Chapter 12: The Choice

The gnomes came back the next morning, and this time they knocked.

It was one horn, three polite notes, and when the Skullcrushers ran to the walls with their axes there were no badgers and no catapults, only a gnome on a pony at the edge of the trees under a little white flag with a red border. Two more gnomes walked behind him carrying a stool between them. Beyond them, in the trees, the rest of the gnome army stood in rows with their shields grounded and their spears straight up, waiting. Somebody had clearly told them this part would take a while.

Bjorn had the gate opened. He did it with a great show, so his people could see how little he thought of anything two feet tall, and the gnome on the pony rode into the middle of the courtyard with the whole clan around him and got down. His two gnomes set the stool down, and he climbed onto it, and from the top of the stool he came about up to Bjorn’s belt.

He wore black robes and spectacles. He had a folio under his arm almost as big as he was, and he opened it on top of his own head while one of the stool gnomes held the other side, and he found his place with one finger, and he read. He didn’t look at the warriors. He didn’t look at the axes. He kept his eyes on the folio.

“Matter of the rings of Muckbubble,” he read. “The court of the Deepburrow sits by its magistrate, who is me. The court notes the claimant is the Mighty Grimble, Chieftain of the Deepburrow.”

He pointed without looking up. At the back of the gnome lines, under the trees, a gnome in a tall red hat stood on a stump with his arms folded and his beard down to his knees. Grimble raised one finger and pointed it at the fortress in general, and held it there.

Next to Bjorn, at the top of the long-house steps, Helga went completely still. She didn’t look at the stump. She kept her eyes on the magistrate and nowhere else, and her hands were folded so tight in front of her that the knuckles had gone white. Sigrid stood on Bjorn’s other side with her axes across her back. She hadn’t slept. You could see it in the skin under her eyes, and her right hand kept going to her belt and coming away again.

“The rings of Muckbubble were taken from the Deepburrow without leave,” the magistrate read. “The court has been told the rings were then kept in this hold. The court requires them returned.”

“Your rings,” Bjorn boomed, so that the whole clan could hear him, “were in my strongbox until yesterday, little lawyer. Two dozen of your people came through my roof and took them back. Big ones. My guards fought them like bears.”

The two guards, standing in the crowd, nodded hard.

The magistrate wrote something in the margin of his folio with a stub of pencil. “The court notes the rings are not in this hold. The court notes the defendant’s account of the roof.” He turned a page. “The rings are lost, and the court proceeds to the debt.”

I was standing at the bottom of the steps, because Bjorn liked his prize where people could see it, with the rings in my smallclothes about a foot from the magistrate’s nose.

“By the Burrow Code,” the magistrate read, “Book of Grievances, ninth clause. Whosoever takes the goods of a gnome without leave owes restitution in kind. In kind is defined in the commentaries. The aggrieved party shall take from the thief as the thief took from the aggrieved party.” He turned the page. “That is to say, the aggrieved party takes the thief. In public, before witnesses of both nations.”

He read it in the same dry little voice he’d used for everything else. It didn’t go up or down once. Nobody in the courtyard said anything for a moment. It took the Skullcrushers that long to work out what it meant, and then the laugh went round the walls in a wave, and some of them started stamping.

I didn’t laugh. I was thinking about the stump at the back of the gnome lines.

“Will the thief identify himself,” the magistrate said, “for the record.”

There was a pause of about half a heartbeat. In that half a heartbeat, Felix, who was standing three paces to my left with the Tome’s satchel on his hip, raised his arm and pointed straight at me.

He didn’t even glance my way while he did it. He kept his eyes on the magistrate, open and helpful. “That one,” he said. “He carried them out of Muckbubble in his smallclothes. There is a pocket. I can describe the pocket, if the court would like.”

“You…” I started.

“The court would not like,” said the magistrate, writing.

The crowd backed him up before I could get another word out. Half of them had watched me fish a ring out of my trousers to bet it a week ago and lose it, and they told the magistrate so, at great length, with gestures. The one who’d grabbed my crotch yesterday did an impression of me rooting for it that got a big laugh. Felix, the man who had actually stolen the rings, the man who had stuffed them down my smallclothes in the first place, folded his hands in front of him and looked holy.

“The court notes the thief,” said the magistrate.

“He’s MINE.”

Bjorn came down two steps. He didn’t shout it. He didn’t have to; he has the kind of voice that rattles cups on the far side of a hall when he’s asking for the salt. “This one I won fair, by the sacred rite of Drink, Gamble, and Take. Before my whole clan. He drank, he gambled, I took. Nobody takes him from me, lawyer.”

“The theft precedes the wager,” the magistrate said, without looking up. “A prior debt follows the thief into any later ownership.”

“By whose law?”

“By the commentaries. The court cites the case of the miller and the heron, in which a heron ate the miller’s fish and was then caught in the net of a fowler. The court held the fowler might keep the heron, but the heron still owed the miller a fish.”

