Half a King

Bending With Circumstance

Someone slapped Yarvi’s face. He saw the hand, heard the noise, but hardly felt it.

“Run,” hissed Jaud’s voice.

The closest Yarvi could manage was a shivering shamble, his flapping chain and his soaked clothes dragging him down with every step, the shingle clutching at his waterlogged boots. He tripped often, but whenever he fell strong arms would be there to haul him up, to haul him on into the darkness.

“Go,” grunted Rulf.

Near the snow-covered top of the beach Yarvi snatched one look back, and forced out, “Gods,” through his rattling teeth.

Mother Sea was hungrily swallowing the South Wind. The forecastle was wreathed in fire, rigging made lines of flame, the top of the mast, where Sumael used to perch, ablaze. The benches where Yarvi had struggled were flooded, tangled oars sticking up helplessly like the legs of a turned-over woodlouse. Only one corner of the aftcastle still showed above waters alive with the reflections of fire. The hold, the stores, and the captain’s cabin were drowned in the silence beneath.

There were black figures on the shore, on the jetty, staring. Guards who had escaped Nothing’s sword? Slaves who had somehow got free of their chains? Yarvi wondered if he could hear faint cries above the keening of the wind. Faint screams above the crackling of the flames. There was no way to know who luck had saved from that ordeal of fire and water, who was living and who dead, and Yarvi was too cold to be glad he had survived one more disaster, let alone to be sad that anyone else had not. No doubt the regrets would come soon enough.

If he lived out the night.

“Move,” said Sumael.

They bundled him over the crest and he tumbled down the far side, came to rest on his back in a drift, skin on fire with the cold, each icy gasp like a knife in his throat. He saw Rulf’s broad face with a glimmer of orange down one cheek, Sumael’s gaunt and twitching in the light of Father Moon.

“Leave me,” he tried to say, but his mouth was too numb to make the words, his teeth chilled to the roots, and all that came was a weak puff of smoke.

“We go together,” said Sumael. “Wasn’t that the deal?”

“I thought it was finished when Trigg started throttling me.”

“Oh, you won’t wriggle out of it that easily.” She caught him by his crooked wrist. “Get up.”

He had been betrayed by his own family, his own people, and found loyalty among a set of slaves who owed him nothing. He was so pathetically glad of it he wanted to weep. But he had a feeling he would need his tears later.

With Sumael’s help he managed to get up. With Rulf’s and Jaud’s to flounder on, hardly thinking about the course except to keep the sinking South Wind somewhere at his back. The icy wetness squelched in his boots, the wind cut through his soaked and chafing clothes as though he wore nothing.

“Did you have to pick the coldest place the gods have made for your escape?” growled Rulf. “And the coldest time of year?”

“I had a better plan.” Sumael sounded less than delighted with the total ruin of it too. “But it sunk with the South Wind.”

“Plans must sometimes bend with circumstance,” said Jaud.

“Bend?” growled Rulf. “This one’s snapped in pieces.”

“Over there.” Yarvi pointed with the frozen stub of his finger. Up ahead a stunted tree clawed at the night, each branch picked out on top in white, underneath in the faintest flickering of orange. He hardly dared believe his own eyes but he started toward it as fast as he could even so, half walking, half crawling, all desperate. At that moment, even a dream of fire seemed better than nothing.

“Wait!” hissed Sumael. “We don’t know who—”

“We don’t care,” said Rulf, floundering past.

The fire had been built in a hollow beneath that twisted tree where there was some shelter from the wind, the fragments of a broken crate carefully arranged, the smallest flame flickering in their midst. Hunched over it, coaxing it into life with his smoking breath, was Ankran.

Had Yarvi made the choice of who to save, Ankran’s name would have been far from the first on his lips. But freeing Rulf and Jaud meant freeing their oarmate, and Yarvi would have thrown himself at Odem’s feet right then had he offered warmth. He flopped onto his knees, holding his shaking hands toward the flames.

Jaud planted his fists on his hips. “You made it, then.”

“Some turds float,” said Rulf.

Ankran only rubbed at his crooked nose. “If my stench bothers you, you could find your own fire.”

A hatchet slid silently from Sumael’s sleeve, the dangling blade gleaming. “I like this one.”

The ex-storekeeper shrugged. “Then far be it from me to turn the desperate away. Welcome one and all to my mansion!” Sumael had already shinned up the frozen rocks to the tree and neatly lopped off a branch. Now she wedged it in the ground so its twigs were toward the fire. She snapped her fingers at Yarvi. “Get your clothes off.”

“Romance yet survives!” said Rulf, fluttering his lashes at the sky.

Sumael ignored him. “Wet clothes will kill you in the night sure as any enemy.”

Now the cold was loosening its grip Yarvi was feeling his bruises — every muscle aching and his head sore and his neck throbbing from Trigg’s hands. Even had he wanted to, he lacked the strength to object. He peeled off his soaked clothes, some of the hems already stiff with ice, and huddled as close to the fire as he dared, near naked but for collar and chain.

Rulf dumped an old fleece around his shuddering shoulders. “I’m lending that,” he said, “not giving it.”

“Much appreciated … either way,” Yarvi forced through his chattering teeth as he watched Sumael hang his clothes facing the flames, where they began to gently steam.

“What if someone sees the light?” Jaud was asking, frowning back the way they had come.

“If you’d rather freeze, sit in the darkness. You’ll find plenty of it.” Ankran tried to prod more warmth from the fire with a twig. “For my part I suspect the fight, then the ship aflame, then the ship sinking, will have dampened their appetite for a search.”

“As long as we’re well gone before dawn,” said Rulf.

“Gone where?” asked Sumael, squatting beside Yarvi.

East was the obvious choice. East along the coast the way the South Wind had brought them. But west was where Yarvi needed to go. West to Vansterland. West to Gettland. West to Odem, and vengeance, and the sooner the better. He glanced around this motley fellowship, all huddled over the life-giving flames, faces pinched and strange in its light, wondering how he could possibly convince them to go the wrong way.

“East of course,” said Rulf. “How long ago did we pass that trading post?”

Sumael spent a moment reckoning on her fingers. “On foot we might make it in three days.”

