Free Before They Are Hanged by Joe Abercrombie Page A

eyebrow at Jezal. “I suppose it would be rude of us to refuse, when the Legate has gone to all the trouble of organising an honour guard. Lead the way.”

    Say one thing for Logen Ninefingers, say he’s in pain. He dragged himself over the broken cobblestones, wincing every time his weight went onto his bad ankle—limping, gasping, waving his arms to keep his balance.
    Brother Longfoot grinned over his shoulder at this sorry display. “How are your injuries progressing, my friend?
    “Painfully,” grunted Logen, through gritted teeth.
    “And yet, I suspect, you have endured worse.”
    “Huh.” The wounds of the past were many. He’d spent most of his life in some amount of pain, healing too slowly from one beating or another. He remembered the first real wound he’d ever taken, a cut down his face that the Shanka had given him. Fifteen years old, lean and smooth-skinned and the girls in the village had still liked to look at him. He touched his thumb to his face and felt the old scar. He remembered his father pressing the bandage to his cheek in the smoky hall, the stinging of it, wanting to shout but biting his lip. A man stays silent.
    When he can. Logen remembered lying on his face in a stinking tent with the cold rain drumming on the canvas, biting on a piece of leather to keep from screaming, coughing it out and screaming anyway while they dug in his back for an arrow-head that hadn’t come out with the shaft. It had taken them a day of looking to find the bastard thing. Logen winced and wriggled his tingling shoulder blades at that memory. He hadn’t been able to talk for a week from all that screaming.
    Hadn’t been able to talk for more than a week after the duel with Threetrees. Or walk, or eat, or see hardly. Broken jaw, broken cheek, ribs broken past counting. Bones smashed until he was no more than aching, crying, self-pitying goo, mewling like an infant at every movement of his stretcher, fed by an old woman with a spoon and grateful to get it.
    There were plenty more memories, all crowding in and cutting at him. The stump of his finger after the battle at Carleon, burning and burning and making him crazy. Waking up sudden after a day out cold, when he got knocked on the head up in the hills. Pissing red after Harding Grim’s spear had pricked him through the guts. Logen felt them now on his tattered skin, all of his scars, and he hugged his arms around his aching body.
    The wounds of the past were many, alright, but it didn’t make the ones he had now hurt any less. The cut in his shoulder nagged at him, sore as a burning coal. He’d seen a man lose an arm from nothing more than a graze he’d got in battle. First they had to take off his hand, then his arm to the elbow, then all the way to the shoulder. Next he got tired, then he started talking stupid, then he stopped breathing. Logen didn’t want to go back to the mud that way.
    He hopped up to a crumbling stump of wall and leaned against it, painfully shrugged his coat off, fumbled at the buttons of his shirt with one clumsy hand, pulled the pin out of the bandage and peeled the dressing carefully away.
    “How does it look?” he asked.
    “Like the parent of all scabs,” muttered Longfoot, peering at his shoulder.
    “Does it smell alright?”
    “You want me to smell you?”
    “Just tell me if it stinks.”
    The Navigator leaned forwards and sniffed daintily at Logen’s shoulder. “A marked odour of sweat, but that might be your armpit. I fear that my remarkable talents do not encompass medicine. One wound smells much like another to me.” And he pushed the pin back through the bandage.
    Logen worked his shirt on. “You’d know if it was rotten, believe me. Reeks like old graves, and once the rot gets in you there’s no getting rid of it but with a blade. Bad way to go.” And he shuddered and pressed his palm gently against his throbbing shoulder.
    “Yes, well,” said Longfoot, already striding off down the near-deserted