Bjorn thought about that. “When my father’s father won a man at dice,” he said, “the man’s wife came to take him home. My father’s father kept the man, and the wife, and her sister, and the dice.”

“The court notes the anecdote,” said the magistrate, and wrote it down.

They went on like that for some time. Bjorn would come down another step and tell a story about some ancestor of his winning something, and the magistrate would turn a page and cite some gnome case about a goat or a well or a borrowed ladder, and neither of them gave an inch, and I stood between them with my collar on and my hands at my sides and the rings warm in my smallclothes. It was the most legal attention anybody had ever paid me, and I hated every second of it.

The worst part was that Bjorn was enjoying himself. Every time the magistrate insisted on the debt, Bjorn puffed up a bit more. Two nations, his face said, were fighting over his prize. He turned round to make sure his clan was seeing it.

Felix’s satchel let out a muffled shriek, and the flap burst open, and the Tome’s eye came up over the edge of it, wide and bloodshot and delighted.

“STOLEN PROPERTY!” it shrieked. “Eight hundred YEARS I have watched men hang for theft! And never ONCE have I seen a court rule that the thief IS the property! Oh, this is MAGNIFICENT, this is…”

“Shut that book up,” Bjorn said.

Felix sat down on the satchel. The rest of the sentence went on for a while underneath him, muffled, and stopped.

The magistrate didn’t look up for any of it. When the Tome was done he turned one more page and laid his hand on it. “The court will hear the matter in full,” he said. “In this courtyard. Tomorrow at noon. Both nations present, with the claimant and the thief. The court will rule on the debt, and the chief of this hold may argue his claim to the thief at that time.”

“And when your gnome has had his restitution,” Bjorn said, “my prize is still mine.”

“The debt is the debt,” said the magistrate. “What is left of the thief afterward is not the concern of the court.”

He closed the folio, climbed down from his stool, and got back on his pony, and the two stool gnomes picked up the stool and walked out after him. At the back of the gnome lines, Grimble lowered his pointing finger at last, and turned, and got down from his stump. He didn’t look at the long-house steps. Helga didn’t look at the stump. I noticed both of those things very hard.

The gate swung shut. The clan cheered, because they cheered everything, and somebody started a song about the heron, and Bjorn came down the last of the steps and ruffled my hair with one enormous hand, grinning, and went off to drink to it.

Felix got up off the satchel and dusted his trousers. The Tome’s eye glared up at him through the gap in the flap.

“You pointed at me,” I said.

“The court asked a question,” Felix said. “It seemed rude not to answer.” He tilted his head. “Would you rather I had pointed at me?”

“Yes!”

“You should have been quicker.” He hitched the satchel back onto his shoulder. “I did tell you, at the inn, that I was only coming to watch.”

He went off after the ale. I stood alone in the middle of the courtyard, where tomorrow at noon a two-foot gnome was going to have his restitution out of me in front of two armies, with the rings he wanted back on me the whole time. Across the yard, Sigrid was walking away toward the long-house on her own, with her hand going to her belt and coming away again.

I couldn’t sleep, and for once it had nothing to do with Bjorn.

That’s not quite true. Some of it had to do with Bjorn. He had told me the frost troll story again, as promised, all the way to the end this time, and I was lying on my side on the furs because sitting was out of the question. But the snoring wasn’t what kept me up. He was snoring with one arm thrown across the furs where I’d been, loud enough to shake the tent pole, and Felix was out by the fires somewhere winning money off people who couldn’t count, and the Tome was with Felix, so for the first time in three days nobody was watching me or talking about my technique. I sat up very carefully against the cold canvas with my knees up, took the pouch out of my smallclothes, and held it in my lap and thought about what it was worth.

I had three good uses for it.

The first was the guild. Somebody I would never meet had paid a lot of money to get these rings back, and I had signed my name to that contract at the River Bell with Ashara watching me do it. I was broke. I had bought an inn with every coin I had, and I had two dead men and a slave and a mule eating me out of it. Bringing these home was the whole reason I was here, and the fee was enough to feed all four of them through the spring and still buy Lily something pretty.

The second was my ass, and I mean that exactly. At noon tomorrow a two-foot gnome was going to take his restitution out of me in the middle of the courtyard, in front of two armies, because his rings were lost. I had been trying all day not to picture it, and all day my brain had kept picturing it anyway, in more and more detail. I didn’t know gnome law. I did know lawyers, and a lawyer with the stolen goods back in his hand has a lot less reason to make a show of the thief. If I walked down to the gate right now and handed the magistrate his rings, I would bet good money nobody would be taking anything out of me at noon.

The third was Sigrid.

