Best Served Cold

“Ooooooh!” Morveer held both hands up and wiggled his fingers like a child playing ghost. “Magic letters! First, there was no wound, and then… there was no wound? I recant! The world is stuffed with miracles.” More tittering from Day.

“I know what I’ve seen.”

“No, my mystified friend, you think you know. There is no such thing as magic. Certainly not here in Styria.”

“Just treachery,” sang Day, “and war, and plague, and money to be made.”

“Why did you favour Styria with your presence, anyway?” asked Morveer. “Why not stay in the North, swaddled in the magic mists?”

Shivers rubbed slowly at the side of his neck. Seemed a strange reason, now, and he felt even more of a fool saying it. “I came here to be a better man.”

“Starting from where you are, I hardly think that would prove too difficult.”

Shivers had some pride still, and this prick’s sniggering was starting to grate on it. He’d have liked to just knock him off his cart with an axe. But he was trying to do better, so he leaned over instead and spoke in Northern, nice and careful. “I think you’ve got a head full of shit, which is no surprise because your face looks like an arse. You little men are all the same. Always trying to prove how clever y’are so you’ve something to be proud of. But it don’t matter how much you laugh at me, I’ve won already. You’ll never be tall.” And he grinned right round his face. “Seeing across a crowded room will always be a dream to you.”

Morveer frowned. “And what is that jabber supposed to mean?”

“You’re the fucking scientist. You work it out.”

Day snorted with high laughter until Morveer caught her with a hard glance. She was still smiling, though, as she stripped the apple core to the pips and tossed it away. Shivers dropped back and watched the empty fields slither by, turned earth half-frozen with a morning frost. Made him think of home. He gave a sigh, and it smoked out against the grey sky. The friends Shivers had made in his life had all been fighters. Carls and Named Men, comrades in the line, most back in the mud, now, one way or another. He reckoned Friendly was the closest thing he’d get to that in the midst of Styria, so he gave his horse a nudge in the flanks and brought it up next to the convict.

“Hey.” Friendly didn’t say a word. He didn’t even move his head to show he’d heard. Silence stretched out. Looking at that brick wall of a face it was hard to picture the convict a bosom companion, chuckling away at his jokes. But a man’s got to clutch at some hope, don’t he? “You were a soldier, then?”

Friendly shook his head.

“But you fought in battles?”

And again.

Shivers ploughed on as if he’d said yes. Not much other choice, now. “I fought in a few. Charged in the mist with Bethod’s Carls north of the Cumnur. Held the line next to Rudd Threetrees at Dunbrec. Fought seven days in the mountains with the Dogman. Seven desperate days, those were.”

“Seven?” asked Friendly, one heavy brow twitching with interest.

“Aye,” sighed Shivers. “Seven.” The names of those men and those places meant nothing to no one down here. He watched a set of covered carts coming the other way, men with steel caps and flatbows in their hands frowning at him from their seats. “Where did you learn to fight, then?” he asked, the smear of hope at getting some decent conversation drying out quick.

“In Safety.”

“Eh?”

“Where they put you when they catch you for a crime.”

“Why keep you safe after that?”

“They don’t call it Safety because you’re safe there. They call it Safety because everyone else is safe from you. They count out the days, months, years they’ll keep you. Then they lock you in, deep down, where the light doesn’t go, until the days, months, years have all rubbed past, and the numbers are all counted down to nothing. Then you say thank you, and they let you free.”

Sounded like a barbaric way of doing things to Shivers. “You do a crime in the North, you pay a gild on it, make it right. That, or if the chieftain decides, they hang you. Maybe put the bloody cross in you, if you’ve done murders. Lock a man in a hole? That’s a crime itself.”

Friendly shrugged. “They have rules there that make sense. There’s a proper time for each thing. A proper number on the great clock. Not like out here.”

“Aye. Right. Numbers, and that.” Shivers wished he’d never asked.

Friendly hardly seemed to hear him. “Out here the sky is too high, and every man does what he pleases when he likes, and there are no right numbers for anything.” He was frowning off towards Westport, still just a sweep of hazy buildings round the cold bay. “Fucking chaos.”

– 

T hey got to the city walls about midday, and there was already a long line of folk waiting to get in. Soldiers stood about the gate, asking questions, going through a pack or a chest, poking half-hearted at a cart with their spear-butts.