Half a King

Cheapest Offerings

Yarvi squatted in the stinking darkness, fingering the raw burns on his neck and the fresh scabs on his rough-shaved scalp, sweating by day and shivering by night, listening to the groans and whimpers and unanswered prayers in a dozen languages. From the broken throats of the human refuse around him. From his own loudest of all.

Upstairs the best wares were kept clean and well fed, lined up on the street in polished thrall-collars where they might draw in the business. In the back of the shop the less strong or skilled or beautiful were chained to rails and beaten until they smiled for a buyer. Down here in the darkness and the filth were kept the old, sick, simple, and crippled, left to squabble over scraps like pigs.

Here in the sprawling slave-market of Vulsgard, capital of Vansterland, everyone had their price, and money was not wasted on those who would fetch no money. A simple sum of costs and profits, shorn of sentiment. Here you could learn what you were truly worth, and Yarvi learned what he had long suspected.

He was close to worthless.

At first his mind spilled over with plans and stratagems and fantasies for his revenge. He was plagued by a million things he could have done differently. But not by one he could do now. If he screamed out that he was the rightful King of Gettland, who would believe it? He had scarcely believed it himself. And if he found a way to make them believe? Their business was to sell people. They would ransom him, of course. Would King Odem smile to have his missing nephew back under his tender care? No doubt. A smile calm and even as fresh-fallen snow.

So Yarvi squatted in that unbearable squalor, and found it was amazing what a man could get used to.

By the second day he scarcely noticed the stink.

By the third he huddled up gratefully to the warmth of his gods-forsaken companions in the chill of the night.

By the fourth he was rooting through the filth as eagerly as any of them when they were tossed the slops at feeding time.

By the fifth he could hardly remember the faces of those he knew best. His mother and Mother Gundring became confused, his treacherous uncle and his dead father melted together, Hurik no longer could be told from Keimdal, Isriun faded to a ghost.

Strange, how quickly a king could become an animal. Or half a king half an animal. Perhaps even those we raise highest never get that far above the mud.

It was not long after sunrise on his seventh day in that manmade hell, the calls of the merchant in dead men’s armor next door just starting to challenge the squawking of the seabirds, that Yarvi heard the voice outside.

“We’re looking for men as can pull an oar,” it said, deep and steady. The voice of a man used to straight talk and blunt dealing.

“Nine pairs of hands.” A softer, subtler voice followed the first. “The trembles has left some gaps on our benches.”

“Of course, my friends!” The voice of the shop’s owner — Yarvi’s owner, now — slick and sticky as warm honey. “Behold Namev the Shend, a champion of his people taken in battle! See how tall he stands? Observe those shoulders. He could pull your ship alone. You will find no higher quality—”

A hog snort from the first customer. “If we was after quality we’d be at the other end of the street.”

“You don’t grease an axle with the best oil,” came the second voice.

Footsteps from above, and dust sifting down, and shadows shifting in the chinks of light between the boards over Yarvi’s head. The slaves around him stiffened, quieting their breathing so they could listen. The shop-owner’s voice filtered muffled to their ears, a little less honey on it now.

“Here are six healthy Inglings. They speak little of the Tongue but understand the whip well enough. Fine choices for hard labor and at an excellent price—”

“You don’t grease an axle with good dripping either,” said the second voice.

“Show us to the pitch and pig fat, flesh-dealer,” growled the first.

The damp hinges grated as the door at the top of the steps was opened, the slaves all cringing on instinct into a feeble huddle at the light, Yarvi along with them. He might have been new to slavery, but at cringing he had long experience. With many curses and blows of his stick the flesh-dealer dragged them into a wobbling, wheezing line, chains rattling out a miserable music.

“Keep that hand out of sight,” he hissed, and Yarvi twisted it up into the rags of his sleeve. All his ambition then was to be bought, and owned, and taken from this stinking hell into the sight of Mother Sun.

The two customers picked their way down the steps. The first was balding and burly, with a whip coiled at his studded belt and a way of glaring from under knotted brows that proclaimed him a bad man to fool with. The second was much younger, long, lean, and handsome, with a sparse growth of beard and a bitter twist to his thin lips. Yarvi caught the gleam of a collar at his throat. A slave himself, then, though judging by his clothes a favored one.

The flesh-dealer bowed, and gestured with his stick toward the line. “My cheapest offerings.” He did not bother to add a flourish. Fine words in that place would have been absurd.

“These are some wretched leavings,” said the slave, nose wrinkled against the stench.

His thick-set companion was not deterred. He drew the slave into a huddle with one muscled arm, speaking softly to him in Haleen. “We want rowers, not kings.” It was a language used in Sagenmark and among the islands, but Yarvi had trained as a minister, and knew most tongues spoken around the Shattered Sea.

“The captain’s no fool, Trigg,” the handsome slave was saying, fussing nervously with his collar. “What if she realizes we’ve duped her?”

“We’ll say this was the best on offer.” Trigg’s flat eyes scanned the dismal gathering. “Then you’ll give her a new bottle and she’ll forget all about it. Or don’t you need the silver, Ankran?”

“You know I do.” Ankran shrugged off Trigg’s arm, mouth further twisted with distaste. Scarcely bothering to look them over, he dragged slaves from the line. “This … this … this …” His hand hovered near Yarvi, began to drift on—

“I can row, sir.” It was as big a lie as Yarvi had told in all his life. “I was a fisher’s apprentice.”

In the end Ankran picked out nine. Among them were a blind Throvenlander who had been sold by his father instead of their cow, an old Islander with a crooked back, and a lame Vansterman who could barely restrain his coughing for long enough to be paid for.

Oh, and Yarvi, rightful King of Gettland.

The argument over price was poisonous, but in the end Trigg and Ankran reached an understanding with the flesh-dealer. A trickle of shining hacksilver went into the merchant’s hands, and a little back into the purse, and the greater share was split between the pockets of the buyers and, as far as Yarvi could tell, thereby stolen from their captain.

By his calculation he was sold for less than the cost of a good sheep.

He made no complaint at the price.

One Family

The South Wind listed in its dock, looking like anything but a warm breeze.

Compared to the swift, slender ships of Gettland it was a wallowing monster, low to the water and fat at the waist, green weed and barnacle coating its ill-tended timbers, with two stubby masts and two dozen great oars on a side, slit-windowed castles hunched at blunt prow and stern.

“Welcome home,” said Trigg, shoving Yarvi between a pair of frowning guards and toward the gangplank.

A dark-skinned young woman sat on the roof of the aftcastle, one leg swinging as she watched the new slaves shuffle across. “This the best you could do?” she asked with scarcely the hint of an accent, and sprang easily down. She had a thrall-collar of her own, but made from twisted wire, and her chain was loose and light, part coiled about her arm as though it was an ornament she had chosen to wear. A slave even more favored than Ankran, then.

She checked in the mouth of the coughing Vansterman and clicked her tongue, poked at the Shend’s crooked back, and blew out her cheeks in disgust. “The captain won’t think much of these slops.”

“And where is our illustrious leader?” Ankran had the air of already knowing the answer.

“Asleep.”

“Asleep drunk?”

She considered that, mouth moving faintly as though she was working at a sum. “Not sober.”

“You worry about the course, Sumael,” grunted Trigg, shoving Yarvi’s companions on again. “The rowers are my business.”

Sumael narrowed her dark eyes at Yarvi as he shuffled past. She had a scar and a notch in her top lip where a little triangle of white tooth showed, and he found himself wondering what southern land she was born in and how she had come here, whether she was older or younger than him, hard to tell with her hair chopped short—

She darted out a quick arm and caught his wrist, twisting it up so his hand came free of his torn sleeve.

“This one has a crippled hand.” No mockery, merely a statement of fact, as though she had found a lame cow in a herd. “There’s only one finger on it.” Yarvi tried to pull free but she was stronger than she looked. “And that seems a poor one.”

“That damn flesh-dealer!” Ankran elbowed past to grab Yarvi’s wrist and twist it about to look. “You said you could row!”

Yarvi could only shrug and mutter, “I didn’t say well.”

“It’s almost as if you can’t trust anyone,” said Sumael, one black eyebrow high. “How will he row with one hand?”

“He’ll have to find a way,” said Trigg, stepping up to her. “We’ve got nine spaces and nine slaves.” He loomed over Sumael and spoke with his blunt nose no more than a finger’s width from her pointed one. “Unless you fancy a turn on the benches?”

She licked at that notch in her lip, and eased carefully backward. “I’ll worry about the course, shall I?”

“Good idea. Chain the cripple on Jaud’s oar.”

They dragged Yarvi along a raised gangway down the middle of the deck, past benches on either side, three men to each huge oar, all shaven-headed, all lean, all collared, watching him with their own mixtures of pity, self-pity, boredom and contempt.

A man was hunched on hands and knees, scrubbing at the deck-boards, face hidden by a shag of matted hair and colorless beard, so beggarly he made the most wretched of the oarsmen look like princes. One of the guards aimed the sort of careless kick at him you might at a stray dog and sent him crawling away, dragging a great weight of heavy chain after him. The ship did not seem well supplied in general but of chain there was no shortage.

They flung Yarvi down with unnecessary violence between two other slaves, by no means an encouraging pair. At the end of the oar was a hulking southerner with a thick fold of muscle where his neck should have been, head tipped back so he could watch the seabirds circling. Closest to the rowlock was a dour old man, short and stocky, his sinewy forearms thick with gray hair, his cheeks full of broken veins from a life in the weather, picking at the calluses on his broad palms.

“Gods damn it,” grunted this older one, shaking his head as the guards chained Yarvi to the bench beside him, “we’ve a cripple at our oar.”

“You prayed for help, didn’t you?” said the southerner, without looking around. “Here is help.”

“I prayed for help with two hands.”

“Be thankful for half of what you prayed for,” said Yarvi. “Believe me, I prayed for none of this.”

The big man’s mouth curled up a little as he looked at Yarvi sidelong. “When you have a load to lift, you’re better lifting than weeping. I am Jaud. Your sour oarmate is Rulf.”

“My name’s Yorv,” said Yarvi, having turned his story over in advance. Keep your lies as carefully as your winter grain, Mother Gundring would have said. “I was a cook’s boy—”

With a practiced roll of the tongue and twitch of the head the old man spat over the ship’s side. “You’re nothing now, and that’s all. Forget everything but the next stroke. That makes it a little easier.”

Jaud heaved up a sigh. “Don’t let Rulf grind the laughter out of you. He’s sour as lemons, but a good man to have at your back.” He puffed out his cheeks. “Though, one must admit, since he’s chained to your side, that will never happen.”

Yarvi gave a sorry little chuckle, maybe his first since he was made a slave. Maybe his first since he was made a king. But he didn’t laugh long.

The door of the aftcastle banged wide and a woman swaggered into the light, raised both arms with a flourish, and shrieked, “I am awake!”

She was very tall, sharp-featured as a hawk with a pale scar across one dark cheek and her hair pinned up in a tangle. Her clothes were a gaudy patchwork of a dozen cultures’ most impractical attire — a silken shirt with frayed embroidery flapping at the sleeves, a silvery fur coat ruffled by the breeze, a fingerless glove on one hand and the other crusted with rings, a crystal-studded belt the gilt end of which flapped about the grip of a curved sword slung absurdly low.

She kicked aside the nearest oarsman so she could prop one sharp-toed boot on his bench and grinned down the ship, gold glinting among her teeth.

Right away the slaves, the guards, the sailors began to clap. The only ones who did not join them were Sumael, her tongue wedged in her cheek on the roof of the aftcastle, the beggar whose scrubbing block was still scrape-scraping on the gangway, and Yarvi, ex-King of Gettland.

“Damn this bitch,” Rulf forced through a fixed grin while he applauded.

“You’d better clap,” murmured Jaud.

Yarvi held up his hands. “I’m worse equipped for that than rowing.”

“Little ones, little ones!” called the woman, ring-covered fist pressed to her chest with emotion, “you do me too much honor! Don’t let that stop you trying, though. To those who have recently joined us, I am Ebdel Aric Shadikshirram, your captain and caregiver. You may well have heard of me, for my name is famous throughout the Shattered Sea and far beyond, yea unto the very walls of the First of Cities and so on.”

Her fame had not reached Yarvi, but Mother Gundring always used to say The wise speaker learns first when to stay silent.

