Best Served Cold

“A jest, of course,” he croaked, realising instantly that his conversational foray had suffered a spectacular misfire. Shivers exhaled long and slow. Murcatto curled her tongue sourly around one canine tooth. Day was frowning down at her bowl.

“I’ve taken more amusing punches in the face,” said Vitari.

“Poisoners’ humour.” Cosca glowered across the table, though the effect was somewhat spoiled by the rattling of his fork against his bowl as his right hand vibrated. “A lover of mine was murdered by poison. I have had nothing but disgust for your profession ever since. And all its members, naturally.”

“You can hardly expect me to take responsibility for the actions of every person in my line of work.” Morveer thought it best not to mention that he had, in fact, been personally responsible, having been hired by Grand Duchess Sefeline of Ospria to murder Nicomo Cosca some fourteen years before. It was becoming a matter of considerable annoyance that he had missed the mark and killed his mistress instead.

“I crush wasps whenever I find them, whether they have stung me or not. To my mind you people-if I can call you people-are all equally worthy of contempt. A poisoner is the filthiest kind of coward.”

“Second only to a drunkard!” returned Morveer with a suitable curling of his upper lip. “Such human refuse might almost evoke pity were they not so utterly repellent. No animal is more predictable. Like a befouled homing pigeon, the drunk returns ever to the bottle, unable to change. It is their one route of escape from the misery they leave in their wake. For them the sober world is so crowded with old failures and new fears that they suffocate in it. There is a true coward.” He raised his glass and took a long, self-satisfied gulp of wine. He was unused to drinking rapidly and felt, in fact, a powerful urge to vomit, but forced a queasy smile onto his face nonetheless.

Cosca’s thin hand clutched the table with a white-knuckled intensity as he watched Morveer swallow. “How little you understand me. I could stop drinking whenever I wish. In fact, I have already resolved to do so. I would prove it to you.” The mercenary held up one wildly flapping hand. “If I could just get half a glass to settle these damn palsies!”

The others laughed, the tension diffused, but Morveer caught the lethal glare on Cosca’s face. The old soak might have seemed harmless as a village dunce, but he had once been counted among the most dangerous men in Styria. It would have been folly to take such a man lightly, and Morveer was nobody’s fool. He was no longer the orphan child who had blubbered for his mother while they kicked him.

Caution first, each and every time.

– 

M onza sat still, said no more than she had to and ate less, gloved hand painfully clumsy with the knife. She left herself out, up here at the head of the table. The distance a general needs to keep from the soldiers, an employer from the hirelings, a wanted woman from everyone, if she’s got any sense. It wasn’t hard to do. She’d been keeping her distance for years and leaving Benna to do the talking, and the laughing, and be liked. A leader can’t afford to be liked. Especially not a woman. Shivers kept glancing up the table towards her, and she kept not meeting his eye. She’d let things slip in Westport, made herself look weak. She couldn’t let that happen again.

“The pair o’ you seem pretty familiar,” Shivers was saying now, eyes moving between her and Cosca. “Old friends, are you?”

“Family, rather!” The old mercenary waved his fork wildly enough to have someone’s eye out. “We fought side by side as noble members of the Thousand Swords, most famous mercenary brigade in the Circle of the World!” Monza frowned sideways at him. His old bloody stories were bringing back things done and choices made she’d sooner have left in the past. “We fought across Styria and back, while Sazine was captain general. Those were the days to be a mercenary! Before things started to get… complicated.”

Vitari snorted. “You mean bloody.”

“Different words for the same thing. People were richer back then, and scared more easily, and the walls were all lower. Then Sazine took an arrow in the arm, then lost the arm, then died, and I was voted to the captain general’s chair.” Cosca poked his stew around. “Burying that old wolf, I realised that fighting was too much hard work, and I, like most persons of quality, wished to do as little of it as possible.” He gave Monza a twitchy grin. “So we split the brigade in two.”

“You split the brigade in two.”

“I took one half, and Monzcarro and her brother Benna took the other, and we spread a rumour we’d had a falling out. We hired ourselves out to both sides of every argument we could find-and we found plenty-and… pretended to fight.”

“Pretended?” muttered Shivers.