Best Served Cold

“That’s the only way they do change, ain’t it?” His one eye stayed on her. “If things change enough around ’em? Men are brittle, I reckon. They don’t bend into new shapes. They get broken into them. Crushed into them.”

Burned into them, maybe. “How’s your face?” she muttered.

“Itchy.”

“Did it hurt, at the eye-maker’s?”

“On a scale between stubbing your toe and having your eye burned out, it was down near the bottom.”

“Most everything is.”

“Falling down a mountain?”

“Not that bad, as long as you lie still. It’s when you try to get up it starts to sting some.” That got a grin from him, though he was grinning a lot less than he used to. Small surprise after what he’d been through, maybe. What she’d put him through. “I suppose… I should be thanking you for saving my life, again. It’s getting to be a habit.”

“What you’re paying me for, ain’t it, Chief? Work well done is its own reward, my father always used to tell me. Fact is I’m good at it. As a fighter I’m a man you need to respect. As anything else I’m just a big shiftless fuck wasted a dozen years in the wars, with nothing to show for it but bloody dreams and one less eye than most. I’ve got my pride, still. Man’s got to be what he is, I reckon. Otherwise what is he? Just pretending, no? And who wants to spend all the time they’re given pretending to be what they ain’t?”

Good question. Luckily they crested a rise, and she was spared having to think of an answer. The remains of the Imperial road stretched away, an arrow-straight stripe of brown through the fields. Eight centuries old, and still the best road in Styria. A sad comment on the leadership since. There was a farm not far from it. A stone house of two storeys, windows shuttered, roof of red tiles turned mossy brown with age, a small stable-block beside. A waist-high wall of lichen-splattered drystone round a muddy yard, a couple of scrawny birds pecking at the dirt. Opposite the house a wooden barn, roof slumping in the middle. A weather vane in the shape of a winged snake flapped limply on its leaning turret.

“That’s the place!” she called out, and Vitari stuck her arm up to show she’d heard.

A stream wound past the buildings and off towards a mill-house a mile or two distant. The wind came up, shook the leaves on a hedgerow, made soft waves in the wheat, drove the ragged clouds across the sky, their shadows flowing over the land beneath.

It reminded Monza of the farm where she was born. She thought of Benna, a boy running through the crop, just the top of his head showing above the ripening grain, hearing his high laughter. Long ago, before their father died. Monza shook herself and scowled. Maudlin, self-indulgent, nostalgic shit. She’d hated that farm. The digging, the ploughing, the dirt under her nails. And all for what? There weren’t many things you worked so hard at to make so little.

The only other one she could think of right off was revenge.

– 

S ince his earliest remembrances, Morveer seemed always to have had an uncanny aptitude for saying the wrong thing. When he meant to contribute, he would find he was complaining. When he intended to be solicitous, he would discover he was insulting. When he sought earnestly to provide support, he would be construed as undermining. He wanted only to be valued, respected, included, and yet somehow every attempt at good fellowship only made matters worse.

He was almost starting to believe, after thirty years of failed relationships-a mother who had left him, a wife who had left him, apprentices who had left, robbed or attempted to kill him, usually by poison but on one memorable occasion with an axe-that he simply was not very good with people. He should have been glad, at least, that the loathsome drunk Nicomo Cosca was dead, and indeed he had at first felt some relief. But the dark clouds had soon rolled back to re-establish the eternal baseline of mild depression. He found himself once more squabbling with his troublesome employer over every detail of their business.

Probably it would have been better if he had simply retired to the mountains and lived as a hermit, where he could injure nobody’s feelings. But the thin air had never suited his delicate constitution. So he had resolved, once more, to make a heroic effort at camaraderie. To be more compliant, more graceful, more indulgent of the shortcomings of others. He had taken the first step, therefore, while the rest of the party were out surveying the land for signs of the Thousand Swords, by pretending at a headache and preparing a pleasant surprise, in the form of his mother’s recipe for mushroom soup. Perhaps the only tangible thing which she had left her only son.