“I could regale you with rousing tales of my colorful past,” she went on, toying with an earring of gold and feathers that dangled down well past her shoulder. “How I commanded the victorious fleet of the empress at the Battle of Fulku, was for some time a favored lover of Duke Mikedas himself but refused to become his wife, scattered the blockade at Inchim, sailed through the greatest tempest since the Breaking of God, landed a whale, and blah blah blah, but why?” She affectionately patted the cheek of the nearest slave, hard enough for the slapping to be clearly heard. “Let us simply say this ship is now the world to you, and on this ship I am great and you are lowly.”

“We’re great,” echoed Trigg, sweeping the benches with his frown, “you’re lowly.”

“Fine profits today, in spite of the sad need to replace a few of your brethren.” The many buckles on the captain’s boots jingled as she swaggered between the benches. “You will all have a mouthful of bread and wine tonight.” Scattered cheers at this spectacular show of generosity. “Though you belong to me—”

Trigg noisily cleared his throat.

“—and the other shareholders in our brave vessel—”

Trigg nodded cautious approval.

“—still I like to think of us all as one family!” The captain gathered the whole ship in her outstretched arms, huge sleeves streaming in the breeze as though she were some rare and enormous seabird taking flight. “I, the indulgent grandparent, Trigg and his guards the kindly uncles, you the troublesome brood. United against merciless Mother Sea, ever the sailor’s most bitter enemy! You are lucky little children, for mercy, charity, and kindness have always been my great weaknesses.” Rulf hawked up phlegm in disgust at that. “Most of you will see the good sense in being obedient offspring, but … perhaps …” and Shadikshirram’s smile collapsed to leave her dark face a caricature of hurt, “… there is some malcontent among you thinking of going their own way.”

Trigg gave a disapproving growl.

“Of turning his back upon his loving family. Of abandoning his brothers and sisters. Of leaving our loyal fellowship at some harbor or other.” The captain traced the fine scar down her cheek with one fingertip and bared her teeth. “Perhaps even of raising a treacherous hand against his doting carers.”

Trigg gave a horrified hiss.

“Should some devil send such thoughts your way …” The captain leaned down toward the deck. “Think on the last man to try it.” She came up with the heavy chain and gave it a savage tug, jerking the filthy deck-scrubber from his feet and squawking over in a tangle of limbs, rags, hair. “Never let this ungrateful creature near a blade!” She stepped onto him where he lay. “Not an eating knife, not a nail-trimmer, not a fishhook!” She walked over him, tall heels grinding into his back, losing not the slightest poise in spite of the challenging terrain. “He is nothing, do you hear me?”

“Damn this bitch,” murmured Rulf again as she hopped lightly from the back of the beggar’s head.

Yarvi was watching the wretched scrubber as he clambered up, wiped blood from his mouth, retrieved his block, and without a sound crawled stiffly back to his work. Only his eyes showed through his matted hair for an instant as he looked toward the captain’s back, bright as stars.

“Now!” shouted Shadikshirram, swarming effortlessly up the ladder onto the roof of the aftcastle and pausing to twirl her ring-crusted fingers. “South to Thorlby, my little ones! Profits await! And Ankran?”

“My captain,” said Ankran, bowing so low he nearly grazed the deck.

“Bring me some wine, all this blather has given me a thirst.”

“You heard your grandma!” roared Trigg, uncoiling his whip.

There were clatters and calls, the hissing of rope and the creaking of timbers as the few free sailors cast off and prepared the South Wind to leave Vulsgard’s harbor.

“What now?” muttered Yarvi.

Rulf gave a bitter hiss at such ignorance.

“Now?” Jaud spat into his palms and worked his two strong hands about the polished handles of their oar. “We row.”

Heave

Soon enough, Yarvi wished he had stayed in the flesh-dealer’s cellar.

“Heave.”

Trigg’s boots ground out a ruthless rhythm as he prowled the gangway, whip coiled in meaty fists, eyes sweeping the benches for slaves in need of its encouragement, blunt voice booming out with pitiless regularity.

“Heave.”

It was no surprise that Yarvi’s withered hand was even worse at gripping the handle of a great oar than it had been the handle of a shield. But Trigg made Master Hunnan seem a doting nursemaid in Yarvi’s memory. The whip was his first answer to any problem, but when that did not cause more fingers to sprout he lashed Yarvi’s crooked left wrist to the oar with chafing thongs.

“Heave.”

With each impossible haul upon the handles of that terrible oar Yarvi’s arms and shoulders and back burned worse. Though the hides on the bench were worn to a silky softness, and the handles to a dull polish by his predecessors, with each stroke his arse was worse skinned, his hands worse blistered. With each stroke the whip cuts and the boot bruises and the slow-healing burns about his rough-forged thrall-collar were more stung by salt sea and salt sweat.

“Heave.”

The suffering went far past any point of endurance Yarvi had imagined, but it was astonishing the inhuman efforts a whip in skillful hands could flick from a man. Soon its crack elsewhere, or even the approaching scrape of Trigg’s boots on the gangway, would make Yarvi flinch and whimper and pull that fraction harder, spit flecking from his gritted teeth.

“This boy won’t last,” growled Rulf.

“One stroke at a time,” murmured Jaud gently, his own strokes endlessly strong, smooth, regular, as though he was a man of wood and iron. “Breathe slow. Breathe with the oar. One at a time.”

Yarvi could not have said why, but that was some help.

“Heave.”

And the rowlocks clattered and chains rattled, the ropes squealed and the timbers creaked, the oarslaves groaned or cursed or prayed or kept grim silence, and the South Wind inched on.

“One stroke at a time.” Jaud’s soft voice was a thread through the haze of misery. “One at a time.”

Yarvi could hardly tell which was the worse torture — the whip’s stinging or his skin’s chafing or his muscles’ burning or the hunger or the weather or the cold or the squalor. And yet, the endless scraping of the nameless scrubber’s stone, up the deck and down the deck and up the deck again, his lank hair swaying and his scar-crossed back showing through his rags and his twitching lips curled from his yellowed teeth, reminded Yarvi that it could be worse.

It could always be worse.

“Heave.”

Sometimes the gods would take pity on his wretched state and send a breath of favorable wind. Then Shadikshirram would smile her golden smile and, with the air of a long-suffering mother who could not help spoiling her thankless offspring, would order the oars unshipped and the clumsy sails of leather-banded wool unfurled, and would airily disclaim on how mercy was her greatest weakness.

With weeping gratitude Yarvi would slump back against the stilled oar of those behind and watch the sailcloth snap and billow overhead and breathe the close stink of more than a hundred sweating, desperate, suffering men.

“When do we wash?” Yarvi muttered, during one of these blissful lulls.

“When Mother Sea takes it upon herself,” growled Rulf.

That was not rarely. The icy waves that slapped the ship’s side would spout, spray, and regularly soak them to the skin, Mother Sea washing the deck and surging beneath the footrests until everything was crusted stiff with salt.

“Heave.”

Each gang of three was chained together with one lock to their bench, and Trigg and the captain had the only keys. The oarslaves ate their meager rations chained to their bench each evening. They squatted over a battered bucket chained to their bench each morning. They slept chained to their bench, covered by stinking blankets and bald furs, the air heavy with moans and snores and grumbles and the smoke of breath. Once a week they sat chained to their bench while their heads and beards were roughly shaved — a defense against lice which deterred the tiny passengers not at all.

The only time Trigg reluctantly produced his key and opened one of those locks was when the coughing Vansterman was found dead one chill morning, and was dragged from between his blank-faced oarmates and heaved over the side.

The only one who remarked on his passing was Ankran, who plucked at his thin beard and said, “We’ll need a replacement.”

For a moment Yarvi worried the survivors might have to work that fraction harder. Then he hoped there might be a little more food to go around. Then he was sick at himself for the way he had started to think.

But not so sick he wouldn’t have taken the Vansterman’s share had it been offered.

“Heave.”

He could not have said how many nights he passed limp and utterly spent, how many mornings he woke whimpering at the stiffness of the last day’s efforts only to be whipped to more, how many days without a thought but the next stroke. But finally an evening came when he did not sink straight into a dreamless sleep. When his muscles had started to harden, the first raw blisters had burst and the whip had fallen on him less.

The South Wind was moored in an inlet, gently rocking. The rain was falling hard, so the sails had been lowered and strung over the deck to make a great tent, noisy with the hissing of drops on cloth. Those men with the skill had been handed rods and Rulf was one, hunched near the rowlock in the darkness, murmuring softly to the fish.

“For a man with but one hand,” said Jaud, chain clinking as he propped one big bare foot up on their oar, “you rowed well today.”

“Huh.” Rulf spat through the rowlock, and a clipping of Father Moon’s light showed the grin on his broad face. “We may make half an oarsman of you yet.”

And though one of them was born long miles away and the other long years before him, and though Yarvi knew little about them that he could not read in their faces, and though pulling an oar chained in a trading galley was no high deed for the son of King Uthrik of Gettland, Yarvi felt a flush of pride, so sharp it almost brought tears to his eyes, for there is a strange and powerful bond that forms between oarmates.

When you are chained beside a man and share his food and his misfortune, share the blows of the overseer and the buffets of Mother Sea, match your rhythm to his as you heave at the same great beam, huddle together in the icy night or face the careless cold alone — that is when you come to know a man. A week wedged between Rulf and Jaud and Yarvi was forced to wonder whether he had ever had two better friends.

Though perhaps that said more about his past life than his present companions.

The next day the South Wind put in at Thorlby.

Until Sumael, frowning from the forecastle, snapped and steered and bullied the fat galley through the shipping to the bustling wharves, Yarvi had hardly believed he could be living in the same world as the one in which he had been a king. Yet here he was. Home.

The familiar gray houses rose in tiers, crowded upon the steep slopes, older and grander as Yarvi’s eyes scanned upward until, he gazed upon the citadel squatting on its tunnel-riddled rock, black against the white sky, where he had been raised. He could see the six-sided tower where Mother Gundring had her chambers, where he had learned her lessons, answered her riddles, planned his happy future as a minister. He could see the copper dome of the Godshall gleaming, beneath which he had been betrothed to his cousin Isriun, their hands bound together, her lips brushing his. He could see the hillside, in view of the howes of his ancestors, where he had sworn his oath in the hearing of gods and men to take vengeance on the killers of his father.

Was King Odem comfortably enthroned in the Black Chair now, loved and lauded by subjects who finally had a king they could admire? Of course.

Would Mother Gundring be standing minister to him, whispering her pithy wisdom in his ear? More than likely.

Had another apprentice taken Yarvi’s place as her successor, sitting on his stool, feeding his doves, and bringing the steaming tea every evening? How could it be otherwise?

Would Isriun be weeping bitter tears because her crippled betrothed would never return? As easily as she forgot Yarvi’s brother, she would forget again.

Perhaps his mother would be the only one to miss him, and that because, in spite of all her cunning, her grip on power would surely crumble without her puppet son perched on his toy chair.

Had they burned a ship and raised an empty howe for him as they had for his drowned uncle Uthil? Somehow he doubted it.

He realized he had bunched his shriveled hand into a trembling, knobbled fist.

“What’s troubling you?” asked Jaud.

“This was my home.”

Rulf gave a sigh. “Take it from one who knows, cook’s boy. The past is best buried.”

“I swore an oath,” said Yarvi. “An oath there can be no rowing away from.”

Rulf sighed again. “Take it from one who knows, cook’s boy. Never swear an oath.”

“But once you have sworn,” said Jaud. “What then?”

Yarvi frowned up toward the citadel, his jaw clenched painfully tight. Perhaps the gods had sent him this ordeal as a punishment. For being too trusting, too vain, too weak. But they had left him alive. They had given him a chance to fulfill his oath. To spill the blood of his treacherous uncle. To reclaim the Black Chair.

But the gods would not wait forever. With every dawn the memory of his father would fade, with every noon his mother’s power would wane, with every dusk his uncle’s grip on Gettland would grow firmer. With every sunset Yarvi’s chances dwindled into darkness.

He would take no vengeance and reclaim no kingdom lashed to an oar and chained to a bench, that much was clear.

He had to get free.

The Minister’s Tools

Stroke by backbreaking stroke, Thorlby, and home, and Yarvi’s old life slipped into the past. Southward dragged the South Wind, though the wind rarely seemed to blow her oarslaves much help. Southward down the ragged coast of Gettland, with its islands and inlets, its walled villages and fishing boats bobbing on the tide, its fenced farmsteads on sheep-dotted hillsides.

