LITMIR.BIZ

       6

      Five years earlier

      Sunny and I made our way to the North Gate of Albaseat in the grey light that steals over the world before dawn. The streets thronged. In summer the Horse Coast bakes and only the earliest hours of the day offer respite. By noon the locals would retreat behind white walls, beneath the terracotta tiles, and sleep until the sun slipped from its zenith.

      In the lanes leading to the gate and the wide plaza that lay before it, business had already started. Tavern doors stood open while men bore kegs in upon their shoulders, or lowered barrels into the cellars by the street-traps. Grey-faced women emptied slops from buckets into the gutters. We passed a smithy open to the road so that passersby could see the hammering and quenching and be tempted to purchase what took such sweat and force to craft. A lad hunched at the forge, poking life back into fires banked overnight.

      ‘Oh, to be still abed.’ Sunny yanked his packhorse away from some tempting refuse.

      A cry turned us back toward the blacksmith’s. We had gone only a dozen steps beyond it. The smith’s boy lay in the street now. He pushed himself up from the flagstones, face grazed, shaking his head, unsteady. The smith paced out from his workshop and kicked the boy hard enough to lift him off the ground. The air left his lungs with a whuff. Under the dirt the boy’s hair looked fair, almost golden, rare this far south.

      ‘My money’s on the big fellow,’ I said. My brother Will had such hair.

      ‘He’s a big one, all right.’ Sunny nodded. The smith wore just a leather apron from shoulder to knee and leggings held up with rope. The muscle in his arms gleamed. Swinging a four-pound hammer from dawn till dusk will put a lot of meat on a man.

      The child lay on his back, one arm half-raised, too winded to groan, a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth. I thought he might be eight, maybe nine.

      ‘Do I have to kick every lesson into you?’ The smith didn’t yell but he had the voice of a man who speaks over the anvil. He drove his foot into the boy’s head, the force rolling him once. Blood on the smith’s boot now, and staining the boy’s hair.

      ‘Ah, hell.’ Sunny shook his head.

      We watched as the smith stepped in closer.

      ‘I should stop this,’ Sunny said, reluctance in every line of him. Something in the smith’s face put me in mind of Rike. Not a man to get in the way of.

      ‘Boys get kicked every day,’ I said. ‘Children die every day.’ Some have their heads broken against milestones.

      The smith loomed above the boy, who lay curled now as if hunched against the pain. The man drew back for another kick, then paused, reaching a decision. He lifted his boot to stamp the life out of the lad. I guessed he thought him past use, best to finish him off.

      ‘They don’t die every day with one of Earl Hansa’s guards watching. The Earl wouldn’t want this.’ But still Sunny didn’t move. Instead he shouted. ‘You, smith, stop!’

      The man paused, his heel a few inches above the side of the boy’s head.

      ‘I’ve picked up strays before and they both died,’ I said past a bitter taste. I saw blood in golden curls and felt the thorns’ tight hold. I learned this lesson young, a sharp lesson taught in blood and rain. The path to the empire gates lay at my back. A man diverted from that path by strays, burdened by others’ needs, would never sit upon the all-throne. Orrin of Arrow would save the children, but they would not save him.

      ‘He’s a street cur,’ the smith said. ‘Too stupid to learn. I’ve fed him for a month. Kept him under my roof. He’s mine to end.’ He brought his heel down hard, his weight upon it.

      A loud retort of leather on stone. The boy rolled clear but lacked the strength to get up. The smith roared a curse – it drowned my own – the burn that stretched across my face from chin to brow as if a red-hot hand had branded me, now burned again with the same pain that it first gave. I’ve been told that conscience speaks in a small voice at the back of the mind, clear to some, to others muffled and easy to ignore. I never heard that it burned across a man’s face in red agony. Still, pain or no pain, I don’t like to be led or to be pushed. Perhaps I selected Balky as a kindred spirit for I took direction as poorly, even from my own conscience on the rare occasions it made a bid for control.

      Sunny passed me, aimed for the smith. He hadn’t even drawn his sword.

      ‘I’ll buy him from you!’ I shouted. Sunny could come in handy and I guessed the smith would break his arms off before the idiot thought to reach for his blade.

      That made the smith stop in his tracks, Sunny too, with a sigh of relief, and it quieted the pain. The smith eyed the silver on my breastplate, the cut of my cloak, and thought perhaps that his satisfaction might be worth less than the contents of my coin pouch.

      ‘What’s your offer?’

      ‘A contest of your choosing. You win and I pay you this for the boy.’ I held a gold ducet before my face between index and middle finger. ‘Lose and you get nothing for him.’ I magicked the coin away.

      He had a good frown at that. The boy managed another roll and fetched up against the wall of the harness shop opposite.

      ‘Perhaps you think you can hold a hot iron longer than I can?’ I suggested.

      The frown deepened into crevasses topped by the black band of his brows. ‘Strength,’ he said. ‘Who can hold the anvil overhead the longest.’

      I glanced at the anvil a few yards back into the smithy. Perhaps two men of regular height might weigh as much. ‘Rules?’ I asked.

      ‘Rules? No rules!’ He laughed. He flexed an arm and muscle mounded on muscle. The Great Ronaldo would be impressed if Taproot’s circus ever made it to Albaseat. ‘Strength! That’s the rule.’

      ‘Show me how it’s done, then.’ I walked into the smithy. The glow of the forge fire and of two smoking lamps gave enough light to avoid the workbenches and various buckets. The place had a pleasing smell of char and iron and sweat. It reminded me of Norwood, of Mabberton, of a dozen other battles.

      The smith followed. I set a hand to his chest as he passed me. ‘Your name?’

      ‘Jonas.’

      He walked around the anvil. I glanced at the ceiling where tools hung from the beams. He would have just enough room. I would have plenty as he stood a hand taller than me.

      Sunny stepped up behind me.

      ‘The boy’s still alive, I take it? I’m not doing this for a corpse.’

      ‘He’s alive. Might be hurt bad.’

      Jonas crouched beside the anvil. He closed one big hand around the horn and set the heel of his other hand beneath the lip of the anvil’s face.

      ‘You’ve done this before.’ I gave him my grin.

      ‘Yes.’ He showed his teeth. ‘I can taste your gold already, boy.’

      He tensed, building for the explosion that would drive the ironwork upward. That’s when I hit him, with a hammer from the nearest bench. I struck the side of his head just by the eye. The noise wasn’t dissimilar from his boot hitting the child. The hammer came away bloody and Jonas pitched forward over his anvil.

      ‘What?’ Sunny asked, as if somehow he hadn’t seen it in the half-light.

      I shrugged. ‘No rules. You heard him.’

      We left them both lying in their blood. Whatever fire ate at my face I didn’t need another stray, and even if the boy could walk, taking him to the Iberico would be more cruel than another month in Jonas’s care. At least the boy was sitting up and looking about,

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