‘The High King given his chair by this One God, I reckon.’
‘You’re right!’ Gorm snapped his fingers. ‘But it is all a pretty lie. I once met the man who carved that chair, and he was not a god but a slave from Sagenmark with the most awful breath. I never thought it fine craftsmanship and my opinion has not changed. Too fussy. I will have a new one made, I think.’
Raith raised his brows. ‘A new one, my king?’
‘I shall soon sit enthroned in the Hall of Whispers as High King over the whole Shattered Sea.’ Gorm peered sideways, mouth pressed into a smug little smile. ‘No man was ever favoured with greater enemies than I. The three brothers Uthrik, Odem and Uthil. The deep-cunning Queen Laithlin. Bright Yilling. Grandmother Wexen. The High King himself. I have prevailed over them all. By strength and cunning and weaponluck. By the favour of Mother War and the treachery of Father Yarvi.’
‘The great warrior is the one who still breathes when the crows feast. The great king is the one who watches the carcasses of his enemies burn.’ How hollow those words rang to Raith now, but Gorm smiled to hear them. Men always smile to hear their own lessons repeated.
‘Yes, Raith, yes! Your brother may have spoken more, but you were always the clever one. The one who truly understood! Just as you said, Skara will be the envy of the world as a queen, and manage my treasury well, and bear me strong children, and speak fair-sounding words that will bring me friends across the sea. As it turns out, you were right not to kill her.’
Raith’s knuckles ached as he bunched his fist. ‘You think so, my king?’ His voice almost croaked away to nothing, he was so sickened with jealousy, sickened with the unfairness of it, but Gorm took it for tearful gratitude.
‘I do, and … I forgive you.’ The Breaker of Swords smiled as though his forgiveness was the best gift a man could have, and certainly a better one than Raith deserved. ‘Mother Scaer likes things that are constant. But I want men about me, not unquestioning slaves. A truly loyal servant must sometimes protect his master from his own rash decisions.’
‘The gods have truly favoured you, my king, and given you more than any man could desire.’ More than any man could deserve. Especially one like this. Raith stared up into that smiling face, scarred by a hundred fights, lit in garish colours from the window. The face of the man he’d once so admired. The face of the man who’d made him what he was.
A killer.
He snatched up the golden cup from the altar. ‘Let me pour a toast to your victory!’ And he tipped the jug so it slopped over, dark wine spattering red as blood-spots on the marble dais. He took the sip the cup-filler takes to make sure the wine’s safe for better lips than his.
There was an echoing crash behind them, bellowed insults, and Gorm turned. Long enough for Raith to slip two fingers into his pouch and feel the cold glass between them.
The High King’s stringy corpse had been knocked from its funeral table and flopped onto the floor while two of Gorm’s warriors fought over his crimson shroud, fine cloth ripping as they dragged it between them like dogs over a bone.
‘There is a song in that, I think,’ muttered Gorm, staring at the naked body of the man who’d ruled the Shattered Sea, sprawled with scant dignity on his unfinished floor. ‘But there will be many songs sung of this day.’
‘Songs of the fall of cities and the death of kings,’ said Raith. He knelt, offering the golden cup to his master. Just as he used to after every duel and battle. After every victory. After every burned farm. After every petty murder. ‘A toast to the new High King!’ he called. ‘Drunk from the cup of the old!’
‘I have missed you, Raith.’ Gorm smiled as he reached for the cup, just as Skara had when she was fitted for her mail, but this time Raith’s hands stayed firm. ‘I have been ungenerous, and we can see what happens to an ungenerous king. You shall return to me, and carry my sword again, and my cup too.’ And Grom-gil-Gorm lifted the drink to his lips.
Raith took a long breath and let it sigh away. ‘That’s all I ever wanted.’
‘Ugh.’ The Breaker of Swords wrinkled his nose. ‘This wine has an ugly flavour.’
‘Everything has an ugly flavour here.’
‘Too true.’ Gorm narrowed his eyes at Raith over the cup’s rim as he took another draught. ‘You have changed a great deal. Your time beside my queen-to-be has taught you much of perception and patience.’
‘Queen Skara has made me see things differently, my king. I should tell her I’m quitting her service to return to my right place. That’d be the proper thing.’
‘The proper thing? I might almost call you house-broken!’ Gorm drained his cup and tossed it rattling on the altar, wiping the stray drips from his beard. ‘Go to the queen, then. She should be ashore by now. We are to be married in the morning, after all. She will be sad, I think, to lose her favourite dog.’ And the Breaker of Swords reached down to scratch roughly at Raith’s head. ‘But I will be happy to have mine back.’
Raith bowed low. ‘Not near so happy as the dog will be, my king.’ And he turned and strutted down from the dais with some of his old swagger, nodding to Soryorn, who was just coming the other way with the High King’s scarred pommel.
‘Shall we burn this place, my king?’ Raith heard the standard-bearer ask.
‘Why burn what you can use?’ said Gorm. ‘A few strokes of the chisel will change these miserable statues into Mother War, and at once we have raised a mighty temple to her! A fitting gift for she that has given her favoured son the whole Shattered Sea …’
Raith stepped out smiling into the night. For once he had no regrets.
The Happiest Day
Skara stared at herself in the mirror.
She remembered doing the same when she first came to Thorlby, a hundred years ago it seemed, after she fled from the burning ruins of her grandfather’s hall. She had hardly recognized the brittle-looking girl in the glass then. She was not sure she knew the sharp-faced woman there now any better. A woman with a proud defiance in her eye, and a ruthless set to her mouth, and a dagger at her jewelled belt she looked more than willing to use.
Skara twisted the armring Bail the Builder had once worn, the red stone winking. She remembered her grandfather giving it to her, thought how proud he would have been to see her now, pictured his smiling face, then flinched at the thought of his body pitching in the firepit, had to swallow the familiar surge of sickness, shut her eyes and try to calm her thumping heart.
She had told herself that when she saw Bright Yilling dead she would be free. She felt her thrall gently arranging the chain of pommels around her neck, the chain the High Queen’s key would soon hang from, and she felt the cold weight of it on her bare shoulders, the weight of things done and choices made.
Instead of banishing the ghosts of Mother Kyre and King Fynn she had added the ghosts of Bright Yilling and his Companions. Instead of freeing herself from the cold touch of his fingertips in the shadows of the Forest she had chained herself further with his death-gripping fist on the fields before Bail’s Point.
Mother Owd had been right. The faster you run from the past, the faster it catches you. All you can do is turn and face it. Embrace it. Try and meet the future stronger for it.
There was a heavy knock at the door, and Skara took a long, sharp breath, and opened her eyes. ‘Come in.’
Blue Jenner was due to take her father’s place in the ceremony, which seemed apt, as he was the closest thing she had to family now. She felt a fresh surge of sickness at the sight of the sacred cloth over his shoulder. The one that would be wrapped around her hand and Gorm’s to bind them together for a lifetime.
The old raider came to stand beside her, his battered features looking doubly battered in the mirror, and slowly shook his head. ‘You look a High Queen indeed. How do you feel?’