And on went Yarvi’s pitiless, sinew-shredding, tooth-grinding war against the oar. He could not have said he was winning. No one won. But perhaps his defeats were not quite so one-sided.

Sumael brought them tight to the coast as they passed the mouth of the Helm River, and the ship began to hum with muttered prayers. The oarsmen cast fearful glances out to sea toward a spiral of blackened cloud that tore the sky. They could not see the splintered elf-towers on the broken islands beneath it, but everyone knew they lurked behind the horizon.

“Strokom,” muttered Yarvi, straining to see and fearing to see at once. In ages past men had brought relics from that cursed elf-ruin, but in their triumph they had sickened and died, and the Ministry had forbidden any man to go there.

“Father Peace protect us,” grunted Rulf, making a shambles of holy symbols over his heart, and the slaves needed no whip to double their efforts and leave that shadow far in their wake.

The irony was not lost on Yarvi that this was the very route he would have taken to his Minister’s Test. On that voyage Prince Yarvi, swaddled in a rich blanket with his books, would have spared no thought for the suffering of the oarslaves. Now, chained to the benches, he made the South Wind his study. The ship, and the people on it, and how he might use them to get free of it.

For people are the minister’s best tools, Mother Gundring always said.

Ebdel Aric Shadikshirram, self-renowned merchant, lover and naval captain, spent most of her time drunk and most of the rest passed out drunk. Sometimes her snoring could be heard through the door of her cabin in the aftcastle, eerily keeping time to the movement of the rowers. Sometimes she would stand upon the forecastle in melancholy mood, one hand on her slouched hip and the other clutching a half-empty bottle, frowning into the wind as though daring it to blow harder. Sometimes she would prowl the gangway slapping backs and telling jokes as though she and her slaves were old friends together. When she passed the nameless deck-scrubber she would never miss a chance to kick, throttle, or upend the night-bucket over him; then she would swig from her wine and roar out, “On to profits!” and the oarsmen would cheer, and a man who cheered especially loudly might get a taste of the captain’s wine himself, and a man who stayed silent might get a taste of Trigg’s whip instead.

Trigg was the overseer, the chain-master, the grip, second-in-command and with a full share in the enterprise. He ordered the guards, perhaps two dozen of them, and watched over the slaves, and made sure they kept whatever pace the captain asked for. He was a brutal man, but there was a kind of awful justice in him. He had no favorites and made no exceptions. Everyone was whipped alike.

Ankran was the storekeeper and there was no justice in him at all. He slept below decks with the stores, and was the only slave to be regularly let off the ship. It was his task to buy food and clothes and share them out and he worked a thousand tiny swindles every day — buying meat that was halfway spoiled, and trimming every man’s rations, and making them mend clothes that were worn to rags — and splitting the profits with Trigg.

Whenever he passed by, Rulf would spit with particular disgust. “What does that crooked bastard want with the money?”

“Some men simply like money,” said Jaud mildly.

“Even slaves?”

“Slaves have the same appetites as other men. It’s the chance to indulge them they lack.”

“True enough,” said Rulf, looking wistfully up at Sumael.

The navigator spent most of her time on the roof of one of the castles, checking charts and instruments, or frowning up at sun or stars while she worked quick sums on her fingers, or pointing out some rock or ripple, some cloud or current, and snapping out warnings. While the South Wind was at sea she went where she pleased, but when they came into dock the captain’s first act was always to lock her by her long, fine chain to an iron ring on the aftcastle. A slave with her skills was probably worth more than their whole cargo.

Sometimes she threaded among the rowers, clambering heedlessly over men, oars and benches to pick at some fixing or other, or to lean over the ship’s side to check depths with a knotted plumbline. The only time Yarvi ever saw her smile was when she was perched on one of the mastheads with the wind tearing at her short hair, as happy there as Yarvi might have been at Mother Gundring’s firepit, scanning the coast through a tube of bright brass.

It was Throvenland that ground by now, gray cliffs besieged by the hungry waves, gray beaches where the sea sucked at the shingle, gray towns where gray-mailed spearmen frowned from the wharves at passing ships.

“My home was near here,” said Rulf, as they shipped the oars on one gray morning, a thin drizzle beading everything with dew. “Two days’ hard ride inland. I had a good farm with a good stone chimney, and a good wife who bore me two good sons.”

“How did you end up here?” asked Yarvi, fiddling pointlessly at the strapping on his raw left wrist.

“I was a fighting man. An archer, sailor, swordsman, and raider in the summer months.” Rulf scratched at his heavy jaw, already gray stubbled, for his beard seemed to spring out an hour after it was shaved. “I served a dozen seasons with a captain called Halstam, an easygoing fellow. I became his helmsman and, along with Hopki Strangletoes and Blue Jenner and some other handy men we enjoyed some successes in the raiding business, enough that I could sit with my feet to the fire and drink good ale all winter.”

“Ale never agreed with me, but it sounds a happy life,” said Jaud, gazing into the far distance. Toward a happy past of his own, perhaps.

“The gods love to laugh at a happy man.” Rulf noisily gathered some spit and sent it spinning over the side of the ship. “One winter, somewhat the worse for drink, Halstam fell from his horse and died, and the ship passed to his oldest son, Young Halstam, who was a different kind of man, all pride and froth and scant wisdom.”

“Sometimes father and son aren’t much alike,” muttered Yarvi.

“Against my better judgment I consented to be his helmsman, and not a week from port, ignoring my advice, he tried to take a too-well-guarded merchant ship. Hopki and Jenner and most of the rest went through the Last Door that day. I was one among a handful taken prisoner and sold on. That was two summers ago, and I’ve been pulling an oar for Trigg ever since.”

“A bitter ending,” said Yarvi.

“Many sweet stories have them,” said Jaud.

Rulf shrugged. “Hard to complain. In my voyages we must’ve stolen ten score Inglings and sold ’em for slaves and taken great delight in the profits.” The old raider rubbed his rough palm against the grain of the oar. “They say the seed you scatter will be the seed you harvest, and so it seems indeed.”

“You wouldn’t leave if you could?” muttered Yarvi, with a glance toward Trigg to make sure they were not heard.

Jaud snorted. “There is a well in the village where I used to live, a well that gives the sweetest water in the world.” He closed his eyes and licked at his lips as if he could taste it. “I would give anything to drink from that well again.” He spread his palms. “But I have nothing to give. And look at the last man who tried to leave.” And he nodded toward the scrubber, his block scraping, scraping, scraping endlessly down the deck, his heavy chain rattling as he shuffled stiffly on scabbed knees to nowhere.

“What’s his story?” asked Yarvi.

“I don’t know his name. Nothing, we all call him. When I was first brought to the South Wind he pulled an oar. One night, off the coast of Gettland, he tried to escape. Somehow he got free of his chain and stole a knife. He killed three guards and cut another’s knee so he never walked again, and he gave our captain that scar before she and Trigg put a stop to him.”

Yarvi blinked at the shambling scrubber. “All that with a knife?”

“And not a large one. Trigg wanted to hang him from a mast but Shadikshirram chose to keep him alive as an example to the rest of us.”

“Mercy’s ever been her weakness,” said Rulf, and gave a grunt of joyless laughter.

“She stitched her cut,” said Jaud, “and put that great chain on him, and hired more guards, and told them never to let him get his hands upon a blade, and ever since he has been scrubbing the deck, and never since have I heard him say a word.”

“What about you?” asked Yarvi.

Jaud grinned sideways at him. “I speak when I have something worth saying.”

“No. I mean, what’s your story?”

“I used to be a baker.” Ropes hissed as they brought up the anchor, and Jaud sighed, and worked his hands about the handles his own palms had polished to a gleam. “Now my story is I pull this oar.”

The Fool Strikes

Jaud pulled their oar, and so did Yarvi, with the calluses thickening even on his crippled hand, his face hardening against the weather and his body turning lean and tough as Trigg’s whip. They rounded Bail’s Point in a soaking squall, hardly able to see the brooding fortress there for the rain, and turned eastward into calmer waters, busy with ships of all shapes and nations, Yarvi twisting around at the oar in his eagerness to see Skekenhouse.

It was the elf-ruins he saw first, of course. The giant walls, sheer and perfectly smooth at their bases, were unmarked by Mother Sea’s fury but torn off ragged higher up, twisted metal showing in the cracks like splintered bone in a wound, battlements of new masonry perching at their tops, the flags of the High King proudly fluttering.

The Tower of the Ministry loomed over all. Over every building about the Shattered Sea, unless you counted the ruins of Strokom or Lanangad where no man dared tread. For three-quarters of its staggering height it was elf-built: pillars of jointless stone, perfectly square, perfectly true, with giant expanses of black elf-glass still twinkling at some of the great windows.

At perhaps five times the height of the tallest tower in Thorlby’s citadel the elf-stone was sheared away, rock melted and congealed in giant tears by the Breaking of God. Above, long generations of ministers had constructed a riotous crown of timber and tile — turrets, platforms, slumping roofs, balconies — sprouting with smoking chimneys and festooned with dangling ropes and chains, all streaked with age and droppings, the rotting work of men ridiculous by comparison with the stark perfection below.

Gray specks circled the highest domes. Doves, perhaps, like the ones Yarvi once tended. Like the one that lured his father to his death. Croaking out messages from the many ministers scattered about the Shattered Sea. Could he even see the odd bronze-feathered eagle carrying the High King’s wishes back?

In that ancient tower, Yarvi would have taken the test. There he would have kissed the cheek of Grandmother Wexen when he passed. There his life as a prince would have ended, and his life as a minister begun, and his life as a wretched slave never come to pass.

“Unship the oars!” called Sumael.

“Unship the oars!” bellowed Trigg, to make sure everyone saw he gave the orders.

“Oars out, oars in,” grunted Rulf. “You’d think they could make up their bloody minds.”

“Skekenhouse.” Yarvi rubbed at the red raw patches on his wrist as the South Wind was heaved into its berth while Sumael leaned from the aftcastle and screamed at the struggling dockers to take care. “The center of the world.”

Jaud snorted. “Compared to the great cities of Catalia this is a stable.”

“We’re not in Catalia.”

“No.” The big man heaved a heavy sigh. “Sadly.”

The docks stank of old rot and salt decay, and with impressive power to be noticed over the stink of Yarvi and his companions. Many of the berths were vacant. The windows of the decaying buildings behind gaped dark and empty. On the dockside a great heap of moldering grain sprouted with weeds. Guardsmen in the patched livery of the High King sat idle and threw dice. Beggars slouched in the shadows. Perhaps it was the bigger city, but there was none of the vigor and vitality of Thorlby, none of the bustle or new building.

The elf-ruins might have been stupendous, but the parts of Skekenhouse that men had built seemed quite a disappointment. Yarvi curled his tongue and neatly spat over the side of the ship.

“Nice.” Rulf gave him a nod. “Your rowing’s not up to much, but you’re coming on where it really matters.”

“You must struggle by without me, little ones!” Shadikshirram strutted from her cabin in her most garish garments, working an extra ring or two onto her fingers. “I am expected at the Tower of the Ministry!”

“Our money’s expected,” grumbled Trigg. “How much for a license this year?”

“My guess would be a little more than last year.” Shadikshirram licked a knuckle so she could twist a particularly gaudy bauble over it. “There is, in general, an upward trajectory to the High King’s fees.”

“Better to toss our money to Mother Sea than to the Ministry’s jackals.”

“I’d toss you to Mother Sea if I didn’t think she’d toss you straight back.” Shadikshirram held out her jewel-crusted hand at arm’s length to admire. “With a license we can trade anywhere around the Shattered Sea. Without one … pfah.” And she blew all profits away through her fingertips.

“The High King is jealous of his revenues,” muttered Jaud.

“Course he is,” said Rulf as they watched their captain aim a lazy kick at Nothing, then stroll across the bouncing gangplank, Ankran scrambling after her on a short length of chain. “It’s his revenues make him High. Without ’em he’ll crash to earth like the rest of us.”

“And great men need great enemies,” said Jaud, “and wars are a damned expensive hobby.”

“Building temples comes close behind.” Rulf nodded up at the skeleton of a huge building showing itself above the nearest roofs, so covered in a ramshackle web of scaffolds, hoists and platforms Yarvi could hardly make out its shape.

“That’s the High King’s temple?”

