Page 1 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

PART IMountain and Book

1The Flayed Bear

I hated to interrupt the two women skinning the bear. Well, one was skinning it, angrily, as if it had maybe once been her husband. She was on the bit where you untuck the hood from the head, like helping a drunk off with his dirty shirt, and she muttered to herself as she went. The other one was about as drunk as you could be and stay in a chair. She was skinny, was the drunkie, her one arsebone hanging off so much you had to guess the other was caught on a nail. She was on the chair, but you couldn’t call her sitting on it, any more than you could call this place a village, though people lived in it and they sold things. The muttery bear-skinner and the teetery chair-user occupied the weedy yard of something that might have been a store, an inn, the worst whorehouse ever, or a place to buy a donkey. Probably three of those four. Anyway, there was a donkey. He seemed the friendliest of the bunch.

I didn’t even know what language to use on these old girls.

There was no writing of any kind on the inn-shop-prostidonkery.

Probably they still spoke Gunnish since we were standing on the wildest and westernmost patch of Oustrim before the Thrall Mountains started and countries ended, but we were well into hill country now, and the people of hill and mountain may have very different ways than their neighbors in a flatter place. These hill women were looking at me now, the one just holding two fistfuls of bearskin.

“Ask them,” Galva said.

I cut her a look. What the fuck else was I going to do?

I said something in Gunnish that was either excuse me or it was my fault.

Bear lady blinked once in impatience. Right, I already had their attention, why the preamble. I tried to say, How much for the donkey? She squinted at me the way you squint at idiots in every kingdom and repeated the word I had thought was donkey, lifting her chin in what must have been a kind of shrug. I’d clearly used a nonword, or the wrong word. I nodded at the donkey and held up a Molrovan scale—a square silver coin from the next country over, worth a bit less than a Holtish shilling or a Gallardian owlet. I doubted she’d know it so far from the other border, but silver was silver. It wouldn’t fetch a donkey in a city, but maybe all the way out here? She looked at it, turned it in my hand so she could see how thick it was. She looked at the chair-leaner, whose eyes had glazed over, then looked at me. Wiped her snotty nose, pointed at the coin, then held up four fingers.

Four scales she wanted.

Country manners, city prices.

I glanced at Galva, but she just stood there looking killy. She didn’t give a soupy kark about the money, but that’s how it is when you’re a duke’s daughter and worship death besides. The donkey was just the first of many things we’d need to make it over the Thrall Mountains, and our money, like all money, was finite—no matter who Galva’s father was in sunny Ispanthia, about as far away as you could get from this cold, hilly nowhere. I held up three fingers. The good woman’s response was just to finish pulling the head-pelt off the bear, which was answer enough. Now she started in cutting the purply-gray muscles of the flayed beast for meat. I had ceased existing. I’m actually a good negotiator when I can talk, but my country of Holt, while no warmer than here, was nearly as far east as Ispanthia.

“Fine. Four scales. I’ll take the donkey. But only if he knows jokes. I hate a boring companion.”

I made a point of not looking at Galva.

The name of the village was Hredlangessfir, or Hredlangessfal, if you’re planning on visiting, but I wouldn’t recommend it—unless you, too, are running from the Takers Guild with their rotten-precious book and have to undertake a suicidal mountain crossing to keep out of their clutches. Headlongasfuck is just not a civilized place. I mean, they do have one glassblower selling a few crude bottles and flasks, but that’s the peak of culture. Standing in the middle of the road that separates the filthy huts down the rocky hill from the merely shabby ones higher up sits a flattish common space with a well, a group of mud-colored dogs not quite chummy enough to call a pack, a blacksmith’s hut, very old men and women with white-blond hair and skin like they’d been hung and smoked, trading stalls packed with furs and tools and leathers, and a public punishment of some kind.

Today’s victim was a shirtless woman with her dugs out, standing with a bowl balanced on her head and her arms tied to a yoke. Two pinch-faced blond boys threw clots of goat shit at her at irregular intervals, but with no real enthusiasm. She didn’t seem much bothered about it either. When we walked past her, I saw that a word had been written on her bare back. Othbleddr. Adulteress. I tried not to laugh. Not at her predicament, but that this shyte town still had enough old men to enforce shyte laws on female fidelity. In most of Manreach, the men all got ground up by goblins in the Threshers’ War, but out here in the sticks, they must have missed the musters. So women hopping the wrong fence get the yoke and goat shit while straying husbands likely get a finger wag and a funny story to tell over a pint of fermented ewe milk or whatever they poison themselves with in this dump.

Maybe war’s not all bad.

I saw what looked like a larger, less shabby house of posed stones where a crudely lettered sign said a room and a bath could be had there. An inn, then. Of sorts. However likely to topple the house looked, and however mean and small the eyes of the paunchy woman carving I don’t know what shape out of some foreign wood, I knew Galva would steer that way when I told her what the sign said, hoping for her last hot soak before the mountains. And there wasn’t really anyplace else to stay, was there? The woman saw us looking and managed something like a smile with fewer teeth than you’d want to eat tough mutton.

“Come on, donkey,” I said. “One last night in something like a bed for me, a snootful of oats for you, and our Ispanthian friend can wash her bits like she’s a’ ganny to.”

“What is this word, ganny?”

“A’ ganny. It’s ready, but with a dash of eagerness. Like game.”

“If you were a’ ganny to wash more often, I would not complain of this.”

“Good! Yah, but then we’re down to who bathes first while the water’s hot and clean. Unless you’re a’ ganny to share.”

She selected from her arsenal of grunts one that conveyed annoyance and also suggested that corporal punishment wasn’t entirely out of the question.

I didn’t want to climb in a tub with her any more than with a wet tree-cat, but the gods made surly Ispanthians for those of us who can’t afford clowns.

Night.

I woke from a bad dream.

I was adrift on a rowboat, like the ones you’d hunt a whale from. I could see land, but I’d need oars to get there. Happy news! I saw a pair of oars at the bow of the boat, just a few yards away. But I wasn’t alone on the boat. I shared it with a naked woman. Great dream, right? Well, so you’d think, but this was no ordinary woman. This one was a Guild Assassin-Adept, wearing magical tattoos from feet to crown. You’ll remember her from the last time we spoke; Sesta, the one who turned her arms to iron and battered us near to death in a cave near Hrava. Well, in this dream, she was Sesta but also not her. This one was part snake and had no arms, just writhing snakelike on the boat. Perfect, you’re thinking, just step over her and get the karking oars, maybe give her a wee swat with one, as you’d serve a snake. But not so fast! Like some Keshite hooded asps, this critter could spit poison. Every time I’d try to get past her, she’d spit in my eyes and I’d go blind for a moment. It was a frustrating fucking dream, so I decided she could have the boat and much joy may it give her.

I woke up confused, as those who travel too much often do, trying to rub poison out of my eyes.