The Blacktongue Thief

52 Bread and Butter

We had been invited down for breakfast, this by a steward with too much tongue in his mouth, slightly sharp teeth, and a tendency to pant when hot or tired. He seemed to be second in command here, for I saw him ordering about the hugely muscled man-bulls cut after Hornhead’s pattern. We came down to find Galva and Yorbez already stuffing themselves with eggs, the yolks of which looked larger than they should have. When he saw us, Fulvir, from his post at the head of the table, motioned at two empty seats and bade us sit. A warm smell came from the kitchen, which was the iron heart of the bone-and-wood house, and a portly Molrovan woman followed it out.

“Braathe ne byar,” she said, setting down a wood block stacked high with sliced bread and a stone pot of butter beside it. I felt bad eating anything from the hand of a man who tangled up kynd and beast and kept the results in cages. As soon as I thought this, Fulvir looked at me and said, “Why don’t you have some bread and butter?” I tried to say something back to him, I didn’t even know what, but I found I couldn’t speak. My hand reached for the bread, and I held it, trembling. The portly woman saw this and buttered it for me. My hand, quite on its own, brought the bread to my mouth, which opened, and I bit, chewed, and swallowed. I was outraged, but not so outraged I didn’t notice it was damned delicious.

“When you eat your bread, thank the cat,” he said in Holtish so all could understand, even though it was a Molrovan saying. It meant that for the grain to stay safe, mice had to die. It meant don’t be a child. It meant that without his and Knockburr’s experiments, we’d have had no corvids, and without corvids, goblins might have pushed us all the way to the Gunnish sea.

I ate the next bite without being forced to, or at least I think I did.

“You slept well, I trust?” Fulvir said.

The Ispanthians nodded. Norrigal shrugged.

I said, “Like a baby,” and we all know how well babies sleep.

“Good,” he said. “There is much to do and little time to do it. I have new intelligence that a giant army has moved well out of Hrava across the plains of Oustrim, and the chance they will pass by here has grown from minimal to probable. I will be moving south. Today. But not without leaving you with certain … gifts … to help you on your important mission.” He made a gesture, and the doors that led to the library opened.

Now, as if they had been waiting behind the door, a trio of musicians came in and began to play. One man thumped a hip-drum, one woman blew wetly into a fife, one man squeezed and puffed his cheeks red wrestling a skreeking wail from a Gallardian cornemuse. They weren’t very good musicians. We all watched the door they entered from to see what the gift would be, but when they finished their tune, they bowed and said their names.

“Bizh,” said the drummer.

“Nazh,” said the woman with the fife. I noticed now her large nose.

“Gorbol,” said the piper, who sneezed all over himself, sorting out his snotty beard and mustache with a pocket-rag.

Galva seemed to be looking for something else, too.

“Were you expecting a horse and carriage? Take these three with you, and mind they don’t die. They will try to die.”

“That’s hardly fair,” said Bizh with a nasal quality to his voice and an accent I couldn’t place.

“Aye,” said Nazh, even more nasally. “All we’ve done is try to live.”

“And we’ve done a good job of it,” said Gorbol, who blinked a great deal.

Bizh beat a triplet on his drum to punctuate Gorbol’s words.

Their names sounded Molrovan, but their accents remained a mystery. They didn’t look particularly fit, and in this horseless world, that meant slowing us down. Were we really going to have to take these bastards with us?

“You will really take these bastards with you, and you will be sad if you do not,” Fulvir said, and that was no lie, and that settled it.

After the “gift” of the musicians, we were ignored. Fulvir had a great deal to see to in preparing his household for a move. The doggish steward oversaw the efforts of the trio of man-bulls, and they buckled this and fastened that and dragged a great deal of furniture outside. The portly woman took all of the plates out of the cupboard and set them by the road.

Fulvir didn’t even see us off.

I had wanted to see if I could worm something else about Galtia out of him, just to further plumb the chances he was my father, but I knew it would be futile. First, he probably wasn’t any more my kin than a cornstalk. One of the greatest devices in confidence games taught at the Low School is to make a mark think they’re more than they are. Many a fool has spilt silver for a honey-tongued deceiver bearing news of true fathers and unlikely inheritances. Even if I were a bastard, my blood da was far surer some local blandie who was half-comely for a month in his twenty-fifth year and never again, some once-lucky fisherman or dung-carter who winked just right or turned a pretty dancing leg for my ma when she’d a slow burn of cider under her skin at a gather-dance.

Second, Fulvir was sane enough to decide what to share and what to keep, and mad enough to turn any question on its head. Father or no, he owed me nothing, not even a goodbye, and however likely we might have all been to die at goblin hands without his murder-birds in Manreach, I felt I owed him even less.

Especially when I saw further evidence of what Corvids could do.

When we approached the tree our donkeys had been tied to, we came upon a scene of terrible carnage. Three of the corvids I had seen last night were disemboweling a donkey, the one I called Anni. The one Norrigal rode. I hadn’t named mine. I didn’t like mine. But there was sweet Anni, dead as summer, with huge black birds greedily swallowing gobbets of meat and croaking in between. Donkey legs and other parts lay scattered on the ground.

“No. Oh, fuck no,” Norrigal said, and sobbed once.

“Dalgatha maia! Jilnaedus corvistus chodadus! Merdu!” Galva hissed.

Somewhere in the distance, a donkey screamed.

“Fucking things!” I said and nocked an arrow.

“No!” Galva said, pushing my bow down with the closest thing to fear I had yet seen in her eyes.

We backed away.

We left on foot.

Just as we neared the breach in the rock wall that led away from Fulvir’s clearing, the house unmoored itself from the ground and tottered on four tree-sized roots that had been hidden in the rocky soil beneath it. Raining dirt in a cape, the hive-shaped house pitched and swayed in the air and then started walking back the way we had come, balancing improbably on parts of the path that seemed too thin for it. We turned and kept our ways. We passed the clay man, inert in the mud, as dead now as he ever was alive, some small trace of blood running out of him and blending with the rivulets of rainwater that returned whatever soul was in him to the earth.

The last evidence of Fulvir’s dominion here was the saddest, even if it was a deity. Bolr, Molrovan god of courage, gave us the farewell Fulvir hadn’t felt bothered about. The small bear with the man’s face shambled near us and watched us go. I was sure he was simple, that his man’s face had no more than a bear’s mind behind it, that he could do no better than scoot a plate and ask for bread and butter, but just before I looked away from him, he waved. I waved back. I saw that his eyes were red and knew his cheeks were wet from more than just the light rain that fell as we departed. He knew he’d been abandoned. Fulvir had turned Bolr out of his cage like he was just another unwanted table to leave in the rain. It occurred to me to kill the mixling for mercy’s sake, but if Fulvir judged him capable of seeing after himself in this wilderness, who was I to deprive him of that chance? We all want to live, don’t we? I would never know what became of Sava’av or Malmrana, nor whether Fulvir in his great generosity took little Fothannon along or simply had one of the man-bulls strangle him. Just as I was thinking that I couldn’t hate the manipulative old prick any more, savior of Manreach or no, the musicians played a wretched, tuneless little song, and I did.

I hated him more.

“Stop playing before I cut your hands off,” Galva said, and they stopped. Even if we were heading straight for an army of giants and our days were thinly numbered, I knew I was following the right woman.