“To this new god of his.” Rulf spat out of the rowlock, missed, and spattered the timbers instead. “A monument to his own vanity. Four years in the building and still not halfway done.”

“Sometimes I think there can be no such thing as gods at all,” mused Jaud, stroking thoughtfully at his pursed lips with a fingertip. “Then I wonder who can be making my life such hell.”

“An old god,” said Yarvi. “Not a new.”

“How d’you mean?” asked Rulf.

“Before the elves made their war upon Her, there was one God. But in their arrogance they used a magic so strong it ripped open the Last Door, destroyed them all and broke the One God into the many.” Yarvi nodded toward that giant building site. “Some in the south believe the One God cannot ever be truly broken. That the many are merely aspects of the one. It seems the High King has seen the merits of their theology. Or at least Grandmother Wexen has.” He considered that. “Or perhaps she sees a profit in currying favor with the Empress of the South by praying the same way she does.” He remembered the hungry brightness in her eye as he knelt before her. “Or she thinks that folk who kneel to one god will kneel more easily to one High King.”

Rulf spat again. “The last High King was bad enough, but he ranked himself as first among brothers. The older this one gets the more he’s taken with his own power. He and his damn minister won’t be happy ’til they’re set above their own One God and all the world kneels before their withered arses.”

“A man who worships the One God cannot choose his own path: he is given it from on high,” mused Yarvi. “He cannot refuse requests, but must bow to commands.” He drew up a length of his chain and frowned down at it. “The One God makes a chain through the world, from the High King, through the little kings, to the rest of us, each link with its right place. All are made slaves.”

Jaud was frowning sideways. “You are a deep thinker, Yorv.”

Yarvi shrugged and let his chain drop. “Less use than a good hand to an oarsman.”

“How can one god make all the world work, anyway?” Rulf held his arms out to encompass the rotting city and all its people. “How can one god be for the cattle and the fish, and the sea and the sky, and for war and peace both? A lot of damn nonsense.”

“Perhaps the One God is like me.” Sumael sprawled on the aftcastle, propped on one elbow with her head resting on her bony shoulder and one leg dangling.

“Lazy?” grunted Jaud.

She gave a grin. “She chooses the course, but has lots of little gods chained up to do the rowing.”

“Pardon me, almighty one,” said Yarvi, “but from where I sit you look to have a chain of your own.”

“For now,” she said, tossing a loop of it over her shoulder like a scarf.

“One God,” snorted Rulf again, still shaking his head toward the quarter-built temple.

“Better one than none at all,” grunted Trigg as he stalked past.

The oarslaves fell silent at that, all knowing their course would take them past the land of the Shends next, who had no mercy on outsiders, and prayed to no god and knelt to no king, however high he said he was.

Great dangers meant great profits, though, as Shadikshirram informed the crew when she sprang back aboard, holding high her rune-scrawled license, eyes so bright with triumph one might have thought she had it from the hand of the High King himself.

“That paper won’t protect us from the Shends,” someone grunted from the bench behind. “They skin their captives and eat their own dead.”

Yarvi snorted. He had studied the language and customs of most of the peoples around the Shattered Sea. The food of fear is ignorance, Mother Gundring used to say. The death of fear is knowledge. When you study a race of men you find they are just men like any others.

“The Shends don’t like outsiders since we’re always stealing them for slaves. They’re no more savage than any other people.”

“As bad as that?” muttered Jaud, eyeing Trigg as he uncoiled his whip.

They rowed east that afternoon with a new license and new cargo but the same old chains, the Tower of the Ministry dwindling into the haze of distance beyond their wake. At sunset they put in at a sheltered cove, Mother Sun scattering gold on the water as she sank behind the world, painting strange colors among the clouds.

“I don’t like the look of that sky!” Sumael had swarmed up one of the masts, legs hooked over the yard, frowning off toward the horizon. “We should stay here tomorrow!”

Shadikshirram waved her warnings away like flies. “The storms in this little pond are nothing, and I have always had outstanding weatherluck. We go on.” And she flung an empty bottle into the sea and called to Ankran for another, leaving Sumael to shake her head at the heavens unmarked.

While the South Wind rocked gently and the guards and sailors huddled at a brazier on the forecastle to dice for trinkets, one of the slaves began to sing a bawdy song in a voice thin and cracked. At one point he forgot the words and filled them in with nonsense sounds, but at the end there was a scattering of tired laughter, and the hollow thumping of fists on oars in approval.

Another man broke in with a rousing bass, the song of Bail the Builder, who in truth had built nothing but heaps of corpses, and made himself the first High King with fire and sword and a hard word for everyone. Tyrants look far better when looked back on, though, and soon enough other voices joined the first. Eventually Bail passed through the Last Door in battle, as heroes do, and the song came to an end, as songs do, and the singer was rewarded with a round of wood-thumping of his own.

“Who else has a tune?” somebody called.

And to everyone’s surprise, not least his own, it turned out Yarvi did. It was one his mother used to sing at night, when he was young and scared in the dark. He did not know why it came to him then, but his voice soared high and free, to places far from the reeking ship and things these men had long forgotten. Jaud blinked at him, and Rulf stared, and it seemed to Yarvi that, chained and helpless in this rotting tub, he had never sung half so well.

There was a silence when he was done, with only the faint creaking of the ship on the shifting water, and the wind in the rigging, and the far, high calls of distant gulls.

“Give us another,” someone said.

So Yarvi gave them another, and another, and another after that. He gave them songs of love lost and love found, of high deeds and low. The Lay of Froki, so cold-blooded he slept through a battle, and the song of Ashenleer, so sharp-eyed she could count every grain of sand on a beach. He sang of Horald the Far-Traveled who beat the black-skinned King of Daiba in a race and in the end sailed so far he fell off the edge of the world. He sang of Angulf Clovenfoot, Hammer of the Vanstermen, and did not mention the man was his great-grandfather.

Each time he finished he was asked for another, until Father Moon’s crescent showed over the hills and the stars began to peep through heaven’s cloth, and the last note of the tale of Bereg, who died to found the Ministry and protect the world from magic, smoked out into the dusk.

“Like a little bird with only one wing.” When Yarvi turned Shadikshirram was looking down at him, adjusting the pins in her tangle of hair. “Fine singing, eh, Trigg?”

The overseer sniffed, and wiped his eyes on the back of his hand, and in a voice choked with emotion said, “I never heard the like.”

The wise wait for their moment, Mother Gundring used to say, but never let it pass. So Yarvi bowed, and spoke to Shadikshirram in her own language. He did not know it well, but a good minister can make anyone a fine greeting.

“It is my honor,” he said sweetly, while thinking about putting black-tongue root in her wine, “to sing for one so famous.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Aren’t you full of surprises?” And she tossed him her mostly empty bottle and walked away, humming so tunelessly he could only just tell it was the Lay of Froki.

If he had been served that wine at his father’s table he would have spat it in the slave’s face, but now it seemed the best he ever tasted, full of sun and fruit and freedom. It was a wrench to share the splash he had, but the sight of Rulf’s huge smile after he took his swallow was well worth the price.

As they made ready to sleep, Yarvi found the other slaves were looking at him differently. Or perhaps it was that they were looking at him at all. Even Sumael gave him a thoughtful frown from her place outside the captain’s cabin, as though he were a sum she could not quite make add up.

“Why are they watching me?” he murmured to Jaud.

“It is rare they get a good thing. You gave them one.”

Yarvi smiled as he pulled the stinking furs to his chin. He would not be cutting the guards down with an eating knife, but perhaps the gods had given him better weapons. Time might be slipping through his fingers. He lacked a full set, after all. But he had to be patient. Patient as the winter.

Once, after his father had hit him in a rage, Yarvi’s mother had found him crying. The fool strikes, she had said. The wise man smiles, and watches, and learns.

Then strikes.

Savages

As a boy, Yarvi had been given a little ship of cork. His brother had taken it from him and thrown it in the sea, and Yarvi had lain on the rocky edge above and watched it tossed and whirled and played with by the waves until it was gone.

Now Mother Sea made the South Wind a toy ship.

Yarvi’s stomach was in his sick-sour mouth as they crested one surging mountain of water, was sucked into his arse as they plunged into the foam-white valley beyond, pitching and yawing, deeper and deeper until they were surrounded by the towering sea on every side and he was sure they would be snatched into the unknowable depths, drowned to a man.

Rulf had stopped saying he’d been in worse. Not that Yarvi could have heard him. It could hardly be told what was the thunder of the sky and what the roaring of the waves and the groaning of the battered hull, the tortured ropes, the tortured men.

Jaud had stopped saying he thought the sky was brightening. It could hardly be told any longer where lashing sea ended and lashing rain began, the whole a stinging fury through which Yarvi could scarcely see the nearest mast, until the storm gloom was lit by a flash which froze the ship and its cowering crew in an instant of stark black and white.

Jaud’s face was grim set, all hard planes and bunched muscle as he wrestled with their oar. Rulf’s eyes bulged as he lent his own strength to the struggle. Sumael clung to the ring she was chained to when they were in dock, shrieking something no one could hear over the shrieking wind.

Shadikshirram was less inclined to listen than ever. She stood on the aftcastle’s roof, one arm hooked around the mast as though it were a drinking companion, shaking her drawn sword at the sky, laughing and, when the gale dropped enough for Yarvi to hear her, daring the storm to blow harder.

Orders would have been useless now anyway. The oars were maddened animals, Yarvi dragged by the strapping about his wrist as his mother had used to drag him when he was a child. His mouth was salty with the sea, salty with his blood where the oar had struck him.

Never in his life had he been so scared and helpless. Not when he hid from his father in the secret places of the citadel. Not when he looked into Hurik’s blood-spotted face and Odem said, Kill him. Not when he cowered at the feet of Grom-gil-Gorm. Mighty though they were, such terrors paled against the towering rage of Mother Sea.

The next flash showed the rumor of a coast, battering waves chewing at a ragged shore, black trees and black rock from which white spray flew.

“Gods help us,” whispered Yarvi, squeezing shut his eyes, and the ship shuddered and flung him back, cracked his head against the oar behind. Men slid and tangled, tumbled from their benches to the farthest extent of their chains, clutching at anything that might spare them from being strangled by their own thrall-collars. Yarvi felt Rulf’s strong arm about his shoulder, holding him fast to the bench, and it was some strange comfort to know he would be touching another person as he died.

He prayed as he never had before, to every god that he could think of, tall or small. He prayed not for the Black Chair, or for vengeance on his treacherous uncle, or for the better kiss Isriun had promised him, or even for freedom from his collar.

He prayed only for his life.

There was a grating crash that made the timbers tremble and the ship lurch. Oars shattered like twigs. A great wave washed the deck and dragged at Yarvi’s clothes, and he knew that he would surely die the way his uncle Uthil had, swallowed by the pitiless sea.…

DAWN CAME MUDDY AND MERCILESS.

The South Wind was beached, listed to one side, helpless as a great whale on the cold shingle. Yarvi hunched soaked through and shivering, bruised but alive at his sharply-angled bench.

The storm had snarled away eastward in the darkness, but in the pale blue-gray of morning the wind still blew chill and the rain still fell steadily on the miserable oarslaves, most of them grunting at their grazes, some whimpering at wounds much worse. One bench had been torn from its bolts and vanished out to sea, no doubt bearing its three ill-fated oarsmen through the Last Door.

“We were lucky,” said Sumael.

Shadikshirram clapped her on the back and nearly knocked her over. “I told you I have outstanding weatherluck!” She at least seemed in the best of moods after her one-sided battle with the storm.

Yarvi watched them circle the ship, Sumael’s tongue tip wedged into the notch in her lip as she peered at gouges, stroked at splintered timbers with sure hands. “The keel and the masts are sound, at least. We lost twelve oars shattered and three benches broken.”

“Not to mention three oarslaves gone,” grunted Trigg, mightily upset at the expense. “Two dead in their chains and six more who can’t row now and may never again.”

“The hole in the hull is the real worry,” said Ankran. “There’s daylight in the hold. It’ll have to be patched and caulked before we can even think of floating her.”

“Wherever will we find some timber?” Shadikshirram swept a long arm at the ancient forest that hemmed in the beach on every side.

“It belongs to the Shends.” Trigg eyed the shadowy woods with a great deal less enthusiasm. “They find us here we’ll all end up skinned.”

