More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Wonderful scratched at the long scar through her shaved-stubble hair. “No better offers. We’ve got to be like an old married couple who haven’t fucked for years, just argue.” “Me and my wife were like that, ’til she died.” Hardbread’s finger tapped at his drawn sword. “Miss her now, though.
It is easy to forget how much you have, when your eyes are always fixed on what you have not.
“Men and their playing at war, mmm?” She slapped Captain Hardrick on the shoulder with her gloves, hard enough to make him wince. “What silly, womanly nonsense, to try to save a life or two. Now I see it! We should be letting them drop like flies by the roadside, spreading fire and pestilence wherever possible and leaving their country a blasted wasteland. That will teach them the proper respect for the Union and its ways, I am sure! There’s soldiering!”
“Have you ever noticed that everyone’s an idiot but you?” She opened her eyes wide. “You see it too?”
“What should they be called? They are engines that produce fire, so… fire engines? No, silly. Death tubes? Names are so important, and I’ve never had the trick of them. Have you two any ideas?” “I liked death tubes…” muttered Denka.
“Don’t call her she. It’s a horse, not your wife.” Shallow patted the horse on the side of its face. “She’s better looking than your wife was.” “That’s rude and uncalled for.” “Sorry. What shall we do with… it, then?
“What? Did I learn to read Southerner in my sleep and not realise? How in the land of the dead should I know what the bloody matter of it is?” Shallow shrugged. “Fair point. It has the look of import, though.” “It do indeed have every appearance of significance.”
He cut someone down with his long steel, laid someone’s else’s head open with the corner of his shield, strap twisting in his hand, his face aching he was smiling so hard, every breath burning with joy. This is living! This is living! Well, not for them, but—
It was sublime. Like a scene from the tales he had read as a boy. Like that ridiculous painting in his father’s library of Harod the Great facing Ardlic of Keln. A meeting of champions! All gritted teeth and clenched buttocks! All glorious lives, glorious deaths and glorious… glory?
Tunny narrowed his eyes. A few hundred strides away, off to the north and east, figures were jogging across the fields, chinks of sunlight through the heavy clouds glinting on armour. The Northmen, presumably. And since no one appeared to be pursuing them, pulling back in their own time, and on their own terms. “Yah!” shrieked Yolk as he ran up, a war cry that could hardly have made a duck nervous. “Yah!” Leaning over the wall to poke away wildly with his sword. “Yah?” “No one here,” said Tunny, letting his own blade slowly fall.