“It’ll be hard going.” Rulf scrubbed with his nails at his stubbly chin. “Damn hard going, and—”

“I’ll be going west,” said Ankran, bent jaw clenched and his eyes fixed on the flames.

There was silence as they all looked at him. “West to where?” asked Jaud.

“Thorlby.”

Yarvi could only raise his brows at help from such an unexpected quarter. Rulf burst out laughing. “Thank you for giving me one good chuckle before I die, Master Ankran! Our ex-storekeeper’s walking to Gettland.”

“To Vansterland. I’ll try to find a ship to take me from there.”

Rulf chuckled again. “So you’re only going to walk to Vulsgard? And how long a stroll do you reckon that to be, oh navigator?”

“At least a month on foot.” Sumael said it so quickly she already must have worked it out.

“A month of this!” Rulf waved his broad hand toward the snow-covered emptiness they had struggled through already, and Yarvi had to admit the thought was by no means a heartening one. “With what gear?”

“I have a shield.” Jaud swung it off his back and knocked at it with one fist. A large, round shield of rough wood with an iron boss. “I thought to use it as a float.”

“And a generous guard lent me his bow.” Rulf plucked at the string as if it was a harp. “But with no arrows it plays no music. Does anyone have a tent? Extra clothes? Blankets? Sleds?” Silence, aside from the moaning of the chill wind just outside their firelit hollow. “Then the very best of luck, Master Ankran! It’s been my pleasure to row beside you but I fear our ways must part. The rest of us will be going east.”

“What fool put you in charge?”

They all spun about as the voice croaked from the darkness, and Nothing was there. He was streaked with soot as well as his usual dirt, rags and hair and beard all blackened. He had Trigg’s boots on, and Trigg’s jacket, blood crusting one shoulder. Over the other he carried a great roll of singed sailcloth, and cradled in one arm, like a babe against the freezing night, the sword with which Yarvi had seen him kill six men.

He dropped cross-legged beside the fire as though it was a meeting long arranged and gave a satisfied sigh as he held his palms to the flames. “West to Gettland sounds well. We will be followed.”

“Trigg?” asked Sumael.

“You need give no more thought to our overseer. My debt to him is paid. But between me and Shadikshirram the account is still open.” Nothing licked a finger and polished a blemish from the blade of his sword. “We must put her far behind us.”

“Us?” snapped Sumael, and Yarvi noticed that, just behind her back, the hatchet was ready. “You’re inviting yourself along?”

The firelight shifted in Nothing’s mad eyes. “Unless someone else wants to invite me?”

Yarvi held his hands up between them and smoothed the way for Father Peace. “We need all the help we can get. What’s your name, even?”

Nothing stared off into the night sky as though the answer might be written in the stars. “I have had three names … perhaps four … but all of them brought me bad luck. I would hate them to bring you bad luck too. If you must talk to me, Nothing will do, but I am no great talker. Shadikshirram will be coming, and she will expect us to go east.”

“Because going west is madness!” Rulf rounded on Sumael. “Tell them!”

She pressed her scarred lips together and narrowed her eyes at the fire. “East is quicker. East is easier.”

“There!” barked Rulf, slapping his thigh.

“I’m going west,” said Sumael.

“Eh?”

“East there will be people. Anyone who got off the ship. Then that trading post was crawling with slavers.”

“And Vansterland isn’t?” asked Rulf. “Because we always did good business in Inglings there.”

“East is dangerous,” said Sumael.

“West is nothing but weeks of wilderness!”

“There is forest. Forest might mean fuel. Might mean food. East has the trading post, but then? Only the fens and the wild, hundreds of miles of it. West is Vansterland. West is civilization. West is … maybe … ships that go farther west. That go home.”

“Home.” Jaud stared into the flames as though he glimpsed his village there, and that well with the sweetest water in the world.

“We head inland,” said Sumael, “out of sight of any ships. Then west.”

Rulf flung up his hands. “How will you find your way out in the snows? You’ll end up walking in circles!”

Sumael slid a leather package from inside her coat, unrolled it to show her eyeglass and instruments. “I’ll find my way, old man, don’t worry on that score. I can’t say I much look forward to either route. Especially in this company. But west might be the better chance.”

“Might be?”

Sumael shrugged. “Sometimes, might be is the best you can hope for.”

“Three for west.” Ankran had the first smile Yarvi had seen him give since Shadikshirram knocked his two front teeth out. “What about you, big man?”

“Hmm.” Jaud propped his chin thoughtfully on one fist and looked about the circle. “Huh.” He carefully eyed each one of them, and ended on Sumael’s instruments. “Heh.” He shrugged his heavy shoulders, and took a long breath. “There is no man I would rather have beside me in a fight, Rulf. But when it comes to getting from a place to a place … I trust Sumael. I go west. If you will have me.”

“You can hold your shield over me when it snows,” said Sumael.

“You’re all bloody mad!” Rulf slapped down a heavy hand on Yarvi’s shoulder. “Looks like it’s just you and me, Yorv.”

“I’m very flattered by the offer …” Yarvi slipped from under Rulf’s hand and his fleece together and back into his shirt, not altogether dry but close enough. “But the first thing we have to do is stick together. Stick together or die apart.” That and his chair, and his oath, and his vengeance all waited for him in Gettland, and the longer they waited, the less his chance of ever claiming them. “We’ll all be going west.” And Yarvi gave Rulf a grin, and slapped him on the shoulder with his good hand. “I prayed for younger help but I’ll take what I can get.”

“Gods!” Rulf pressed at his temples with the heels of his hands. “We’ll all regret this.”

“It can keep the rest of my regrets company.” Nothing stared off into the darkness as though he saw a ghostly host beyond the firelight. “There are enough of them.”

Freedom

Sumael led the way at a furious pace and they all walked her course with as little question as they had rowed it. Through a broken land of black rock and white snow they floundered, where stunted trees had all been swept into tortured shapes by the wind, bowing mournfully toward the sea.

“How many steps to Vansterland?” called Rulf.

Sumael checked her instruments, lips moving with silent sums, peered up at the smudge of Mother Sun in the iron sky, and headed on without answering.