“Then you’d best get started, Trigg. You look bad enough with your skin on. If my luck holds we can handle the repairs and be away before the Shends sharpen their knives. You!” And Shadikshirram stepped over to where Nothing was kneeling on the shingle and rolled him over with a kick in the ribs. “Why aren’t you scrubbing, bastard?”

Nothing crawled after his heavy chain onto the sloping deck and, like a man sweeping his hearth after his house has burned down, painfully set about his usual labor.

Ankran and Sumael exchanged a doubtful glance, then set to work themselves, while Shadikshirram went to fetch her tools. Wine, that was, which she started steadily drinking, draped over a nearby rock.

Trigg opened some of the locks — a rarity indeed — and oarsmen who had not left their benches in weeks were put on longer chains and given tools by Ankran. Jaud and Rulf were set to splitting trunks with wedge and mallet, and when the planks were made Yarvi dragged each one to the rent in the ship’s side, where Sumael stood, jaw set with concentration as she neatly trimmed them with a hatchet.

“What are you smiling about?” she asked him.

Yarvi’s hands were raw with the work and his head hurt from the blow against the oar and he was riddled with splinters from head to toe, but his smile only got wider. On a longer chain everything looked better, and Sumael was by no means an exception.

“I’m free of the bench,” he said.

“Huh.” She raised her brows. “Don’t get used to it.”

“There!” A screech shrill as a cock dropped on a cook slab. One of the guards was pointing inland, face ghostly pale.

A man stood at the treeline. He was stripped to the waist in spite of the weather, body streaked with white paint, hair a black thicket. He had a bow over his shoulder, a short ax at his hip. He made no sudden move, roared no threat, only looked calmly toward the ship and the slaves busy around it, then turned without hurry and disappeared into the shadows. But the panic he sparked could hardly have been greater had he been a charging army.

“Gods help us,” whispered Ankran, plucking at his thrall-collar as if it sat too tight for him to breathe.

“Work faster,” snarled Shadikshirram, so worried she stopped drinking for a moment.

They doubled their efforts, constantly glancing toward the trees for any more unwelcome visitors. At one point a ship passed out at sea and two of the sailors splashed into the surf, waving their arms and screaming for help. A small figure waved back, but the ship made no sign of stopping.

Rulf wiped the sweat from his forehead on one thick wrist. “I wouldn’t have stopped.”

“Nor I,” said Jaud. “We will have to help ourselves.”

Yarvi could only nod. “I wouldn’t even have waved.”

That was when more Shends slipped noiselessly from the blackness of the forest. Three, then six, then twelve, all armed to the teeth, each arrival greeted with growing horror, by Yarvi as much as anyone. He might have read that the Shends were peaceable enough but these ones did not look as if they had read the same books he had.

“Keep working!” growled Trigg, grabbing one man by the scruff of his neck and forcing him back to the felled trunk he had been stripping. “We should run them off. Give ’em a shock.”

Shadikshirram tossed her latest bottle across the shingle. “For every one you see there’ll be ten hidden. You’d be the one getting the shock, I suspect. But try it, by all means. I’ll watch.”

“What do we do, then?” muttered Ankran.

“I’ll be doing my best not to leave them any wine.” The captain pulled the cork from a new bottle. “If you wanted to save them some trouble I suppose you could skin yourself.” And she chuckled as she took a swig.

Trigg nodded toward Nothing, still on his knees, scrubbing at the deck. “Or we could give him a blade.”

Shadikshirram stopped laughing abruptly. “Never.”

The wise wait for their moment, but never let it pass.

“Captain,” said Yarvi, setting down his plank and stepping humbly forward. “I have a suggestion.”

“You going to sing to them, cripple?” snapped Trigg.

“Talk to them.”

Shadikshirram regarded him through languidly narrowed eyes. “You know their tongue?”

“Enough to keep us safe. Perhaps even to trade with them.”

The overseer jabbed a thick forefinger at the growing crowd of painted warriors. “You think those savages will listen to reason?”

“I know they will.” Yarvi only wished he was as certain as he somehow managed to sound.

“This is madness!” said Ankran.

Shadikshirram’s gaze wandered to the storekeeper. “I keenly await your counterproposal.” He blinked, mouth half open, hands helplessly twitching, and the captain rolled her eyes. “There are so few heroes left these days. Trigg, you conduct our one-handed ambassador to a parley. Ankran, you toddle along with them.”

“Me?”

“How many cowards called Ankran do I own? You trade for the stores, don’t you? Go trade.”

“But nobody trades with the Shends!”

“Then the deals you make should be the stuff of legend.” Shadikshirram stood. “Everyone needs something. That’s the beauty of the merchant’s profession. Sumael can tell you what we need.” She leaned close to Yarvi, blasting him with wine-heavy breath, and patted his cheek. “Sing to ’em, boy. As sweetly as you did the other night. Sing for your life.”

That was how Yarvi found himself walking slowly toward the trees, his empty hands high and his short length of chain held firm in Trigg’s meaty fist, desperately trying to convince himself great dangers meant great profits. Ahead, more Shends had gathered, silently watching. Behind, Ankran muttered in Haleen. “If the cripple manages to make a trade, the usual arrangement?”

“Why not?” answered Trigg, giving a tug on Yarvi’s chain. He could hardly believe they were thinking about money even now, but perhaps when the Last Door stands open for them men fall back on what they know. He had fallen back on his minister’s wisdom, after all. And a flimsy shield it seemed as the Shends got steadily closer in all their painted savagery.

They did not scream or shake their weapons. They were more than threatening enough without. They simply stepped back to make room as Yarvi came near, herded through the trees by Trigg and into a clearing where more Shends were gathered about a fire. Yarvi swallowed as he realized how many more. They might have outnumbered the whole crew of the South Wind three to one.

A woman sat among them, whittling at a stick with a bright knife. Strung around her neck on a leather thong was an elf-tablet, the green card studded with black jewels, scrawled with incomprehensible markings, riddled with intricate golden lines.

The first thing a minister learns is to recognize power. To read the glances, and the stances, the movements and tones of voice that mark the followers from the leader. Why waste time on underlings, after all? So Yarvi stepped between the men as if they were invisible, looking only into the woman’s frowning face, and the warriors shuffled after and hedged him and Trigg and Ankran in with a thicket of naked steel.

For the briefest moment Yarvi hesitated. For a moment, he enjoyed Trigg and Ankran’s fear more than he suffered with his own. For a moment he had power over them, and found he liked the feeling.

“Speak!” hissed Trigg.

Yarvi wondered if there was a way to get the overseer killed. To use the Shends to get his freedom, perhaps Rulf’s and Jaud’s as well … But the stakes were too high and the odds too long. The wise minister picks the greater good, the lesser evil, and smooths the way for Father Peace in every tongue. So Yarvi dropped down, one knee squelching into the boggy ground, his withered hand on his chest and the other to his forehead in the way Mother Gundring had taught him, to show he spoke the truth.

Even if he lied through his teeth.

“My name is Yorv,” he said, in the language of the Shends, “and I come humbly upon bended knee, stranger no longer, to beg the guest-right for me and my companions.”

The woman slowly narrowed her eyes at Yarvi. Then she looked about at her men, carefully sheathed her knife and tossed her stick into the fire. “Damn it.”

“Guest-right?” muttered one of the warriors, pointing toward the stranded ship in disbelief. “These savages?”

“Your pronunciation is dismal.” The woman flung up her hands. “But I am Svidur of the Shends. Stand, Yorv, for you are welcome at our hearth, and safe from harm.”

Another of the warriors angrily flung his ax on the ground and stamped off into the brush.

Svidur watched him go. “We were very much looking forward to killing you and taking your cargo. We must take what we can, for your High King will make war upon us again when the spring comes. The man is made of greed. I swear I have no idea what we have that he wants.”

Yarvi glanced back at Ankran, who was frowning at the conversation with the deepest suspicion. “It is my sad observation that some men always want more.”

“They do.” She sadly propped elbow on knee and chin on hand as she watched her crestfallen warriors sit down in disgust, one of them already bunching moss to scrub off his battle-paint. “This could have been a profitable day.”

“It still can be.” Yarvi clambered to his feet, and clasped his hands the way his mother did when she began a bargain. “There are things for which my captain would like to trade …”

Ugly Little … Secrets

Shadikshirram’s cabin was cramped and garish, gloomy from the three slit windows, shadowy from sacks and bags dangling from the low roof-beams. Her bed, heaped with sheets and furs and stained pillows, took up most of the floor. An outsize, iron-bound chest took up most of the rest. Empty bottles had rolled to every corner. The place smelled of tar, salt and incense, stale sweat and stale wine. And yet compared to the life Yarvi had been living — if that even qualified as a life — it seemed the height of indulgent luxury.

“The repair won’t last,” Sumael was saying. “We should head back to Skekenhouse.”

“The wonderful thing about the Shattered Sea is that it forms a circle.” Shadikshirram made a circle in the air with her bottle. “We will come to Skekenhouse either way.”

Sumael blinked at that. “But one in days, the other months!”

“You’ll keep us going, you always do. The sailor’s worst enemy is the sea, but wood floats, no? How difficult can it be? We head on.” Shadikshirram’s eyes drifted to Yarvi as he ducked under the low lintel. “Ah, my ambassador! Since we still have our skins I assume things went well?”

“I need to speak to you, my captain.” He spoke with eyes downcast, the way a minister speaks to their king. “You alone.”

“Hmmm.” She stuck out her bottom lip and plucked at it like a musician might a harp. “A man seeking a private audience always intrigues me, even one so young, crippled, and otherwise unattractive as you. Get to your caulk and timber, Sumael, I want us back on the salt by morning.”

The muscles at the sides of Sumael’s head bunched as she ground her teeth. “On it or under it.” And she shouldered past Yarvi and out.

“So?” Shadikshirram took a long swig of wine and set the bottle rattling down.

“I begged the Shends for guest-right, my captain. They have a solemn tradition not to deny a stranger who asks properly.”

“Nimble,” said Shadikshirram, gathering her black-and-silver hair in both hands.

“And I negotiated for the things we need, and made what I consider an excellent trade.”

“Very nimble,” she said, winding her hair into its usual tangle.

But now was when his nimbleness would truly be needed. “You may not think it quite so excellent a deal as I, my captain.”

Her eyes narrowed slightly. “How so?”

“Your storekeeper and overseer took their own shares in your profits.”

There was a long pause while, one by one, Shadikshirram slid the pins carefully through her hair to hold it fast. Her face did not change by the slightest detail, yet Yarvi felt suddenly that he was standing at the brink of a precipice.

“Did they?” she said.

He had expected anything but this offhand coolness. Did she know already but not care? Would she send him back to the oar regardless? Would Trigg and Ankran learn he had betrayed them? He licked his lips, knowing he stood on desperately thin ice. But he had no choice but to press on, and hope somehow to reach solid ground.

“Not for the first time,” he croaked.

“No?”

“In Vulsgard you gave money for healthy oarslaves and they bought the cheapest dregs they could find, myself among them. I’ve a guess you received little change.”

“Pathetically little.” Shadikshirram picked up her bottle between two fingers and took a long swig. “But I begin to wonder whether I got a bargain with you.”

Yarvi felt a strange desire to blurt the words out, had to make himself speak calmly, earnestly, just as a minister should. “They made both arrangements in Haleen, thinking no one would understand. But I speak that language too.”

“And sing in it, no doubt. For an oarslave you have many talents.”

A minister should endeavor never to be asked a question they do not already know the answer to, and Yarvi had a lie hanging ready for that. “My mother was a minister.”

“A minister’s belt should remain ever fastened.” Shadikshirram sucked air through her pursed lips. “Oh ugly little secret.”

“Life is full of them.”

“So it is, boy, so it is.”

“She taught me tongues, and numbers, and the lore of plants, and many other things. Things that could be of use to you, my captain.”

“A useful child indeed. You may need two hands to fight someone, but only one to stab them in the back, eh? Ankran!” she sang through the open door. “Ankran, your captain would speak with you!”

The storekeeper’s footsteps came fast, but not as fast as Yarvi’s heart. “I’ve been checking the stores, Captain, and there’s a hatchet missing—” He saw Yarvi as he ducked through the doorway, and his face twitched, shock at first, then suspicion, and finally he tried to smile.

“Can I bring you more wine—”

“Never again.” There was an ugly pause, while the captain smiled bright-eyed, and the color steadily drained from Ankran’s face, and the blood in Yarvi’s temples surged louder and louder. “I expect Trigg to rob me: he is a free man and must look to his own interests. But you? To be robbed by one’s own possessions?” Shadikshirram drained her bottle, licked the last drops from the neck and weighed it lazily in her hand. “You must see that is something of an embarrassment.”

