The Blacktongue Thief

48 The Bitterns

We took a sail-raft from Grevitsa to Rastiva, and it was a good thing Galva had a fat purse from the sale of the goblin ship in Edth, because we had to hire the whole boat to get the donkeys on. It saved us time, though, and both Galva and I had cause to hurry. It only took us two days and a night to get to the capital of Molrova, which sat where the Spine River met the Gunnish Sea.

Rastiva. We pulled up to her docks on the thirty-sixth and last of Lammas. I was supposed to be in Hrava tomorrow, but the way the false girleen at the Hanger’s House had said it, it sounded more like a goal than a command. With luck, the Takers wouldn’t be after my blood just yet.

As with all capitals, there was no other city just like Rastiva, but those who prefer cities will find it more familiar than any small village back home. The official color of Rastivan nobility was blue, so all the houses up the hill were painted some shade of it, the newer ones darker, but most of them proudly faded to a handsome robin’s-egg hue.

The skies were so full of slate-gray clouds and the high houses such a brilliant, pale blue, I remember thinking the city looked upside down. Under the three hills of Rastiva, the elegance of the people thereon diminishing with altitude, the lesser city roiled with noise and color.

In lower Rastiva, we met cardsharps and courtesans, embittered clowns and bear baiters; we had pointed out to us two of the king’s rumored hundred bastard sons, these two apparently older than the king, and though it was death to speak of the unnatural magic that preserved him, we heard no less than four theories on the subject. We spent the afternoon replenishing our stocks of food and repairing our gear and clothes. That evening, Yorbez brought home a boy-whore with a handsome false smile and kicked Galva out, so the three of us played dice while trying to ignore the sounds of them in the next room.

At first light the next morning, I saw the whorelet washing makeup from his face at the yard’s pump-well. He was just a bit younger than me. He turned his weary face my way as I stalked to the jakes, and though it wasn’t candlelight, I could only just make out the shape of a rose tattooed on his cheek. Poor fucker had once thought himself a thief, but now the Guild had whored him. He was doing his armpits as I crossed back to my room. I flipped him a copper shave, and he snatched it from the air without meeting my eyes.

We left that day, the first of Vintners, heading for a small line of mountains called the Bitterns; these would be the last real mountains before the Thralls. The narrow kingdom of Oustrim would lie between, thick with pine forests and golden with unkillable wheat that fed Molrova and Middlesea when their crops faltered. Now, of course, overrun with giants. The air was growing colder as the second month of fall came on, and faint traces of snow could be seen in the rock pleats, promising freezing nights and carefully husbanded fires.

Once, as we were marching along, I thought about those bigguns I saw in the witness coin, how broad they were as well as tall. My feet got heavier, and I had to concentrate to make myself keep walking west. It’s like my feet were smarter than my mind, telling it, “Look, karker, you’re telling us to go toward violent, man-shaped things the size of a house, not away from them, and we don’t want any.” The others in the party weren’t slowing down or cold-sweating in their leathers, but they hadn’t seen them, had they? I missed Malk now. He was the best-traveled of the bunch, being a sailor, and I could have talked to him. So I imagined him next to me, walking his bored cockerel walk toward the frontier. I asked him, in my mind, Hey, Coldfoot, you ever see a giant? And he said, Every time I unbutton my pants, and we had a laugh. Well, I had a laugh, and Yorbez looked at me like I was queer in the head. But I felt better.

Thanks, fucking Malk. Thanks for the good humor.

You’re welcome, fucking Kinch. Watch out for giants!

And imaginary Malk thrust his imaginary pelvis at me twice, and I laughed again all by myself, looking at nothing.

Yorbez shook her head at me and lit a taback stub.

Norrigal and I had kept off lovemaking for no good reason; it’s not like it profited Malk’s bones wherever in the mud of Goblintown they lay. But that first night of Vintners, a Lūnday and a full moon as the first always is, we stayed in an old brick horse barn mad with ivy just starting to blush red. She came to me wearing a pair of stag’s antlers woven into a garland of ivy and goldenrod. She was playing the part of Marael, daughter of Haros and Cael Ilenna, the bright moon. Marael was said to roam the woods at the full moon, a human woman of great beauty, but horned like her father. You had to be careful of Lūnday night, or you might meet Marael’s half sister, Solgra, Cael Ilenna’s first daughter, whom she’d conceived with the wolf-headed god of war.

Solgra was just as pretty as her sister, and she’d sometimes wear false antlers to fool mortals. After the act of love, she’d turn wolf and kill you. You only knew it was her because she never lost her wolf’s tail, so she would try to hide it in her skirts or wouldn’t turn her back to you. The first thing Norrigal did was strip off and show me her backside, which was a very pleasing thing to look on, and would have been even if it bore a wolf’s tail, which it didn’t. So I took her like a stag would take a doe and tried to make Haros proud. She howled low like a wolf as I got close, and her voice was so husky and fertile, that did me. I spent before I meant to, and where I oughtn’t have, and said, “Sorry,” as I fell away from her. She ate my mouth with hers and said, “It’s natural to try to make life after a death. Anyway, I’ve herbs for that, so you’ll not be punished this once.”

“You’re two more weeks my wife,” I said.

She nodded, her horns silvered by the moonlight.

“Eighteen sweet days and sweeter nights. What then?” I said.

“Then?” she said. “How should I know? Ask me then, you silly fond thing.”

As the moon waned and we drew near the Bittern Mountains, Galva announced we had one more stop to make before we crossed over into Oustrim and made for its ruined capital.

“This bird I keep here,” she said, gesturing at the spot on her chest where the tattoo was hidden beneath her chain mail, “her kind were made by magickers.”

The Spanth looked even more solemn than usual as she said this, which I hadn’t thought possible.

