“Just meat,” said Thorn plaintively, weighing Father Yarvi’s purse in her hand. “We just want meat.” Safrit hadn’t even asked for a certain kind. She dodged as a woman in a stained apron strode past with a goat’s head under her arm. “Where the hell do we start?”
“Hold up.” Brand had stopped at a stall where a dark-skinned merchant was selling strings of glass beads and lifting one so Mother Sun sparkled through the yellow glass. “Pretty, ain’t they? Sort of thing a girl likes as a gift.”
Thorn shrugged. “I’m no expert on pretty. Girls neither, for that matter.”
“You are one, aren’t you?”
“So my mother tells me.” She added in a mutter, “Opinion’s divided.”
He held up another necklace, green and blue this time. “Which ones would you want?” And he grinned sideways. “For a gift?”
Thorn felt that tingling in her stomach, stronger than ever. Close to actual vomiting. If ever she was going to get proof then here it was. A gift. For her. Hardly the one she would have chosen but with luck that might be next. If she picked out the right words. What to say? Gods, what to say? Her tongue seemed twice its usual size of a sudden.
“Which ones would I want, or …” She kept her eyes on him and let her head drop to one side, tried to make her voice soft. Winsome, whatever that sounded like. She couldn’t have been soft more than three times in her life and winsome never, and it came out a clumsy growl. “Which ones do I want?”
The puzzled look, now. “I mean, which ones would you want brought back? If you were in Thorlby.”
And in spite of the cloying heat a coldness spread out, starting in Thorn’s chest and creeping slowly to her very fingertips. Not for her. For someone back in Thorlby. Of course they were. She’d let herself get blown away on her own wind, in spite of Skifr’s warnings.
“Don’t know,” she croaked, trying to shrug as if it was nothing, but it wasn’t nothing. “How should I know?” She turned away, her face burning as Brand talked prices with the merchant, and she wished the ground would open up and eat her unburned like the southern dead.
She wondered what girl those beads were for. Wasn’t as if there were that many in Thorlby the right age. More than likely Thorn knew her. More than likely Thorn had been laughed at and pointed at and sneered at by her. One of the pretty ones her mother always told her to be more like. One of the ones who knew how to sew, and how to smile, and how to wear a key.
She thought she’d made herself tough right through. Slaps and punches and shield blows hardly hurt her. But everyone has chinks in their armor. Father Yarvi might have stopped them crushing her with stones, but casually as that Brand crushed her just as flat with a string of beads.
He was still grinning as he slipped them into a pocket. “She’ll like them, I reckon.”
Thorn’s face twisted. Never even occurred to him she might think they were for her. Never even occurred to him to think of her the way she’d come to think of him. It was as if all the color had drained out of the world. She’d spent a lot of her life feeling shamed and foolish and ugly, but never so much as this.
“I’m such a stupid shit,” she hissed.
Brand blinked at her. “Eh?”
The helpless look, this time, and the temptation to sink her fist into it was almost overpowering, but she knew it wasn’t his fault. It was no one’s fault but her own, and punching yourself never solves anything. She tried to put a brave face on but she couldn’t find it right then. She wanted just to get away. To get anywhere, and she took one step and stopped dead.
The scowling Vansterman who had stood beside Mother Scaer in the palace was blocking her path, his right hand hidden in a rolled up cloak where, she had no doubt, it held a blade. There was a rat-faced little man at his shoulder and she could feel someone moving over on her left. The big Lowlander, she guessed.
“Mother Scaer wants a word with you,” said the Vansterman, showing his teeth, and far from a pretty set. “Be best if you came quietly.”
“Better yet, we’ll go our own way quietly,” said Brand, plucking at Thorn’s shoulder.
She shook him off, hot shame turned to chill rage in an instant. She needed to hurt someone, and these idiots had come along at just the right moment.
Right for her. Wrong for them.
“I’ll be doing nothing quietly.” And she flicked one of Father Yarvi’s silver coins to the holder of the nearest stall, covered in tools and timber.
“What’s this for?” he asked as he caught it.
“The damage,” said Thorn, and she snatched up a hammer, flung it underhand so it bounced from the Vansterman’s skull, sending him stumbling back, all amazement.