“Softly,” I said. “Now.”
“It was night. We were drunk. Celebrating.” He paused suddenly.
Did he think he would keep a secret from me? “Celebrating what?”
He took several breaths. “We had a prisoner. One that could do magic. Could make people not see us …” His voice trailed away as he tried to make sense of shredded and dangling recollections.
“I hate you,” I told him affably. “I enjoy hurting you. You might not want to give me an excuse to make you bleed more.” I cocked my head at him. “A rapist does not need to be handsome. A rapist does not need a nose. Or ears.”
He spoke quickly. “We had the soft man. The man who looks like a boy. Vindeliar. The one who can make you forget things. We’d separated him from the pale folk and convinced him to enjoy himself. To use his magic for things he might want to do. We wanted to make him like us and think we were his friends. And it worked. He was worth more to us than any of the others, more than anything they offered us. We were going to take them all back to Chalced, sell them in the market there but keep the magic-man.”
A bigger story here, but not one I cared about. “You were celebrating. Then what happened?”
“I wanted a woman. I should not have had to ask for one. They were plunder, I had a right to my share, and there were plenty of them. But we had not had them …” Again, his words dangled. With no Ellik to recall, he would not know why they were working for women, let alone why he had refrained from raping them. He scowled to himself. “I had to take the ugliest one. The one that most of us thought was probably not a woman at all. But that was the only one …” Again he paused in puzzlement. I let him try to gather his threads.
“She started screaming before I even touched her. She fought so hard when I tried to strip her. If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have … I did nothing to her that a woman is not meant to have done to her. Nothing that would have killed her! But she screamed and screamed … And someone brought Vindeliar to have a turn … I think. I don’t know. Something happened. Oh. A woman, older and fleshy, and we were going to have her. But then … And everyone went mad. We chased them and hunted them, and the blood … and then we turned on one another. Sword-brothers. We’d eaten together, fought side by side for the last four years. But that one that she brought with her, the one who could make the villagers not see us? He turned on us and made us forget our brotherhood. All I could remember were the slights, the times they had cheated me at dice or taken a woman I wanted or eaten more than their share of the best food. I wanted to kill every one of them. I did kill two. Two of my fellow warriors. Two I had taken my oaths with. One slashed my leg before I killed him. Chriddick. He did that. I’d known him for five years. But I fought him and killed him.”
The words were pouring out now, heedless of the pain it cost him. I did not interrupt. Where in that mad night had my little girl been? Where were Bee and Shine? Somewhere beyond the camp, fallen bloody in the snow? Captured and dragged off by the fleeing mercenaries?
“The ones who hired us, the pale ones, the white ones? They did not do this to us. They could never have fought us. They were weak, stupid with weapons, with little stamina for the march or the cold. Always, they begged us to go slower, to rest more, to find more food for them. And we did. Why? Why were warriors commanded by sniveling women and sapling men? Because of a dirty magic they put upon us. They made us less than warriors. They shamed us. And then they turned us upon each other.” He gave a noise between a sob and a cry. “They took our honor!”
Did he hope to win sympathy from me? He was pathetic, but not in a way that roused any pity in me. “I care nothing for your lost honor. You took a woman and a child. What became of them?”
He balked again. My knife moved, slicing his nose. Noses bleed a lot. He flung himself back from my knife and lifted his hands defensively. I slashed both of them and he shrieked.
“Bastard! You cowardly bastard! You’ve no sense of a warrior’s honor! You know I cannot do battle with you or you would not dare treat me so.”