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August 26 - September 15, 2025
“King Orso!” Jappo Murcatto reclined on a velvet daybed in a mask sculpted like spread eagle’s wings and a Gurkish robe that left nothing to the imagination. “It is a great pleasure to make your acquaintance!” “The pleasure is mine,” said Orso, in Styrian, giving the kind of sweeping bow his mother had always told him was popular in Talins. “How often, after all, do two kings get to chat? It’s rather refreshing, being able to speak to someone on an equal footing.” And he took his mask off and tossed it on a side table, then dropped down in a chair and poured himself a glass of wine. Jappo
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“Honestly, I’d rather put it all behind me. What’s the point in having new generations if all we do is pick up the feuds of the old one?”
“Enemies are like furniture, aren’t they? Better chosen for oneself than inherited.”
“Any names?” “Only two.” Orso pronounced them carefully, dropped into the silence like great stones dropped down a well. “Stour Nightfall… and Leo dan Brock.” The Arch Lector closed his eyes. Crushing news, especially for him, but Orso could have sworn he saw a wry smile at the corner of the old Inquisitor’s mouth. “Body found floating by the docks,” he murmured.
“Inquisitor Teufel.” Glokta smiled up, showing the yawning gap in his front teeth. “Thank you for coming.” It only occurred to her then that she could’ve stayed away. Could’ve ignored him. But obedience can be a hard habit to break. Ask any dog.
“I have often said that life is the misery we endure between disappointments. Whatever the reasons, you have never once disappointed me. I wish I had been so reliable in return, but I fear I have let you down. I know how much you want to be… need to be… loyal.”
“Everyone should forgive themselves, Vick.” He gave her wrist another squeeze then let her go, looking out towards the lake again. “After all… no one else will.”
“They’re late,” grunted Sarlby. Broad turned to look at him, the glint of moonlight in the corners of his sunken eyes and on the edges of his loaded flatbow. “Coming to something when you can’t rely on folk to come timely to their own ambush.”
“Huh,” grunted the girl, walking up to Rikke. “You’re younger’n I thought you’d be.” “Give it time,” said Rikke. “I’ll get older.”
No one mentioned the one thing about rainbows that came at once to Clover—you can march at ’em for ever but you’ll never actually reach the bastards.
Calder gave a disgusted sigh as he watched the King of the Northmen swagger towards the steps. “The dead save me from the fucking young.”
“You don’t plan…” Hoff looked pale. “To fight, Your Majesty?” “Bloody hell, no. But I plan to damn well look like I might.”
“No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Helmuth von Moltke
“Are Stour’s men ready?” asked Leo, in Northern. Greenway’s grin was almost a leer. “Oh, we’re always up for a fight.” Jin frowned sideways at him. “He didn’t ask you to measure your cock. He asked if Stour’s men are ready.”
The Nail shook his head, blade flashing as he worked that dagger back and forth. “I knew you were a bad enemy to have.” He looked up at her from under his pale brows, his pale lashes. A long, slow look, just taking it all in. “Now I’m wondering if you might be a bad friend to have and all.”
“In war, you seize all the high ground you can.” He lifted the egg to his lips, looking small between his big finger and thumb. “Except the moral kind.” And he sucked the insides out through the hole. “That ain’t worth shit.”
Here was a sad lesson. You can talk fine words till your tongue bleeds and never get a favour. Cut one throat and everyone’s falling over themselves to be helpful.
Orso grinned at them, too. Grins were free, after all. “Are there any small Northmen? I’ve never seen one!” “We keep ’em at the back,” growled Jin.
“I was expecting something… harsher,” said Vick. “From your reputation.” “I find reputations rarely fit people all that well. What are they, after all, but costumes we put on to disguise ourselves?”
I like to tell myself that every life I have taken has saved five more. Fifty more, perhaps. Not everyone has the stomach for that kind of arithmetic.”
I was a quartermaster in my inglorious youth, and I can tell you for a fact that armies run on details. Without the keystones, those bridges come apart. Without the bridges, their whole plan comes apart. So much of failure is a failure to consider the details.”
“I’ve fought in five sieges and three pitched battles,” said Broad. “Never saw one yet where I had a clue what was happening.”
Antaup, you dog! How do you do it? Easy when you made it up. And a lot more fun than having to actually persuade women to take you to bed. He’d no patience with women at all.
The best you could do was play a long con and act as if you had them. Never show fear. Never show doubt. Command was a trick. You had to spread the illusion that you knew what you were doing as deep and as wide through your men as you could. Spread the illusion and hope for the best.
“Finish it.” The words tasted like blood. Did he catch a mocking flash of gold, high above, as the smoke shifted? The Steadfast Standard? A last glimpse of glory? Gorst glanced from Leo to Jin, to Antaup, to the rest of the corpses. “It’s already over,” he said, in that little girl’s voice. “It couldn’t be more over.”
The Nail didn’t shift a hair. He was one of those rare men goes beyond bravery to a kind of madness where there’s no regard for danger at all. He just watched whatever it was plummet down, hands on hips, and didn’t even flinch as it crashed into the cobbles a stride or two in front, spotting him with blood.
“Maybe’s a game with no winners.” Shivers turned that ring on his little finger thoughtfully around. “I let go o’ my regrets. You’ll swim better without their weight.”
It was terribly unfair on her, when you thought about it, that she had lost everything because of who her mother fucked, by definition some time before she was born.
Savine gave a disbelieving snort. “Can you really still believe in God? That this is all part of some grand plan? That it means something?” “What is the alternative?” Zuri looked at her, eyes wide. “To believe that it means nothing?”
One young man with broken eye-lenses started to make a speech on the deficiencies of monarchy, maybe hoping to bore a pardon from the king. Orso cut him off after a minute or two with a curt, “If you wanted to change the world you should have won.”
