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Javre slowly worked her bare shoulders. They reminded Shev of the Amazing Zaraquon’s, too, woody hard and split into a hundred little fluttering shreds of muscle. ‘I will ask you once to put the dark-skinned girl down and leave.’ Crandall snorted. ‘And if we don’t?’ That one eye narrowed slightly. ‘Then long after we are gone to the Goddess, the grandchildren of the grandchildren of those who witness will whisper fearful stories of the way I broke you.’
Javre looked over at the one with his hands rammed in his pockets, whose mouth had just dropped open. ‘No need to feel embarrassed,’ she said. ‘If I had a cock I would play with it all the time, too.’
There’s no style of contempt like the stuff one kind of savage has for another, Craw guessed.
‘We got a backup plan?’ asked Wonderful. ‘In case the impossible happens and things don’t work out quite according to the scheme?’
In hard times, soft thoughts can kill you quicker than the plague.
Whirrun had hardly moved, the Father of Swords still gripped in his fist, long, dull blade pointing to the ground. Only now he was spotted and spattered head to toe in blood, and the twisted and hacked, split and ruined corpses of the dozen Fox Clan who’d faced him were scattered around his boots in a wide half-circle, a few bits that used to be attached to them scattered wider still. ‘He killed the whole lot.’ Brack’s face was all crinkled up with confusion. ‘Just like that. I never even lifted my hammer.’
Wonderful was hardly out of breath. ‘By the dead, the state o’ you fat old men.’ She slapped Never on the arm. ‘That was some nice work down there at the village. Thought they’d catch you and skin you sure.’ ‘You hoped, you mean,’ said Never, ‘but you should’ve known better. I’m the best damn runner-away in the North.’ ‘That is a fact.’
‘It is the least I could do. You have been a fine sidekick so far.’ ‘I thought this was an equal partnership.’ ‘All the best sidekicks think that,’ said Javre, striding towards the front door of the Weeping Slaver, its sign hanging precariously from a rusting pole by one loop.
Times like these reveal a man for what he truly is. For a while Temple had convinced himself he was a righteous man, but it is easy to be virtuous before your virtue is put to the test. Like a camel turd baked in the sun, beneath the pious crust he was the same stinking, self-serving coward he had always been.
Kahdia once told him he thought too much to be a good man.
‘But it is easy to speak of the past, impossible to go there.
‘If you have to tell someone you are furious, and then, furthermore, that you mean it, your fury has failed to achieve its desired effect.’
A bowstring went. It was that boy with the wobbly hands, looking as surprised he’d let fly as anyone. Whirrun caught the arrow. Just snatched it from the air, neat as you like.
But the sad fact was, only the winners got to regret what they did in a fight,
‘Bastards,’ Shy whispered, cursing the day she ever took up with them. But you have to take up with someone, don’t you? And you can only pick from what’s on offer.
Ain’t many blessings aren’t mixed blessings once you have to live with them,
Takes a lifetime of hard work to make a man. Only takes a few moments to end one.
There’s war for you. You start with something worth something, you end up with slop.
Put a few men with swords together, even men with usually pleasant manners, and it’s never long before they’re all acting like animals.
It was like old Threetrees always said–a sword’s a shitty thing to give a man. Shitty for him, and shitty for everyone around him.
He might not be the fighter he once was, and he might never have been the hardest, but a man’s no man who won’t die for his children.
Surprise is like virginity. You only get the one chance at using it, and that normally turns out a crushing disappointment.
Gorst sighed. What difference does it really make, anyway? Would he be any less dead if it had been a Northern sword that split his head?
Folk stood united precisely as long as it suited them, in her experience, and not one instant longer.
If you want to be a fine new person with a fine new life you’ve got to put the person you were behind you, like a snake sheds its skin. You’ve got to stop picking through your hoard of hurts and grievances like a miser through his coins, set ’em down and allow yourself to go free. You’ve got to forgive and you’ve got to trust, not because anyone else deserves it, but because you do.
There’s always a worse case than your worst case, and more often than not, it happens.
‘There’s a certain spot …’ muttered Tunny, pipe waggling between his teeth, ‘between too drunk and not drunk enough …’ as he scooped up scattered winnings in a dozen different currencies, ‘where I’m a hell of a card player. The trick, as with so much in life, is keeping the balance just right.’
A good thief goes unseen. A truly great one merely goes unnoticed.
‘You will simply steal it?’ ‘The one upside of being a thief,’ Shev muttered through tight lips, ‘is that you can make free with things that don’t belong to you. It’s practically a requirement of the job.’
‘You are more or less the only friend I have not been obliged to kill. I am concerned for your welfare.’
‘When you have only one choice, there is no purpose waiting to make it. I accept.’
‘If I die, drowned in some bog, or spitted by some guard, or roasted by some wizard’s Art, well, it will be some consolation to know that my partner lived to be old and shrivelled, still telling tall tales of our high adventures together.’
She tried to smile but her sight was swimming. ‘It’s been something, though, hasn’t it?’ ‘It has,’ said Javre, glancing over to Carcolf. ‘Look after her.’ Carcolf swallowed. ‘I’ll try.’ ‘Fail, and there will be no place in the Circle of the World where you will be safe from me.’ She laid that great, heavy, comforting hand on Shev’s shoulder one more time. ‘Fare you well, my friend.’ And she turned away, towards her mother. ‘Fare you well,’ whispered Shev, wiping her eyes.
You’ve got to be realistic, that old Northman on the farm near Squaredeal used to tell her.
Be generous with your own people, she had always said, or others will be.
‘Did you see two Northmen drinking on your way in?’ ‘I saw two Northmen. One was reading a book.’ ‘Really? A book?’ Friendly shrugged. ‘There are readers everywhere.’
‘I have to confess,’ he said, clearing his throat and spitting, ‘to being somewhat on the drunk side of drunk.’
The other one shoved his bearded face in the gap, a wicked-looking knife in his hand, not that someone you just robbed ever has a nice-looking knife.
It’s a hard rain don’t wash someone a favour,
The woman didn’t snigger. ‘It is a parcel, wrapped in leather, about …’ She held up one big hand, thumb and forefinger stretched out. ‘Five times the length of your cock.’ If she knew about the luggage, she was trouble. And Fallow had no sense of humour about his cock, to which none of the ointments had made the slightest difference. He stopped grinning. ‘Kill her.’
‘That was with one hand.’ She held up the other big fist, and had produced from somewhere a sheathed sword, gold glittering on the hilt. ‘Next I draw this sword, forged in the Old Time from the metal of a fallen star. Only six living people have seen the blade. You would find it extremely beautiful. Then I would kill you with it.’
‘I work for Kurrikan!’ he gasped. ‘I am new in town. Names work no magic on me.’
‘To find me, you need only ask for Javre.’ She leaned over him, breath tickling at his ear. ‘It is once you find me that your difficulties begin.
‘Could you be any more pompous?’ ‘It would require an effort.’
Scale hit him on the side of the head and knocked him over, thus demonstrating the limits of cleverness.
‘Now go, and if I hear of more fighting, let it be of how the two of you beat someone else together.’
Men without fear are men without imagination. Men who use their heads for smashing through things rather than thinking. They celebrate spiteful, prideful, wrathful men here, and pick the most childish of the crowd for leaders.’
Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he looks on the sunny side o’ the case.’
Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s a fighter, but a fuck just soothes all those—’
‘Before you make a man into mud, make sure he’s no use to you alive. Some men will smash a thing just because they can. They’re too stupid to see that nothing shows more power than mercy.’
