You Die When You Die by Angus Watson

Author:Angus Watson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Epic, Fiction / Fantasy / Historical
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2017-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Shelter

Wulf the Fat was a good guy. Finnbogi the Boggy asked him if he could be rearguard again and Wulf agreed, putting him on with Keef the Berserker.

If Keef knew about Finnbogi’s woes, it wasn’t obvious. He certainly didn’t mention them or offer any consoling words. He darted around with Arse Splitter, menacing every squirrel and chipmunk. When he did walk next to Finnbogi, he walked backwards or circled crabwise, scanning the trees for imaginary foes.

Finnbogi tramped along. He didn’t mind if the Lakchans caught up and killed him, not when the two worst things that had ever happened to anyone had happened to him the day before.

He was coming to terms with losing Thyri, in the same way you might be coming to terms with losing an arm, the day after you lost that arm. It was painful and raw, he felt unbalanced and sick but, not one for self-pity, he could see that life was going to be possible. It was just going to be very different from the life he’d planned. Although it didn’t help, to carry on his arm analogy, that someone else was waving his detached arm around as if to say, ‘look, I’ve got your arm and you haven’t,’ especially when that someone would be the chief twat of the tribe made up of chief twats from all the twattiest tribes.

And then the discovery that he had a living father, and that father was some weird outcast whose only friend was a bear, and that father was coming with them to The Meadows? Had anyone ever had worse news?

Having no parents was what Finnbogi was all about. He was the solo hero, the maverick, the romantic loner, his own man formed by his own choices. You could look at others and say, “oh he’s just like his father,” or even “he’s totally unlike his father,” but not Finnbogi. He was a man without a reference point.

And now they said that this thick-looking, Scrayling-dressed lunk was his father?

He didn’t know what to do about it. Avoiding him seemed the best tactic. He couldn’t work out why Erik was avoiding him, though. Was he biding his time before wandering over and having a manly father-to-son chat? Finnbogi dreaded that almost as much as he dreaded hearing Thyri and Garth shagging again.

Up ahead of Finnbogi, Chnob the White walked along on his own. Chnob’s betrayal of their leaving plans to Jarl Brodir and his subsequent pariah status was the only good thing that had happened recently.

“You’re a dirty traitor, Chnob!” Finnbogi shouted at the loser’s back. Chnob carried on walking, but his shoulders sagged a little. It made Finnbogi feel a lot better, for about three seconds, until he found himself feeling sorry for Chnob and he wished he hadn’t shouted at him.

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