“In the war, there were two. Dalgatha and Bellu. They were magnificent. They tore the biters like fish. They saved my life many times. But Bellu is dead now, and his tattoo, over my heart, is his grave.” Her hand rested over her left breast now. “His name means ‘handsome,’ and he was. The light made his black feathers a blue so beautiful my heart aches to think of him. The maker of these two I carry was a magicker of rare skill, and something even more rare—he pays no fealty to crown or Guild.”

“You know this maker?” I said, suspecting this was the point she was building toward. It was unlike her to speak of her birds, or the war, or worst for a Spanth, her fucking feelings.

“I knew him in Ispanthia,” she said.

This stilled me. A rare and great magicker from Molrova who had lived and worked in Ispanthia? Galva was talking about Fulvir.

Fulvir the Dissolver.

Fulvir Lightning-Binder.

Fulvir who could make the dead talk.

“Hold on a moment. Fulvir—you know fucking Fulvir? That’s who we’re meeting in the Bitterns?”

“Who do you think inked Dalgatha into my skin? Who else made it so I could heal her in my skin even if she nearly died?”

Not only was Galva a duke’s daughter, she bore a sleeper tattoo inked by a magicker as powerful as Deadlegs, whose warmth to Galva now made even more sense. My skin tingled with excitement. He was a bone-mixer like the great Galt Knockburr, his onetime partner who fell out with him over the ethics of mixing the bones of kynd with those of beasts. Knockburr had done it, as evidenced by Hornhead, but came to conclude it offended the gods and swore off the practice.

Fulvir, it was said, was none so delicate.

Another name for Fulvir was Father of Abominations.

Ispanthian mothers threatened their children with him, that he would come to them and change their heads to ravens’ heads or their feet to roosters’ feet. He was said to have a magical library unmatched in Manreach, coveted by witches from Goltay to Pigdenay. Galva had resolved that we should meet this infamous magicker, and I resolved that I would steal a book from him.

The Bittern Mountains weren’t so large as the Thralls farther west, but what they lacked in height and depth, they more than made up for in treachery. The donkeys were having a time of it, and so were we. Norrigal in particular kept nodding off on her mount, which could be deadly on narrow mountain paths.

To help keep her in the saddle, she chewed a plant called fast-leaf that gave her energy but made her over-passionate about mundane things, and she talked a great deal, which normally wasn’t her way. This small path over the mountains, while far harder than the main road farther south, and impassable to anything with wheels, was actually supposed to be a more direct route to Oustrim. In other words, gods preserve us all, a shortcut. It also had the advantage of taking us by Fulvir’s bonegarden.

The afternoon we drew near the wizard’s keep, I entertained myself trying to imagine what sort of spell books the old codger would be hoarding in his mountain fastness. Books on flight? Metamorphosis? Necromancy? Probably the lot. While I indulged my fancies, Norrigal, hopped up on the fastleaf, described how she once shrunk herself so she could ride a wolf.

“And he wasn’t having any, so I had to use a bit of calming powder, which I mixed with my own spit and lamb’s blood, you really shouldn’t go anywhere without a bit of lamb’s blood, it’s in every spell, at least every spell out of Galtia, and you can get good silverwater, which’ll keep the blood quick in its vial without spoiling its properties, I highly recommend it. Where was I, right, the wolf, an old fellow with white in his muzzle, and I slicked the powder and blood on my hand and held it out for him to lick, and you could just see he was thinking about biting the hand right off me, but he must have decided I was his friend, so lick he did, and then he was rolling on his back, and I gave him a rub, but I was already turning wee so my hand fairly disappeared in all that chest fur and—”

Here I interrupted:

“If I rolled on my back, would you give me a rub?”

“You’ve had rubs enough. Another one and you’ll go tame and be no use to me. Where was I? Right, so I gave his belly a rub, and when he got up, it was one leg over…”

The story carried on. I resisted the temptation to make a lewd comment about one leg over and just listened. It’s fascinating to hear about a girl four feet tall riding hither and thither on a wolf, though when she chewed that plant, it was nearly too fast to follow.

A fog had settled in, and it was getting strangely dark with sunset at least two hours away. I found myself following Norrigal’s voice, feeling strangely at peace despite our harsh surroundings and her breathless fastleaf speech, and staring off to the sides of the path, where weeds or yellow grass grew, as if I thought I might find coins there. Before long, I did find a coin and, when I got off my donkey, snatched it up and wiped the dirt off. I couldn’t believe my luck, because it was my favorite coin of all—a Gallardian owlet.

“How about that?” I said and held it up toward Norrigal’s voice, which was still weaving her tale.

“And we were at a sort of brook, which looked too large for him to leap, but leap it he did, and that wolf smell of his all gamy and musky in my nose, and I got such a case of the giggles that I was afraid I’d fall off him, but dug my fingers even tighter in the fur at his neck, and he didn’t mind, but rather seemed encouraged, and went faster yet, which I hadn’t thought possible…”

I had fallen away from the party, though not by much and could still see their shadows in the murk.

“Hey, Norrigal,” I said and hurried toward her with my coin held up in one hand, leading the donkey by the bridle with the other. I tried to follow her monologue, but I couldn’t seem to close distance. That’s when it occurred to me that I was being magicked. Was she doing it? I didn’t think so. When you get to know someone well, their magic has its own feel and even smell; Norrigal’s magic was warm and smelled like good, fresh mud, and honeycomb, and maybe pup’s fur. This other magic was animal, yes, but old and dry and hard.

“Norrigal?” I said and pulled the donkey toward her shadow in the thick fog, but even as I moved toward it, it seemed to trot casually away from me at exactly the same distance, talking all the while.

I left my donkey and leapt at it now, and finally managed to close with the thing that had somehow taken her place.