#sazza

She waits till they're up over the earthworks. The halfling would make tough eating, she concedes with grudging respect; when she swings her branch at the yark's back, it breaks. The scuffle's worth boasting about to the lads. They crash through every gorse bush by the deerpath, cursing and snarling like gnolls, till Sazza gets her knee on the halfling's chest and her hands round the halfling's knife.

“Reckon I’ll saw off your head,” she pants, aching in every limb—they're both full of prickers from the gorse. She bears down on the knife. The halfling's got her by the wrists, pushing it up. “Then you’ll be a—what’s half of a half?”

"Quarter," gasps the halfling, bloody-nosed. Her face goes hopeful under the strain. In the moonlight the knife glints as it trembles towards her throat. "Quarter?"

Thinks she's funny, this one. Sazza grins. "No quarter, worgmeat—"

"Not for"—the soon-to-be quarterling catches her breath—"True Souls?"

The knife shivers to a standstill between them.

"You ain't," says Sazza, and spits for emphasis into the dirt. A tooth flies out with the gob. One of those boots had kicked her in the jaw. "You're lying."

"On the ground," the halfling concedes, breathless. She winces. "And cold and hard it is. Gerroff."

She's lying, Sazza thinks, tense. Unless she ain't. And anyone who so much as pokes one of the Absolute's favorites—even She's got them—gets to explain it to the drow.

The thought crawls over her like one of those leggies in the pit. She climbs off and squats sullen on her hams. "What's a True Soul doing out here?"

"Faffing about with you," says the halfling, "when I could have left you in there, and no harm done. To misself." She sits up with a grunt, holding her side. She's bloody beaming, for some reason. "Happen they'd play popinjay with you."

True enough. It's the rest that don't add up. Sazza scowls, picking the gap in her teeth with the guard of the halfling's knife, and asks the obvious question. "What's a True Soul care?"

"Told you." The halfling wipes her nose with her cloak, then holds it there. Her voice comes out muffled. "Dunno where it's at, your camp. Your mighty booyahg."

If she's no True Soul, Gut will know. Gut's got nothing to fear from the drow. The halfling's boots, Sazza thinks, smug at her own cleverness, are going nowhere Sazza can't go, too—with her new bone-handled knife, neblin-made.

"No, you don't." The halfling, hobgoblin-bold, plucks the thing from Sazza's hand. "Off with you. But—listen, now, here's where we'll meet next—"

* * *

How do, thinks Vally Dell cheerfully at her only companion still up. Made a friend. She considers. Made off with a friend.

The mad minstrel she saved on the ship—who'd been staring at air, sunk deep in his own muddled head, when she slipped out of camp—spills from his mind into hers. They've all got headaches, trying to keep him in hisself. It's like keeping eels in a pail.

The goblin, he thinks back in disbelief: bone-weary, bringing too much dross up with the thought. His ribs hurt, his head, his teeth. He wants to sleep and can't—the others' dreams keep sludging with his in a sickening slurry. He hates them. He hates them. He hates her, too—he doesn't, he's tired, he's sorry. He's tired. The bloody goblin.

Vally's gotten used to him. She grins. You'll like her.

I don't even like you.

She snorts and climbs the earthwork wall. The watchman at the winch, one of the refugees, is still snoring; she prods his brittle ribs and smiles all through his stammering apology. In the tieflings' shanty-camp, where her companions' fire winks at her across the crowded cave, she breathes stuffily of the night air: warmer here, smelling of smoke and earth and armpit. Gale's snoring in the firelight. Shadowheart's snug in her cloak. Their madman's a ways off, with the tieflings' oxen. A body hears of minstrels charming beasts with song—but she'd not expected it of their minstrel, who can't even charm people.

The oxen greet her with flummoxed looks. When she sees why, she nearly laughs. "Heard of the dog in the manger, Silk?"

Happen he hasn't. In the pointed silence that follows, a bullock blows a huge, hay-sweet breath in Vally's face.

"Doesn't eat the feed," she goes on, scratching it behind the horns, "but doesn't let the beeves at it, neither."

A hand with a fistful of hay in it sticks up from the oxen's trough. The bullock, with an interested glint in its eye, snuffles at it.

Vally doesn't peer in at him, poor wretch. She'll let him be. The less she sees now, the less the others will see in her head, come morning. She sits by the trough instead, wincing; she's hellered up from head to toe, and Silk's bitter, biting mind's still elver-twined with hers. He'd come here to escape everyone's thoughts, dreaming and waking, noise, noise—and here she is, of all unlikely things, thinking—

His legs are dangling from the trough. She yanks one. "Oi."

A twinge of shame, not hers, twists in her head. He'd come here to spare them all his chelping, too.

"We know—ech," he says. The bullock's lipping his fingers. His voice is flat and quiet-like. "We know where the goblins are camped."

She'd been waiting on this. She smiles grimly to herself.

"You knew that," Silk goes on. The straw in the trough rustles; he's sat up in there, maybe. "Those hired swords gave you their map."

"Didn't like leaving her there." Might as well answer before he asks. Let him take it as he may. "That's all."

Her nephews will be snug abed by now, she thinks in the silence after that—squirming, kicking each other with their cold feet. Gar will be darning by the fire. Earnie will be puffing his pipe, squirrely-cheeked. She feels a twitch behind her eye before she feels the grief: a heavy, burrowing ache, as though there’s a wriggler in her heart, too.

“Give over,” she grumbles at the thing in her head, rubbing her eye. Her hand comes away damp.

Silk's voice is almost lucid, almost kind. "The valiant Vally Dell."

He doesn't understand aught. But he clambers down—clumsy, he's still wobbly in his wits—and, little as he likes her, sits beside her in the dark.