Free Wolfsbane: 3 (Rebel Angels) by Gillian Philip

sings in off the sea, and there isn’t a third dimension to the world, and all the air smells of is indistinguishable
life,
and you can’t afford to be scared to lose it
.
    And to go there, and not run away, you’ve got to believe you’re right, you’ve got to believe in something and someone, even if it’s only the wolf on your right or the
friend pissing himself on your left, even if it’s only a memory or a thought or a ghost. I can’t really explain it. There’s no explaining it till you’re there.
    That’s what I tell my son.
    But he doesn’t listen.

    The friend on my left on this occasion was Orach, and she’d never been known to piss herself. Other people had, when they saw her coming down on them with a bared
blade.
    ~
How’s the back, Murlainn?
    ~ Fine.
    ~ Uh-huh. It’s always fine in a fight.
    ~ Focus,
I snapped. I knew she wasn’t accusing me of malingering at other times, but this was hardly the moment for the argument.
    ~
Yes, Captain.
She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her thoughts, and I shot her an evil look.
    Dunster was a shabby but compact village on the very rim of the world; at least that was how it felt, and I thought that was probably what had attracted the Lammyr. They’d enjoy the
bleakness, and the desolation of the marsh, and I imagined they’d thoroughly approve of the achingly cold wind that swept in with the tide. They liked their home comforts, it was true, but
they also had a fondness for a nice bit of atmosphere.
    They’d installed themselves in a cluster of old fishermen’s huts and set about their business, which doubled as entertainment. I hadn’t heard about the killings for months
after they began; that was a typical trick. Sowing arguments, feeding resentments, freshening old hostilities until the villagers did their work for them.
    From where I crouched below the edge of the sandbank, I could make out the lolling figure at the drowning-stake. The tide was out now, and the sea was reduced to thin salty runnels that made a
glistening jigsaw of the marsh, but it was all too easy to imagine those trickles swelling and rising around you with agonising slowness, and the struggle to keep your face raised above the
encroaching water, and the inevitable horrible inundation. The man at the stake shouldn’t have slit his captain’s throat, of course, but then the captain should never have inflicted the
drowning fate on the man’s sister, and all on the heels of a savage woman-to-woman argument and a miscarried baby. That was Lammyr-influence for you.
    One day, if I could be bothered, I’d trace it back to the original deed: a silent strangling in an alleyway, maybe, or an unexplained poisoning on the back of a too-obvious grudge. It
hardly mattered now. It was one of the younger villagers who’d rounded up a delegation to come to me, though Dunster lay just outwith the dun lands and was not officially under my protection.
I was angry with their elders for letting it get so far, for sitting on their fat pride and their dignity too long, but that was how it worked. They wouldn’t have known the Lammyr were even
around, not to start with. Never try to sort out a Lammyr nest yourself; not without a good detachment of fighters and a better assortment of blades.
    ~ Poor bastard.
Orach nodded at the sagging cadaver on the marsh below. Her voice in my head recalled me to the moment.
    ~ Poor bastards, the lot of them,
I told her briskly. ~
Shall we get on with it?
    ~ I wondered when you were going to say that.
    There was not the usual over-familiar grin on her face, and she watched me strangely, but I’d farted about for long enough. I gestured half of my detachment round to the back of the
hut-cluster and sent two men up with Branndair into the raggedy birks: just as well, since the first Lammyr came from there.
    It gave a shriek that could have been a laugh, grabbed a branch with a bony hand and let the rotten limb snap and carry it down onto Braon. She,