Blood For Wages

17: A Piss-Up or a Brawl

Boni Woe and the rest of Gunn's crew attacked the following day, a few hours after Fia's company had broken camp, having waited just long enough for the skittish and jaded riders to let down their guard.

It was a pearler of a morning. A few insubstantial clouds hung in a brittle sky the colour of glacial ice. A stiff breeze brought with it the sharp, almost painfully cutting scent of fresh snow from the far north.

They crossed the dry riverbed, trotted across it quickly, without seeing so much as a single leg of a single spider.

"Where'd they go?" Darach Lees asked weakly. He was looking a little green around the gills and had refused so much as a strip of dried venison when they'd broken their fast. By the time Fia and Gunn had returned to the fire the night before, Lees had already blitzed through the stage of being a jovial drunk, bypassed snot-slinging pissed altogether, and passed clean out.

"Burrows," Fia said. She wasn't feeling particularly fresh herself.

Lees eyed the riverbed with loathing and clicked his tongue at his horse so that it hurried along the quicker. He must've had a hell of a morning head on him, Fia thought, because as he rode briskly past Gunn, who was whistling tunelessly, he said, "It's nice that you're in a rare good humour this morning, but if you can't carry a tune, Gunn, then how's about quitting the whistling for the sake of the rest of us?"

Fia heard the grin in Gunn's voice when he replied."I can carry it just fine, it's when I try to unload it that it gives me trouble, friend."

He carried on his whistling, giving Fia a sideways look as he pulled his coat closer about him.

Fia kept her face blank, but on the inside she couldn't suppress a warm tickle as Gunn's grey eyes fell on her.

What the bloody hell are you doing, Fia? part of her mind asked her.

She had no real answer, but her heart told her that she might very well be drawing close to the end of her life. She couldn't imagine that Redmond would take her in with open arms, not after he'd already tried to have her quietly murdered in the Foldwood. Not when he was so obviously in up to his eyebrows with the Imperator. Her mother, if she still lived, might want to see her even after she'd run away, but Redmond might make that impossible. Her half-brother's plan, the deal he had made with the Imperator, would be a lot less complicated to honour once she was out of the picture and floating face down in some bog, or being picked at and nosed through by wolves on an open hillside somewhere.

That realisation, that she might very well be marching on to meet her own death, was a confronting one, certainly, but it was also extremely liberating. An impending grisly demise at the hands of a family member sure couldn't be beat, as far as ways to whittle down the list of things you gave a shit about went.

She looked over at Gunn, who was riding slightly ahead of her. Eyed his rugged profile; the crow's foot in the corner of his eye, the silver shot beard, the grim mouth. Yeah, looming death certainly took the care out of choosing who she fucked, that was for sure.

Fia's sixth sense was still pulling at her, but it had settled down now—less like having the world digging its heels into the flanks of her mind, more like being urged on with an apple and a soothing word. It was as if the land knew that she had resigned herself to the fate that had been lying in wait for her all these years. Ever since she had watched Arlen cough out his ghost. And the land was glad at the rightness of it.

They rode through the tumbled grasslands, while around them the hills began to swell once more out of the wild waving meadows of cudweed, sword-grass and honeygorse. The plains breathed around them. High up, riding the thermals, hawks and wedge-tailed eagles looked for the unwary to kill.