“No!” She swallowed. “No. I still need your help.”
“Standing up and facing a man, that’s one thing… but this-”
“The rest will be different. I’ll see to it.”
“Nice, clean murders? I doubt it. You set your mind to killing, it’s hard to pick the number of the dead.” Shivers slowly shook his head. “Morveer and his fucking like might be able to step away from it and smile, but I can’t.”
“So what?” She walked slowly to him, the way you might walk to a skittish horse, trying to stop it bolting with your eyes. “Back to the North with fifty scales for the journey? Grow your hair and go back to bad shirts and blood on the snow? I thought you had pride. I thought you wanted to be better than that.”
“That’s right. I wanted to be better.”
“You can be. Stick. Who knows? Maybe you can save some lives, that way.” She laid her left hand gently on his chest. “Steer me down the righteous path. Then you can be good and rich at once.”
“I’m starting to doubt a man can be both.”
“Help me. I have to do this… for my brother.”
“You sure? The dead are past helping. Vengeance is for you.”
“For me then!” She forced her voice to drop soft again. “There’s nothing I can do to change your mind?”
His mouth twisted. “Going to toss me another five, are you?”
“I shouldn’t have done that.” She slid her hand up, traced the line of his jaw, trying to judge the right words, pitch the right bargain. “You didn’t deserve it. I lost my brother, and he’s all I had. I don’t want to lose someone else…” She let it hang in the air.
There was a strange look in Shivers’ eye, now. Part angry, part hungry, part ashamed. He stood there silent for a long moment, and she felt the muscles clenching and unclenching on the side of his face.
“Ten thousand,” he said.
“Six.”
“Eight.”
“Done.” She let her hand fall, and they stared at each other. “Get packed, we leave within the hour.”
“Right.” He slunk guiltily out of the door without meeting her eye and left her there, alone.
And that was the trouble with good men. Just so damned expensive.
III
SIPANI
“The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness”.
Not two weeks later, men came over the border looking to even the tally, and they hanged old Destort and his wife, and burned the mill. A week after that his sons set out for vengeance, and Monza took down her father’s sword and went with them, Benna snivelling along behind. She was glad to go. She had lost the taste for farming.
They left the valley to settle a score, and for two years they did not stop. Others joined them, men who had lost their work, their farms, their families. Before too long it was them burning crops, breaking into farmhouses, taking what they could find. Before too long it was them doing the hangings. Benna grew up quickly, and sharpened to a merciless edge. What other choice? They avenged killings, then thefts, then slights, then the rumours of slights. There was war, so there was never any shortage of wrongs to avenge.
Then, at the end of summer, Talins and Musselia made peace with nothing gained on either side but corpses. A man with a gold-edged cloak rode into the valley with soldiers behind him and forbade reprisals. Destort’s sons and the rest split up, took their spoils with them, went back to what they had been doing before the madness started or found new madness to take a hand in. By then, Monza’s taste for farming had grown back.
They made it as far as the village.
A vision of martial splendour stood at the edge of the broken fountain in a breastplate of shining steel, a sword hilt set with glinting gemstones at his hip. Half the valley had gathered to listen to him speak.
“My name is Nicomo Cosca, captain of the Company of the Sun-a noble brotherhood fighting with the Thousand Swords, greatest mercenary brigade in Styria! We have a Paper of Engagement from the young Duke Rogont of Ospria and are looking for men! Men with experience of war, men with courage, men with a love of adventure and a taste for money! Are any of you sick of grubbing in the mud for a living? Do any of you hope for something better? For honour? For glory? For riches? Join us!”
“We could do that,” Benna hissed.
“No,” said Monza, “I’m done with fighting.”
“There will be little fighting!” shouted Cosca, as if he could guess her thoughts. “That I promise you! And what there is you will be well paid for thrice over! A scale a week, plus shares of booty! And there will be plenty of booty, lads, believe me! Our cause is just… or just enough, and victory is a certainty.”
“We could do that!” hissed Benna. “You want to go back to tossing mud? Broken down tired every night and dirt under your fingernails? I won’t!”
Monza thought of the work she would have just to clear the upper field, and how much she might make from doing it. A line had formed of men keen to join the Company of the Sun, beggars and farmers mostly. A black- skinned notary took their names down in a ledger.
Monza shoved past them.
“I am Monzcarro Murcatto, daughter of Jappo Murcatto, and this is my brother Benna, and we are fighters. Can you find work for us in your company?”
Cosca frowned at her, and the black-skinned man shook his head. “We need men with experience of war. Not women and boys.” He tried to move her away with his arm.
She would not be moved. “We’ve experience. More than these scrapings.”
“I’ve work for you,” said one of the farmers, made bold by signing his mark on the paper. “How about you suck my cock?” He laughed at that. Until Monza knocked him down in the mud and made him swallow half his teeth with the heel of her boot.
Nicomo Cosca watched this methodical display with one eyebrow slightly raised. “Sajaam, the Paper of Engagement. Does it specify men, exactly? What is the wording?”
The notary squinted at a document. “Two hundred cavalry and two hundred infantry, those to be persons well equipped and of quality. Persons is all it says.”
“And quality is such a vague term. You, girl! Murcatto! You are hired, and your brother too. Make your marks.”
She did so, and so did Benna, and as simply as that they were soldiers of the Thousand Swords. Mercenaries. The farmer clutched at Monza’s leg.
“My teeth.”
“Pick through your shit for them,” she said.
Nicomo Cosca, famed soldier of fortune, led his new hirings from the village to the sound of a merry pipe, and they camped under the stars that night, gathered round fires in the darkness, talking of making it rich in the coming campaign.
Monza and Benna huddled together with their blanket around their shoulders. Cosca came out of the murk, firelight glinting on his breastplate. “Ah! My war-children! My lucky mascots! Cold, eh?” He swept his crimson cloak off and tossed it down to them. “Take this. Might keep the frost from your bones.”
“What d’you want for it?”
“Take it with my compliments, I have another.”
