Before They Are Hanged

to his
friends. When he’d followed Bethod he’d talked to him,
all the day long, for they’d been close back then, like
brothers almost. Talk took your mind off the blisters on your feet,
or the hunger in your belly, or the endless bloody cold, or who’d
got killed yesterday.
    Logen used to
laugh at the Dogman’s stories while they slogged through the
snow. He used to puzzle over tactics with Threetrees while they rode
through the mud. He used to argue with Black Dow while they waded
through bogs, and no subject was ever too small. He’d even
traded a joke or two with Harding Grim in his time, and there weren’t
too many who could say that.
    He sighed to
himself. A long, painful sigh that caught at the back of his throat.
Good times, no doubt, but far behind him now, in the sunny valleys of
the past. Those boys were all gone back to the mud. All silent,
forever. Worse yet, they’d left Logen out in the middle of
nowhere with this lot.
    The great Jezal
dan Luthar wasn’t interested in anyone’s stories except
his own. He sat stiff upright and aloof the whole time, chin held
high, displaying his arrogance, and his superiority, and his contempt
for everything like a young man might show off his first sword, long
before he learned that it was nothing to be proud of.
    Bayaz had no
interest in tactics. When he spoke at all he barked in single words,
in yeses and in nos, frowning out across the endless grass like a man
who’s made a bad mistake and can’t see his way clear of
it. His apprentice too seemed changed since they left Adua. Quiet,
hard, watchful. Brother Longfoot was away across the plain, scouting
out the route. Probably best that way. No one else had any talk at
all. The Navigator, Logen had to admit, had far too much.
    Ferro rode some
distance away from the rest of this friendly gathering, her shoulders
hunched, her brows drawn down in a constant scowl, the long scar on
her cheek puckered up an angry grey, doing her best to make the
others look like a sack of laughs. She leaned forwards, into the
wind, pushing at it, as if she hoped to hurt it with her face. More
fun to trade jokes with the plague than with her, Logen reckoned.
    And that was the
merry band. His shoulders slumped. “How long until we get to
the Edge of the World?â€

Small Crimes
    â€œCold, eh,
Colonel West?â€

Rain
    Jezal had always
found a good storm a thorough amusement. Raindrops lashing at the
streets, and walls, and roofs of the Agriont, hissing from the
gutters. Something to be smiled out at through the wet window while
one sat, warm and dry in one’s quarters. Something that took
the young ladies in the park by surprise and made them squeal,
sticking their dresses excitingly to their clammy skin. Something to
be dashed through, laughing with one’s friends, as one made
one’s way from tavern to tavern, before drying out before a
roaring fire with a mug of hot spiced wine. Jezal used to enjoy the
rain almost as much as the sun.
    But that was
before.
    Out here on the
plains, storms were of a different stamp. This was no petulant
child’s tantrum, best ignored and soon ended. This was a cold
and murderous, merciless and grudge-bearing, bitter and relentless
fury of a storm, and somehow it made all the difference that the
nearest roof, let alone the nearest tavern, was hundreds of miles
behind them. The rain came down in sheets, dousing the endless plain
and everything on it with icy water. The fat drops stung at Jezal’s
scalp like sling-stones, nipped at his exposed hands, the tops of his
ears, the back of his neck. Water trickled through his hair, through
his eyebrows, down his face in rivulets and into his sodden collar.
The rain was a grey curtain across the land, obliterating anything
more than a hundred strides ahead, although out here of course, there
was nothing ahead or anywhere else.
    Jezal shivered
and clutched the collars of his coat together with one hand. A
pointless gesture, he was already soaked to his skin. Damn shopkeeper
back in Adua had assured him that this coat was entirely waterproof.
It had certainly cost him enough, and he had looked very well in it
in the shop, quite the rugged outdoorsman, but the seams had begun to
leak almost as soon as the first drops fell. For some hours now he
had been every bit as wet as if he had climbed into the bath with his
clothes on, and a good deal colder.
    His boots