“Lowland swill,” muttered the bartender, by way of agreement.
Shane raised an eyebrow. “Won’t such a strike hurt those on the far side more? It seems like it would be much easier to move goods to the Court by the river than overland into the highlands.”
“Oh, aye,” said the bartender. “Any other season, they’d be laughed out of the place. But Court’s on right now, and either the boatmen get what they want or the fancy lords start to notice that they’re running short of beer and meat and dainties among other things. And they’ll stay short for at least a month, too. Can’t just magic up a full court’s worth of meat overnight.”
Ossien nodded acknowledgment and lifted his mug in the general direction of the lake and,
presumably, the boatmen. “Best time to strike. The big man in charge this year won’t want to be known as the one who made his guests eat salt fish instead of…I dunno, pickled partridge, whatever these people eat. So they do it now and they’ve got him. He’ll yowl and threaten but he’s stuck and they know it.”
Shane knew very little about trade routes or pickled partridge, but lifted his mug as well.
“Always strike where the enemy’s weakest,” he said.
“Hear, hear.” Ossien tapped his mug against Shane’s. “The hard part is figuring out where that is.”
That’s not always the hard part. Not for us, anyway. But explaining a berserker fit and the way that one saw the enemy through the black tide’s haze would have required far more than a single beer.
Shane wondered absently what the equivalent of a berserker fit would be for a trade negotiation .
Perhaps somewhere there’s a god that oversees merchants and tradesmen, Whose chosen champion goes into a fugue state and when they come to, they’ve written a binding legal document about how many barrels of beer can be delivered in a fortnight.
Actually, that sounds like something a champion of the Rat might do. Shane’s old friend Istvhan had joked occasionally about lawyer-berserkers. Beartongue had said, “Don’t tempt me.”
Still, if you were sussing out the weakness of an enemy economically, rather than simply stabbing them, and you didn’t have access to divine intervention, you’d need…well, someone like Marguerite, when you got down to it.
She told you how she worked out the details on that one job, and all you could think was that it was silly to go to that much effort over lace. But is lace any sillier than dainties for a lord’s table?
And here we are drinking to the men refusing to move those.
“You alright?” asked Ossien.
“Uh?”
“It’s just that you’ve been sitting there with your beer in the air for the last minute.”
“Oh.” Shane hurriedly took a gulp and set it down. It was nothing to write home about, but swill had probably been an unkind description. “Sorry. Had a thought.”
“That happens, yeah. Not to me that often, thankfully.”
Shane snorted. “I suspect that you’re not being entirely truthful there.”
“What, me? Nah. Empty-headed as they come.”
“Mmm.”
Ossien cocked his head. “Is it a woman, then?” Shane nearly choked on his beer. “Or a man, I’m not judging.”
Shane sighed. “Have you ever wanted something badly, even though you know it would be an absolutely terrible idea?”
“Oh gods, yes.” Ossien took a long draw on his beer. “My first wife.”
“How many have you had?”
“Only the one so far, but I hold out hope.” He gazed over the rim at nothing in particular. “Gave
me the best years of my life. Then the worst decade of it.”
“…I see.”
It was Ossien’s turn to snort. “They say the gods never give us more than we can handle, but let’s just say that the gods had an overinflated sense of my abilities. Ah, well. She’s gone now.”
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
“My loss was someone else’s gain. In this case, a tailor who worked down the road.” He paused.
“Err…not saying that your situation would work out that way, you understand.”
Shane had to laugh. “Thanks. I think.”
Ossien set his mug down, then winced and rubbed his shoulder. “Bah. I should get a real job instead of working as a tame duelist at my age. Maybe something predicting weather, since half my joints do that anyway.”
Shane let himself be drawn into a rambling conversation about joints, injuries that ached when it was going to rain, and how those injuries had been acquired. When both he and Ossien called it a night, he was feeling, if not better, at least a little more resigned to his own confusion. Probably the ale helped.
The keep was quiet at this hour, or as quiet as it ever got. The Court of Smoke was perhaps best viewed as a small, vertical city, with main corridors that encircled each level and dozens of branching hallways off each one. Shane had no doubt that, somewhere below his feet, an army of servants was awake, tending to the laundry or the baking or any of the other hundred tasks that kept the Court functioning. He passed one girl with her arms full of scrolls and another lugging a small keg, but for the most part, the corridors were empty.
Shane turned onto one of the outer walks, where windows had been cut high in the wall to provide a brisk cross-breeze. The cool air chased some of the mental fog away, not that he was particularly tipsy to begin with. Narrow rectangles of moonlight marked the walls, providing plenty of illumination, even though the lamps had been extinguished for the evening.
He had perhaps half a second of warning before someone tried to club him over the head.
If he had been something other than a paladin of the Saint of Steel, it definitely might have worked. If he had actually been drunk, it still might have worked. But half a second was a small eternity, so far as the battle tide went, and the tide rose up and grabbed him and flung him sideways before his conscious mind had even registered the stealthy sound of footsteps.
It wasn’t quite enough to avoid the blow completely. Instead of landing square, the club clipped the left side of his head, scraping along his scalp and smacking hard into his left ear. Stars exploded in his vision and he staggered, but didn’t go down.
Hitting the enemy in the head is usually a good idea. Even if you don’t knock them out, frequently they’re stunned and groggy. But it was very unwise to try this on a berserker unless you were very, very certain that you could put them down with one blow.