Between Two Fires

by Christopher Buehlman

At just that moment, the seigneur noticed that the hurdy-gurdy player had stopped playing to watch the standoff. He grabbed the little man’s closest arm, dragged him to the table, and, in three nauseating blows, broke his hand against it with a heavy pewter mug. The musician screamed and ran off, dropping his hurdy-gurdy, which broke as well.

Messed up

slightly in salute to her, which she answered by dipping her thumb into a monkey’s head and putting that thumb into her mouth. Thomas saw her tongue flicker for just a moment and knew that the wound he got in St. Martin-le-Preux was completely healed. “I think the lord’s daughter likes you,” said the man next to Thomas.

Bruh

The room smelled like hot cunt and red wine vomit.

XD

And God had stopped the fountain of His love. And it was said that He had gone to make a new world and new angels and new men. And the walls of Heaven would fall. And all these now struggling above and below would perish.

Please don’t let them die because of me, God. And now the rain fell, and fell, and fell.

TnT

“That explains it, then,” he said. “They tell priests stories about how bad women are so they won’t fuck them.”

XD

between two fires to burn off pestilential air,

In the end his head was reeling, he was spent, dry-mouthed from spitting in his hand, and he lay in his shame and guilt until the small hours of the morning.

Bruh

This pestilence cooked away pretense and showed people’s souls, as surely as it eventually showed their bones.

The most puzzling thing for him was his own reaction to the newfound, though seemingly platonic intimacy between his companions; Père Matthieu was jealous.

Awww poor bugger

“There are no bad babies,” she said. “They don’t know any better.” “Sounds like you’ve never met a baby. Many of them are awful. I knew one in Picardy who stole his father’s money and crawled down the road to the whorehouse. “

Had my dying

who did her best to take exactly one third of it. He shared the rest with Thomas, who said, “How can you stuff yourself so? Aren’t you full of shit and cabbage stew?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But don’t you see? This is the one thing I can do as well as anyone else. I can’t plow. I can’t build. But I can suffer. God wants suffering now.”

the Lord were they that they could not quicken any new thing,

There is a lot of mistakes in this book.

“She was tempted by something stronger than her. Adam was tempted by a weaker creature. Or so we are told. If Eve was his inferior, his sin was greater. You can’t have it both ways.”

It was this song, more than any other, that made him want to travel with his lute; it was this one he played to seduce the chestnut-haired girl whose pregnancy anchored him on this little patch of land forever.

TuT

Thomas would dig another grave and lay the old man in it without ever learning his name, though he knew the name of the wife, because it was to her the old man addressed his last words.

He breathed three more hard breaths, each one longer in coming, and then he stopped.

ToT

“If you open that case, I’ll bite your fucking thumbs off.”

None of them mistook his actions for cowardice. He had them. All of them. And they knew it.

They raged and bit at beings so calm, beautiful, and deliberate that it seemed they and the devils occupied two entirely different realities.

The six eyes