gods favor the quick.”

“Slow? Did you see that bitch move?”

“Better than you saw her.”

I had no rejoinder, so I switched subjects.

“And did you ever think about selling that shield? That springwood’s worth twice its weight in gold. And worth our heads to some as well,” I added, recalling that Pagran’s desire for that shield is what got me in this mess to start with.

“It was my grandfather’s shield. And gold never stopped an arrow.”

“Well, a shield never kept you from starving, or bought you passage on a boat, or attracted a lover to you, or put wine in your flask, and if gold also brings thieves, that’s only if you don’t hide it. There’s no hiding that shield.”

“With an arrow in your heart, you’re not hungry, and they throw you off the boat.”

“For fuck’s sake,” I said, but she wasn’t done.

“And your lover marries your brother, and the wine leaks out of the hole in you.”

The witchlet shook her head at us.

“This is the most ridiculous argument I ever heard,” she said, but she was laughing as she did, and since she was done stuffing and smearing my knife-hole, I set about my favorite after-battle chore, raiding the pouches of the slain.

Only there were more slain than I thought.

“Where the spiny devils did these come from?” I said.

Two more of Hornhead’s party never made it to the fray, a stout woman in a breastplate, a broadsword near her, and a girleen with a bow that might have turned the fight. Hell, a wet sneeze might have turned that fight, so close it was. The stout woman was purple in the face with bugged eyes and a lolling tongue, clearly strangled. The bow-girl had fallen clutching her chest, but I saw no wound on her. It was possible her heart burst, it’s been known to happen, but her youth argued otherwise. Poison seemed more likely.

“Hey, witch,” I said.

“Yah,” said Norrigal.

When she was closer, I said, “You kill these two?”

“You know I didn’t.”

“I know nothing. Least of all who killed Chopper and Plucker here. And if the killer were trying to do us a favor, why’d they take these two and not that great, thick stream of piss of a bull?”

“Maybe they were trying to even things up, not hand it to us.”

“Yeah, and maybe they’re listening right now.”

“Could well be.”

“Hey!” I said, louder. “I just want to say thanks. That’s all.”

Silence was the only answer I expected, and that’s the one I got. Not that it meant anything.

When listening for danger, one must never mistake silence for safety.

The most curious thing about the aftermath was the bird, Dalgatha, and the way she got on with the Spanth. Woman and corvid were like woman and horse or woman and dog—but also something else entirely. She followed the knight’s commands like those other animals, and with great discipline. I had heard corvids weren’t allowed to feed on kynd, for it wouldn’t be wise to encourage the habit in them, and so she stayed away from the dead even though she walked near Galva and croaked the Spanth word for food, “Nourid.”

Galva gave her the last of the grilled meats we had taken from the feast at the Downward Tower, including a haunch of roebuck I coveted, though we still had some smoked squirrel and rabbit. That done, the great, lethal bird rolled in the field near the corpses and kicked her feet up in the air, very like a horse or a dog in the grass. Galva knelt behind her head and scratched at the hackles of her neck and rubbed the top of her wicked-sharp beak. Dalgatha stretched her wings out one at a time for the woman to rub her pinion feathers, then she play-beat Galva with them, and put her cheek to hers, making contented clicking sounds, blinking her great, black eyes.

The fucking bird loved that Spanth.

And I loved my birds.

The man-bull had three silver owlets in his blood-stiff pouch, as well as a good Holtish duchess—a handsome coin, that, with a wee slender lady holding her hand to her mouth as if to blow a kiss or stop herself making sick—and no shortage of silver knights, knaves, and maids. Into my pouch they all went after I had a good smell of the metal in each one. It was too dark yet to really see them in their beauty, but silver and gold have their own nose, and I drank this from each coin, diluted though they were by the stink of the hide.

The creature known as Marrus carried divers other odd bits as well—ivory buttons, rune stones, a needle and thread I couldn’t imagine his fat fingers pinching, pewter pins from hats, a deer-bone whistle. That I kept as well. You never know. Neither did I know if the filthy cloth poppet he carried was a minder from his own mewling calfhood or a trophy from the murder of some farmer’s child. There’s nothing so opaque as the heart of a stranger.

