08 A Little Hatred: Book One (The Age of Madness)

Pike raised one brow. Or looked as if he would have, had he any to raise. Then he gave the faintest nod, perhaps even a nod of approval, and faded back to confer with Sulfur.

Orso was left alone in the wheatfield with Tunny, the Steadfast Standard resting covered in the crook of one arm.

‘What is it, Corporal?’

‘I never saw more harm done than by the heroes who couldn’t wait to get started.’

Orso popped open his top button. Uniforms were a great help around the belly but they could get awfully tight at the throat. ‘Well, if I excel at anything, it’s doing nothing.’

‘You know what, Your Highness? I’m starting to think you might make a better-than-average king.’

‘So you’re always telling me.’

‘Yes.’ Tunny had a knowing smirk as he watched the men of the Crown Prince’s Division steadily spread out around the city. ‘But I never actually meant it before.’

The Battle of Red Hill

‘How’s your leg?’ asked Rikke.

‘Sore,’ said Isern, wrinkling her nose as she picked at the stitches with a fingernail, ‘and somewhat crusty.’ She straightened with a sigh. ‘But sore and crusty is about as good as one could hope for from an arrow wound.’

She stuck two fingers in a pouch and started smearing something on the pink and puckered skin. It was Rikke’s turn to wrinkle her nose. The smell of it was quite impossible to describe. ‘By the dead,’ trying to hold her breath, ‘what is that?’

Isern started to wind a fresh bandage around her thigh. ‘Better you don’t know. I might have to spread some on you if you get arrow-pricked, and I wouldn’t want you arguing.’ She slipped a pin through the bandage and stood, wincing as she rubbed at her thigh with her thumb, flexing her knee, testing her weight on it. ‘Knowledge isn’t always a gift, d’you see? Sometimes it’s better we be swaddled in the comforting darkness of ignorance.’

She pushed a pellet of chagga up behind her lip, then rolled another between finger and thumb and handed it over. Rikke chomped on it, savoured that sour, earthy taste which she’d found so vile when she started chewing it but that now she could never get enough of, and pushed it down behind her lip.

It was cold. No fires in case Stour’s scouts saw them and spoiled the trap, and she’d hardly slept and she was aching and hungry but sick at the same time and bloody hell she felt nervous. Kept fussing with her fingers, fussing at the chagga pellet with her tongue, fussing at the runes around her neck, fussing at the ring through her nose—

‘Stop fussing,’ said Isern. ‘Neither of us’ll be fighting.’

‘I can feel worried for those who will, can’t I?’

‘Meaning your Young Lion?’ Isern grinned, tip of her tongue showing through that hole in her teeth. ‘Can’t spend your whole life fucking, you know.’

‘No.’ Rikke gave a smoky sigh. ‘Something to aim for, though.’

‘I’ve heard less noble goals, ’tis true.’

The silence stretched. The silence, and the nerves, and somewhere someone started up a song in a deep bass. That one about the Battle in the High Places, where her father laid Bethod low. Old battles. Old victories. She wondered whether some time in the future, folk would sing songs about the Battle of Red Hill, and if they did, who’d be the winners and who the losers.

‘When will they get here?’ she asked for the hundredth time.

Isern leaned on her spear and frowned off to the east. The sun was rising there, a brilliant crescent over the hills that set the edges of the clouds on fire. The valley bellow was dark still, here or there a glitter on the stream, mist hanging over the trees that marched off to the North. ‘Could be soon,’ mused Isern. ‘Could be later. Might be they change their mind and don’t come at all.’

‘In other words, you’ve no notion.’

Isern glanced sideways. ‘If only someone could just look into the future and tell us how it’ll all unfold. That’d be handy.’

‘Aye.’ Rikke planted her chin in her palms and sagged. ‘It would.’

‘Bravery,’ said Glaward, staring gloomily at the fire, ‘audacity, loyalty … yes. But I never guessed patience would be the soldier’s most important virtue.’

Barniva rubbed at his scar with a thumbtip. ‘Fighting and soldiering are two very different things.’

They were starting to seem like opposite things to Leo. He frowned at the sun, the slightest pink smudge in the east. He could’ve sworn the damn thing was rising at a tenth the normal speed. No doubt it was somehow in league with his mother.

‘Patience is the parent of success,’ murmured Jurand, with so gentle a touch on Leo’s shoulder he only just felt it. ‘Stolicus.’

‘Huh.’ Normally, as the sun rose, Leo would’ve been training. He’d heard Bremer dan Gorst, well into his fifties, still trained for three hours every day, so he’d determined to do the same. But what’s the point of training if you end up stuck on your arse in a village miles from the fight? He took a hard breath and let it smoke away. His thousandth of the morning so far.