Lots of weapons in that hall, lots of sorrow and lots of anger, and Clover made sure he knew where all the doors were. When a great man dies, those left over always take a moment working out where their loyalties are most fruitfully laid, and there’s a high risk of bloodshed in the meantime. He’d seen one funeral turn into several often enough.
The Dogman himself lay pale on the long table, scarred shield under his feet, a hint of drama from a shaft of light falling on him through the smoke-hole. A woman stood over him in the shadows, back to the door. Her red-brown hair was clipped short and it made her neck look very long and very thin, blue veins standing stark up the side.
Stour strode into the silent hall, steel toes on his boots scraping. “I just had to pay my respects!” Voice dripping contempt, not caring a shit, as usual, for anyone’s feelings but his own.
Then the woman turned, and that shaft of light caught her smile, and Stour shuffled to an uncertain halt. So did his men. A dozen warriors always keen to advertise their courage, but they all checked at the sight of her, and Clover hardly blamed ’em.
“By the dead,” muttered Greenway, taking a nervy step back and near tripping over his own sword.
“The King of the Northmen!” she raised her arms in delight. “What a joy! The gates of Uffrith stand open to you, even though last time you visited you burned the place, eh? Eh? Eh?” The last eh? hissed through her gritted teeth, spit spraying.
Rumour was the Dogman’s daughter was a witch. That she had the Long Eye. Clover hadn’t taken it too seriously. Now it was hard to doubt. She’d turned so lean her face was like a skull, skin so stretched you fancied you could see through it, scabbed and angry around her left eye, across her forehead, her cheek, the bridge of her nose. Clover wondered if, of the two of ’em, her father looked the healthier.
“What the hell happened to you?” muttered Stour, giving voice to the thoughts of everyone in the hall, most likely.
“A sorceress said she could make me more ordinary,” said Rikke. “Or she could make me less. Guess which I chose?”
She strutted closer, bony shoulders tipped back, bony chin tipped up, and the mingling of that battered face and that snake-like swagger and that friendly grin and those mad, mad eyes was really most off-putting.
“I’ve been in the High Places. Up in the mountains, beside a lake.” And she waved a hand, runes on thongs around her thin wrist clicking and clattering. “Fine views, but the water was a little chilly on the toes, eh, Isern?”
Isern-i-Phail, no doubt used to being the weirdest in just about any company, was of a sudden looking workaday by comparison. “I didn’t paddle,” she said, and spat some chagga juice across the floor.
“You should’ve. The kind of cold that burns all your doubts away. Whole business was…” And Rikke opened her eyes wide, so wide it seemed they might pop out of her pinched-in face. “Eye-opening. I see right through you, now. Right through all of you.” And she laughed, a jagged laugh, like she’d left her senses far behind her, and it didn’t help at all that she was laughing at her father’s funeral.
Stour twisted his face sideways as she came close, like he was looking into a wind. Her right eye was all swollen, many-coloured bruises on the bloated lids and a great red stain all across the white of it, pupil shrivelled to a milky pinprick. The pupil of the other yawned huge and black, and Clover saw the scabbed and angry skin around it was pricked with designs. A cobweb of black lines and letters, circles and symbols, so fine it seemed it couldn’t have been drawn by men at all. Clover never saw a thing looked so much like witch’s work, and the warriors muttered and shifted, a dozen big men edging back fearful from one girl thin as a birch sapling.
“Fucking witch,” muttered one who came from over the Crinna, making a holy sign across his chest. “Should be burned.”
Rikke smiled at him, pointing with one thin finger. “But it’s you who’ll die by fire!” She smiled at Greenway. “You on the water! And ’cause I’ve told you so, all the days you have left, you’ll go in fear of streams and boats and wells and cups and every drop of dew shall be a terror.” She wagged that finger at him. “But the water will find you out. It will leak in through the cracks in your life no matter how you try to caulk ’em up. I see the Great Leveller coming, and there are no bargains made with him.” She stared at Stour, and took a necklace of green stones she wore and dragged them back until they made a noose, cutting into her thin neck. “But it’s steel for most of you. It takes no Long Eye to see that.” She dropped the necklace and laughed again. “Stay! You’re all welcome. Stay, and I can tell you more.”
“Not me,” muttered Greenway, who should’ve been called Whiteway he’d turned so pale. He blundered to the door, and saw a bucket there put under a leak, and he shrank away from it, then scrambled out into the daylight. The rest of Stour’s big men weren’t far behind him. Seemed this hadn’t turned out quite the fun he’d promised.
The Great Wolf himself stayed to give the room a wet-eyed scowl. “We’ll be back,” he barked out. “See that, witch!” And he shoved past Clover and stalked from the hall.
“How rude.” Rikke’s pale eye and her red eye slid across to Clover. “You I know.”
“We met once,” he said. “In the woods.” And she’d come a long way from the stringy little scrap who fell at his feet then. She’d come a long, hard way by a crooked road, he reckoned.
“I remember,” she said. “Do you want to hear what’s coming, Jonas Clover?”
“Reckon I’d rather not.” Wasn’t easy to meet those strange eyes, one seeming too shallow and one too deep. But he made himself do it. “Just wanted to say I’m sorry about your father. Didn’t know him well, but I wish I’d known him better. Ain’t many left in the North you could say that much for.”
“Why don’t you stay?” she asked, raising one brow. Seemed the other got shaved off when the tattooing was done. “We can talk about what’s coming.”
“D’you know? I wish I could.” And it was true. He’d rather have stayed with the witches and the dead than gone back out to Stour and his bastards. “But I am what I am.” Nightfall had the power. More even than before, with the Dogman back to the mud. And Clover was done with losing sides. So he nodded to Isern-i-Phail, and nodded to Rikke, too. Then he turned for the door.
Shivers stood in his path, that metal eye glinting in the shadows. “We still need to have that talk.”
“We do.” Clover thought about giving Shivers a clap on the arm or something, but he didn’t really seem the arm-clapping type. “More’n ever.”
Then he left.
It was raining when they put him in the mud. Thin rain, making the whole world damp. Soft as a maiden’s kiss, as he used to say. Seemed right, somehow, for the occasion. The gulls and the sea and the sad voices deadened. Everything deadened, like the world was wrapped in a shroud.
Usually, when a man goes in the ground, there are a few words said. Words from his chief or his family. How good they were, how strong, how brave. How much missed they’ll be by those staggering on. But today, it seemed everyone in Uffrith had words. The little garden beside the hall was packed shoulder to shoulder, mourners spilling out into the wet lanes around.