Few in the citadel of Thorlby would have reckoned it a treasure, but Nothing’s roll of mildewed sailcloth became their most valued possession. With the care of pirates dividing a stolen hoard they tore it up between them and wound it under their clothes, around their frozen heads and hands, stuffed their boots with it. Half, Jaud carried with him so they could huddle beneath it when night came. No doubt it would scarcely be warmer than the utter darkness outside, but they knew they would be grateful for that little.

That little would be the difference between life and death.

They took turns breaking new ground, Jaud forging ahead without complaint, Rulf venting curses on the snow as though it was an old enemy, Ankran struggling on with arms hugged around himself, Nothing with head up and sword clutched tight, as though he fancied he was made from steel himself and no weather could chill or warm him, even when in spite of Yarvi’s prayers snow began to settle across the shoulders of his stolen jacket.

“Bloody wonderful,” muttered Rulf at the sky.

“It works for us,” said Ankran. “Covers our tracks, keeps us hidden. With luck our old mistress will think we froze out here.”

“Without luck we will,” muttered Yarvi.

“No one cares either way,” said Rulf. “No one’s mad enough to follow us here.”

“Ha!” barked Nothing. “Shadikshirram is too mad to do anything else.” And he tossed the end of his heavy chain over his shoulder like a scarf and cut that conversation down as dead as he had the South Wind’s guards.

Yarvi frowned back the way they had come, their tracks snaking off into the gray distance. He wondered when Shadikshirram would find the wreck of her ship. Then he wondered what she would do when she did. Then he swallowed, and floundered after the others just as fast as he could.

At midday, Mother Sun no higher than Jaud’s shoulder at her feeble zenith, their long shadows struggling after them across the white, they paused to huddle in a hollow.

“Food,” said Sumael, giving voice to every thought among them.

No one was keen to volunteer. They all knew food was worth more than gold out here. It was Ankran who surprised them all by first reaching into his furs and bringing out a packet of salted fish.

He shrugged. “I hate fish.”

“The man who used to starve us now feeds us,” said Rulf. “Who says there’s no justice?” He came up with a few biscuits well past their best, if they had ever had one. Sumael followed that with two dried loaves.

Yarvi could only spread his empty palms and try to smile. “I’m humbled … by your generosity …?”

Ankran rubbed gently at his crooked nose. “It warms me just a little to see you humbled. How about you two?”

Jaud shrugged. “I had little time to prepare.”

Nothing held up his sword. “I brought the knife.”

They all considered their meager larder, scarcely enough for one decent meal for the six of them.

“I suppose I’d better be mother,” said Sumael.

Yarvi sat, slavering like his father’s dogs waiting for scraps, while she rationed out six fearsomely equal and awfully tiny shares of bread. Rulf swallowed his in two bites, then watched as Ankran chewed every crumb a hundred times with eyes closed in ecstasy.

“Is that all we eat?”

Sumael wrapped up the precious bundle again, jaw tight, and pushed it into her shirt without speaking.

“I miss Trigg,” said Rulf, mournfully.

Sumael would have made a fine minister. She had been thinking clearly enough on her way off the ship to grab two of Shadikshirram’s abandoned wine bottles, and now they packed them with snow and took turns to carry them inside their clothes. Yarvi soon learned only to sip the results, since unwrapping to piss in that cold was an act of heroism that earned grunted congratulations from the others, all the more heartfelt since everyone knew sooner or later they would have to present their own nethers to the searing wind.

For all it felt like a month of torture the day was short, and as evening came the heavens blazed with stars, glittering swirls and burning trails, bright as the eyes of the gods. Sumael pointed out strange constellations, for every one of which she had a name — the Bald Weaver, the Crooked Way, Stranger-Come-Knocking, the Eater of Dreams — and as she spoke them steaming into the dark she smiled, a happiness in her voice that he had never heard from her before, and made him smile too.

“How many steps to Vansterland, now?” he asked.

“Some.” She looked back to the horizon, happiness swiftly snuffed out, and upped the pace.

He toiled on after her. “I haven’t thanked you.”

“You can do it when we don’t end up a pair of frozen corpses.”

“Since I might not get that chance … thank you. You could’ve let Trigg kill me.”

“If I’d taken a moment to think about it, I would have.”

He could hardly complain at that. He wondered what he would have done if she had been the one Trigg throttled, and did not like the answer. “I’m glad you didn’t think, then.”

There was a long pause, with just the crunching of their boots in the snow. Then he saw her frown over her shoulder at him, and away. “So am I.”

THE SECOND DAY THEY JOKED to keep their spirits up.

“You’re being stingy with the stores again, Ankran! Pass back the roast pig!” And they laughed.

“I’ll race you to Vulsgard! Last one through the gate gets sold to pay for ale!” And they chuckled.

“I hope Shadikshirram brings some wine when she comes for us.” Not so much as a smile.

When they slithered from their wretched tent at dawn on the third day, if you could call that watery gloom a dawn, they were all grumbling.

“I do not care for this old blunderer in front,” croaked Nothing, after tripping over Rulf’s heels for a third time.

“I’m not sure I like this madman’s sword at my back,” snapped Rulf over his shoulder.

“You could have it through your back instead.”

“How many years between you and still you act like children?” Yarvi pushed his way in to step between them. “We need to help one another or the winter will kill us all.”

Faintly, just ahead, he heard Sumael say, “More than likely it will kill us all anyway.”

He did not disagree.

By the fourth day, the freezing fog lying over the white land like a shroud, they were silent. Just a grunt now as one or another stumbled, just a grunt as one or another helped them up and on to nowhere. Six silent figures in the great emptiness, in the great, cold void, each struggling under their own burden of chill misery, under their own chafing thrall-collar and ever heavier chain, each with their own pain, and hunger, and fear.

At first Yarvi thought about the men drowned on the ship. How many dead? The planks cracking and the sea pouring in. So that he could save himself? The slaves straining at their chains for one more gasp before Mother Sea dragged them down, down, down.

But his mother had always said, Never worry about what has been done. Only about what will be.

There was no changing it, and guilt over the past and worry about the future began both to fade, leaving only taunting memories of food. The four dozen pigs roasted for the visit of the High King, so much for such a little, gray-haired man and his hard-eyed minister. The feast when Yarvi’s brother passed his warrior’s test that Yarvi had done no more than pick at, knowing he could never pass himself. The beach before his ill-fated raid, men cooking the meal that might be their last, meat turning above a hundred fires, heat like a hand on your face, a ring of hungry grins lit by flame, fat sizzling and the crackling blackened—

“Freedom!” roared Rulf, opening his arms wide to hold the vast expanse of empty white. “Freedom to freeze where you please! Freedom to starve where you like! Freedom to walk ’til you drop!”

