She felt a nervous tingle as their eyes met, their fingers almost touching. Then he nodded. ‘I fight for you.’ He was rough and he was rude, and for some reason she found herself wondering what it might be like to kiss him. She heard Sister Owd clear her throat, felt her face burning and quickly let go.
Raith squeezed the ring closed, his wrist so thick the ends barely met around it. A reward for good service. But also a sign that he served, and a mark of whom he served. ‘I should have come to find you after the battle, but …’
‘I needed you to fight.’ Skara pushed thoughts of kissing away and put a little iron into her voice. ‘Now I need you to come with me.’
She watched Raith give his brother a parting hug, then stand, her silver glinting on his wrist, and follow her. He might not truly be her man, but she began to understand why queens had Chosen Shields. There is nothing for your confidence like a proven killer at your shoulder.
When Skara played in the great hall of Bail’s Point as a child it had seemed grand beyond reckoning. Now it was narrow, and dim, and smelled of rot, the roof leaking and the walls streaked with damp, three dusty shafts of light falling across the cold floor from windows looking over grey Mother Sea. The great painting of Ashenleer as warrior-queen that covered one wall was peeled and blistered, a bloom of mould across her mail and the adoring expressions of her hundred guards faded to smudges. A fitting image for the fallen fortunes of Throvenland.
Bail’s Chair still stood upon the dais, though, made of pale oak-wood cut from a ship’s keel, the twisted grain polished to a sheen by years of use. Kings had once sat there. Until Skara’s grandfather’s great-grandfather decided the chair was too narrow to hold all his arse, and the hall too narrow to hold all his boasting, and had a new chair made in Yaletoft, and began to build a fine new hall around it that would be the wonder of the world. It took twenty-eight years to finish the Forest, by which time he was dead and his son was an old man.
Then Bright Yilling burned it in a night.
‘Seems the fighting’s not quite done,’ grunted Raith.
Gorm and Uthil glowered at each other over Bail’s Chair, their ministers and warriors bristling about them. The brotherhood of battle had lasted no longer than the life of their last enemy.
‘We could draw lots-’ King Uthil grated out.
’You had the satisfaction of killing Dunverk,’ said Gorm, ‘I should have the chair.’
Father Yarvi rubbed at one temple with the knuckles of his shrivelled hand. ‘For the gods’ sake, it is a chair. My apprentice can carve you another.’
‘It is not just any chair.’ Skara swallowed her nerves as she stepped up onto the dais. ‘Bail the Builder once sat here.’ King Uthil and his minister stood frowning on her left, Gorm and his minister on her right. She was the balance between them. She had to be. ‘How many ships did we take?’
‘Sixty-six,’ said Mother Scaer. ‘Among them a gilded beast of thirty oars a side which we hear is Bright Yilling’s own.’
Father Yarvi gave Skara an appreciative nod. ‘It was a deep-cunning plan, princess.’
‘I only sowed the seed,’ said Skara, bowing low to the two kings. ‘Your bravery reaped the harvest.’
‘Mother War was with us and our weaponluck held good.’ Gorm turned one of the pommels on his chain around and around. ‘But this fortress is far from safe. Grandmother Wexen knows well its importance, in strategy and as a symbol.’
‘It is a splinter pushed into her flesh,’ said Uthil, ‘and it will not be long before she tries to pluck it out. You should return to Thorlby with my wife, princess. You will be far from danger there.’
‘My respect for you is boundless, King Uthil, but you are wrong. My father knew well the importance of this fortress too. So much so he died to defend it, and is buried in the barrows outside the walls, beside my mother.’ Skara lowered herself into the chair where her forefathers had once sat, painfully upright, the way Mother Kyre had taught her. Her guts were churning, but she had to be strong. Had to lead. There was no one else. ‘This is Throvenland. This is my land. This is the very place I should be.’
Father Yarvi gave a tired smile. ‘Princess-’
‘In fact, I am a queen.’
There was a silence. Then Sister Owd began to climb the steps. ‘Queen Skara is quite right. She sits in Bail’s Chair as King Fynn’s only living descendant. There is precedent for an unmarried woman to take the chair alone.’ Her voice quavered under Mother Scaer’s deadly glare but she went on, nodding up towards the faded painting that loomed over them. ‘Queen Ashenleer herself, after all, was unmarried when she won victory against the Inglings.’
‘Is there another Ashenleer among us, then?’ sneered Mother Scaer.
Sister Owd stood at Skara’s left hand where a minister belongs, and resolutely folded her arms. ‘That remains to be seen.’
‘Whether you are princess or queen will mean nothing to Bright Yilling,’ rumbled Gorm, and Skara felt a surge of that familiar fear at the name. ‘He kneels to no woman but Death.’
‘He will already be on his way,’ said Uthil, ‘and with vengeance in mind.’
You can only conquer your fears by facing them. Hide from them, and they conquer you. Skara let them wait, taking a moment to settle her thumping heart before she answered. ‘Oh, I am counting on it.’
Part II
Young Love
She pushed her hand into his hair, pulled him down so their foreheads were pressed hard together, quick breath hot on his face. For a long while they lay tangled with each other, the furs kicked down around their ankles, in silence.
Not one word spoken since Koll said his goodbyes to Thorn on the docks and strode up like a thief after a promising purse through the darkened city. In silence Rin had opened her door, taken him into her house, into her arms, into her bed.
Koll had always loved words, but to be a minister’s apprentice was to drown in them. True words, false words, words in many tongues. Right words, wrong words, written and spoken and unspoken. For now silence suited him. To forget for a moment what he owed Father Yarvi, and what he owed Rin, and how there was no way he could settle both debts. Whatever words he said, he felt like a liar.
Rin put one rough hand on his cheek, gave him a parting kiss and slithered out from under him. He loved to watch her move, so strong and sure, shadows shifting between her ribs as she fished his shirt from the floor and pulled it on. He loved it when she wore his clothes, not asking, not needing to ask. It made them feel so close together, somehow. That and he loved the way the hem only came halfway down her bare backside.
She squatted, the key she wore to her own locks swinging free on its chain, tossed a log on the fire, sparks drifting up and the light flaring on her face. Not one word spoken all that time but, like everything good, the silence couldn’t last.
‘You’re back, then,’ she said.
‘Only for tonight.’ Koll probed gently at the bridge of his nose, still not quite healed from its sharp meeting with Raith’s head. ‘The Prince of Kalyiv has come to Roystock. Queen Laithlin is sailing to an audience and needs a minister beside her. Father Yarvi’s busy trying to bail out our foundering alliances, so …’
‘She calls on the mighty Koll! Changing the world, just like you always wanted.’ Rin drew his shirt tight about her, the flames reflected in the corners of her eyes. ‘Minister to the Golden Queen and you never even took the Minister’s Test.’
‘No, but … I will have to. And swear the Minister’s Oath too.’