The storekeeper’s thin lips twisted. “He’s lying, Captain!”

“But his lies match my suspicions so closely.”

“It’s all—”

So fast that Yarvi hardly saw it, only heard the hollow thud, Shadikshirram clubbed Ankran with the base of her bottle. He dropped with a grunt and lay blinking, blood streaming down his face. She stepped forward, lifting her boot over his head and, calmly, steadily, frowning with concentration, started stamping on it.

“Swindle me?” she hissed through gritted teeth, heel opening a cut down his cheek.

“Steal from me?” as her boot smashed Ankran’s nose sideways.

“Take me for a fool?”

Yarvi looked away into the corner of the room, the breath crawling in his throat as the sick crunching went on.

“After all … I’ve … done for you!”

Shadikshirram squatted down, forearms resting on her knees and her hands dangling. She thrust her jaw forward and blew a loose strand of hair out of her face. “I am once again disappointed by the wretchedness of humanity.”

“My wife,” Ankran whispered, bringing Yarvi’s eyes crawling back to his ruined face. A bubble of blood formed and broke on his lips. “My wife … and my son.”

“What of them?” snapped Shadikshirram, frowning at a red spatter that had caught the back of her hand and wiping it clean on Ankran’s clothes.

“The flesh-dealer … you bought me from … in Thorlby.” Ankran’s voice was squelchy. “Yoverfell. He has them.” He coughed, and pushed a piece of tooth out of his mouth with his tongue. “He said he’d keep them safe … as long as I brought him their price … every time we passed through. If I don’t pay …”

Yarvi felt weak at the knees. So weak he thought he might fall. Now he understood why Ankran had needed all that money.

But Shadikshirram only shrugged. “What’s that to me?” And she twisted her fingers in Ankran’s hair and pulled a knife from her belt.

“Wait!” shouted Yarvi.

The captain looked over at him sharply. “Really? Are you sure?”

It took everything he had to force his mouth into a watery smile. “Why kill what you can sell?”

She squatted there a moment, staring at him, and he wondered if she would kill them both. Then she snorted out a laugh, and lowered the knife. “I do declare. My soft heart will be my undoing. Trigg!”

The overseer paused for just a moment when he stepped into the cabin and saw Ankran on the floor with his face a bloodied pulp.

“It turns out our storekeeper has been robbing me,” said the captain.

Trigg frowned at Ankran, then at Shadikshirram, and finally, for a long time, at Yarvi. “Seems some people think only of themselves.”

“And I thought we were one family.” The captain stood, dusting off her knees. “We have a new storekeeper. Get him a better collar.” She rolled Ankran toward the door with her foot. “And put this thing in the space on Jaud’s oar.”

“Right y’are, Captain.” And Trigg dragged Ankran out by one arm and kicked the door closed.

“You see that I am merciful,” said Shadikshirram brightly, with merciful gestures of the blood-spotted hand which still loosely held her knife. “Mercy is my weakness.”

“Mercy is a feature of greatness,” Yarvi managed to croak.

Shadikshirram beamed at that. “Isn’t it? But, great though I am … I rather think Ankran has used up all my mercy for this year.” She put her long arm about Yarvi’s shoulders, hooking her thumb through his collar, and drew him close, close, close enough to smell the wine on her whisper. “If another storekeeper betrayed my trust …” And she trailed off into silence more eloquent than any words.

“You have nothing to worry about, my captain.” Yarvi looked into her face, so close that her black eyes seemed to merge into one. “I have no wife or children to distract me.” Only an uncle to kill, and his daughter to marry, and the Black Chair of Gettland to reclaim. “I’m your man.”

“You’re scarcely a man, but otherwise, excellent!” And she wiped her knife one way then the other on the front of Yarvi’s shirt. “Then wriggle down to your stores, my little one-handed minister, ferret out where Ankran was hiding my money, and bring me up some wine! And smile, boy!” Shadikshirram pulled a golden chain from around her neck and hung it over one of the posts of her bed. A key dangled from it. The key to the oarslaves’ locks. “I like my friends smiling and my enemies dead!” She spread her arms wide, wriggled the fingers, and toppled back onto her furs. “Today dawned with such little promise,” she mused at the ceiling. “But it turns out everyone got what they wanted.”

Yarvi thought it unwise to point out, as he hurried for the door, that Ankran, not to mention his wife and child, would probably not have agreed.

Enemies and Allies

To no one’s surprise, Yarvi found himself much better suited to the stores than the oars.

At first he could hardly crawl into his shadowy, creaking new domain below decks for the confusion of barrels and boxes, of overspilling chests, of swinging bags hooked to the ceiling. But within a day or two he had everything as organized as Mother Gundring’s shelves had been, in spite of the pale new planks of the repair steadily oozing saltwater. It was not a comforting task, bucketing out the brackish puddle that built up every morning.

But a great deal better than being back on the benches.

Yarvi found a length of bent iron to bash at any nail that gave a hint of loosening, and tried not to imagine that just beyond that straining tissue of rough-sawn wood Mother Sea’s full crushing weight was bearing in.

The South Wind limped eastward and, wounded and undermanned though she was, within a few days reached the great market at Roystock, a hundred hundred shops pressed onto a boggy island near the mouth of the Divine River. Small, swift ships were caught at the tangle of wharves like flies in a spider’s web and their lean and sunburned crews were caught too. Men who had rowed hard weeks upstream, and carried their ships for even harder ones at the tall hauls, were swindled from their strange cargoes for a night or two of simple pleasures. While Sumael cursed and struggled to patch the leaking patches, Yarvi was taken ashore on Trigg’s chain, looking for stores and oarslaves to replace what the storm had taken.

There in narrow lanes aswarm with humanity of every cut and color, Yarvi bartered. He had watched his mother do it — Laithlin, the Golden Queen, no sharper eye or quicker tongue around the Shattered Sea — and found he had her tricks without thinking. He haggled in six languages, merchants aghast to find their own secret tongues turned against them. He flattered and blustered, snorted derision at prices and contempt at quality, stamped off and was begged back, was first as yielding as oil, then immovable as iron, and left a trail of weeping traders in his wake.

Trigg held the chain with so light a hand that Yarvi almost forgot he was chained at all. Until, when they were done and the saved hacksilver was jingling back into the captain’s purse, the overseer’s whisper tickled at Yarvi’s ear and made his every hair bristle.

“You’re quite the cunning little cripple, aren’t you?”

Yarvi paused a moment to collect his wits. “I have … some understanding.”

“Doubtless. It’s clear you understood me and Ankran, and passed your understandings to the captain. Got quite the vengeful temper, don’t she? The tales she tells of herself might all be lies, but I could tell you true ones would amaze you no less. I once saw her kill a man for stepping on her shoe. And this was a big, big man.”

“Perhaps that’s why his weight bruised her toes so.”

Trigg yanked at the chain and the collar bit into Yarvi’s neck and made him squawk. “Don’t lean too much on my good nature, boy.”

Trigg’s good nature did indeed seem too weak a thing to bear much weight. “I played the hand I was dealt,” croaked Yarvi.

“We all do,” purred Trigg. “Ankran played his poorly, and paid the price. I don’t mean to do the same. So I’ll offer you the same arrangement. Half of what you take from Shadikshirram, you give to me.”

“What if I don’t take anything?”

Trigg snorted. “Everyone takes something, boy. Some of what you give to me, I’ll pass on to the guards, and everyone’s kept friendly. Smiles all round. Give me nothing, you’ll make some enemies. Bad ones to have.” He wound Yarvi’s chain about his big hand and jerked him closer still. “Remember cunning children and stupid ones all drown very much the same.”

Yarvi swallowed once more. Mother Gundring used to say, A good minister never says no, if they can say perhaps.

“The captain’s watchful. She doesn’t trust me yet. Only give me a little time.”

With a shove, Trigg sent him stumbling back toward the South Wind. “Just make sure it’s a little.”

That was well enough with Yarvi. Old friends in Thorlby — not to mention old enemies — would not wait for him forever. Charming though the overseer was, Yarvi hoped very much to quit Trigg’s company before too long.

FROM ROYSTOCK THEY TURNED NORTHWARD.

They passed lands that had no name, where fens of mirror pools stretched into unknown distances, thousands of fragments of sky sprinkled across this bastard offspring of earth and sea, lonely birds calling out over the desolation, and Yarvi breathed deep the salt chill and longed for home.

He thought often of Isriun, trying to remember her scent as she leaned close, the brush of her lips, the shape of her smile, sun glowing through her hair in the doorway of the Godshall. Scant memories, turned over and over in his mind until they were worn threadbare as a beggar’s clothes.

Was she promised to some better husband now? Smiling at some other man? Kissing another lover? Yarvi clenched his teeth. He had to get home.

His every idle moment was crowded with plans for escape.

At a trading post where the buildings were so rough-hewn a man could get splinters just from walking by, Yarvi pointed out a servant-girl to Trigg, then among the salt and herbs acquired some extra supplies while the overseer was distracted. Enough tanglefoot leaf to make every guard on the ship slow and heavy, or even send them off to sleep if the dose was right.

“What about the money, boy?” Trigg hissed as they headed back to the South Wind.

“I have a plan for that,” and Yarvi gave a humble smile while he thought of rolling a slumbering Trigg over the side of the ship.

He was a great deal more valued, respected and, being honest, useful as a storekeeper than he had been as a king. The oarslaves had enough to eat, and warmer clothes to wear, and grunted their approval as he passed. He had the run of the ship while they were on the salt, but like a miser with his profits, that much freedom only sharpened his hunger for more.

When Yarvi thought no one could see, he dropped crusts near Nothing’s hand, and saw him slip them quickly into his rags. Once their eyes met afterward, and Yarvi wondered if the scrubber could be grateful, for it hardly seemed there was anything human left behind those strange, bright, sunken eyes.

But Mother Gundring always said, It is for one’s own sake that one does good things. He kept dropping crumbs when he could.

Shadikshirram noted with pleasure the greater weight of her purse, and with even more the improvement in her wine, achieved in part because Yarvi was able to buy in such impressive bulk.

“This is a better vintage than Ankran brought me,” she muttered, squinting at its color in the bottle.

Yarvi bowed low. “One worthy of your achievements.” And behind the mask of his smile he considered how, when he sat in the Black Chair once more, he would see her head above the Screaming Gate and her cursed ship made ashes.

Sometimes as darkness fell she would stick one foot at him so he could pull her boots off while she spouted some tale of past glories, the names and details shifting like oil with every telling. Then she would say he was a good and useful boy, and if he was truly lucky would give him scraps from her table and confess, “My soft heart will be my undoing.”

When he could keep himself from cramming them in his mouth on the spot he would slip them to Jaud, who would pass them to Rulf, while Ankran sat frowning into nowhere between them, his scalp cut from his shaving and his scabbed face a very different shape than it had been before its argument with Shadikshirram’s boot.

“Gods,” grunted Rulf. “Remove this two-handed fool from our oar and give us Yorv again!”

The oarslaves about them laughed, but Ankran sat still as a man of wood, and Yarvi wondered whether he was turning over his own oath for vengeance. He glanced up and saw Sumael frowning down from her place on the yard. She was always watching, judging, as though at a course she could not approve. Even though they were chained at night to the same ring outside the captain’s cabin she said nothing to him beyond the odd grunt.

“Get rowing,” snapped Trigg, shoving past and barging Yarvi into the oar he used to pull.

It seemed he had made enemies as well as friends.

But enemies, as his mother used to say, are the price of success.

“BOOTS, YORV!”

Yarvi flinched as if at a slap. His thoughts had wandered far away, as they often did. Back to the slopes above his father’s burning ship, swearing his oath of vengeance before the gods. Back to the roof of Amwend’s holdfast, the smell of burning in his nose. Back to his uncle’s calmly smiling face.

You would have been a fine jester.

“Yorv!”

He struggled from his blankets, tugging a length of chain after him, stepping over Sumael, hunched in her own bundle, dark face twitching silently in her sleep. It was growing colder as they headed north, and specks of snow whirled from the night on a keen wind, dotting the furs the oarslaves huddled under with white. The guards had given up patrolling and the only two awake hunched over a brazier by the forward hatch into the hold, pinched faces lit in orange.

