As the news spread the music stuttered to a halt and the celebrations with it. Mother Scaer was scowling towards Yarvi. ‘You thought to outwit Grandmother Wexen, but she has outwitted you and all of us with you. Arrogant fool!’
‘I heard none of your wisdom!’ Father Yarvi snarled back, shadows black in the angry hollows of his face.
‘Stop!’ pleaded Skara, stepping between them. ‘We must be united, now more than ever!’
But a babble of voices had broken out. A clamour like the one she had heard outside her door the night the High King’s warriors came to Yaletoft.
‘Ten thousand men? That could be three times what we fought here!’
‘Twice as many as we have!’
‘There could be more flooding across the straits!’
‘Plainly the High King has found more ships.’
‘We must strike them now,’ snapped Uthil.
‘We must fall back,’ growled Gorm. ‘Draw them onto our ground.’
‘Stop,’ croaked Skara, but she could not seem to take a proper breath. Her heart was surging in her ears. Something clattered from the black sky and she gasped. Raith caught her by the arm and dragged her behind him, whipping free his dagger.
A bird, swooping from the night and onto Mother Scaer’s shoulder. A crow, folding its wings and staring unblinking with yellow eyes.
‘Bright Yilling has come!’ it shrieked. And suddenly Skara was back in the darkness, the mad light of fires outside the windows, the white hand reaching out to touch her face. She felt her guts churn and her knees tremble, had to clutch at Raith’s arm to stop herself from falling.
In silence Mother Scaer unpeeled the scrap of paper from her crow’s leg. In silence she read the markings, her stony face growing stonier yet. In silence Skara felt the fear settling ever deeper on her like drifting snow, like a great stone crushing out her breath, acid tickling the back of her throat.
She remembered what her grandfather used to tell her. Victory is a fine feeling. But always a fleeting one.
Her voice was tiny in the night. ‘What is it?’
‘More dark news,’ said Mother Scaer. ‘I know where Bright Yilling has been.’
The Price
Rulf always said there was no place to forget your troubles like the prow of a ship under full sail, where your worst enemy was the wind and your biggest worry the next wave but one. It surely seemed like wisdom to Koll as he clung grinning to the prow-beast, relishing the spray on his face and the salt on his lips.
But the gods love to laugh at a happy man.
A quick arm snaked around his shoulders. It might not have been as big an arm as Brand’s but the strength in it was just as frightening, the dangling knuckles scabbed and scarred, the elf-bangle won from fighting seven men alone glowing a faint orange.
‘Nearly back home.’ Thorn took a long breath through her bent nose, and nodded towards the ragged line of Gettland’s hills just showing on the horizon. ‘You’ll be seeing Rin again, I reckon?’
Koll sighed. ‘You can sheathe the threats. Brand already gave me the talk-’
‘Brand doesn’t talk loud enough. He’s an easy-going man. The gods know he has to be, to put up with me. But I married Brand.’ Thorn flicked at the red-gold key around her neck and set it swinging by its chain. ‘So Rin’s my sister too. And I’m not so easy-going. I’ve always liked you and I don’t like anyone, but you see where I’m headed with this?’
‘It hardly takes a far-sighted fellow.’ Koll hung his head. ‘Feel like I’m trapped in a shrinking room. Can’t see how to do right by Rin and Father Yarvi both.’
‘Can’t see how to get what you want from both, do you mean?’
He glanced guiltily up at her. ‘I want to be loved while I change the world. That so wrong?’
‘Only if you end up doing neither and make a heap of wreckage getting there.’ Thorn sighed, and gave his shoulder a sympathetic pat. ‘If it’s any consolation I know just how you feel. I swore an oath to Queen Laithlin to be her Chosen Shield and I made a promise to Brand to be his wife and … turns out they both deserve better.’
Koll raised his brows. It was an odd reassurance to know Thorn, who always seemed so certain, might have her own doubts. ‘Not sure they’d agree.’
She snorted. ‘Not sure they’d disagree. Feels like there’s not enough of me to go around and what there is no one in their right mind would want. I never aimed to become … well …’ She made a fist of her right hand and winced down at it. ‘Some angry bastard.’
‘You didn’t?’
‘No, Koll. I didn’t.’
‘What’re you going to do, then?’ he asked.
She puffed out her scarred cheeks. ‘Try harder, I guess. What’re you going to do?’
Koll puffed out his as he looked towards home. ‘I’ve no bloody idea.’ He frowned as he saw grey smudges against the sky. ‘Is that smoke?’ He slipped from under Thorn’s arm, hopped onto a barrel and from there to the mast. The queen had come to stand at the rail, frowning off towards the west with her golden hair snatched and tossed in the wind.
‘Dark omens,’ Skifr murmured from inside her hood as she watched the birds circle in their wake. ‘Bloody omens.’
Koll dragged himself onto the yard and hooked his legs over, one hand on the masthead, the other shading his eyes as he stared off towards Thorlby. At first he couldn’t see much for the swaying of the ship, then Mother Sea calmed a moment and Koll caught a good glimpse. The docks, the walls, the citadel …
‘Gods,’ he croaked. There was a blackened scar down the hillside, right through the heart of the city.
‘What do you see?’ snapped out Queen Laithlin.
‘Fire,’ said Koll, the hairs on his neck prickling. ‘Fire in Thorlby.’
Flames had swept through the docks. Where crowds had bustled and fishermen toiled and merchants called prices ghosts of dust whirled among scorched ruins. Scarcely a wharf was left standing, all fallen twisted into the water. The blackened mast of a sunken boat poked from the slapping waves, the forlorn prow-beast of another.
‘What happened?’ someone croaked against the stink of burned wood.
‘Land us at the beach!’ snarled Thorn, clinging so hard to the rail her knuckles were white.
In brooding silence they rowed, staring up towards the city, gaps torn from the familiar buildings on the steep hillside like teeth from a lover’s smile, each an aching absence. Houses burned to shells, windows blank as corpse’s eyes, charred skeletons of roof-beams stripped obscenely bare. Houses still coughing up a roiling of dark smoke, and above the crows circling, circling, cawing out gratefully to their iron mother.
‘Oh, gods,’ croaked Koll. Sixth Street, where Rin’s forge had been, where they’d worked together, and laughed together, and lain together, was a streak of blackened wreckage in the shadow of the citadel. He went cold to the very tips of his fingers, the fear so savage a beast in his chest he could barely take a proper breath for its clawing.
The moment the keel ground on shingle Thorn sprang from the prow and Koll followed, hardly noticing the cold, nearly floundering into her on the sand she pulled up so quickly.
‘No,’ Koll heard her whisper, and she put the back of one hand to her mouth and it was trembling.
He looked up the slope of the beach towards the howes of kings long dead. There was a gathering there on the dunes, among the thin grass lashed by the sea wind, a gathering of dozens, shoulders hunched and heads bowed.
A funeral gathering, and Koll felt the fear grip him tighter.
He tried to set a hand on Thorn’s shoulder, for her comfort or his he couldn’t have said, but she twisted away and ran on, sand kicking from her boot heels, and Koll followed.
He could hear a low voice droning out. Brinyolf the Prayer-Weaver, singing songs for Father Peace, for She Who Writes and She Who Judges, for Death who guards the Last Door.
‘No,’ he heard Thorn mutter as she struggled on up the dunes towards them.