I didn’t agonize over it. I sat there long enough to be sure I meant it, and that didn’t take long, and the whole time I was sitting there my asshole kept clenching every time I thought about noon, which I thought was a very fair contribution from it. After that I pulled on one of Bjorn’s shirts, which hung down to my knees. It was the first shirt I had worn since the drinking contest, and I put it on because it was cold, and because I didn’t want to do this with my nipples out.

Getting out of Bjorn’s tent was the easy part. I am a rogue, whatever my record in this fortress suggests, and sneaking is the one thing I do well when nobody is grabbing my crotch. I lifted his arm off the furs an inch at a time and let it down on a rolled-up cloak instead of me, and he grunted, and said “troll” in his sleep, and kept snoring.

The camp was mostly drunk or asleep. The fires had burned down to red, with Skullcrushers piled around them in heaps of fur and snoring, and the dogs had finished whatever bones they could find and gone to sleep on top of the people. I went from shadow to shadow along the backs of the tents with the pouch in my fist inside my shirt, barefoot, because boots creak on frozen snow and feet don’t, and my feet went numb by the third tent and I told myself that was a sign of good technique.

Felix was at the last fire before the gate, the only one still burning properly. He was sitting cross-legged on somebody’s cloak with the Tome’s satchel at his knee and a pile of coins in front of him, and the two Skullcrushers across from him were staring at their dice with the faces of men who had been losing for hours and could not work out how. I went past behind them, along the dark side of a woodpile, quiet as I have ever been.

Felix didn’t turn his head. He raised his cup, though, without looking, in my direction, and drank from it, and rolled the dice. The satchel at his knee shifted and the Tome’s eye came up over the flap and followed me all the way to the gate, and it didn’t say a word, which frightened me more than shouting would have.

There were two guards at the foot of the gate ladder. One was asleep sitting up against it with his axe across his lap, and the other was pissing into the snow round the corner of the gatehouse and singing to himself while he did it, and I went up the ladder between the snoring and the singing with my numb feet on the rungs, and was very pleased with myself right up until I got my head over the top.

She was on the wall above the gate, where I had guessed she would be. The gnome campfires were out there in the trees, dozens of tiny orange points, and she was sitting on the wall walk with her back to the parapet and her axes across her knees, watching them through a gap in the timbers. The axes were steaming in the cold. Up close the blades weren’t glowing, but they were warm enough that the frost had melted off the iron in a ring around them, and her breath and theirs went up together.

She heard me on the ladder and had one axe up before my head was over the edge. When she saw who it was she put it down again. That was new. Two days ago she would have thrown it.

“Southlander.” She didn’t ask what I wanted. She went back to watching the fires.

I climbed up and sat down on the wall walk across from her. Even like this, worn out and furious with herself, she was the best thing I had seen in the north. Her braids had come half undone and her auburn hair was everywhere, and she had a bruise on her jaw from Brynhild and another on her shoulder from the barn door, and the leather wrap across her chest had split down one side, and through the split was the curve of one big, bare tit going pale and pebbled in the cold. I told myself it was the cold making me stiff, which was a stupid lie even for me, because the cold works the other way, and I pulled my knees up to hide it.

She didn’t look away from the fires. “You’re staring at my tit,” she said.

“It’s dark,” I said. “I’m squinting.”

“Brynhild says you’re loud. With my father.”

I opened my mouth and nothing useful came out of it. She said it calmly, still watching the gnome fires, and I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me or just reporting what she had heard. Brynhild, I thought, should mind her own business. I also shifted closer along the wall walk, an inch, then another, because it was cold up there and she was the warmest thing on the wall, and when I was inside axe reach she moved the nearer axe one hand’s width toward me without looking, and I moved straight back out again.

Her hands were the thing I couldn’t stop watching, though. She had them on the haft of the nearer axe, and they were shaking. She was holding on hard enough to stop it and it wasn’t working. Every few breaths her right hand opened and closed on the wood, and her face went tight, and she gripped harder.

“Father thinks I’m sick,” she said, without looking at me. “I’m not sick.”

“I know.”

“You don’t know.” She said it without heat. “I lost a word today. In the ring. I knew the word, and it went, and I stood there like…” She stopped. Her jaw worked. “Like I was drunk. And the axes. You saw the axes. Everybody saw the axes.” She looked down at her hands on the haft. “I am Bjorn Skullcrusher’s daughter. Tomorrow the gnomes come in, and I stand next to my father in front of both armies, and I don’t know what I’ll do.”

She was nineteen, the same as me, or near it. I had forgotten that, because she was six and a half feet tall and had nearly killed me twice and had shared me with Brynhild a few nights back. She looked nineteen right then. She looked like a girl from Willowbrook the night before her wedding, scared out of her wits and trying to hide it from her father.

I didn’t make a speech. I took the pouch out of my shirt, undid the silver cord, and tipped the rings out into my palm. There were three of them, crude iron with knotwork running round them and a stone set in each, one blue, one grey, one the color of amber. They were warm from me. Up here, next to her, they were warmer than that, and I could feel them humming faintly against my skin, and I’d swear they leaned toward her.

