As though aiming an arrow at a running stag, he pointed the Otter’s bow at the place where the rowboat would be when the river galley met it. An arrow, once shot, was gone. Here, he could and did correct his aim all the way up to the instant of impact.
Before then, archers on the Otter were shooting at the luckless Thervings. “Brace yourselves!” Grus cried just before the ram struck home.
The Otter hit the rowboat amidships, exactly as he’d hoped. He staggered at the collision. One archer fell into the Tuola. The fellow grabbed at an oar and held on. The river galley rode up and over the boat full of Thervings.
“That’ll be the end of that,” Nicator said with no small satisfaction.
“We’ll stop to make sure—and to pick up the poor bastard who went over the side,” Grus answered. He raised his voice. “Rowers, rest on your oars.”
As the Otter glided to a stop, Grus felt a tug on the rudder. He wondered if it had caught on a snag. But it wasn’t a snag, as he discovered when he looked down. A Therving clung to the rudder. Grus yanked out his sword. “Come up,” he called.
“Come up and we’ll spare your life.” He added gestures in case the Therving spoke no Avornan.
He was strong enough, that was certain. Hanging on to the rudder with one hand, he got the other one on the rail. Then he hauled himself up into the Otter and stood there for a moment. With his soaked clothes and long hair, with water dripping from his stubbly chin, he looked as much like a river god as a man.
“Take his blade,” Grus told a couple of soldiers who’d hurried back to the stern. “I don’t want him doing anything stupid.”
“Right you are, sir,” one of them said. They advanced on the Therving together.
Maybe he thought they were coming to kill him. Maybe he’d been one of the men who’d shot hopeless arrows at the Otter as the river galley bore down on the rowboat, and still didn’t feel like giving up. Maybe he’d intended to sell his life dear from the moment he grabbed the rudder. Whatever the reason, his blade leaped free with a wet hiss of metal. He sprang past the startled sailors and straight at Grus.
Only because Grus had half expected the Therving to do something foolish did he keep from getting cut down in the first moments of the fight. The enemy warrior was bigger, stronger, and younger than he was, and fought as though he didn’t care whether he lived or died. Had a half-mindless thrall from the southern lands under the Banished One’s sway been able to fight at all, he might have fought like that. But thralls mostly lacked the wit to fight at all.
Grus gave ground. It was that or be hacked down where he stood. The Therving was utterly without fear. Killing seemed the only thing that mattered to him.
Thunk! An arrow sprouted in his side, as though it had grown there. He grimaced when it struck home, but kept right on trying to slay Grus. Thunk! Thunk!—one in the side, one in the chest. The Therving grunted. Blood began to run from his nostrils and from the corner of his mouth, but he fought on.
Thunk! Another arrow, this one right in the middle of his chest. Swaying, he nodded to Grus as though to an old friend. “He still remembers you,” he said in excellent Avornan. Only then did he topple.
“Tough bugger,” a sailor remarked, more in praise than otherwise. “You all right, Skipper?”
“Yes, I think so,” Grus answered, panting. “Tough bugger is right. I had all I could do to keep him from carving me.”
Sailors picked up the Therving’s body and flung it over the rail into the Tuola. As it splashed into the river, one of them asked, “What was that he meant, sir, about somebody remembering you?”
“I don’t know. He was dying. And he didn’t have any idea who I was, anyhow,” Grus said. “How could he?”
The sailor shrugged and went about his business. Grus wished he could do the same. For him, though, it wasn’t so easy. He had a pretty good idea whom the Therving might have meant. There was only one being who had ever taken note of him. And, just for a moment, he’d thought the Banished One stared out through the dying warrior’s eyes.
He tried to tell himself he’d been imagining things. He tried and tried, but couldn’t make himself believe it.
Winter in the city of Avornis was a slow time, a time to spend with friends and family. Rain and snow made travel outside the city difficult, sometimes impossible. Even travel inside the city often wasn’t easy. Without the rivers that came together at or near it, the place never could have grown bigger than an average provincial town. But in a hard winter, the rivers froze, and could stay frozen for weeks at a time. Poor people went hungry then, and the poorest starved. In a very hard winter, the kind that came once or twice in a hundred years, even people not so very poor starved.
At first, King Lanius didn’t worry about the snow that fell day after dreary day. He enjoyed playing in it and throwing snowballs as much as any other boy his age. Servants’ children could throw snowballs at him without fear of arrest for treason.
Lepturus was the one who began worrying out loud a couple of weeks before the winter solstice. “We’ve had a lot of snow already this year, Your Majesty,” he said.
“I know that,” Lanius answered. He knew it quite well. He’d had some of that snow delivered, with considerable force, just in front of his left ear, not long before coming back into the palace.
But Lepturus persisted. “If it keeps up like this, it’s going to be a nasty one. I think the rivers will freeze, and I think they’ll stay frozen too cursed long.”
Lanius frowned. He’d come across accounts of such hard times in his reading. “That could be very bad.”
“You’re right. It could.” Lepturus drummed his fingers on his thigh. “When I was your age, or maybe even smaller, my granddad used to tell me stories about a hard, hard winter that had happened when he was small. He said it got so bad, some people had to turn cannibal to get by. It was as though the Banished One prowled through the streets of the city. We don’t want times like those coming back.”
“Gods forbid!” Lanius exclaimed. But then, wistfully, he asked, “What was it like—having a grandfather, I mean? I hardly knew my own father, and both my grandfathers died years before I was born.”
“My granddad was an old man who liked wine a bit too much and talked and talked when he got tiddly,” the commander of his bodyguards said with a reminiscent smile. “But you need to think about the city of Avornis now, and—”
“Bring in as much grain as we can while the rivers are still passable?” Lanius broke in.
Lepturus looked at him and clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You’re getting ahead of me, Your Majesty,” he said, almost reproachfully. “Yes, I think that’s what we ought to do, and the sooner the better.”
“Go tell my mother, then,” Lanius said. “Tell her I think it’s a good idea, too.” His mouth twisted. “Or maybe you’d better not. She doesn’t seem to want to heed anything I say these days.”
“You’re not that far from coming of age, Your Majesty,” Lepturus said. “Your mother… likes heading the regency.”
“And so she doesn’t like it when I show I know what I’m doing?” Lanius asked. The guards commander nodded. Lanius sighed. “That’s silly. I’d come of age even if I didn’t know what I was doing. Would she like that better?”