Free Wild Magic by Jude Fisher

of new tricks. Have you tried “the Rose of Elda”? It’s what they all want at the moment. Guaranteed to make you shoot before your friend here has had time to count his coin.’ She leered at Halli. ‘I might even do you for free, since you’re such a handsome fellow, if your mate here pays for the Rose—’
    Katla, puzzled as to why anyone should want to pay a greater price for a briefer encounter, and curious to know exactly what ‘the Rose’ entailed, opened her mouth to ask, but Halli pushed her roughly in the back.
    ‘We’ve just arrived, ladies,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘and we’ll need considerable sustenance before we have the strength to do your skills true justice.’
    Katla quirked an eyebrow. How strange to hear her diffident brother so confident and self-possessed.
    ‘I’ll take the Rose!’
    The cry came from behind them. Katla turned to see a motley bunch coming up Fish-eye Lane led by a small round figure in a boiled leather jerkin. Behind him was a tall, gaunt, one-handed man in full wargear, an ugly fellow wearing a skullcap and a lugubrious expression and, some steps in arrears, a fearsome-looking woman with a cropped head and a mouthful of pointed teeth. Walking beside her was a giant of a man with a long sword banging against his leg.
    ‘Sell-swords,’ said Halli in a low voice.
    ‘Aye, I know,’ Katla returned cheerfully. ‘Joz! Hey – Joz Bearhand!’ She waved and whistled.
    The big man stopped in his tracks. He squinted ahead, then turned to the woman beside him. ‘Well, now, Mam: look what the tide threw up: it’s Katla Aransen, by Sur!’
    The woman strode forward until the light cast by the sconce in the brothel’s doorway fell squarely upon her. The whores took one look at this new arrival and without further discussion took their business further up the street.
    ‘We thought you were dead,’ Mam grunted, looking Katla up and down suspiciously.
    ‘You looked dead the last time we saw you,’ the small fat man said, grinning up at her. ‘Laid out on the shoreline like a half-burned trout, you was, and yer hair all frizzled off.’
    ‘Fish don’t have hair,’ the skullcapped man pointed out with deadpan logic.
    ‘She didn’t neither, Doc—’
    ‘Shut up, Dogo.’ Joz Bearhand pushed the little man aside and gave her a hug to suit his name. ‘I’m glad you’re alive, girlie.’ He stepped back and patted the sword at his side. ‘Best blade I’ve ever had, this. I’ve a hankering for a dagger to match.’
    Katla smiled delightedly. ‘Ah, the Dragon of Wen.’ It was indeed the best sword she had forged, other than the carnelian blade which Tam Fox now had in his possession.
And much luck may it bring him
, she thought. ‘It’d be a pleasure, Joz.’
    Mam glanced at the sword and curled her lip. ‘Lost me a fortune, that thing. I’d say it carried bad luck.’
    It was hard to believe the Dragon of Wen could have lost the mercenary woman a fortune, Katla thought. At the worst she could sell it for a good sum. ‘Bad luck?’ she asked.
    Mam laughed and the light from the sconce gave her filed gnashers a grim and bloody aspect. ‘Your sweet brother,’ she said, ‘borrowed this little beauty and proceeded to use it to make a kabob of the shipwright.’
    Katla frowned. Quite how Fent had come by the Dragon with which to carry out the deed she had no idea; nor why the death of Finn Larson should be such a loss to a mercenary troop.
    ‘The King promised us one of Larson’s ships,’ Joz said helpfully, as if reading her mind. ‘Thought we’d take to the high seas in our own right, instead of in the service of some other rich bastard, make our own fortunes. Bit of a problem now he’s a goner.’
    ‘But you still got the price of one—’ the small man called Dogo started, then stopped with a yelp as the tall man in wargear kicked his shin. ‘No need for that, Knobber, I was just thinking of that coffer of coin we fished out of his