“Kneel,” muttered Thorn. “Got it.” She had one of the back oars, the place of most work and least honor, right beneath his ever-watchful eye. She kept twisting about, straining over her shoulder in her eagerness to see Skekenhouse, but there was a rainy mist in the air and she could make out nothing but ghosts in the murk. The looming phantoms of the famous elf-walls. The faintest wraith of the vast Tower of the Ministry.
“You might be best just shuffling around on your knees the whole time you’re here,” said Rulf. “And by the gods, keep your tongue still. Cause Grandmother Wexen some offense and crushing with stones will seem light duty.”
Thorn saw figures gathered on the dock as they glided closer. The figures became men. The men became warriors. An honor guard, though they had more the flavor of a prison escort as the South Wind was tied off and Father Yarvi and his bedraggled crew clambered onto the rain-slick quay.
At sixteen winters Thorn was taller than most men but the one who stepped forward now might easily have been reckoned a giant, a full head taller than she was at least. His long hair and beard were darkened by rain and streaked with gray, the white fur about his shoulders beaded with dew.
“Why, Father Yarvi.” His sing-song voice was strangely at odds with that mighty frame. “The seasons have turned too often since we traded words.”
“Three years,” said Yarvi, bowing. “That day in the Godshall, my king.”
Thorn blinked. She had heard the High King was a withered old man, half-blind and scared of his own food. That assessment seemed decidedly unfair. She had learned to judge the strength of a man in the training square and she doubted she had ever seen one stronger. A warrior too, from his scars, and the many blades sheathed at his gold-buckled belt. Here was a man who looked a king indeed.
“I remember well,” he said. “Everyone was so very, very rude to me. The hospitality of Gettlanders, eh, Mother Scaer?” A shaven-headed woman at his shoulder glowered at Yarvi and his crew as if they were heaps of dung. “And who is this?” he asked, eyes falling on Thorn.
At starting fights she was an expert, but all other etiquette was a mystery. When her mother had tried to explain how a girl should behave, when to bow and when to kneel and when to hold your key, she’d nodded along and thought about swords. But Rulf had said kneel, so she dropped clumsily down on the wet stones of the dock, scraping her sodden hair out of her face and nearly tripping over her own feet.
“My king. My high … king, that is-”
Yarvi snorted. “This is Thorn Bathu. My new jester.”
“How is she working out?”
“Few laughs as yet.”
The giant grinned. “I am but a low king, child. I am the little king of Vansterland, and my name is Grom-gil-Gorm.”
Thorn felt her guts turn over. For years she had dreamed of meeting the man who killed her father. None of the dreams had worked out quite like this. She had knelt at the feet of the Breaker of Swords, the Maker of Orphans, Gettland’s bitterest enemy, who even now was ordering raids across the border. About his thick neck she saw the chain, four times looped, of pommels twisted from the swords of his fallen enemies. One of them, she knew, from the sword she kept at home. Her most prized possession.
She slowly stood, trying to gather every shred of her ruined dignity. She had no sword-hilt to prop her hand on, but she thrust her chin up at him just as if it was a blade.
The King of Vansterland peered down like a great hound at a bristling kitten. “I am well accustomed to the scorn of Gettlanders, but this one has a cold eye upon her.”
“As if she has a score to settle,” said Mother Scaer.
Thorn gripped the pouch about her neck. “You killed my father.”
“Ah.” Gorm shrugged. “There are many children who might say so. What was his name?”
“Storn Headland.”
She had expected taunts, threats, fury, but instead his craggy face lit up. “Ah, but that was a duel to sing of! I remember every step and cut of it. Headland was a great warrior, a worthy enemy! On chill mornings like that one I still feel the wound he gave me in my leg. But Mother War was by my side. She breathed upon me in my crib. It has been foreseen that no man can kill me, and so it has proved.” He beamed down at Thorn, spinning one of the pommels idly around and around on his chain between great finger and thumb. “Storn Headland’s daughter, grown so tall! The years turn, eh, Mother Scaer?”
“Always,” said the minister, staring at Thorn through blue, blue narrowed eyes.
“But we cannot pick over old glories all day.” Gorm swept his hand out with a flourish to offer them the way. “The High King awaits, Father Yarvi.”
Grom-gil-Gorm led them across the wet docks and Thorn slunk after, cold, wet, bitter, and powerless, the excitement of seeing the Shattered Sea’s greatest city all stolen away. If you could kill a man by frowning at his back, the Breaker of Swords would have fallen bloody through the Last Door that day, but a frown is no blade, and Thorn’s hatred cut no one but her.
Through a pair of towering doors trudged the South Wind’s crew, into a hallway whose walls were covered from polished floor to lofty ceiling with weapons. Ancient swords, eaten with rust. Spears with hafts shattered. Shields hacked and splintered. The weapons that once belonged to the mountain of corpses Bail the Builder climbed to his place as the first High King. The weapons of armies his successors butchered spreading their power from Yutmark into the Lowlands, out to Inglefold and halfway around the Shattered Sea. Hundreds of years of victories, and though swords and axes and cloven helms had no voice, together they spoke a message more eloquent than any minister’s whisper, more deafening than any master-at-arms’ bellow.
Resisting the High King is a very poor idea.
“I must say it surprises me,” Father Yarvi was saying, “to find the Breaker of Swords serving as the High King’s doorman.”
Gorm frowned sideways. “We all must kneel to someone.”
“Some of us kneel more easily than others, though.”
Gorm frowned harder but his minister spoke first. “Grandmother Wexen can be most persuasive.”
“Has she persuaded you to pray to the One God, yet?” asked Yarvi.
Scaer gave a snort so explosive it was a wonder she didn’t blow snot down her chest.
“Nothing will pry me from the bloody embrace of Mother War,” growled Gorm. “That much I promise you.”
Yarvi smiled as if he chatted with friends. “My uncle uses just those words. There is so much that unites Gettland and Vansterland. We pray the same way, speak the same way, fight the same way. Only a narrow river separates us.”
“And hundreds of years of dead fathers and dead sons,” muttered Thorn, under her breath.
“Shush,” hissed Rulf, beside her.
“We have a bloody past,” said Yarvi. “But good leaders must put the past at their backs and look to the future. The more I think on it, the more it seems our struggles only weaken us both and profit others.”
“So after all our battles shall we link arms?” Thorn saw the corner of Gorm’s mouth twisted in a smile. “And dance over our dead together into your brave future?”
Smiles, and dancing, and Thorn glanced to the weapons on the walls, wondering whether she could tear a sword from its brackets and stove Gorm’s skull in before Rulf stopped her. There would be a deed worthy of a warrior of Gettland.
But then Thorn wasn’t a warrior of Gettland, and never would be.
“You weave a pretty dream, Father Yarvi.” Gorm puffed out a sigh. “But you wove pretty dreams for me once before. We all must wake, and whether it pleases us to kneel or no, the dawn belongs to the High King.”
“And to his minister,” said Mother Scaer.
“To her most of all.” And the Breaker of Swords pushed wide the great doors at the hallway’s end.