“No!” Leo remembered his father, at the end, raving and drooling. “No. I need… to stay sharp.” Though what for? So he could watch his friends train from a chair? Sit through endless meetings about tax? He should take husk for the pain of that rubbish.
The surgeon offered a strip of leather to bite on. “You might want to look away, Your Grace.”
“I think I will.” Flashing steel used to delight him. Now the glint of the sun on the tiny blade was making him feel faint.
He was the Young Lion! No man braver! Riding into a line of spears had been nothing. Now even the idea of moving the leg, touching the leg, using the leg, made him cringe. It was his first thought before he did anything—how much would it hurt? You would’ve thought the more pain you suffered, the more you’d get used to it, but it was the other way around. Hour after hour, day after day, it wore down your patience until everything was unbearable.
So rather than suffer in heroic silence, he trembled and whimpered his way through it, sobbing at every touch of the blade. At even the expectation of a touch. When it was over, he peeled the wad of leather from his teeth, strings of spit hanging off it. “I swear it hurts more than when I took the wound in the first place.”
“Pain dulls in the excitement of combat.” The surgeon wiped Leo’s thigh then wrinkled his nose at the cloth. “The chronic is, in the end, far harder to stand than the acute.”
Leo lay back, limp as a wrung-out rag. “When will it heal?”
“Perhaps weeks. Perhaps months.”
“Months?” He made a fist as though he might punch his own leg, but quickly thought better of it.
“But you should be aware…” The surgeon frowned as he dried his hands. “Some things never heal.”
“It could be like this for ever?”
“It is a possibility.”
Leo turned his head away towards the window. Watched the grey rooftops and the grey sea through the distorting little rain-flecked panes. Would he be a cripple? Like that bastard Glokta, imprisoned behind his desk, burrowing among his papers like a maggot in filth?
Tears made his sight swim. He wished Rikke was with him. She would’ve turned it into a joke, played the fool, made him… feel good. It was a long time since he’d felt good.
“All done for now.” And the surgeon began to wind a fresh bandage around Leo’s thigh, hiding that puckered red eye.
He’d dreamed of leading armies and winning great victories, just like in the stories. He’d dreamed of fighting in the Circle and being reckoned a great warrior, just like in the songs. He’d dreamed of stepping from his mother’s shadow into the sunlight of renown and being cheered as Lord Governor of Angland. He’d done it all.
And look where it had left him.
That’s the trouble with songs. They tend to stop before it all turns to shit.
With the Wind
Downside frowned towards the burned-out shells of hovels and houses. Couple of chimney stacks still stood, couple of charred beams poked at the pink morning sky. He cleared his throat, worked the results around his mouth like he was tasting ale, then spat ’em out. He loved a good spit, did Downside. Might’ve been his favourite pastime. After killing folk.
“Just like the village I came from, this,” he said.
“Aye,” said Clover, “well. Villages all look much the same when they’re burned.”
“You say that like you’ve seen a few.”
“There was a time back in the wars…” Clover thought about it and gave a sorry grunt “…’fore you lot were born, I daresay, when burned villages were a more common sight in the North than unburned ones. I’d hoped those days were behind us but, you know. Hoping for a thing often seems the best way o’ bringing on the opposite.” There was another gurgling retch behind and Clover turned to look. “How can you have any puke left?”
“It’s just…” Flick straightened up, wiping his mouth. “A sort o’ snot coming out now.’ And he peeked at the display from the corner of his eye, as if looking sidelong might make it prettier.
You could tell it had been people once. A hand here. A face there. But mostly just bits of meat, nailed up high or dangling in the burned trees at the centre of the village, where the rain had washed the ash into a black slurry. There was something coiled snake-like around a trunk which Clover had an unpleasant sense might be someone’s guts. A scene from a nightmare, and no mistake.
“Fucking flatheads,” muttered Flick, then he hunched over and coughed up another string of drool.
“Chief?”
“By the dead!” shouted Clover, near jumping in the air with fright. Sholla had slipped out of the bushes, silent as regrets, and was squatting not a step to his side, one eye big and white in her ash-smeared face and the other just a gleam behind her tangled hair. “Creep up on them, girl, not on me! I near shat myself!” He was worried he might’ve, just a streak.
“Sorry.” She didn’t look sorry at all. She never looked much of anything. Deadpan as an actual pan, this girl.
“I should hang a bell on you,” muttered Clover, bending over and trying to calm his racing heart. “What is it?”
“The flatheads left tracks. Took some sheep with ’em. Wool tufted on the trees. Tracks all over. Couldn’t have left bigger ones if they’d driven a wagon. I could track ’em easy. Want me to track ’em? I’ll track ’em, shall I?” Maybe she spent so much time on her own, only trees for company, that she’d poor judgement now on quantity of words. It was either too few in little stabs or too many in a flurry. “Want to follow, Chief?”
Clover still didn’t much like being called chief. The tallest flower is oft the first clipped, and no one he’d called chief down the years had lived to enjoy a pleasurable retirement. “No, I don’t much want to follow, as it happens.” He held a hand out to the nailed-up offal. “Adding my own innards to such a display in no way appeals.”
There was a pause. Sholla’s one visible eye, and the gleam of the one hidden, slid to Downside, and he shrugged his great shoulders. They slid to Flick, who groaned, and straightened, and wiped his mouth again. They slid to the display, which still sat there in the trees, of course. They slid back up to Clover. “Shall we follow, though?”
Clover puffed out his cheeks. They’d been puffed out ever since Stour gave him these scrapings from the pot and told him to hunt Shanka. But when your chief gives you a task, you get to it, don’t you? Even if it’s far from the task you’d have picked.
“Aye,” he grunted. “We shall.”
“Chief?”
“Huh?”
Flick knelt in the wet brush, twisting his spear nervously in his pale fists. “What you thinking about?”
Clover stood, trying to find a gap in the leaves so he could peer into the valley, grunted as he stretched one aching leg, then the other, then squatted down again. “The past. Choices made. Things done.”
“Regrets, eh?” Flick nodded sagely, like he knew all about regrets, though if he’d seen sixteen winters Clover would’ve been surprised.
“Might be a parade o’ triumphs and successes, mightn’t it?”