His voice died quickly in that thin sharp air.

“Finished?” asked Nothing.

Rulf let his arms flop down. “Yes.” And they slogged on.

It was not the thought of his mother that kept Yarvi going, step after floundering step, stride after aching stride, fall after chilling fall, dogged in the tracks of the others. It was not the thought of his betrothed, or his dead father, or even his stool beside Mother Gundring’s fire. It was the thought of Odem, smiling with his hand on Yarvi’s shoulder. Of Odem, promising to be his shoulder-man. Of Odem, asking gently as the spring rain if a cripple should be King of Gettland.

“I think not,” Yarvi snarled in smoke through his cracked lips. “I think not … I think not.”

And step after torturous step, Gettland edged ever closer.

The fifth day was clear and icy crisp, the sky blinding blue, so that it seemed Yarvi could see almost all the way to the sea, a strip of black and white on the far horizon of a land of black and white.

“We’ve done well,” he said. “You have to admit.”

Sumael, shading her eyes from the brightness as she frowned westward, had to do no such thing. “We’ve had good weatherluck.”

“I don’t feel lucky,” muttered Rulf, hugging himself. “Do you feel lucky, Jaud?”

“I feel cold,” said Jaud, rubbing at the pinked tips of his ears.

Sumael shook her head at the sky, which aside from a distant bruise far off to the north looked unusually clear. “Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, you’ll learn what bad weatherluck looks like. There’s a storm coming.”

Rulf squinted up. “You’re sure?”

“I don’t tell you how to snore, do I? Don’t tell me how to navigate.”

Rulf looked at Yarvi, and shrugged. But before dark, as usual, she was proved right. That bruise on the sky grew, and swelled, and darkened, and turned odd colors.

“The gods are angry,” muttered Nothing, frowning.

“When aren’t they?” said Yarvi.

The snow began to fall in giant flakes, in curtains and eddies. The wind blew up in shrieking gusts, bludgeoning from every way at once, barging them left and right. Yarvi took a fall and, when he clambered up, couldn’t see any of the others. He blundered on in a panic and ran straight into Jaud’s back.

“We have to get out of this!” he screeched, hardly able even to hear his own voice over the wind.

“I will not argue!” Jaud bellowed back.

“We need deep snow!”

“Snow we have!” roared Ankran.

They floundered to the bottom of a narrow gully, the most promising slope Yarvi could hope to find with the snow coming in such flurries that the others were little more than ghosts. He dug like a rabbit, scooping snow between his legs, burrowing desperately inward then, when he’d tunneled a body’s length, up. His hands burned with the cold inside their wrappings of wet sailcloth, his muscles burned with the effort but he forced himself on. He dug as if his life depended on it.

It did.

Sumael wormed her way after him, growling through her gritted teeth and using her hatchet like a trowel. They dug out first a shelf, then a hollow, then a tiny chamber. Ankran wriggled in behind, tongue wedged into the gap in his front teeth as he scooped the snow back. Rulf came next into the cold dimness, then Jaud worked his great shoulders up into the growing cave, and finally Nothing poked his head in.

“Neat,” he said.

“Keep the entrance clear,” Yarvi muttered, “or we’ll be buried in the night,” and he hunched against the packed snow, unwound the soaked wrappings and blew into his cupped hands. He had few enough fingers already: he could afford to lose no more.

“Where did you learn this?” asked Sumael, sitting back beside him.

“My father taught me.”

“I think he has saved our lives.”

“You must thank him, when you see him.” Ankran wriggled his shoulders into place. They were tightly squeezed, but they had been for days. There was no room for pride, or distaste, or enmity out here in the wastes.

Yarvi closed his eyes then and thought of his father, laid out pale and cold on the slab. “My father’s dead.”

“I am sorry,” came Jaud’s deep voice.

“It’s good that one of us is.”

Yarvi let his hand drop, and realized a moment later it had fallen against Sumael’s, her upturned fingers pressed into his palm. It felt good there, warm where her skin touched his. He did not move it. Nor did she.

Slowly he closed his fingers around hers.

There was a long silence then, the wind whining soft outside their shelter and the breath coming heavy inside, and Yarvi began to feel about as close to comfortable, packed under strides of frozen snow, as he had since they left Ankran’s fire.

“Here.” He felt the breath of the word on his face, felt Sumael gently take him by the wrist. His eyes flicked open but he could not guess at her expression in the darkness.

She turned his hand over and pressed something into his palm. Stale, and sour, and halfway between soggy and frozen, but it was bread, and by the gods he was glad to get it.

They sat pressed together, all eking out their shares, all chewing with something like contentment, or at least relief, and one by one swallowing, and falling silent, and leaving Yarvi wondering whether he dared take Sumael’s hand again.

Then she said, “That’s the last food.”

Another silence, but this one far less comfortable.

Rulf’s voice came muffled in the darkness. “How far to Vansterland?”

No one answered.

The Better Men

“Gettlanders are the better men,” came Nothing’s breathy croak. “They fight as one. Each guarded by the shield of his shoulder-man.”

“Gettlanders? Hah!” Rulf snorted smoke as he struggled on up the snowy slope after Sumael. “A herd of bloody sheep driven bleating to the butcher! When the shoulder-man falls, what then? Throvenmen have fire in them!”

They’d been arguing all day. Whether sword or bow was superior. Whether Hemenholm was south of Grenmer Island. Whether painted wood or oiled were more loved by Mother Sea and hence made for a more favored vessel. Yarvi could not imagine where they found the breath. He hardly had enough for breathing with.

“Throvenmen?” croaked Nothing. “Hah! When the fires burn out, what then?” First they would argue their case, then settle to stating their position with ever more certainty, and finally to a contest of scornful grunting. In Yarvi’s hearing neither had conceded a hair’s breadth since they left the South Wind sinking.

