Page 52 of The Thrice-Bound Fool

She nodded. She was getting it. She saw that two of the carts were cages, one smaller, one larger. The smaller one held several people in it.

A complex thing happened on the Spanth’s face just then. First, she went pale, and she took on a hopeless look. But then, as fast as an octopus changes its color, a rage like I’d rarely seen came to her features.

“Galva, no,” I said. “I might talk our way out of this, I have an idea…”

“No mi metterun in dessa chodada hala.”

I understood that much.

They are not putting me in that fucking cage.

As it turns out, they were going to put her in that fucking cage, but not without cost, and not until a good bit later.

Things were about to get weird.

“Fuck me, I guess,” I said and nocked an arrow. “Thanks again, Fothannon!” And I went into the fight laughing, for what else was there to do?

“I am wanting you to know,” said a jolly Wostran outside my cage, looking down at me from the smelly heights of a camel, “that you fight good, good as any two I see who are not giant.”

This was the same fellow who had relieved me of my hard-won ring of Catfall. He didn’t keep these for himself, though—they went to his chieftain, who took them to a loot-wagon. This was roundish, faded yellow, and painted with birds very like the ones we had nearly been eaten by. I will note that he did not strip me of the half stone that Norrigal had given me in Edth, and I wondered whether it had been magicked so covetous eyes might not notice it or if it simply looked not worth a squirt of piss.

“Thanks, I guess,” I said to the fellow who had just praised our fighting, holding my badly bruised arm in my lap, glad it was more numb than painful. I was at once annoyed by this looming ham and glad for his shadow blocking the sun, from which the side bars of the cage provided skinny relief, though we did have a cloth over the top, which was useful at the day’s peak. I looked at this fellow’s great pillow-hat, still decorated with one of my arrows. These fuckers lean their heads into missiles with more talent than you’d believe, and this was why I had heard and then forgotten the term nodders used for Wostran soldiers. Wostrans had long ago developed their military culture against the cat-eating Albyed horse-archers of the Molrovan steppes, so small wonder that a fellow with a bow little impressed them. I had only pricked a camel, which I could see limping in front of us, but I had ornamented three hats, one of these twice.

Galva had been another matter.

They had tried to ring her in with catchpoles and clubbers, but she would find the weakest point in the circle, punch through it, then sprint at the cavalry and cause great harm.

She had disemboweled a camel; cut the toes off one slaver’s foot, boot and all; cut off one’s leg, one’s hand, and one’s head. And stabbed a catchpole-dam through the jaw besides. You could almost build a spare slaver from the parts she’d taken off. The girleen she’d jawed would likely live, but wouldn’t be saying any tongue twisters for a while. The head she’d cut had landed upside down on its big fucking hat, the fellow’s eyes rolling this way and that trying to make sense of his dimming, topsy-turvy world. I hope he at least appreciated the jump his killer had made to reach him, using her knee on the camel’s hide to boost her that extra bit. But maybe she’d put a bit too much into that leap, for it was in landing that she’d been catchpoled around first a leg and then her neck. She’d confided to me that her great weakness as a soldier was that her academy training had too greatly emphasized single combat, which could sometimes blind her to the more confusing demands of a melee. Happy problem, I suppose, being so unstoppably good at killing one or two geezers that sometimes, just sometimes, the third got the drop on you.

I looked at her now, the eye the mountain goat had blacked now swollen shut and her face purpling where they’d had to wallop her sleepy with padded sticks to get her down and bound. She nodded in the cart, trussed like a capon, soon to wake and start swearing in garlicky Ispanthian—this would do little to loosen our bonds, but would be more entertaining than the cage, and the camels, and the cunt in the hat.

But even if our bonds were off us and the cart-cage open wide, where would we have gone?

These slavers knew how to make camp, I’ll give them that.

I don’t mean from a tactical perspective; I just mean the life they were living out here in the badlands didn’t seem half-bad. What’s more, they let us sit with them around their fire and fed us not only decent food but wine. Galva had long since awakened, and even if she seemed a bit woozy, she was neither woozy nor surly enough to turn her nose up at the goblet of not-too-nasty red wine one of the camel-riders put below it. She did sniff it first—and I love her for that—but then she drank hard.

I noticed now the one who handed her the drink was the one who had peered down at me in the cage and said nice things.

“I am fight goblins in east,” this one said. “You as well, ya?”

She nodded and reassessed him, moving his peg from slaver to soldier.

“Where?” she said, sounding less croaky with wine in her.

“Braxos.”

She shook her head. “That does not sound like Gallardia. Where is that?”

“Is normal for easterner think everything happen in Gallardia or Ispanthia. Braxos is Beltia. Islands of Beltia.”

“Ah yes. I heard there were skirmishes there.”

“I am not knowing this word skirmishes.”

“Small fights,” I said, before I thought how that sounded.

“You are not thinking small if you in fight,” he said to me, with some pepper in his voice. I almost said, “She said it, not me,” but then this thought was washed away by a tidal fuck you anyway, which I uncharacteristically dammed up in-head before it spilled out-mouth.