“These boots are worth more than you, damn it!”

Shadikshirram was sitting on her bed, eyes shining wet, straining forward and trying to grab her foot but so drunk she kept missing. When she saw him she sagged back.

“Give me a hand, eh?”

“As long as you don’t need two,” said Yarvi.

She gurgled with laughter. “You’re a clever little crippled bastard, aren’t you? I swear the gods sent you. Sent you … to get my boots off.” Her chuckles became like snores, and by the time he wrestled her second boot off and heaved her leg onto the bed she was sound asleep, head back, hair fluttering over her mouth with each snorting breath.

Yarvi stopped still as stone. Her shirt had come open at the collar and the chain slipped from it. Glinting on the furs beside her neck was the key to every lock on the ship.

He looked toward the door, open a crack, snow flitting outside. He opened the lamp and blew out the flame, and the room sank into darkness. It was an awful risk, but a man with time against him must sometimes throw the dice.

The wise wait for their moment, but never let it pass.

He inched to the bed, skin prickling, and slipped his one-fingered hand under Shadikshirram’s head.

Gently, gently he lifted it, shocked at the dead weight, teeth clenched with the effort of moving so slowly. He winced as she twitched and snorted, sure her eyes would flick open, thinking of her heel smashing his face as it had smashed Ankran’s.

He took a breath and held it, reached across her for the key, caught by a gleam of Father Moon’s light from one of the narrow windows. He strained for it … but his itching fingertips came up just short.

There was a choking pressure around his neck. His chain had snagged on something. He turned, thinking to yank it free, and there in the doorway, jaw locked tight and Yarvi’s chain gripped firmly in both fists, stood Sumael.

For a moment they were frozen there. Then she began to reel him in.

He let Shadikshirram’s head fall as gently as he could, gripped the chain with his good hand and tried to drag it back, breath hissing. Sumael only pulled harder, the collar grinding into Yarvi’s neck, the links of the chain cutting into his hand, making him bite his lip to keep from crying out.

It was like the rope contest that the boys used to play on the beach in Thorlby, except only one of them had both hands and one end was around Yarvi’s neck.

He twisted and struggled but Sumael was too strong for him, and in silence she dragged him closer, and closer, his boots slipping on the floor, catching a bottle and sending it rolling, until in the end she caught him by the collar and hauled him out into the night, dragging him close.

“You damn fool!” she snarled in his face. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“What do you care?” he hissed back, her knuckles white around his collar and his knuckles white around her fist.

“I care if they change all the locks because you stole the key, idiot!”

There was a long pause, then, while they stared at each other in the darkness, and it settled on him just how very close they were. Close enough for him to see the angry creases at the bridge of her nose, to see her teeth gleaming through the notch in her lip, to feel her warmth. Close enough for him to smell her quick breath, a little sour, but none the worse for that. Close enough, almost, to kiss. It must have settled on her at the same moment, because she let go his collar as if it was hot, pulled away and twisted her wrist free of his grip.

He turned her words over, and looked at them this way and that, and the realization settled on him.

“Changing the locks would only bother someone who had a key already. Who found a way to copy a key, perhaps?” He sat down in his usual place, rubbing at the chafe marks and the old burns on his neck with his good hand, tucking his bad one into the warmth of his armpit. “But the only reason a slave would need a key is to escape.”

“Shut your mouth!” She slid down beside him, and there was another pause. The snow drifted, settled upon her hair, across his knees.

It was not until he was giving up hope of her ever speaking again that she finally did, so softly he could scarcely hear it over the wind. “A slave with a key might free some other slaves. All of them, perhaps. In the confusion, who knows who might slip away?”

“A lot of blood could be spilled,” murmured Yarvi. “In the confusion, who knows whose? Far safer to put the guards to sleep.” Sumael looked sharply over at him; he could see the gleam of her eyes, the mist of her breath. “A slave who knew plants, and poured the guards’ ale and brought the captain’s wine might find a way.” A risk, he knew, but with her help things could be so much easier, and a man with time against him must sometimes throw the dice. “Perhaps two slaves together could achieve—”

“What one alone couldn’t,” she finished for him. “Best to slip from the ship while in port.”

Yarvi nodded. “I’d have thought so.” He’d been thinking about little else for days.

“Skekenhouse would be the best chance. The city’s busy but the guards are lazy, the captain and Trigg spend a lot of time off the ship—”

“Unless one had friends somewhere around the Shattered Sea.” He let the bait hang there.

She swallowed it whole. “Friends that might shelter a pair of escaped slaves?”

“Exactly. In, say … Thorlby?”

“The South Wind will be back through Thorlby within a month or two.” Yarvi could hear the excitement, squeaky in her whisper.

He could not keep it from his own. “As soon as that a slave with a key … and a slave who knew plants … could be free.”

They sat in silence, in the cold, in the darkness, as they had so many nights before. But, looking across by Father Moon’s pale light, Yarvi thought there was the rare hint of a smile at the corner of Sumael’s mouth.

He thought it suited her.

One Friend

Far north, now, the oarslaves dragged the South Wind, over the black sea with winter on the march. Snow fell often, settling on the roofs of the ship’s castles, across the shoulders of the shivering rowers, blowing smoke onto their numbed fingers with each stroke. All night the broken hull groaned. In the morning men leaned over the sides to crack ice from its wounded flanks. At sunset Shadikshirram would wander from her cabin wrapped in furs, eyes and nostrils rimmed with boozy pink, and say she didn’t think it overly cold.

“I try to keep love in my heart,” said Jaud, grasping with both hands at the soup Yarvi handed him. “But gods, I hate the North.”

“There’s nowhere more North than this,” answered Rulf, rubbing at the tips of his ears as he frowned out toward the white blanket of the coast.

Ankran, as usual, added nothing.

The sea was an ice-flecked emptiness, groups of lumpen seals watching them sadly from the rocky shoreline. They saw few other ships, and when they did Trigg glowered toward them, hand on his sword, until they were dots in the distance. However powerful the High King thought himself, his license would not protect them out here.

“Most merchants lack the courage for these waters.” Shadikshirram wedged her boot carelessly on an oarsman’s leg. “But I am not most merchants.” Yarvi silently thanked the gods for that. “The Banyas who live out in this icy hell worship me as a goddess, for I bring pots and knives and iron tools which they treat like elf-magic, and ask only for pelts and amber which to them are so plentiful as to be next to worthless. They’ll do anything for me, poor brutes.” She rubbed her palms together with an eager hissing. “Here my best profits are made.”

And indeed the Banyas were waiting for the South Wind when she finally broke through the shore-ice to a slimy jetty at a gray beach. They made the Shends seem the height of civilization in Yarvi’s memory — all swathed in furs so they looked more bears or wolves than men, their shaggy faces pierced with splinters of polished bone and studs of amber, their bows fluttering with feathers and their clubs set with teeth. Yarvi wondered if they were human teeth, and decided people who scratched a living from this miserly land could afford to waste nothing.

“I will be four days away.” Shadikshirram vaulted over the ship’s side and clomped down the warped timbers of the jetty, the South Wind’s sailors following with her cargo lashed to clumsy sleds. “Trigg, you’re in charge!”

“She’ll be better’n when you left her!” the overseer called back with a grin.

“Four days of idleness,” Yarvi hissed as the last light stained the sky red, fretting at his thrall-collar with his withered thumb. Every night spent on this rotting tub it seemed to chafe him more.

“Patience.” Sumael spoke through closed teeth, scarred lips hardly moving, dark eyes on the guards, and on Trigg in particular. “A few weeks and we might be with your friends in Thorlby.” She turned her familiar frown on him. “You’d better have friends in Thorlby.”

“You’d be surprised who I know.” Yarvi wriggled down into his furs. “Trust me.”

She snorted. “Trust?”

Yarvi turned his back to her. Sumael might be spiky as a hedgehog but she was tough, and clever, and there was no one on this ship he would rather have had beside him. He needed an accomplice, not a friend, and she knew what to do and when.

He could see it as though it was already done. Every night he lulled himself to sleep with thoughts of it. The South Wind rocking gently at a wharf beneath the citadel of Thorlby. The guards snoring a drugged slumber beside their empty ale cups. The key turning smoothly in the lock. He and Sumael stealing together from the ship, chains muffled with rags, through the steep and darkened streets he knew so well, boot-printed slush on the cobbles, snow on the steep roofs.

He smiled as he pictured his mother’s face when she saw him. He smiled even more as he pictured Odem’s, just before he rammed the knife into his guts.…

YARVI STABBED, AND CUT, and stabbed, his hands slippery hot with traitor’s blood, and his uncle squealed like a slaughtered pig.

“The rightful King of Gettland!” came the shout and all applauded, none louder than Grom-gil-Gorm who smashed his great hands together with every squelch of the blade and Mother Scaer who shrieked and capered in her joy and turned into a cloud of clattering doves.

The squelching became a sucking and Yarvi looked over at his brother, white and cold on the slab. Isriun leaned over his face, kissing, kissing.

She smiled up at Yarvi through the shroud of her hanging hair. That smile. “I’ll expect a better kiss after your victory.”

Odem propped himself up on his elbows. “How long is this going to take?”

“Kill him,” said Yarvi’s mother. “One of us at least must be a man.”

“I am a man!” snarled Yarvi, stabbing and stabbing, his arms burning with the effort. “Or … half a man?”

Hurik raised an eyebrow. “That much?”

The knife was slippery in Yarvi’s grip and all the doves were a terrible distraction, staring at him, staring, and the bronze-feathered eagle in their midst with a message from Grandmother Wexen.

“Have you considered the Ministry?” it croaked at him.

“I am a king!” he snarled, cheeks burning, hiding his useless clown’s hand behind his back.

“A king sits between gods and men,” said Keimdal, blood leaking from his cut throat.

“A king sits alone,” said Yarvi’s father, leaning forward in the Black Chair, the wounds that had been dry all dripping fresh and spilling a slick of blood across the floor of the Godshall.

Odem’s screams had turned to giggles. “You would have been a fine jester.”

“Damn you!” snarled Yarvi, trying to stab harder but the knife was so heavy he could hardly lift it.

“What are you doing?” asked Mother Gundring. She sounded scared.

“Shut up, bitch,” said Odem, and he caught Yarvi around the neck, and squeezed.…

YARVI WOKE WITH A HORRIBLE jolt to find Trigg’s hands around his throat.

A crescent of fierce grins swam above him, teeth shining in torchlight. He retched and twisted but he was held fast as a fly in honey.

“You should’ve taken the deal, boy.”

“What are you doing?” asked Sumael again. He’d never heard her sound scared before. But she sounded nowhere near as scared as Yarvi was.

“I told you to shut your mouth!” one of the guards snarled in her face. “Unless you want to go with him!”

She shrank back into her blankets. She knew what to do, and when. Perhaps a friend would’ve been better than an accomplice after all, but it was a little late now to find one.

“I told you clever children drown just like stupid ones.” Trigg slid his key into the lock and unfastened Yarvi’s chain.

Freedom, but not quite how he had pictured it. “We’re going to put you in the water and see if it’s true.”

And Trigg dragged Yarvi down the deck like a chicken plucked and ready for the pot. Past the oarsmen sleeping on their benches, the odd one peering from his bald furs. None of them stirred to help him. Why would they? How could they?

Yarvi’s heels kicked pointlessly at the deck. Yarvi’s hands fumbled at Trigg’s, good and bad equally useless. Perhaps he should have bargained, bluffed, flattered his way free, but his bursting chest could only gather the air to make a small wet sound, like a fart.

At that moment the soft arts of the minister were shown to have their limitations.

“We’ve got a bet going,” said Trigg, “on how long it takes you to sink.”

Yarvi plucked at Trigg’s arm, scratched at his shoulder with his nails, but the overseer scarcely noticed. Out of the corner of his weeping eye he saw Sumael standing, shaking off her blankets. When Trigg unlocked Yarvi’s chain he unlocked hers too.

But Yarvi knew he could expect no help from her. He could expect no help at all.

“Let this be a lesson to the rest of you!” Trigg stabbed at his chest with his free thumb. “This is my ship. Cross me and you’re done.”

“Let him be!” someone growled. “He’s done no harm.” Jaud, Yarvi saw as he was dragged past. But no one marked the big man. Beside him, from Yarvi’s old place, Ankran watched, rubbing at his crooked nose. It did not look like such a bad place now.

