The Folly of the World by Jesse Bullington Page B

hoped so. Then she was in the air, leaping the last few ells to land on top of him, and Jan sidestepped her, shooting out a fist as he did.
    The blow caught her in the stomach and her pounce degenerated into a plummet, the girl landing on her face and gasping for air in the sand. Although it brought a queasy pinch to his crotch and a wince to his face, Jan gave her a sharp kick in the exposed armpit, rolling her over. Before she could move, he dropped down onto her chest, knees-first. Her eyes bulged, and from where he half-sat atop her, Jan considered the angle. Then he cocked her chin with one hand, nodded, and punched her flat across the face, snapping her nose—if he had hit her dead-on, he might have driven it into her brain, and that wouldn’t do at all, not after what he had gone through on her behalf.
    The cracking of cartilage brought some movement back to the girl, and she spit blood on him as he darted out his hand again and snatched her broken nose. It took several sharp twists to get it set, and she didn’t make things easier, writhing underneath him like a landed shark. Finally her nose was straight as it was liable to be and both his hands were covered in sticky blood the color of the sea at his back, and he released her. She didn’t crawl so much as slither partway up the dune she had attacked him from, her noises not quite the sobbing he expected. No, he realized as he fished his sword out of the sand and retrieved his throwing bar from the weeds, she was cackling, clutching her face in her hands and honking with laughter, threads of viscous blood dangling from between her fingers.
    “I’ll set to cooking supper,” Jan told her as he took Mackerel’s reins. “When you’re ready, I’ll take a look at your hand, see that cut from yesterday doesn’t need tending.”
    Leading his horse back to the bole in the dunes, her deranged laughter at his back, Jan reflected that things could have gone far worse.

VI.
    T he light was blinding on both sides of the water, and then Sander realized he wasn’t bobbing in water anymore at all; it was his eyelids flickering, the sun driving nails of burning fire into his brain. Someone was pushing on his stomach, and he punched the Belgian, which sent the fucker rolling down the bank. He tried to sit up and vomited again, remembering with a start that this had happened several times already, and recently, save for the punching of the… fisherman?
    The man was kneeling on the bank, clutching the ear Sander had struck. A small boat was dragged up on the grassy break in the reeds beside him. There was a net in the boat, and a length of willow with a line wound around it, and two oars—not a Belgian, then, but, yeah, a fisherman.
    Belgian? What? Where? The details were already sinking back down in the murk of his headache-echoing skull, and wiping his mouth and peering around, Sander saw only the narrow river slicing through teeth-achingly green pastureland. No Sneek, or Under-Sneek or wherever, and, most thankfully, no slimy monsters. They had come out of the dark for him, and he had fought them all, the bone knife sticking in the first and leaving him empty-handed, hard knuckles hitting harder skin, the chirping Belgians mobbing him, driving him down into the muck, burying him alive, until—
    “You’re welcome, then,” said the fisherman, scowling at Sander.
    “Yeah,” said Sander. “Where’s Sneek?”
    “Sneek?”
    “Yeah, fucking Sneek,” said Sander, mildly less annoyed to realize the man was speaking proper Dutch instead of Stiffhead. “This river comes from there, yeah?”
    “Dunno,” said the fisherman. “Maybe? Sure.”
    “Heh.” Sander chuckled. “All right, then. Fucking stiffheads.”
    “Frisians put you in there? I seen you floating in the rushes an—”
    “Who the fuck else?” said Sander. “Think I jumped in?”
    “I don’t—”
    “Think they tried to hang me?” said Sander, his tone suddenly severe. The fisherman glanced at his