Nor so heavy as that bastard’s head. I picked it up by a horn twice to gauge it, and by the feel of it, it was mostly bone in there. I got my knife ready, wondering if I should use my off hand, but deciding not to. Most magical tattoos stop working when the owner dies, and this beastie was straight dead. I rolled my sleeve up.

“Ho!” Galva said. “What are you doing, thief?”

“Thought I’d shave him so his mother’s not embarrassed at the funeral.”

She actually paused for a moment to work out if I meant it, then said, “Do not cut his head off.”

“Would you mind telling me how we’re supposed to collect the reward if I don’t?”

“Take the horn.”

“They’ll say it’s a drowned cow.”

“Not if I say it.”

“Why, because you come from the holy land of holy fucking truth-tellers? They’ll call you a liar, and someone else’ll take the head in.”

She considered this. “Bolnu, then we make a, what’s the word for it, like a sled?”

“A sled.”

“Travois,” said Norrigal from somewhere I couldn’t see.

I said, “Are you seriously proposing we try to scoot this heavy, dead cow all the way to Pigdenay? We’re cutting his head off.”

“I am against this.”

“For fuck’s sake, why?”

“Taking heads is goblin-sport. They have a game they play with heads and spears. Are you a goblin?”

“You’re saying that because I’m short.”

“No, jilnaedu, because you are about to cut a warrior’s head off.”

“What’s jilnaedu?”

“It is like idiot, but with meanness. The idiot cannot help himself.”

“I like that.”

“Give me your knife.”

“So I could say jilnaedu chodadu and that’s ‘fucking mean idiot’?”

“Put them reversed.”

“I thought you Spanths did that already.”

“Most of the time. Not for commands or insults.”

“So chodadu jilnaedu.”

“Yes. Perfect.”

Now she took Palthra and walked away with her.

“Hey, come back with that.”

She just kept walking.

When I was about to catch up with her, she drove the knife into a tree, hard, and kept walking.

“Hey, I had a good edge on that!” I said. I was glad she didn’t look back. I wouldn’t have wanted her to see me have to use both hands and even brace my foot to get the blade out of the tree, though the bird watched. Scary how quiet they can be. It bobbed its head at me, and I couldn’t help thinking that’s how they laugh.

By the time I got the sap off my knife and walked back to Marrus, Norrigal was red to her elbows and had the head in a sack, holes cut out for the horns. Galva shook her head, but Norrigal didn’t give the Spanth the pleasure of looking back at her. She looked at me, though.

“Men like you always find something to argue about when there’s nasty work to do.”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “I was going to—”

“Shut your cake-hole,” she said, brushing her hair away from her eye and leaving a bloody streak on her forehead.

We traveled by the river now. When we settled, we set watches against the possible return of the deerskin girl, and, after I whetstoned my knife, I slept. My sleep was better now, exhaustion playing the largest part in that, but also better for the wrong of the charcoal makers’ deaths having been righted. I know, a thief who wags his tail at justice, there’s a sorry creature. Especially one who can hardly bear to start a fight.

Sometime while I slept, Dalgatha slept as well, for when I woke in the morning, the Spanth must have had her tattoo back on her, shirted and chain mailed over, for we heard the bird’s croaks and clicks no more. I hesitate to say it, but I almost missed them, for I knew we’d be a hard bunch to tussle with where she stalked, but without her, we were one sword, one knife, and a powerful but green witchling as like to hurt friend as foe.

Bully found me again. It looked like I found him, because he was yowling in the dirt road near the fishmonger’s in the last hamlet before Norholt’s capital, just about to earn a clout from the fishmonger’s broom-wielding wife, when I scooped him up. No sooner had I than he purred blind in my arms. After that, he was all lazy yawns and calm licks of his bunger, as if we hadn’t met a witch who walked on corpse’s legs and fought a half bull for our lives since last he abandoned me.

“Please tell me that is not the same cat,” Galva said.

“It’s not the same cat,” I said and plunked him in my pack.