Evil for Evil by K. J. Parker

jellying blood. The puncture had burst the rivets on five of the links; must've been a cavalryman's lance, with the full impetus of a charging horse behind it, to have done that. He looked a little closer, contemplating the twisted ends of the damaged links. So much force, applied in such a small space. He'd seen wounds before, felt them himself; but there was more violence in the silent witness of the twisted metal than his own actual experiences. That's no way to behave, he thought.
    She'd been right; it was much easier to understand than sewing, though it was harder work. He needed both hands on the ends of the wirecutter handles to snip through the damaged links, and after he'd bent a few replacement links to fit (one twist to open them, one to close them up again), the plier handles had started blisters at the base of both his thumbs. The only really awkward part was closing up the rivet. For an anvil he used the face of one of his two hammers. The only way he could think of to hold it was to sit cross-legged and grip it between his feet, face up, his calf jamming the handle into the floor. He tried it, but the pain from his injured knee quickly persuaded him to try a different approach; he ended up sitting on the hammer handle and leaning sideways to work, which probably wasn't the way they did it in the ordnance factory at Mezentia. Hauling the shirt into position over the hammer was bad enough; lining up the tiny holes in the ends of the links and getting the rivet in without dropping it was torture. He remembered someone telling him once that there were fifty thousand links in a really high-class mail shirt. He also remembered what he'd paid for such an item. It didn't seem quite so expensive, somehow.
    "Is that all you've done?"
    He looked up at her. "Yes," he said.
    "You're very slow."
    "I'll get quicker," he replied. "I expect you get into a rhythm after a bit." He picked up a rivet and promptly dropped it. It vanished forever among the heaped-up links on his lap. "What happens to all this stuff, then?"
    "We sell it," she said. "Juifrez'll pick it up on the cart and take it up the mountain to the Stringer pass. That's where he meets the buyers. Of course," she added,
    "we've got you to thank."
    "For what?"
    "For our living," she said gravely. "For fighting your war. We've been tidying up after you ever since you started it. If it wasn't for you and your friends, I don't know what we'd have done."
    "Oh," Miel said.
    "It was Juifrez's idea," she went on. "Our village was one of the first to be burned out, it was soon after you attacked the supply train for the first time. Aigel; don't suppose you've ever heard of it. We ran away as soon as we saw the dust from the cavalry column, and when we came back…" She shrugged. "The idea was to walk down to Rax—that's the next village along the valley—and see if they'd take us in. But on the way we came across the place where you'd done the ambush. Nobody had been back there; well, I suppose a few scouts, to find out what had happened, but nobody'd buried the bodies or cleared away the mess. You'd burned all the food and the supplies, of course, but we found one cart we could patch up, and we reckoned that'd be better than walking. Then Juifrez said, 'Surely all this stuff's got to be worth some money to someone,' and that was that. Ever since then, we've been following you around, living off your leftovers. You're very popular with us, actually. Juifrez says you provide for us, like a good lord should. The founder of the feast, he calls you." She laughed. "I hope you've got someone to take your place while you're away," she said. "If the resistance packs up, we're really in trouble." While you're away; the implication being that sooner or later he'd go back. "He's your leader, then," he said, "this Juifrez?"
    "I suppose so," she replied. "Actually, he's my husband. And while I think of it, it'd probably be just as well if you didn't let him find out who you are. Like I