“How did you make the Shanka serve you?” asked Rikke as it shoved its fish-laden spear point-down near the water’s edge. Her father always talked of the flatheads as if they were animals. A plague that couldn’t be reasoned with. And here was one snuffling around for sticks to build a fire like any fisherman on the beach. Well, any fisherman with spikes hammered into his head.
“The same way you make anyone serve you,” said Caurib. “By offering them what they want.”
Rikke watched that flathead grunt and slurp to itself, tongue wedged in its great teeth as it carefully stacked twigs on a patch of shingle blackened by years of fires. “They’re like people, then?”
“Oh no.” And Rikke felt Caurib’s hand on her shoulder, light but firm, and her soft voice in her ear. “They can be trusted. It is them I have to thank for my life.”
“What, the Shanka?”
“Yes. If thanks are appropriate for what hardly seems a life.”
Rikke watched the flathead fumbling with a flint and tinder and juggling it all over the beach. “Wouldn’t think they had the fingers for pretty stitching.”
“Does this look pretty to you?”
Rikke cleared her throat and thought it best to say nothing.
“The Shanka don’t like baths and they’ve no sense of humour at all, but they understand the meeting betwixt flesh and metal. They learned that much from the Master Maker.” And the Shanka bent down, crooked lips pursed, and coaxed a flame into life with its breath.
“What happened to the others?” asked Rikke.
“The man with the steel eye and the woman with the iron temper? They sat a while beside you, each pretending to be less worried than the other, but after a few days they tired of fish. Neither would trust the other to hunt so they went off together.”
“Hold on,” said Rikke. “Days?”
“Four days you slept. They are good companions. A woman who is to be taken seriously as a seer should have some colourful folk about her.”
“I didn’t pick ’em for their colour.”
“No, they picked you, which speaks to your quality and theirs.”
“Speaks of good quality, or poor?”
Caurib didn’t answer. Just turned her bright blue eyes on Rikke and said nothing. Rikke didn’t much care for being looked at in that way, specially not by a witch, and specially not one with wire through her face.
“Reckon I’ll eat if you don’t mind sharing your breakfast.” The Shanka had his fish over the fire now and was making quite the mouth-watering smell. First time Rikke felt hungry in weeks, and she rubbed at her aching belly. Not much to rub these days. Her clothes were hanging off her like rags off a scarecrow. “When my colourful friends get back we’d best start home. Long way down to Uffrith.”
“Going so soon?”
Gave Rikke a worried feeling, the way Caurib said it. Like there was an unpleasant surprise coming. Pleasant surprises seemed to get rarer as you got older. “Aye, well… I feel better now.” Rikke put her palm a little nervously to her left eye. Cool and clammy, just like the other. Just like anyone’s. “Whatever you did worked.”
“I have painted runes about your Long Eye. Runes to keep it caged.”
“Caged, eh? Grand.” Since she woke, she’d seen no visions of things past and no ghosts of things to come. The world looked more ordinary than any time since the duel, when she’d forced the Long Eye open. Aside from standing in a magic lake with a woman sent back from the land of the dead while flatheads cooked breakfast, that was. Rikke took a long breath, puffed up her chest and blew it out. “I’m all good.”
“For now.”
Rikke felt her shoulders sag. “It’ll get worse again?”
“The runes will fade, and it will get worse again, then worse still. We must paint the runes so they will not fade. We must tattoo them into your skin with a crow-bone needle and chain the Long Eye for as long as you live.”
Rikke stared at her. “I thought it was the demon that breaks all chains?”
“Yet we must chain it. With eleven wards and eleven wards reversed, and eleven times eleven. A lock strong enough to hold shut the gates of hell themselves.”
“That… doesn’t sound like something you want on your face.”
“You should eat. Then you should rest. You should drink plenty of water.”
“What’s the water for?”
“One should always drink plenty of water. The tattooing will take several days. It will be draining for you and even more so for me.”
Rikke brushed her cheek with her fingertips as she watched the smoke from the cook-fire drift across the lake. She thought of the hillmen, and the hillwomen, and those bastards from past the Crinna she’d seen sometimes with their blue painted faces. She gave one of those sorry sighs made her lips flap. “There’s just no going back from tattoos on your face, is there?”
“There has never been any going back for you.” Caurib shrugged. “Though you could always leave it, and let the visions get madder and madder until you are sucked into the darkness and your mind bursts apart into a million screaming fragments. That would save me some work.”
“Thanks for that option.” Rikke felt a bit teary, had to sniff back hard. But it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it, and all that. “Reckon I’ll go for the tattoos, then. If that’ll fix it.”
The witch gave a hiss of impatience. “Nothing is ever fixed. From the moment it is born, from the moment it is built, everything is always dying, decaying, drifting into chaos.”
“I could stand a mite less philosophising and a couple of actual answers in the conversation, if it’s all the same to you.”
“Look about you, girl. If I had all the answers, do you think I would be standing in a freezing lake with my head stitched together?”
And the witch held up her skirts and sloshed back towards the shore, leaving Rikke scared and shivering, up to her calves in the frosty water.
“Oh!” Caurib had turned back to shout at her. “And if you need to shit, make sure you do it well away from the cave!”
The King’s Justice
“Spoke to the king myself, at length.” Isher lounged on the front bench as if he was in his drawing room. “Orso’s every bit his father’s son.”
“None too bright.” The Lords’ Round was full, but Barezin hardly seemed to care if they were overheard. “And ever so easily led.”
Open disdain for not one but two kings felt a mite disloyal to Leo, especially here at the heart of government, attending a trial where a man’s life would hang in the balance. His mother would’ve been most displeased to hear it. But then, sooner or later, a man has to stop making everything about pleasing his mother.
“Last year, outside Valbeck, Crown Prince Orso presided over the summary hanging of two hundred supposed revolutionaries,” said Isher. “Without trial or process.”
“Their gibbeted bodies were used to decorate the road to Adua.” Barezin stuck his tongue out and mimed a hanging. “As a warning to other commoners.”
“Now they want to do the same to a member of the Open Council.”