It was three days since the food ran out, and Yarvi’s hunger was an aching void inside him that swallowed every hope. When he had unwrapped the sailcloth from his hands that morning he had hardly recognized them: they were shriveled and bloated at once. The skin on his fingertips had a waxy look, prickly-numb to the touch. Even Jaud was hollow about the cheeks. Ankran had a limp he was trying and failing to hide. Rulf’s breath came with a wheeze that made Yarvi wince. Nothing had frost in his straggling eyebrows. Sumael’s scarred lips were thinner and grayer and tighter pressed with every mile they trudged.

All Yarvi could think about, as this debate of the damned droned on, was which of them would die first.

“Gettlanders know discipline,” droned Nothing. “Gettlanders are—”

“What kind of fool even gives a damn?” snarled Yarvi, rounding on the two old men and stabbing his stub of a finger in their faces, suddenly furious. “Men are just men, good or bad depending on their luck! Now save your breath for walking!” And he wedged his hands back under his armpits and forced himself on up the slope.

“He’s a cook’s boy and a philosopher,” he heard Rulf wheeze.

“I can hardly decide which is the more useless out here,” muttered Nothing. “I should have let Trigg kill him. Gettlanders are clearly …”

He fell silent as he crested the ridge. They all did. A forest lay before them, stretching away in every direction until it was lost in the gray veil of the falling snow.

“Trees?” whispered Sumael, as though she hardly dared believe her own senses.

“Trees could mean food,” said Yarvi.

“Trees could mean fire,” said Ankran.

Suddenly they were all plunging down the hillside, whooping like children freed from their chores. Yarvi fell, tumbled in a shower of snow, and was up again. They floundered eagerly between the stunted outliers, then in among towering firs with trunks so thick Yarvi could scarcely have linked his hands around them. Mighty pillars as in some sacred place and they unwelcome trespassers.

They slowed from run to jog, from jog to cautious shuffle. No fruit fell from the sparse branches. No deer flung themselves onto Nothing’s sword. Such fallen wood as they found was soaked and rotted. Beneath the snow the ground was treacherous with tangled roots and countless years of rotted needles.

Their laughter guttered out and the wood was perfectly quiet, not so much as a bird’s chirrup to scratch the heavy silence.

“Gods,” whispered Ankran. “We’re no better here than out there.”

Yarvi scrambled to a tree trunk, breaking off a piece of half-frozen fungus with a trembling hand.

“Have you found something?” asked Jaud, squeaky with hope.

“No.” Yarvi tossed it aside. “This kind can’t be eaten.” And despair began to float down with the snow and settle on Yarvi even more heavily than before.

“Fire is what we need,” he said, trying to keep the flickering of hope alive. Fire would warm them, and raise their spirits, and bring them together, and keep them going a little longer. Where that might take them he could not afford to think about. One stroke at a time, as Jaud had always told him.

“For a fire we need dry wood,” said Ankran. “Might the cook’s boy know where to find some?”

“I’d know where to buy it in Thorlby,” Yarvi snapped back. In truth, he probably wouldn’t have. There had been slaves for that.

“Higher ground should be drier ground.” Sumael set off at a jog and Yarvi struggled after, sliding down a slope and into a treeless dip, covered in clean white snow. “Maybe up here …”

She hurried out into that scar in the forest and Yarvi followed the trail of her quick footprints. Gods, he was tired. He could scarcely feel his feet. There was something strange about the ground here, flat and hard under a thin blanket of snow, black patches scattered. At Sumael’s next step there came a strange creaking.

She froze, frowning down.

“Wait!” Nothing stood on the slope behind them, clutching a tree with one hand and his sword with the other. “It’s a river!”

Yarvi stared at his feet, every hair on him prickling with horror. The ice pinged, clicked, shifted under his boots. It gave a long groan as Sumael turned toward him, her wide eyes flicking up to his. There was no more than a stride or two between them.

Yarvi swallowed, hardly daring even to breathe, and held out his hand to her.

“Tread softly,” he whispered.

She took a step and, without so much as a gasp, vanished through the ice.

First he stood frozen.

Then his whole body twitched as if to dash forward.

He stopped himself with a moan, floundered down onto all fours and wriggled to where she had disappeared. Black water, and splinters of ice floating, and not the slightest sign of her. He stared over his shoulder to see Jaud bounding down the bank in a shower of snow.

“Stay!” shrieked Yarvi. “You’re too heavy!”

He thought he saw movement under the ice, dragged himself to it sprawled out on his face, scrubbed away snow, could see nothing down there but blackness, lonely bubbles shifting.

Ankran teetered out onto the river, arms spread wide, skittered to a halt as the frozen surface groaned. Nothing was floundering through the snow downstream, toward a patch of bare ice where jagged rocks poked through.

Awful silence stretched out.

“Where is she?” screamed Yarvi. Rulf only stared from the bank, mouth hanging helplessly.

How long could someone hold their breath? Not this long, surely.

He saw Nothing hop a few steps from the bank and raise his sword high, point downward.

“Are you mad?” Yarvi screeched, before he realized.

Of course he was.

The sword darted down, spray fountained up, and Nothing dropped on the ice and thrust his other arm into the water.

“I have her!” He hauled Sumael from the river, limp as rags and streaming freezing water, dragged her toward the bank where Jaud and Rulf were waiting.

“Is she breathing?” screamed Yarvi, crawling on hands and knees for fear of going through himself.

“How do I tell?” asked Jaud, kneeling beside her.

“Put your cheek to her mouth!”

“I don’t think so!”

“Lift her feet!” Yarvi scrambled from the frozen river and forced his leaden legs along the snow-covered bank.

“What?”

“Get her upside-down!”

Jaud dumbly lifted her by her ankles, her loose head dragging in the snow, and Yarvi struggled up and forced two fingers into her mouth, hooked them round and down her throat.

“Come on!” he growled, spitting, and straining. “Come on!” He had seen Mother Gundring do it once, to a boy who fell in a mill-pond.

The boy had died.

Sumael didn’t move. She was clammy-cold, like a dead thing already, and Yarvi snarled a mess of prayers through his clenched teeth, he hardly even knew who to.

He felt Nothing’s hand on his shoulder. “Death waits for us all.”

Yarvi shrugged him off and pushed harder. “Come on!”

