Chapter 13: Restitution

They came for me at midmorning, and they were very nice about it, which was the worst part.

Two Skullcrushers I had served ale to all week walked into Bjorn’s tent, said good morning, and took my trousers. They took my shirt as well. They took my smallclothes, which now had nothing in the pocket but lint and bad memories, and one of them held them up and shook them to make sure, and looked disappointed. They didn’t take the collar. The collar was Bjorn’s, and Bjorn wanted everybody to see whose thief was paying whose debt.

Bjorn himself was up and dressed in his best furs, which looked exactly like his worst furs with more bones on. He was in a wonderful mood. He combed his beard while they stripped me, and told me that in the old days a debt like this would have been paid with a hand, and that I should count myself lucky gnomes were so civilized.

“I’ll count something,” I said.

He laughed and slapped my bare ass hard enough to leave a print, and went out to take his place.

They walked me out into the courtyard naked except for the collar, and the cold hit me everywhere at once. Everything I own shrivelled up and tried to climb back inside me. I want that on the record before anybody says anything about the size of anything else in this story.

The whole clan watched from the walls, eating breakfast and passing skins of ale, and they cheered when I came out. Bjorn stood on the long-house steps with Helga on his left and Sigrid on his right, and I didn’t look at Sigrid, which took more effort than walking.

The gate stood open, and the gnome army was drawn up outside it in rows of little shields and spears, none of them smiling, with Grimble on his stump in front. In the courtyard the magistrate sat on his stool at a little lectern beside a thick post sunk into the frozen ground, with a sawhorse in front of it and his pony tied to the gatepost.

I knew what the sawhorse was for the moment I saw it.

They bent me over it, tied my wrists to the post and my ankles wide to the legs of the sawhorse, and left me looking at the long-house steps upside down between my own knees.

Felix wandered over with my clothes folded over one arm and the Tome’s satchel over his shoulder, and crouched in front of the post where I could see him, because Felix never misses a good seat.

“Good morning,” he said. “You look well.”

“I’m tied to a sawhorse.”

“And it suits you.” He patted my trousers. “Is there anyone you’d like me to tell, in case?”

“Tell them you did this.”

“But I didn’t,” said Felix. “You did.”

The satchel at his hip thumped once against his leg, and Felix put his hand on the flap and kept it there.

The magistrate cleared his throat. It was a very small throat. It carried anyway.

“Matter of the rings of Muckbubble,” he read. “The thief is present.” He glanced over his spectacles at my ass. “The thief is noted. The chief of this hold wishes to argue his claim to the thief.”

Bjorn came down one step and argued it with a great-uncle who had won a horse at knucklebones. The magistrate wrote, “The court notes the horse,” and ruled that the debt came first, and the clan cheered Bjorn for losing.

“The court reminds both nations of the ninth clause,” the magistrate read, “and of the commentary upon it. The aggrieved party takes the thief. The debt is discharged when the aggrieved party is seen, by the witnesses of both nations, to be satisfied.”

I heard every word. I lay over that sawhorse and I worked it through, and I worked it through wrong.

Satisfied, I thought. Fine. That was a gnome getting off, and the one thing I knew for certain about everybody was that they got off a lot faster if you held still and let them. So I would hold still and keep my dignity, and the little bastard would have his minute and a half, and the debt would be paid. It was a good plan. I was proud of it.

I would like to go back and slap myself.

“The aggrieved party will come forward,” the magistrate said.

The gnome army stamped its feet once, all together. Grimble came through the gate on his own, platform boots clicking, finger already pointing at me from thirty paces, and climbed onto the magistrate’s stool behind me.

“THIEF,” he squeaked, right behind me, loud enough that both armies jumped. His voice cracked in the middle. “The MIGHTY Grimble comes for what is OWED! You took from the Deepburrow, and the Deepburrow TAKES from YOU! I DEMAND…”

“The aggrieved party will proceed,” said the magistrate.

Grimble stopped shouting. Behind me there was a rustle of robes being lifted, and some fumbling, and a pause that went on long enough that someone on the wall coughed. I turned my head to look under my arm. I shouldn’t have. I couldn’t not.

Grimble stood on the stool with his robes hitched up round his waist and his beard tucked over one shoulder to keep it out of the way. He was holding himself in one hand. It took me a moment to find what he was holding. It was about the size of my little finger, if my little finger had been out in the cold all morning, and it lay in his palm the way a baby mouse lies in a nest.

