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

Even blinking, spitting and off balance, Nightfall managed to parry, but Leo was already coming at him with all the strength he had left. He smashed his forehead into Stour’s mouth with a glorious crunch, making the Great Wolf stagger back onto the shields of his men.

For a moment, his eyes were bleary, his bloody mouth wide with surprise. Leo took a great whooping breath, brought his sword whistling up and over, but the blade hacked into the shields where Stour had been a moment before, and Leo only just kept his grip on the buzzing hilt.

Stour danced back, spitting grass, showing red teeth as he grinned. ‘Oh, now we got us a fight!’

He darted one way, switched in an instant and whipped past on the other side, quick as the wind and as hard to pin down. Leo was left stranded, gasped as the edge of Stour’s sword whipped across his thigh, left a cold line that soon turned burning hot. It was the most he could do to stay standing as the blood soaked into his trouser leg.

He wasn’t a lion, he was a scared little boy who didn’t want to die.

But it was too late to listen to Mother now.

Brock was cut bad. Red streaks down his face from the cut on his cheek, trousers dark around the cut on his leg, hand red from the cut on his arm. Watering the Circle with his blood, as the skalds have it. Not a pleasant sight, but nothing Clover hadn’t seen before. Hadn’t lived before. If pleasant sights are what you’re after, the Circle’s a bad place to come.

Stour was sure of victory. Grinning like a wolf, strutting like a cock. The kind that rules the farmyard rather’n the kind you piss with, but Clover reckoned both meanings fit the heir to the North pretty well. He laughed, arms spread wide, urging the crowd to ever-louder shrieks of admiration and delight. Some men take to applause like other men take to drink. The more they get, the more they need, until too much is never enough.

Scale was loving it almost as much as his nephew, shaking his iron hand at the Circle and roaring, ‘Play with him!’ The admiration of one cock for another. Seemed to sting an effort from Brock, who lumbered in, sluggish from the bleeding, took a clumsy swing you could see coming ten strides off. Stour flicked it away with a contemptuous sneer, could’ve chopped Brock across the back but chose to let him stumble by.

‘Finish him, damn it!’ snarled Black Calder, as disgusted by his son’s display as his brother was delighted by it.

Stour could’ve finished Brock five times now but he was enjoying hooking him so much, he kept letting him wriggle free so he could hook him again. Clover thought that ill-advised, to say the least. You take no risks in the Circle and give no chances, not with all you’ve got and all you’ll ever have in the balance. It only takes a little twist of fate to land you back in the mud, and fate can be a twisty little bastard.

No one knew that better than Clover.

Rikke’s head spun, sight swam, stomach churned as she stared down into the Circle. Her left eye was hot, burning in her head. She forced it open wider, staring, staring.

Leo bent, clumsy, hunched around the wound in his side, blood-streaked top to toe. Stour looked quicker than ever, surer than ever, prancing, dancing, only a short step from blowing kisses to the audience.

Rikke saw ghosts of swords and spears above the crowd. Of flags shifting with a wind that wasn’t there. The battle yesterday? A battle yet to come? By the dead, she wanted to be sick. Her head was pulsing. The cold sweat tickled at her scalp, trickled down her face, but she didn’t dare shift her eyes. Didn’t dare blink. Didn’t dare break the spell.

There were ghosts in the Circle, too. Shimmering and shifting. Ghosts of Leo and of Stour. Ghosts of hands and feet and faces. Ghosts of swords.

Leo winced as Stour’s blade caught him across the belly. Not a killing blow. Just a kiss. A slash that spotted the shields beside him with blood. Leo stumbled, fell to his knees, sword slipping from his hand into the grass.

‘No,’ whispered Leo’s mother, tears running down her cheeks as she closed her eyes.

Nightfall turned slowly around in the middle of the Circle, stretching out the victory, sucking up the glory, and he looked over his shoulder at Rikke, and he winked.

By the dead, her eye was on fire. Like it might burn right out of her head.

Stour turned away from her, raising his arm.

She saw his sword.

But she saw it with the Long Eye.

And for an instant, like the water flooding in when the dam bursts, the absolute knowing of that sword flooded into her.

She saw the ore of its iron, ripped from the cold earth, made steel in the flame-spurting furnace and poured white-hot into the mould.

She saw Watersmeet the smith swing his hammer, face lit orange by sparks at each blow, his children working the bellows, his mother Drenna puffing plumes of chagga smoke from her pipe as she tugged at the binding on the grip.