And as suddenly as a child pinched awake Sumael jerked and coughed out water, rasped in half a breath and coughed out more.

“Gods!” said Rulf, taking a dumbstruck step back.

Yarvi was almost as surprised as he was, and certainly had never been so glad to have a handful of cold puke.

“You going to put me down?” croaked Sumael, eyes swiveling to the corners. Jaud let her drop and she hunched on the snow, plucking at her thrall-collar, and coughing and spitting, and starting to shiver hard.

Rulf was staring as if he had witnessed a miracle. “You’re a sorcerer!”

“Or a minister,” murmured Ankran.

Yarvi had no wish to let anyone pick at that scab. “We need to get her warm.”

They struggled to coax a fire with Ankran’s little flint, tearing sheets of moss from the trees for kindling, but everything was wet and the few sparks would not take. One after another they tried while Sumael stared, eyes fever-bright, shivering harder and harder until they could hear her clothes flapping against her.

Jaud who had once lit the ovens in a bakery every morning could do nothing, and Rulf who had set fires on beaches windswept and rain-lashed all about the Shattered Sea could do nothing, and even Yarvi made a futile effort, fumbling the flint in his useless stub of a hand until his fingers were cut while all the while Ankran muttered a prayer to He Who Makes the Flame.

But the gods were working no more miracles that day.

“Can we dig a shelter?” Jaud rocked back on his heels. “Like we did in the blizzard?”

“Not enough snow,” said Yarvi.

“With branches, then?”

“Too much snow.”

“Got to keep going.” Sumael suddenly wobbled to her feet, Rulf’s outsize coat dropping in the snow behind her. “Too hot,” she said, unwinding the sailcloth from her hands so it flapped free, tugging her shirt open and pulling at the chain inside. “Scarf’s too tight.” She took a couple more shambling steps and pitched straight on her face. “Got to keep going,” she mumbled into the snow.

Jaud gently rolled her, sat her up, hugging her with one arm.

“Father won’t wait forever,” she whispered, faintest breath of smoke spilling from her blued lips.

“The cold’s in her head.” Yarvi put his palm against her clammy skin and found his hand shook. He might have saved her from drowning but without fire or food the winter would take her through the Last Door still, and he could not stand the thought of it. What would they do without her?

What would he do without her?

“Do something!” hissed Rulf, gripping hard at Yarvi’s arm.

But what? Yarvi chewed at his cracked lip, staring off into the forest as though some answer might present itself among those barren trunks.

There is always a way.

He frowned for a moment, then shook Rulf off and hurried to the nearest tree, tearing the wrappings from his good hand. He plucked a red-brown tuft of something from the bark, and the embers of hope sparked to life once again.

“Wool,” muttered Ankran, holding up another tuft. “Sheep passed this way.”

Rulf tore it from his fingers. “Were driven?”

“Southward,” said Yarvi.

“How can you tell?”

“The moss grows out of the wind on the west side of the trunks.”

“Sheep mean warmth,” said Rulf.

“Sheep mean food,” said Jaud.

Yarvi did not say what he was thinking. That sheep meant people, and people might not be friendly. But to weigh your choices you need more than one.

“I’ll stay with her,” said Ankran. “You bring help, if you can.”

“No,” said Jaud. “We go together. We are all oarmates now.”

“Who’ll carry her?”

Jaud shrugged. “When you have a load to lift, you’re better lifting than weeping.” And he slipped his arms underneath Sumael and grimaced as he lifted her, stumbled just a little, then settled her twitching face against his shoulder and without another word started southward, head held high. She must not have weighed much now but, cold and hungry and tired as Yarvi was, it seemed a feat almost impossible.

“I’ve lived a while,” muttered Rulf, blinking at Jaud’s back. “But I can’t say I ever saw a finer thing.”

“Nor I,” said Yarvi, clambering up and hurrying after. How could he complain, or doubt, or falter, with that lesson in strength before him?

How could any of them?

Kindness

They huddled in the damp brush, and looked down toward the steading.

One building was stone-built, so old it had settled into the land, a thin plume of smoke drifting from the snow-humped roof which made Yarvi’s mouth water and his skin prickle at misty memories of food and warmth. Another building, which from the occasional muffled bleating was the barn where the sheep were kept, looked to be made from the hull of an upended ship, though how it might have come this far inland he had no notion. Others were rough-hewn sheds almost lost under the drifted snow, the gaps between them blocked by a fence of sharpened logs.

Just outside the entrance, by a hole in the ice and with his fishing rod propped on a pair of sticks, a small boy sat swaddled in furs, and from time to time noisily blew his nose.

“This worries me,” whispered Jaud. “How many will be in there? We know nothing about them.”

“Except that they are people and people are never to be trusted,” said Nothing.

“We know they have food, and clothes, and shelter.” Yarvi looked at Sumael, hunched in every thread they could spare, which was few enough. She was shivering so hard her teeth rattled, lips gray-blue like slate, eyelids drooping, closing, opening and drooping again. “Things we need to survive.”

“Then it is simple.” Nothing unwrapped the cloth from the hilt of his sword. “Steel is the answer.”

Yarvi stared at him. “You’re going to kill that boy?”

Rulf wriggled his shoulders uncomfortably, but Nothing only shrugged his. “If it is a choice between his death or ours then, yes, I will kill him, and anyone else down there. They can join my regrets.” He started to rise but Yarvi grabbed his ragged shirt and dragged him back down, found himself staring into his hard, flat, gray eyes. Close up, they looked no more sane. Quite the reverse.

“The same goes for you, cook’s boy,” whispered Nothing.

Yarvi swallowed, but he did not look away, and he did not let go. Sumael had risked her life for his on the South Wind. It was time to repay the debt. And besides, he was tired of being a coward.

“First we’ll try talking.” He stood, tried to think up some gesture that might make him look less like a ragged beggar at the utter extremes of desperation, and failed.

“Once they have killed you,” said Nothing, “will steel be the answer?”

Yarvi breathed a smoky sigh. “I expect so.” And he shuffled down the slope toward the buildings.

All was still. No sign of life but for the boy. Yarvi stopped perhaps a dozen steps from him.

“Hey.”