I held my hand out across the wall walk, as far as I could reach without getting into axe range.

“Put these on,” I said. “You’ll sleep.”

That was all I said. I had thought about saying more, the whole way across the camp. I had a whole speech about Helga and the storage room and what I had heard Grimble say with his trousers round his ankles, and every version of it ended with Sigrid going down that ladder with both axes, and I didn’t think anybody would live through the night if she did. So I said the one true thing that wouldn’t get anybody killed, and I held my hand out, and I waited.

She stared at the rings in my palm for a long time. She didn’t ask where I had got them. She had heard the magistrate that morning, and she had seen Felix point at me, and she had watched her father stare at his robbed safe all day, so she could work out where I had got them without my help. I sat there with my arm out and my guess, which was that she was going to throw me off the wall. I even had a look at the drop. It was about twice my height into the snow outside the gate, onto whatever the gnomes had left there, and I thought I could probably land it if I didn’t mind walking funny for the rest of my life, which after tonight I was going to do anyway.

Her eyes came up from my hand to my face, and stayed there, and I let her look.

She took them. Her fingers brushed my palm, and they were hot, hotter than anybody’s should be, and shaking, and the touch went straight up my arm so fast I nearly told her she had lovely hands. I bit the inside of my cheek instead. She put the rings on one at a time, the blue one first, on the first three fingers of her left hand, and they went on as if they had been sized for her.

Nothing flashed. There was no light and no sound. She breathed in, and held it, and let it out, and her hands stopped shaking.

She looked at them. She held her left hand up in front of her face and turned it over, and back, and closed it into a fist and opened it, slowly, watching the fingers do what she told them. On her knees, the axes stopped steaming. The frost started to come back on the iron while I watched, white and fine, from the edges in.

“Oh,” Sigrid said. It came out small.

She leaned her head back against the parapet and closed her eyes, and she sat like that long enough that I thought she might have fallen asleep right there, which would have served me right. When she opened her eyes again she studied me with her head tipped a little, frowning, as if I was a word she had lost and had just found again, and she didn’t know yet what it meant.

“Why?” she said.

I could have said a lot of things. I could have told her it was the right thing to do, and that would have been half true, and she would have smelled the other half. I didn’t know the other half myself. Some of it was her tit in the cold, I’ll admit that, and some of it was her standing in that ring with her mouth open and the word gone, and the rest I hadn’t worked out yet and didn’t want to.

“You looked tired,” I said.

She kept studying me. Her mouth moved, and for a second I thought she was going to laugh, or hit me. She did neither. She picked up her axes, one in each hand, steady as anything, and stood up, and stepped over my legs to the top of the ladder. Her bare thigh went right past my face on the way, close enough to feel the heat coming off it, and I sat there and let it go past.

She stopped at the top of the ladder. She didn’t turn round.

“Southlander,” she said. “Don’t get killed tomorrow.”

She went down the ladder.

I sat on the wall walk with my hands empty and the gnome fires out in the trees, and I added it up again, the way I had in the tent. The guild money was gone. That was the spring, and the mule’s feed, and whatever I had been going to buy Lily, and the inn’s next quarter, gone onto three fingers of a barbarian girl’s left hand. My one way out of noon was gone with it. Tomorrow, in front of two armies, a gnome was going to have his restitution out of me, and I had just given away the only thing in the world that might have stopped him, for nothing, to a woman who had told me not to get killed and hadn’t said thank you.

I waited to regret it. I sat there in the cold long enough to give regret every chance. It didn’t come, and that worried me more than anything else that had happened in this fortress.

From the wall I could see the whole yard. Sigrid walked across it toward the long-house in the torchlight, slow and straight, with the axes hanging easy at her sides. Halfway across she lifted her left hand and looked at it again, the way you look at a new knife.

Helga was at her tent flap. I don’t know how long she had been there. She was wrapped in a fur, with her braids down, and she had been watching the long-house, the way she watched everything in this camp that belonged to her husband. Sigrid passed through the torchlight ten paces from her with her hand up, and the light caught the iron and the three stones.

Helga’s hand came off the tent flap.

She watched Sigrid all the way to the long-house door, and Sigrid went in without seeing her. Helga stayed where she was. Last night she had pinned me to a wall by my collar and offered to leave the postern open, and I had told her I wasn’t watching her, and she had believed me, or decided to. I wondered whether the offer still stood. I had a strong feeling the terms had changed.

After a while she turned her head, slowly, and looked up at the wall above the gate.

I was sitting in the dark up there. I don’t think she could see me. I sat very still anyway, with my empty hands in my lap and my heart going hard, and I didn’t breathe until she had gone back inside her tent and let the flap fall.