My first honest thought, hanging upside down over a sawhorse in front of two armies, was: that? Two nations had marched, and a fortress had been sieged twice, and badgers had died, and I had been tied naked to a post in the snow, and the whole time, under all of it, at the very bottom, was that? I thought about Helga riding him on the pile of furs in the storage room, shouting for all he had, and I thought, well, there’s no accounting for taste, and then I thought, with a sort of horrified respect, that he must be very good with his hands.

Grimble saw me looking. His beady eyes narrowed. He went a dark, furious red above the beard, and he took hold of my hip with one tiny hand, and stepped in, and pushed.

I waited.

I want to describe what it felt like so nobody can say I left anything out. It felt like nothing. I knew it was happening because I could see his boots on the stool between my ankles and feel his little hand on my hip, and hear him grunting. If I had been asleep I would have stayed asleep. So I lay there with my dignity, as planned, not moving and not making a sound, in a courtyard so silent you could hear the stool creak from the walls.

The problem was Sigrid. I could feel her up there on the steps. I knew that if I looked at her, at her hair coming loose in the wind and those rings on her hand and the split in her leather where I’d stared last night, I would get hard, and I was not going to get hard for two armies with a gnome on a stool behind me. So I didn’t look at her. I looked at Felix instead, which was the stupidest thing I did all week.

He was still crouched in front of the post. He was holding my clothes in his lap with his eyes on me, and when he caught mine he wet his lips, slowly, the tip of his tongue going all the way from one corner to the other, and lowered his violet eyes to the snow under the sawhorse where my cock was hanging and back up to mine, and smiled.

My cock twitched. It didn’t care about the gnome. It didn’t care about the armies. It cared about Felix licking his lips, the same as it had every day since Ashara’s, and it started to fill.

I stared past Felix at the gnome army. I picked the angriest gnome I could find in the front row, a little one with a broken nose and one eyebrow, and I stared at him as hard as I could and started humming. It was the shearing hymn from Willowbrook, the one the old shepherd used to sing over the sheep, and I hummed it through my nose into the fur, all eleven verses, with my eyes on that one-eyebrowed gnome the whole time, and my cock thought about it, and gave up, and hung there in the cold.

Felix’s smile went wider. He knew exactly what I was doing. He mouthed something at me, which I think was coward.

Behind me, Grimble was flagging. The grunting had gone ragged. The little hand on my hip was sweating. He stopped, and started, and stopped, and from the walls I heard the first barbarian start to laugh, a deep one, quickly hushed by somebody else.

That was when the Tome got out.

I don’t know if Felix let it go. He says he didn’t. He says it kicked. All I know is that his hand came off the satchel, and the flap flew open, and the Tome of Wanton Desecration came up out of that bag with its eye wide open and blazing, and it had a clear view of the stool.

“THAT?” it screamed. Its voice went all the way round the walls and out through the gate and into the trees, and every head in two armies turned to it. “THAT is the instrument of gnomish JUSTICE? Eight hundred YEARS! And never, NEVER in eight hundred years have I seen anything so SMALL and so LIMP and so pathetically, piteously UNEQUAL to its TASK!”

I turned my head as far as the rope would let me and mouthed at it, very clearly, shut up.

The Tome saw me. Its eye swivelled to me, and it was delighted. “And look at the BOY! He is not even AWARE! He is lying there like a sack of MEAL! The gnome could be knitting back there for all the boy can tell!”

The walls roared, one long roar, and somebody fell off the wall walk into a snowbank and lay there laughing in it. Out past the gate, the gnome army stood in its rows and went slowly, terribly red, all the way down the lines.

Behind me, Grimble had stopped moving entirely. I could feel him standing there on the stool, shaking, with his hand still on my hip.

The Tome wasn’t finished. Its eye swept up the long-house steps and stopped.

I turned my head and followed it.

Helga was red. She had gone red from the throat up, a deep, hot, blotchy red, and she was breathing through her mouth. She wasn’t laughing. She was staring at Grimble on his stool, at that little red face and that little shaking body, and I knew that look because I had seen it in a storage room through the crack of a door.

And Bjorn was looking at her.

His face had gone quite still in all that beard. I don’t think I had seen him look at her once all week. He looked at her now for a long time, frowning, a man trying to work out when his wife had turned into a stranger while he was busy.

Helga felt it. She turned her head and met his eyes, and went redder.

The Tome had seen all of it.

“OH-ho,” it said. It said it slowly, with enormous pleasure. “Oh, ho, ho. But SHE likes it! LOOK at her! The chieftain’s lady is the color of a BOILED BEET!” Its eye rolled back toward the stool, and back to Helga, and back. “Of COURSE she does! I was THERE! I was in this boy’s cloak, in the storeroom, five days ago, when she rode this very gnome on a pile of furs and shouted for MORE! The whole fortress at war and the chieftain’s wife upside down on the gnome king!”