The lad jerked up, upsetting his fishing rod, stumbled back and nearly fell, then ran toward the house. Yarvi could only wait, and shiver. Shiver with the cold, and with the fear of what was coming. You could not expect too much kindness from folk who lived in land as harsh as this.

They spilled from the stone building like bees from a broken hive. He counted six, each well-wrapped in furs, each with a spear. Three of them had stone points rather than metal, but all were gripped with grim purpose. Silently they rushed to make half a circle around him, spears pointing in.

All Yarvi could do was lift his hands, empty apart from their swaddlings of filthy sailcloth, send up a silent prayer to Father Peace, and croak out, “I need your help.”

The figure in the center planted her spear butt-down in the snow, and walked slowly up to Yarvi. She pushed her hood back to show a shag of yellow-gray hair and a face deep-lined, worn by work and weather. For a moment, she studied him.

Then she stepped forward and, before Yarvi could cringe away, threw her arms about him and hugged him tight.

“I am Shidwala,” she said in the Tongue. “Are you alone?”

“No,” he whispered, fighting to hold back his tears of relief. “My oarmates are with me.”

THE INSIDE OF THE HOUSE was low, and narrow, and stank of sweat and woodsmoke, and it seemed a palace. An oily stew of roots and mutton was doled out from a blackened pot into a wooden bowl polished with years of use. Yarvi dug into it with his fingers and had never tasted anything finer. Benches followed the curving walls, and Yarvi and his friends sat on one side of the sizzling firepit and their hosts on the other — Shidwala, and four men he took to be her sons, and the boy from the ice pool, who stared at Sumael and Jaud as if they were elves stepped out of legend.

Back in Thorlby, these people would have seemed beyond poor. Now the room was crammed with riches. Tools of wood and bone were bracketed on the walls, cunning instruments for hunting, and fishing, and digging shelter, and teasing a living from the ice, skins of wolf and goat and bear and seal on every surface. One of the hosts, a man with a thick brown beard, scraped out the pot to hand Jaud a second bowl, and the big man nodded his thanks and started to stuff it in, eyes closed in ecstasy.

Ankran leaned close to him. “I think we have eaten all their dinner.”

Jaud froze with his fingers in his mouth and the bearded man laughed and leaned across the fire to clap him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” said Yarvi, putting his own bowl aside.

“You are hungrier than us, I think,” said Shidwala. They spoke the Tongue with a strange accent. “And also remarkably far from your way.”

“We are heading to Vulsgard from the land of the Banyas,” said Ankran.

The woman considered that a moment. “Then you are remarkably close to your way, but I find your way a very strange one.”

Yarvi could only agree with that. “If we had known the hardship of it, we might have chosen another.”

“So it is with many choices.”

“All we can do now is see it through.”

“So it is with many choices.”

Nothing leaned close to Yarvi and whispered in his ground-down stub of a voice. “I do not trust them.”

“He wants to thank you for your hospitality,” said Yarvi, quickly.

“We all do,” said Ankran. “You, and the gods of your house.”

Yarvi brushed ashes from the prayer stone that was set into the hearth and read the runes there. “And She Who Breathes Out the Snows.”

“Well said and well reckoned.” Shidwala narrowed her eyes. “Where you come from she is a small god, eh?”

Yarvi nodded. “But here a tall one, I think.”

“Like many things, gods seem bigger when you are closer to them. Here, She Who Breathes Out the Snows is ever at our elbows.”

“She shall have our first prayers waking,” said Ankran.

“Wise,” said Shidwala.

“And you’ll have our second,” said Yarvi. “You’ve saved our lives.”

“Here all the living must be friends.” She smiled, and the deep creases in her face reminded Yarvi of Mother Gundring, and for a moment he was sick for home. “The winter is enemy enough for all of us.”

“We know it.” Yarvi looked over at Sumael, hunched close to the fire with her eyes shut, rocking gently with a blanket about her shoulders. Most of the color had come back to her face.

“You could wait with us, until winter passes.”

“I cannot,” said Ankran, voice cracking as he set his jaw hard. “I must get to my family.”

“And I to mine,” said Yarvi, though his pressing need was to kill one of his rather than save them. “We must go on, but there are many things we need …”

Shidwala took in their wretched state and raised her brows. “Indeed there are. We would happily trade.”

At the word “trade” Shidwala’s sons smiled, and nodded their approval.

Yarvi glanced at Ankran, and Ankran spread his empty palms. “We have nothing to trade.”

“There is the sword.”

Nothing frowned even harder, cradled the blade a little closer, and Yarvi was painfully aware he had been happy to kill these people a few moments before.

“He will not part with it,” said Yarvi.

“There is one thing I could make good use of.” The man with the brown beard was staring across the fire at Sumael.

Jaud stiffened, and Rulf gave an unhappy grunt, and Ankran’s voice had a harsh edge when he spoke. “We will not sell one of our own. Not at any price.”

Shidwala laughed. “You misunderstand. Metal here is scarce.” She came around the fire on her haunches, reached into Sumael’s collar where steel glinted, and drew out a length of her fine chain. “This is what we want.”

Yarvi felt the smile spread across his face. It had been a while, and it felt fine there. “In that case …” He unwound his scarf of frayed sailcloth and drew out his own heavier chain. “You might want this one too.”

The bearded man’s eyes lit up as he weighed it in his hand, then his jaw dropped as Nothing jerked open his own collar. “And there is this,” he said, dragging out the heavy links.

Now everyone was smiling. Yarvi leaned in close to the fire, and clasped his hands the way his mother used to. “Let us trade.”

Nothing leaned to whisper in his ear. “I told you steel would be the answer.”

WITH A FINAL CRASH the rusted bolt sheared away and Nothing’s collar sprang open.

“That was a stubborn one,” said the bearded man, frowning at his ruined chisel.

Somewhat unsteadily Nothing stood from the block, reached with one trembling hand to touch his neck, the skin leathery with the chafing of years.

“For twenty years I wore that collar,” he whispered, tears glimmering in his eyes.

Rulf slapped him on the shoulder. “I wore mine only three, and still I feel light as air without it. You must feel like you could float away.”

“I have,” whispered Nothing. “I will.”

