He shrugged, looking her straight in the eye. ‘You think Bright Yilling loses much sleep over what’s fair?’
Skara felt herself blush. He had the manners of a stump, treated her with not the slightest deference. Mother Kyre would have been outraged. Maybe that was why Skara found it so hard to be. She was not used to bluntness and there was something refreshing in it. Something appealing in it, even. ‘So I should send a dog to catch a dog?’ she asked.
Raith gave a harsh little chuckle at that. ‘Send a killer to kill a killer, anyway.’ He reached for his pouch, and his smile vanished.
That was when Koll came strolling around the side of the cedar, stopping a moment to help Soryorn up. His lip was split and his nose was swollen and bloody, but he was smiling.
‘Lost something, friend?’ he asked as Raith patted at his clothes. With a flourish of his spindly fingers he produced, apparently from nowhere, the armring Bail the Builder once wore into battle. He bowed in an entirely proper manner. ‘I think this is yours, princess.’
Raith gaped. ‘You thieving-’
Koll showed his bloody teeth as he smiled wider. ‘You think Bright Yilling loses much sleep over thieving?’
Raith made a grab for the armring but Koll was too quick, flipped it glittering into the air. ‘You lost the game.’ He snatched the armring right out of Raith’s clutching fingers, tossed it nimbly from left hand to right and left Raith grabbing at nothing. ‘Don’t lose your sense of humour too!’
Skara saw Raith clenching his fists as Koll flicked the armring up one more time.
‘Enough!’ She stepped between the two of them before any more harm could be done and plucked the armring from the air. ‘Gettland is the winner!’ she called, as she slipped it back over her wrist and up her arm.
The Gettlanders burst into cheering. The Vanstermen were a good deal quieter as they watched Soryorn hop away, leaning hard on Mother Scaer’s shoulder. As for Skara’s own little entourage, Raith looked as if he had swallowed an axe and Blue Jenner was in tears, but only because he was laughing so hard.
Thorn Bathu cupped her hands to shout over the noise. ‘I guess all that time spent up the mast wasn’t wasted after all!’
‘A man can learn more up a mast than in any minister’s chamber!’ called Koll, basking in the applause and blowing kisses to his friends.
Skara leaned close to him. ‘You realize you’ve won the chance to climb alone into an impregnable fortress full of enemies?’
His smile wilted as she took his wrist and raised his limp hand in triumph.
First Man In
The walls of Bail’s Point were frozen in another flash of lightning, the battlements black teeth against a brilliant sky. Gods, they looked a long way up.
‘Is it too late to say I don’t like this plan?’ shrieked Koll over the howling of the wind, the hissing of the rain, the hammering of Mother Sea against their little boat.
‘You can say it whenever you like,’ Rulf bellowed back at him, his bald pate running with wet. ‘Long as you climb up there afterward!’
The wind swept up and lashed spray into the faces of the struggling crew. Thunder crackled loud enough to make the world tremble, but Koll could hardly have been trembling more as they jerked and wobbled closer to the rocks.
‘These skies don’t strike me as a fine omen!’ he called.
‘Nor these seas neither!’ shouted Dosduvoi, wrestling with his oar as if it was a horse that needed breaking. ‘Bad luck all round!’
‘We all have luck, good and bad!’ Thorn weighed the grapple in her hand. ‘It’s how you meet it that matters.’
‘She’s right,’ said Fror, his misshapen eye white in his tar-blacked face. ‘He Who Speaks the Thunder is on our side. His rain will keep their heads indoors. His grumbling will muffle the sounds of our coming.’
‘Provided his lightning doesn’t fry you to a cinder.’ Thorn slapped Koll on the back and nearly knocked him out of the boat.
The base of the wall was made from ancient elf-stone but buckled and broken, rusted bars showing in the cracks, coated in limpet, weed and barnacle. Rulf leaned low, teeth bared as he dragged hard on the steering oar, hauling them side on.
‘Easy! Easy!’ Another wave caught them, brought Koll’s stomach into his mouth and carried them hard against stone, wood grating and squealing. He clung to the rail, sure the boat would break her back and Mother Sea come surging in, ever hungry for warm bodies to drag into her cold embrace, but the seasoned timbers held and he muttered thanks to the tree that had given them.
Thorn tossed the grapple and it caught first time among those ancient rods. She braced her legs on the strakes beside Koll, teeth gritted as she hauled the boat close.
Koll saw the two buttresses Princess Skara had spoken of. Man-built from rough-hewn blocks, mortar crumbled from years of Mother Sea’s chewing. Between them was a shadowy cleft, stone shining slick and wet.
‘Just imagine it’s another mast!’ roared Rulf.
‘Masts often have angry seas at the bottom,’ said Thorn, tar-blacked sinews flexing in her shoulders as she wrestled with the rope.
‘But rarely angry enemies at the top,’ muttered Koll, staring up towards the battlements.
‘You sure you don’t want tar?’ asked Fror, offering out the jar. ‘They see you climbing up-’
‘I’m no warrior. They catch me I’ve a better chance talking than fighting.’
‘You ready?’ snapped Rulf.
‘No!’
‘Best go unready, then, the waves’ll smash this boat to kindling soon enough!’
Koll clambered up onto the rail, one hand gripping the prow, the other jerking some slack into the rope he had tied across his chest and coiled up between the sea-chests. Wet it was some weight, and it’d only get heavier the higher he climbed. The boat yawed, grinding against the foot of the buttress. Angry water clapped between rock and wood and fountained up, would’ve soaked Koll through if rain and sea hadn’t soaked him through already.
‘Hold her steady!’ shouted Rulf.
‘I would!’ called Dosduvoi, ‘but Mother Sea objects!’
The wise wait for their moment, as Father Yarvi was always telling him, but never let it pass. Another wave lifted the boat and Koll muttered one more prayer to Father Peace that he might live to see Rin again, then sprang.
He’d been sure he’d plunge scrabbling and wailing straight through the Last Door, but the chimney between the two buttresses was deeper than a man was tall and just the right width. He stuck there so easily it was almost a disappointment.
‘Ha!’ he shouted over his shoulder, delighted at his unexpected survival.
‘Don’t laugh!’ snarled Thorn, still struggling with the grapple. ‘Climb!’
The crumbling mortar offered foot and hand holds in plenty and to begin with he made quick progress, humming away to himself as he went, imagining the song the skalds would sing of Koll the Clever, who swarmed up the impenetrable walls of Bail’s Point as swiftly as a gull in flight. The applause he’d won in the yard of Thorlby’s citadel had only given him a taste for more. To be loved, and admired, and celebrated seemed to him no bad thing. No bad thing at all.
The gods love to laugh at a happy man, however. Like a good mast the buttresses tapered towards their tops. The chimney between them grew shallower, wind and rain lashing into it and giving Koll such an icy buffeting he couldn’t hear himself hum any longer. Worse still it grew wider, so he was reaching further for handholds until there was no choice but to give up one buttress and climb in the angle between the other and the wall itself, the stone ice-cold and moss-slick so he had to keep stopping to scrape the wet hair from his face, wipe his battered hands and blow life back into his numb fingers.
The last few strides of sheer man-built stone took longer than all the rest combined. There was a deadly length of rain-heavy rope dragging at his shoulder now, weightier than a warrior’s armour, whipping and snapping about the chimney as the wind took it. It was as hard a test as he’d faced in his life, muscles twitching, trembling, aching past the point of endurance. Even his teeth were hurting, but to turn back would’ve been more dangerous than to go on.