“You should’ve taken the deal.” Trigg bundled Yarvi over the shipped oars like a sack of rags. “I can forgive a lot in a fine singer, boy, but—”

With a sudden yelp the overseer fell sprawling, hand suddenly loose, and Yarvi jabbed his twisted little finger in Trigg’s eye, gave him a wriggling kick in the chest, and went tumbling free.

Trigg had tripped on Nothing’s heavy chain, pulled suddenly taut. The deck-scrubber hunched in the shadows, eyes gleaming behind his hanging hair. “Run,” he whispered.

Perhaps Yarvi had made one friend after all.

The first breath he heaved in made his head reel. He scrambled up, sobbing, snorting, careered into the benches, through oarslaves half asleep, clambering, slithering, under oars and over them.

People were shouting but Yarvi could scarcely hear the words through the throbbing of blood in his ears, like the mindless thunder of a storm.

He saw the forward hatch, wobbling, shuddering. His hand closed around the handle. He hauled it open and pitched face-first into the darkness.

Death Waits

Yarvi fell, knocked his shoulder, cracked his head, tumbled over sacks and sprawled on his face.

Wet on his cheek. In the hold.

He rolled with an effort, dragged himself into the shadows.

Dark down here. Pitch-dark, but a minister must know the ways, and he felt them out now with his fingertips.

Roaring in his ears, burning in his chest, terror tickling at every part of him, but he had to master it, and think. There is always a way, his mother used to tell him.

He could hear the guards shouting as they looked down into the hatch, too close, too close behind. He jerked his chain after him, squirming between crates and barrels in the hold, a flicker of light from the torches above catching bands and rivets, guiding him toward the ship’s stores.

He slithered through the low doorway, sloshing between shelves and boxes in the freezing puddle that was today’s leakage. He crouched against the ship’s cold side, breath whooping and wheezing, more light now as the guards brought their torches down after him.

“Where is he?”

There had to be a way. Surely they’d be coming from the other direction soon, from the aft hatch. His eyes flickered to its ladder.

Had to be some way. No time for a plan, all his plans were gone like smoke. Trigg would be waiting. Trigg would be angry.

His eyes darted to every sound, to every glint of light, searching desperately for some means of escape, some place to hide, but there was none. He needed an ally. He pressed himself helplessly back against the wood, felt the icy dampness there, heard the drip of saltwater. And Mother Gundring’s voice came to him, soft and careful at the firepit.

When a wise minister has nothing but enemies, she beats one with a worse.

Yarvi dived below the nearest shelf, fumbling in the black, and his fingers closed around the iron bar he kept to knock in nails.

The sailor’s worst enemy is the sea, Shadikshirram never tired of saying.

“Where are you, boy?”

He could just see the outlines of Sumael’s repair and he rammed the iron bar between hull and fresh timbers and dragged on it with all his strength. He gritted his teeth and worked it deeper and snarled out all his fury and his pain and his helplessness and ripped at that bar as though it was Trigg and Odem and Grom-gil-Gorm combined. He tore at it, strained at it, wedged the wrist of his useless hand around it, the tortured wood creaking, pots and boxes clattering down as he barged the shelves with his shoulder.

He could hear the guards now, near, the glow of their lamps in the hold, their humped shapes in the low doorway, the gleam of their blades.

“Come here, cripple!”

He screamed as he made one last muscle-tearing effort. There was a crack as the timbers suddenly gave. Yarvi lurched flailing backward, and hissing with the rage of a devil released from hell, Mother Sea burst into the stores.

Yarvi brought a shelf crashing down with him, was soaked in an instant in icy water, rolled gasping toward the aft hatch, up and slithering sodden, the din of shouting men and furious sea and splintering wood in his ears.

He floundered to the ladder, the water already to his knees. A guard was at his heels, clutching in the darkness. Yarvi flung the bar at him, sent him stumbling into the jet of water and it tore him across the store like a toy. More leaks had sprung, the sea showering in at a dozen angles, the wails of the guards hardly heard over its deafening roar.

Yarvi dragged himself up the ladder a couple of rungs, heaved the hatch open, slithered through and stood, swaying, wondering if some magic had transported him onto the deck of some other ship in the midst of battle.

The gangway between the benches crawled with men, struggling in the garish light of burning oil which a broken lamp must have sprayed across the forecastle. Flickering flames danced in the black water, in the black eyes of panicked slaves, on the drawn blades of the guards. Yarvi saw Jaud grab one of them and fling him bodily into the sea.

He was up from his bench. The slaves were freed.

Or some of them. Most were still chained, huddling toward the rowlocks to escape the violence. A few lay bleeding on the gangway. Others were even now leaping over the side, preferring to take their chance with Mother Sea than with Trigg’s men, who were flailing about them without mercy.

Yarvi saw Rulf butt a guard in the face, heard the man’s nose-bone pop and his sword clatter away across the deck.

He had to help his oarmates. The fingers of his good hand twitched open and closed. Had to help them, but how? The last few months had only reinforced Yarvi’s long-held opinion that he was no hero. They were outnumbered and unarmed. He flinched as a guard cut down a helpless slave, ax opening a yawning wound. He could feel the slope in the deck, tilting as the sea rushed in below and dragged the South Wind down.

A good minister faces the facts, and saves what he can. A good minister accepts the lesser evil. Yarvi clambered across the nearest bench, toward the ship’s side and the black water beyond. He set himself to dive.

He was halfway off the ship when he was snatched back by his collar. The world tumbled and he crashed down, gasping like a landed fish.

Trigg stood over him, the end of his chain in one fist. “You’re going nowhere, boy.”

He leaned down and planted his other hand around Yarvi’s throat, just under his collar so the metal bit into his jaw, but this time the overseer squeezed even harder. He dragged Yarvi up until his kicking boots only just scraped the deck, twisting his face around to look at the carnage that choked the ship. Dead men and wounded men, two guards beating a slave with their sticks in the midst.

“See the trouble you’ve caused me?” he screeched, one eye red and weepy from Yarvi’s finger. The guards were all yammering over one another.

“Where’s Jaud and that bastard Rulf?”

“Got onto the jetty. But they’ll freeze out there for sure.”

“Gods, my fingers!”

“How’d they get free?”

“Sumael.”

“That little bitch had a key.”

“Where the hell did she get that hatchet?”

“She cut my fingers off! Where are they?”

“What does it matter? They’re no use now!”

“He broke the hull!” gasped a soaked guard as he crawled from the aft-hatch. “There’s water flooding in!” And as though to make the point the South Wind shuddered again, the deck tilting further so that Trigg had to grab at a bench to stay upright.

“Gods help us!” screeched one of the chained oarslaves, clawing at his collar.

“Are we sinking?” asked another, wide eyes rolling down.

“How are we going to explain this to Shadikshirram?”

“Gods damn it!” roared Trigg, and he smashed Yarvi’s head against the blunt end of the nearest oar, filling his skull with light and his mouth with scalding sick, then drove him down against the deck and started choking him in earnest.

Yarvi struggled mindlessly but the overseer’s full weight was on him and he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything but Trigg’s snarling mouth, and that growing blurrier, as though it was at the end of a tunnel down which Yarvi was being steadily dragged.

He’d cheated Death half a dozen times in the last few weeks, but no matter how strong or clever, no matter how good your weaponluck or your weatherluck, none can cheat her forever. Heroes and High Kings and Grandmothers of the Ministry all pass through her door in the end: she makes no exceptions for one-handed boys with big mouths and bitter tempers. The Black Chair would be Odem’s, his father unavenged, his oath forever unfulfilled …

Then, through the surging of trapped blood in his ears, Yarvi heard a voice.

It was a broken, whispering voice, rough as a scrubbing block. Had it been Death’s voice he would not have been surprised. Except by what it said.

“Did you not hear Shadikshirram?”

With an effort Yarvi forced his weeping eyes toward it.

Nothing stood in the middle of the deck. His grease-matted hair was pushed back and for the first time Yarvi could see his face, bent and lopsided, scarred and broken, twisted and hollowed, his eyes wide and gleaming wet.

His heavy chain was wound around and around one arm, and from his fist the hasp dangled free, a chunk of splintered wood and nails still attached. In his other hand he held the sword Rulf had knocked from a guard’s hand.

Nothing smiled. A broken smile full of broken teeth and speaking of a broken mind. “She told you never to give me a blade.”

“Put the sword down!” Trigg barked the last word, but his voice creaked with something Yarvi had never heard there before.

Fear.

As if it was Death indeed that stood before him on the deck.

“Oh, no, Trigg, no.” Nothing’s smile grew broader, and madder, and the tears brimmed in his eyes and left shining streaks on his pitted cheeks. “I think it will put you down.”

A guard charged at him.

Scrubbing the deck Nothing had seemed old, and painfully slow. A brittle remnant. A man of twigs and string. With sword in hand he flowed like water, danced like flickering fire. It was as if the blade had its own mind, quick and merciless as lightning, and Nothing was pulled after.

The sword darted out, its point glinted between the charging guard’s shoulder blades and was gone, left him tottering, wheezing, hand clasped to his chest. Another guard swung an ax and Nothing slipped out of its way and let it chop splinters from the corner of a bench. It went up again and with a click of metal the arm that held it spun off into the darkness. The guard sank to his knees, eyes goggling, and Nothing’s bare foot knocked him flat.

A third came at him from behind, sword raised. Without looking, Nothing thrust his blade out, took the guard through the throat and left him spluttering blood, then knocked a club away with his chain-wrapped arm and smashed the pommel of his sword into the mouth of its owner, teeth flying, dropped soundlessly to scythe the legs from under another and send him spinning onto the deck face-down.

All this in the space of time that Yarvi might have taken one breath. If he could have taken a breath.

The first guard still stood, fumbling at his pierced chest, trying to speak but saying only red froth. Nothing pushed him gently out of his way with the back of his arm as he passed, the balls of his bare feet making no sound. He looked down at the blood-soaked boards and clicked his tongue.

“The deck is very dirty.” He looked up, wasted face all black-dashed and red-speckled. “Shall I scrub it, Trigg?”

The overseer backed away while Yarvi fumbled helplessly with his hand. “Come closer and I kill him!”

“Kill him.” Nothing shrugged. “Death waits for us all.” The guard with the ruined legs was whimpering as he tried to drag himself up the tilted deck. Nothing stabbed him through the back in passing. “Today she waits for you. She reaches for her key, Trigg. She unlocks the Last Door.”

“Let’s talk about it!” Trigg backed off with one palm up. The deck was tipping farther now, black water welling from the aft-hatch. “Let’s just talk!”

“Talk only makes problems.” Nothing lifted the sword. “Steel is always the answer.” And he spun it in his hand so the blade caught the light and danced red and white and yellow and all the colors of fire. “Steel does not flatter or compromise. Steel tells no lies.”

“Just give me a chance!” whined Trigg, water pouring over the sides of the ship now, flooding among the benches.

“Why?”

“I’ve got dreams! I’ve got plans! I’ve got—”

With a hollow click the sword split Trigg’s skull down to his nose. His mouth kept making words for a moment, but no breath came to give them sound. He flopped back, kicking a little, and Yarvi tore free of his limp hand, gasping in air, and coughing, and trying to drag his collar free so he could breathe.

“Perhaps I shouldn’t,” said Nothing, twisting the sword from Trigg’s head, “but I feel much better.”

All around them men were screaming. If any guards survived they’d preferred the sea to Nothing’s sword. Some slaves were trying to clamber over their sinking benches to drier ones behind, others straining at their chains as the water surged higher and higher, others with faces only just showing, mouths sucking at the air and their eyes bulging with horror. Still others, Yarvi knew, must already be below the black surface, holding their breath for a few more moments while they struggled hopelessly at their locks.

He dropped to his hands and knees, retching, head spinning, digging at Trigg’s bloody clothes for his key, struggling not to look at his split face but catching a glimpse anyway of features distorted and fleshy pulp gleaming inside the great wound and he swallowed vomit, rooting again for the key, the wails of the trapped slaves loud in his ears.

“Leave it.” Nothing stood over him, standing far taller than Yarvi had ever imagined he might, blood-spotted sword hanging from one hand.

Yarvi blinked up at him, and then down the tipping deck toward the drowning slaves. “But they’ll die.” His voice was a tiny croak.

“Death waits for us all.”

Nothing caught Yarvi by his thrall-collar, hefted him into the air and over the rail, and once again Mother Sea took him in her icy embrace.