A Little Hatred (The Age of Madness #1) - Joe Abercrombie Page 0,1

of it down her chin. ‘If you think I picked any part of this, you’re mad.’

‘They said the same thing about my da.’

‘He was mad as a sack of owls, you’re always saying so!’

‘Aye, well, one person’s mad is another’s remarkable. Need I observe you’re a long leap from ordinary yourself? You kicked so hard this time you nearly kicked your boots off. Might have to rope you in future, make sure you don’t crack your nut and end up a drooler like my brother Brait. At least he can keep his shit in, mind you.’

‘My thanks for that.’

‘No bother.’ Isern made a little diamond from her fingers and squinted through it at the sun. ‘Past time we were on our way. High deeds are being done today. Or maybe low ones.’ And she dropped the trousers in Rikke’s lap. ‘Best dress yourself.’

‘What, wet? They’ll chafe.’

‘Chafe?’ Isern snorted. ‘That’s the limit o’ your worries?’

‘My head still aches so bad I can feel it in my teeth.’ Rikke wanted to shout but knew it’d hurt too much, so she had to whine it soft instead. ‘I need no more small discomforts.’

‘Life is small discomforts, girl! They’re how you know you are alive.’ And Isern hacked that laugh out again, slapped happily at Rikke’s shoulder and sent her stumbling sideways. ‘You can walk with your plump white arse hanging out if that’s your pleasure, but you’ll be walking one way or the other.’

‘A curse,’ grumbled Rikke as she wriggled into her clammy trousers. ‘Definitely a curse.’

‘So … you really think I’ve got the Long Eye?’

Isern strode on through the woods with that loping gait that, however fast Rikke walked, always left her an uncomfortable half-step behind. ‘You really think I’d be pissing my efforts away on you otherwise?’

Rikke sighed. ‘Guess not. Just, in the songs, it’s a thing witches and magi and deep-wise folk used to see into the fog of what comes. Not a thing that makes idiots fall down and shit themselves.’

‘In case you never noticed, bards have a habit of dressing things up. There is a fine living, d’you see, in songs about deep-wise witches, but in shitty idiots, less.’

Rikke sadly conceded the truth of that.

‘And proving you have the Long Eye is no simple matter. You cannot force it open. You must coax it.’ And Isern tickled Rikke under the chin and made her jerk away. ‘Take it up to the sacred places where the old stones stand so the moon might shine full upon it. But it’ll see what it sees when it chooses, even so.’

‘Uffrith on fire, though?’ Rikke was feeling a weight of worry now they were down from the High Places and getting close to home. The dead knew she hadn’t always been happy in Uffrith, but she’d no wish to see it in flames. ‘How’s that meant to happen?’

‘Carelessness with a cook-fire would do it.’ Isern’s eyes slid sideways. ‘Though up here in the North, I’d say war’s a more likely cause of cities aflame.’

‘War?’

‘It’s when a fight gets so big almost no one comes out of it well.’

‘I know what it bloody is.’ Rikke had a spot of fear growing at the nape of her neck which she couldn’t shrug off however much she wriggled her shoulders. ‘But there’s been peace in the North all my lifetime.’

‘My da used to say times of peace are when the wise prepare for violence.’

‘Your da was mad as a bootful of dung.’

‘And what does your da say? Few men so sane as the Dogman.’

Rikke wriggled her shoulders one more time, but nothing helped. ‘He says hope for the best and prepare for the worst.’

‘Sound advice, say I.’

‘But he lived through some black times. Always fighting. Against Bethod. Against Black Dow. Things were different then.’

Isern snorted. ‘No, they weren’t. I was there when your father fought Bethod, up in the High Places with the Bloody-Nine beside him.’

Rikke blinked at her. ‘You can’t have been ten years old.’

‘Old enough to kill a man.’

‘What?’

‘Used to carry my da’s hammer, ’cause the smallest should take the heaviest load, but that day he was fighting with the hammer so I had his spear. This very one.’ Its butt tapped the rhythm of their walking on the path. ‘My da knocked a man down, and he was trying to get up, and I stabbed him right up the arse.’

‘With that spear?’ Rikke had come to think of it as just a stick Isern carried. A stick that happened to have a