Liars and Thieves (A Company of Liars short story) Read Free

Then she rose and ducked down into one of the bothies. She emerged with a wad of cloth and a clay jar. She dipped the cloth into the jar, coating it thickly with some green unguent. Dye tossed it to the third man in the group, a small, hunched wretch with weeping sores round his mouth and nose, and one scaly hand knotted into a useless claw, which looked as if it had been withered from birth.
    ‘Here, Weasel, get him to press on that. It’ll stop the bleeding.’
    Weasel ambled over. He ripped the hole in my shirt wider over the wound and stuffed the wad of cloth through the hole. I felt the unguent growing hot against my skin, as if the tongue of an animal was probing into the wound.
    ‘Something’s not right here,’ Pecker said, frowning. ‘You got a horse, a fine-looking beast ’n’ all, compared to most we get in these parts. It’d be worth a fair bit. See, I’d have thought that if you was as poor as you claim, you’d have sold that horse or eaten it by now.’
    Pecker crouched down and peered menacingly into my face. ‘That man and his woman, what’re they to you? She your daughter, is she? ’Cause he don’t look like any pedlar.’
    Holy Jack squinted over at Zophiel. ‘Swear, I’ve seen him somewhere before and he wasn’t with any woman then. He wasn’t dressed like that neither.’ Jack scratched his head thoughtfully with the point of his dagger.
    ‘There, see,’ said Pecker. ‘You’d best give us the truth. Holy Jack here can sniff out a liar better than a dog can scent a rabbit.’
    It took me a few moments to realise that he assumed Adela was Zophiel’s wife or mistress. In any other circumstances I’d have laughed, imagining the look of disgust on Zophiel’s face at the mere thought of touching Adela, never mind being the father of her baby. I glanced at Zophiel, but he still hadn’t moved.
    All eyes were turned on me and none of them were friendly. It occurred to me that this might just be a trick. What if Adela had already told them that her husband and the others were out there in the forest somewhere, or if they’d realised the man she was shouting for was not the man they had tied to a tree? If they even suspected a lie, the dagger Jack was playing with would slice through my throat. And that’s if I was lucky. I’d heard that some outlaws amused themselves by torturing men before they killed them, thinking up novel ways to make their ends as drawn out and painful as possible, just to while away the hours. I stared at Adela, willing her to give me some sort of sign, but all I could see were fear and panic in her eyes.
    ‘I told you, Holy Jack isn’t a patient man,’ Pecker growled. ‘You don’t want to—’
    He stiffened, staring into the trees, listening. My heart began to race. Our companions must have discovered we’d been taken. They were out there somewhere, creeping towards us, trying to rescue us. Desperate not to give them away, I stared fixedly at the ground as if I’d heard nothing, but I was straining to listen as intently as Pecker. There was a sudden flapping of wings, as if birds had been disturbed from a roost, maybe by our little band moving through the undergrowth. The outlaws scrambled to their feet.
    ‘More plump pigeons heading this way,’ Pecker announced.
    Before I could even turn my head, the outlaws had vanished into the forest. Somewhere a horse screamed. The caltrops had claimed another victim.
    We huddled close to the outlaws’ fire pit in the ruined building, digging into the common pot with spoons made of sheep’s bones to fish out pieces of hare and the flesh of several different birds, but I was gobbling so fast I barely had time to taste it. I hadn’t realised how ravenous I was. Zophiel had at last regained consciousness, though he seemed to have little appetite. There was a streak of blood on his forehead and he looked even paler and more gaunt than usual. Adela was picking listlessly at the leg of the woodcock Dye had shoved in her