The Blacktongue Thief

6 The Wasted Plum

The next day, adolescent, yellow-shirted runners from the Runners Guild came to Cadoth, and after the baron broke the seals on the messages they carried, the baron’s town mouths stood atop step-boxes to read the hastily prepared bans. The mouth I heard first was a plumpish girl with deep lungs. Her inbreath reminded me of a dragon getting ready to breathe fire.

“Listen all! Listen all! Word has reached the fair and serene Baron Anselm of Cadoth and His Most August Majesty, King Conmarr of Holt, that the lands known as Oustrim! Have been most treacherously invaded! By armies from beyond the Thrall Mountains!”

This girl was loud, her voice ringing off glass panes and stone walls, her mouth opening so wide as she spoke, I could see her back teeth.

“The capital city, Hrava, has fallen! And the king is feared dead! A merchant from Molrova, a man well known to the person of the baron, has had a runner last night! And assures us that the walls of his kingdom, the Oxbone Walls, just east of Oustrim, have not been darkened! And that they cannot be breached!”

“Was it goblins?” a woman shouted. She had a thick Unthern accent and wore their traditional dress-like long-coat over her traditional Unthern gut. Her status as a foreigner didn’t excuse her from the baron’s justice, however, and the mouth pointed her baton at her so that two guards most folks hadn’t noticed before scurried over and shook her until she thumbed half a silver out of her pouch. You don’t interrupt the bans, not in Cadoth.

Everyone knew the lands of kynd stopped at the Thrall Mountains, so whatever came east wasn’t human. Goblins weren’t west, though, and not much north. Oustrim was cold, and those mountains were colder. Goblins don’t like snow, or so I had heard. Goblins came from the Hordelands in the south, the huge island also known as Old Kesh, beyond the Hot Sea.

Right where we kicked them back to.

For now.

These people had not seen the hard truths of the witness coin as I had. They did not yet know that giants had spilled east. But some were figuring it out, and the rest would know soon.

“The baron stands with King Conmarr and knows you stand with him, each man, woman, and child. None are so faithful as Cadothmen! Nor so brave! For the falcon of Cadoth! Harralah!”

The crowd harralahed. The mouth stepped down and hurried off to the next square, step-box in hand, the guards trotting behind her. The roughed-up Untherdam supported herself on the ring of a long-unused horse-head hitching stone while she tested a burp to see if it would turn more material.

And the crowd talked.

I caught bits of it.

“Far too much like the start of the other business for my tastes.”

“Rally? Y’think they’ll call a rally?”

“—been training at the bow since I was a pup. What’s it for if not for such?”

“Yer still a pup, girl, and wise tongues don’t wag so. Wouldn’t be training at the bow if they hadn’t spent all the lads on goblins in the Threshers’ War twenty years back. They went from the fields and shops in their hundreds of thousands and tried to smother the biters in numbers. And they fell in the corn and on the grass and in sand. They fell in mud and on stone, and sickened in their camps, and brought back whip-cough and worse.”

“But then they let the women fight in the Daughters’, and women are better.”

“No better nor worse. In the Daughters’, ye had the birds. And training. And men fought beside you, too.”

“I have training. I can put a bodkin through a thrown plum.”

“That just shows how soft y’are, ready to waste a plum.”

The oldster had the right of it. Not enough hands to bring the crops in during the Threshers’ War, and most of Manreach went hungry. We’d had it better in Galtia, with game in the woods and fish in the river.

“I’ll kill a goblin,” boasted the girleen.

“That’s as they said, to a man, and all gone to the worming vaults now.”

“S’not goblins,” another old man said.

“Nae, s’worse.”

“Nothin’ worse.”

“There’s worse.”

“How so?” said the girl.

“Goblins you look down at—what’s past the Thralls looks down at you.”

The gaffer who said that last was a one-legger, his empty pants leg pinned up, the hand at the crutch missing fingers. A goblin killer, he. Goblins bite.

But it wasn’t goblins I was marching toward, and for that, I was strangely relieved.

Even as a slipper who’d never met a living goblin, I knew they’d brewed up plagues to sicken us and kill our horses. I knew the second war, the Threshers’ War, went so badly you’d scarcely find a man between thirty and sixty, and the Daughters’ War made so many women soldiers you’d hardly find a child between eight and fifteen.

The giants I’d seen in the witness coin were fearsome, and no question, but kynd and goblins were made to kill each other.