Page 55

“Oh. Right. Fucking share. You’re trying to say fucking share.”

“Is for fuckenshare.”

“Now you’ve got it.”

I saw the sense in treating wells as sacred. Life being so precarious out here, people had to watch out for each other, even if they didn’t get along.

“Is for same reason no stay near three-god.”

That caught my attention, and no question.

“You mean, that thing tosses people across the mountains often?”

“Often? No. At times. But is no good wait too close. Others do same, we fight. No good. Also, Ftagi-zhon. Knife-birds.”

“Yah, we met those birds. Knife-birds? Good name. Fuck those birds, and their arsehole flowers.”

Szymnal took a moment with this, then started laughing.

Hard.

“What?” I said.

In between laughs, he said, “I picture flowers from arsehole. Is bad gift.”

I chuckled a bit but found his laughing so hard at something so stupid childish.

Then a sort of chill of unwelcome understanding hit me as I grasped that this was how others looked at my karkery. This understanding seemed of itself to be a sort of bad gift, risking to make me proper or, worse, wise, so I went full the other way and imagined bending over and shitting a hot torrent of flowers right into Szymnal’s face. Pretty soon, I was laughing just as hard as he was.

“I have a bad gift for you!” I said, pointing at him.

“I do not want it!”

As this high talk was being held in Holtish, Galva understood it and made a typically Galvish expression of weariness. For I was her bad gift, wasn’t I, and she was stuck with me.

It was at this moment that a high, punk, frankly awful smell hit my nose.

I knew that stink.

I would never forget it.

I looked at Galva, and her eyes had gone narrow, as they will before a fight.

“Goblin!” Galva said. “Hey, jilnaedu,” Galva said to me. “You smell that? Tell your new friend that biters are near.”

I was opening my mouth to do exactly that when I saw the source of the odor.

A goblin of normal height, about three and a half feet, walked up jankily, as they do, with a kynd on each side. The three of them carried water, wood, three gazelles.

“The fuck is that thing doing here?” I asked Szymnal.

He smiled at the goblin, who fluttered its white eye-membranes at him while showing its teeth, which may be how those fuckers smile.

Galva said something choice in Ispanthian.

“Get it away from here! Kill it!” I said, which might have been the same thing Galva said, I don’t know. But it was neither gotten away from there nor killed. Instead, it put down the several heavy-looking waterskins it carried and came to sit on Szymnal’s lap.

“Kill it?” he said.