The laughing on the walls stopped all at once.

“And THEN,” said the Tome, into the silence, and it was enjoying itself now more than I had ever heard it enjoy anything, “and then, lying in a heap on the furs, do you know what they talked about? The RINGS! She asked him for them! He made them for her! Three iron rings to keep Bjorn’s girl QUIET!” The eye swung up to Sigrid. “Berserker blood! The girl has her father’s blood, the true old berserker blood, and the stepmother has kept it on a LEASH, for years, with gnome iron, and the gnome king made the leash!” Its voice dropped to a purr. “And she is wearing it. Look at her hand. She is wearing it NOW.”

Every head on the walls turned to Sigrid’s left hand.

Sigrid looked down at it herself. She lifted it slowly in front of her, and turned it, and the three stones caught the noon light, and she studied them for a long time. She didn’t look at me. She turned her head, very slowly, and looked at Helga.

I had seen Sigrid angry plenty of times that week. I had seen her throw Brynhild into the ale barrels. This was different. Her face went completely calm, and her hand closed into a fist, slowly, over the rings, and stayed closed, and stayed steady.

Helga moved first.

She came down the steps in two strides and across the courtyard, faster than anything that size had a right to move. She went for the satchel. Felix, who has never once in his life been where a blow was landing, stepped neatly back and let her take it, and she got both hands on the Tome and tried to tear it shut. It bit her palm, and she flung it in the snow, where it lay on its back shouting, “ASSAULT! ASSAULT ON A GRIMOIRE!”

She turned to me, a woman whose whole life had just been read out to two armies by a book, coming round the sawhorse with blood dripping from her palm, and I was tied with good soft rope and couldn’t do a thing.

“HELGA,” said Bjorn.

He caught her by the arm before she reached me, and she hit him in the face with her bleeding fist, and he took it, and she hit him again, and that time he hit her back. They went down together in the snow at the foot of the post.

Grimble had his robes back down. I felt him get down off the stool. I heard the click of his platform boots as he went round to the lectern, and his squeaky voice, cracking, to the magistrate.

“Rule!” he said. “RULE!”

The magistrate hadn’t moved through any of it. He took in the brawl in the snow, and the book shouting on its back, and me, and he dipped his pencil and wrote.

“The court rules,” he read. “The aggrieved party has not been seen to be satisfied. The witnesses of both nations will attest it. The thief has shown no sign whatever of having been taken.”

He looked over his spectacles at me, and I swear he looked sorry for me, a little.

“The debt is unpaid,” he said.

That was when I understood the clause. Satisfied didn’t mean the gnome getting off. It meant me, the thief, moaning and squirming for two armies to see, and every second I had lain there quiet, humming the shearing hymn, I had been telling the whole Deepburrow that their king couldn’t do it. If I had squealed and wriggled like I meant it, the little bastard might have finished, and gone home, and none of the rest of this would have happened.

I had never in my life been punished so badly for having manners.

Grimble turned to face his army through the gate, and he raised one finger, shaking with rage, and pointed it at the fortress, at all of it, and he shrieked, in a voice that cracked clean in half:

“I DEMAND SATISFACTION!”

The gnome army roared back at him. It was the first sound they had made all morning. They lowered their spears all together, and came through the gate.

Everything happened very fast after that. The barbarians came off the walls in a wave, still half laughing, and behind the gnome lines the catapults creaked and wound up. The magistrate folded his lectern and walked out through the fight to his pony, and nobody touched him. Sigrid came down the steps with both axes out and her hands steady, and walked straight toward the place where her father and her stepmother were rolling in the snow.

Felix stood next to me holding my clothes. He looked down at me, and over at the gnomes coming through the gate, and back at me.

“Felix,” I said. “Untie me.”

“Would you like that?” said Felix, considering it. He tucked my trousers more comfortably under his arm, bent down, and picked the Tome up out of the snow by its spine, and the Tome bit at him and missed. “I think you’re safest where you are, honestly. Both sides own you. Neither of them will want to break you.” He patted my ass once, kindly. “I’ll be nearby.”

He wasn’t. He walked off into the fighting with my clothes under one arm and the book under the other, and the gnomes ran past him on both sides and never laid a finger on him.

So I stayed where I was, naked and tied over the sawhorse with a gnome army’s unpaid debt hanging out of my ass, in the dead center of the biggest fight that fortress had ever seen.

Nobody touched me. They all went right round me, both sides, in a ring. I was the only neutral party left in the whole fortress, and I was neutral the way a fencepost is neutral, with my ass in the air.