“That’s right. I had a brother.” He started to turn for the door.
“You need more work?” She kept her eyes fixed on his as she came forwards, and while she did it she slid her good hand around behind her back and found the handle of the knife there. He knew her name, and Orso’s, and Sajaam’s, and that was enough to get them all killed ten times over. One way or another, he had to stay.
“More work like this?” He frowned down at the bloodstained sawdust under her boots.
“Killing. You can say it.” She thought about whether to stab him down into the chest or up under the jaw, or wait until he’d turned and take his back. “What did you think it’d be? Milking a goat?”
He shook his head, long hair swaying. “Might sound foolish to you, but I came here to be a better man. You got your reasons, sure, but this feels like a bastard of a stride in the wrong direction.”
“Six more men.”
“No. No. I’m done.” As if he was trying to convince himself. “I don’t care how much-”
“Five thousand scales.”
His mouth was already open to say no again, but this time the word didn’t come. He stared at her. Shocked at first, then thoughtful. Working out how much money that really was. What it might buy him. Monza had always had a knack for reckoning a man’s price. Every man has one.
She took a step forwards, looking up into his face. “You’re a good man, I see that, and a hard man too. That’s the kind of man I need.” She let her eyes flick down to his mouth, and then back up. “Help me. I need your help, and you need my money. Five thousand scales. Lot easier to be a better man with that much money behind you. Help me. I daresay you could buy half the North with that. Make a king of yourself.”
“Who says I want to be a king?”
“Be a queen, if you please. I can tell you what you won’t be doing, though.” She leaned in, so close she was almost breathing on his neck. “Begging for work. You ask me, it’s not right, a proud man like you in that state. Still.” And she looked away. “I can’t force you.”
He stood there, weighing the purse. But she’d already taken her hand off her knife. She already knew his answer. Money is a different thing to every man, Bialoveld wrote, but always a good thing.
When he looked up his face had turned hard. “Who do we kill?”
The time was she’d have smirked sideways to see Benna smirking back at her. We won again. But Benna was dead, and Monza’s thoughts were on the next man to join him. “A banker.”
“A what?”
“A man who counts money.”
“He makes money counting money?”
“That’s right.”
“Some strange fashions you folk have down here. What did he do?”
“He killed my brother.”
“More vengeance, eh?”
“More vengeance.”
Shivers gave a nod. “Reckon I’m hired, then. What do you need?”
“Give Friendly a hand taking out the rubbish, then we’re gone tonight. No point loitering in Talins.”
Shivers looked towards the anvil, and he took a sharp breath. Then he pulled out the knife she’d given him, walked over to where Friendly was starting work on Gobba’s corpse.
Monza looked down at her left hand, rubbed a few specks of blood from the back. Her fingers were trembling some. From killing a man earlier, from not killing one just now, or from needing a smoke, she wasn’t sure.
All three, maybe.
II
WESTPORT
“Men become accustomed to poison by degrees”.
The first year they were always hungry, and Benna had to beg in the village while Monza worked the ground and scavenged in the woods.
The second year they took a better harvest, and grew roots in a patch by the barn, and got some bread from old Destort the miller when the snows swept in and turned the valley into a place of white silence.
The third year the weather was fine, and the rain came on time, and Monza raised a good crop in the upper field. As good a crop as her father had ever brought in. Prices were high because of troubles over the border. They would have money, and the roof could be mended, and Benna could have a proper shirt. Monza watched the wind make waves in the wheat, and she felt that pride at having made something with her own hands. That pride her father used to talk about.
A few days before reaping time, she woke in the darkness and heard sounds. She shook Benna from his sleep beside her, one hand over his mouth. She took her father’s sword, eased open the shutters, and together they stole through the window and into the woods, hid in the brambles behind a tree-trunk.
There were black figures in front of the house, torches flickering in the darkness.
“Who are they?”
“Shhhh.”
She heard them break the door down, heard them crashing through the house and the barn.
“What do they want?”
“Shhhh.”
They spread out around the field and set their torches to it, and the fire ate through the wheat until it was a roaring blaze. She heard someone cheering. Another laughing.
Benna stared, face dim-lit with shifting orange, tear-tracks glistening on his thin cheeks. “But why would they… why would they…?”
“Shhhh.”
Monza watched the smoke rolling up into the clear night. All her work. All her sweat and pain. She stayed there long after the men had gone, and watched it burn.
In the morning more men came. Folk from around the valley, hard-faced and vengeful, old Destort at their head with a sword at his hip and his three sons behind him.
“Came through here too then, did they? You’re lucky to be alive. They killed Crevi and his wife, up the valley. Their son too.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to track them, then we’re going to hang them.”
“We’ll come.”
“You might be better-”
“We’ll come.”
Destort had not always been a miller, and he knew his business. They caught up with the raiders the next night, working their way back south, camped around fires in the woods without even a proper guard. More thieves than soldiers. Farmers among them too, just from one side of the border rather than the other, chosen to settle some made-up grievance while their lords were busy settling theirs.
“Anyone ain’t ready to kill best stay here.” Destort drew his sword and the others made their cleavers, and their axes, and their makeshift spears ready.
“Wait!” hissed Benna, clinging at Monza’s arm.
“No.”
She ran quiet and low, her father’s sword in her hand, fires dancing through the black trees. She heard a cry, a clash of metal, the sound of a bowstring.
