The Blacktongue Thief

44 A Bone in the Throat

I was home. My mother had just served a roast hen and a pottage of peas and barley, the top shiny with drippings from the bird. It was a luxury, eating a bird. We smeared the stew on our trenchers and took small bits of the chicken, there being eight of us, my father first, mother next, three brothers, me, two sisters, and the one orphan boy we’d taken in who’d run away after only a year. Geals, his name was.

My da was moving slow from his bad joints, drinking beer so fast he’d have to go out and piss loudly against the wall before the meal was over, and before long at all, he’d get to telling us how this was his house and we’d best show him some respect. The little orphan lad was showing us his food while my mother rebuked him for it. She had curly hair, my mother, and it never behaved. She’d try to tie it up out of her face, and a strand would always come untucked and she’d blow at it while my little sister went on about how the goat deviled her or were clouds made of wool or she didn’t ever want a husband unless it was a boy with blond hair because she fancied blond hair.

Then my sister stopped jabbering and said to me, very serious, “You’ll watch the bones now, Kinch. Mother said this hen’s bad for bones.”

I said, “The hell you say. All hens are boned alike, it’s the beauty of ’em. You can go anywhere in the world and open up a hen, and they’ve put bones in the same place, just like home.”

“Mother said this one’s boned particular.”

“Boned particular,” I said back to let her know how that sounded coming out of her, and I swallowed a bite of the wing. What do you know, but I felt a tickle in my throat now, a sharp tickle, and I wanted to say, “Godsdamn it all, I’ve a bone in my throat,” but that’s the chief embarrassment of choking; there’s no talking. I coughed, though, which means I wasn’t choking proper.

I coughed horrible and painful and bloody, and now everyone was staring at me, except da, who kept eating because, screw you, he works in the silver mine all day so someone else can deal with the ungrateful blood-cougher. Now it felt as though the bone was actually poking through my throat, so I bugged my eyes and clutched at it—my throat, I mean—so the bone stuck my hand.

My sister, Shavoen, said, “You see, Mother, I told him about this hen.”

“Boned particular,” she agreed and blew a lock of hair out of her eyes.

“He doesn’t listen.”

Then I realized it wasn’t a bone poking me at all but a knife. A knifepoint was stabbing out of my throat, and I tried to remember the handcant for My throat’s being cut open from the inside out, but I’d honestly never had to use that before.

“You’ll be in the shyte for making a mess now,” Shavoen said, and I tried to tell her how she shouldn’t swear, especially at the table, but all I could do was wheeze blood all over the chicken.

“What?!” my dead, deaf stepbrother shouted. He was wearing the reeve’s shirt he’d stolen.

Now a voice from my throat said, “Take me to the looking-brass,” so up I went to the sheet of polished brass on the wall near mother’s clothes-trunk and had a look at myself. I looked all right except for a pint or so of blood all over my shirt and a cut in my throat and a knife poking out of the cut and a pair of eyes behind it. Now a mouth appeared in the cut in my throat and spoke out of it.

“See here,” she said, because of course it was the Assassin-Adept, “you’re going to let me out of you, or I’ll cut my way out and kill those cunnies at the table.”

“You’ll kill my moon-wife if I free you,” I said, and I almost said something about how we were supposed to go and find Mireya so she could be queen of Ispanthia and fuck the Guild over, then remembered that would be bad.

“You were going to say something?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

“Where were we?”

“You said you’d kill my family.”

“Right,” she said. “Would you rather I kill the witchlet or your family?”

And I said, “You’ll do neither,” which angered her and she cut me open, throat to navel, like a fish. She put a booted foot through my stomach like she was going to step out of me onto the floor, and I remember being angry that normally she went everywhere barefoot and nude but for her tattoos, but she had worn big, heavy boots today just for the pleasure of stepping all over my guts. The pain was breathtaking, and I coughed and choked and sputtered and woke up sputtering hot blood in my mouth.

Only it wasn’t blood, just awful bile from the pear liquor of Yorbez.

Malk groaned his annoyance at having been awakened and hit me with a boot. I didn’t want to see a boot at all, as you’ll imagine, so I gathered up my leather jerkin, which I’d been sleeping on, and headed out from the strange tent into the night to look west at the stars over Molrova, which seemed no better or worse than the stars behind me over Middlesea.

The plan was to leave in the morning and ride our donkeys hard toward the land of pretty lies.