Yarvi stroked absently at the old burns where his own collar used to sit, watching Ankran carefully pack the things their chains had bought them. A fishing rod and bait. A shovel made from the shoulderblade of a moose. A bronze knife that looked like a relic from a time soon after the Breaking of God. Nine arrows for Rulf’s bow. A wooden bowl for drinking. Dried moss to start a fire. Rope woven from wool. Ewe’s cheese and mutton and dried fish. Furs too, and rough over-clothes stitched from fleeces, and raw wool to stuff inside them. Leather sacks to carry it all. Even a sled to pull it on.

What silly things these would have seemed once, what beggar’s junk. Now it was a treasure hoard.

Sumael was wrapped up to her chin in a thick white fur, eyes closed and a rare grin on her face, white tooth showing through the notch in her lip.

“Feels good?” Jaud asked her.

“I am warm,” she whispered, without opening her eyes. “If I’m dreaming, don’t wake me.”

Shidwala tossed Nothing’s open collar clattering into a barrel alongside their chains. “If you want advice—”

“Always,” said Ankran.

“Head north and west. In two days you will come upon a country that fires under the earth make hot. At its edges the streams run with warm water and the fish teem.”

“I’ve heard tales of such a country,” said Yarvi, remembering Mother Gundring’s voice droning over the firepit.

“We will go north and west,” said Ankran.

Shidwala nodded. “And may the gods walk with you.” She turned to go but Nothing dropped suddenly to his knees, took her hand, and pressed his cracked lips to it.

“I will never forget this kindness,” he said, wiping tears on the back of his hand.

“None of us will,” said Yarvi.

With a smile she pulled Nothing to his feet, and patted his grizzled cheek. “That is its own reward.”

The Truth

Rulf slipped from the trees with a huge grin on his face, bow over one shoulder and a stringy deer over the other. To leave no one in any doubt as to the quality of his archery he had left the arrow sticking from its heart.

Sumael raised one brow at him. “So you’re not just a beauty.”

He winked back. “To an archer, arrows make all the difference.”

“Do you want to skin, cook’s boy, or shall I?” Ankran held out the knife with the hint of a twisted grin. As though he knew Yarvi would refuse. He was no fool. The few times Yarvi had been dragged out to hunt his hand had stopped him drawing bow or holding spear and he had felt sick when it came to the butchery. His father had scolded him and his brother had mocked him and their men had barely bothered to conceal their contempt.

Much like the rest of his childhood, then.

“You can skin this time,” said Yarvi. “I’ll give you some pointers if you go wrong.”

After they ate Jaud sat with his bare feet to the fire, rubbing fat into the cracks between his thick toes. Rulf tossed the last bone aside and wiped his greasy hands on his fleece jacket.

“Some salt would’ve made all the difference.”

Sumael shook her head. “Have you ever had a thing you didn’t complain about?”

“If you can’t find anything to complain about you aren’t looking hard enough.” Rulf settled back on one elbow, smiling into the darkness and scratching at his thick growth of beard. “Though I never was disappointed in my wife. I thought I’d die at that bloody oar. But since I still seem to be casting a shadow I’ve a mind to see her again. Just to say a hello. Just to know that she’s well.”

“If she has any sense she’ll have moved on,” said Sumael.

“She had more’n her share. Too much to waste life waiting.” Rulf sniffed, and spat into the fire. “And better men than me aren’t hard to find.”

“There we can agree.” Nothing sat a little way from the fire with his stiff back to the rest of them and his naked sword on his knees, polishing the blade with a rag.

Rulf only grinned over at him. “And what about you, Nothing? You spent years scrubbing a deck, will you spend the rest of them scrubbing that sword? What will you do once we get to Vulsgard?”

Yarvi realized it was the first time since the South Wind went beneath the waves that any one of them had talked about what might come next. It was the first time it had looked as if they might make it.

“I have scores to settle. But they have kept fresh twenty years.” Nothing bent back to his frantic polishing. “It can rain blood later.”

“Anything but snow would be an improvement in the weather,” said Jaud. “I will be finding passage south, back to Catalia. Najit is the name of my village, and from its well comes the sweetest water in the world.” He clasped his hands over his stomach, and smiled the way he always did when he mentioned the place. “I mean to drink from that well again.”

“Perhaps I’ll join you,” said Sumael. “It won’t be far out of my way.”

“Your way where?” Yarvi asked. Though they had slept within reach of each other for months he hardly knew a thing about her, and found he wanted to. She frowned at him, as if wondering whether to open a door so long kept bolted, then shrugged.

“The First of Cities, I expect. I grew up there. My father was a famous man, in his way. A shipwright to the empress. His brother still is … perhaps. I hope. If he’s alive. A lot can change in the time I’ve been away.”

And she fell silent, and frowned into the flames, and so did Yarvi, worrying over what might have changed in Thorlby while he was gone.

“Well, I will not be turning down your company,” said Jaud. “Someone who actually knows where they are going can be a considerable help on a long journey. What about you, Ankran?”

“In Angulf’s Square in Thorlby there is a flesh-dealer’s shop.” Ankran growled the words at the fire, his bony face full of shadows. “The one where Shadikshirram bought me. From a man called Yoverfell.” He flinched when he said the name. The way Yarvi might have when he thought of Odem’s. “He has my wife. He has my son. I have to get them back.”

“How do you plan to do that?” asked Rulf.

“I will find a way.” Ankran made a fist, and thumped it harder and harder against his knee until it had to be painful. “I must.”

Yarvi blinked across the fire. When he first laid eyes on Ankran he had hated him. He had tricked him, watched him beaten, and stolen his place. Then he had accepted him, walked beside him, taken his charity. Come to trust him. Now he found what he had never thought to. That he admired him.

All Yarvi had done was for himself. His freedom, his vengeance, his chair. What Ankran had done was for his family.

“I could help,” he said.

Ankran looked up sharply. “You?”

“I have … friends in Thorlby. Powerful friends.”

“This cook you were apprenticed to?” snorted Rulf.

“No.”

Yarvi was not sure why he chose that moment. Perhaps the closer he was bound to this band of misfits the heavier the lie sat on him. Perhaps some spot of pride had somehow survived and chose that moment to chafe. Perhaps he thought Ankran was putting the truth together anyway. Or perhaps he was just a fool.

“Laithlin,” he said. “Wife of the dead king, Uthrik.”

Jaud gave a smoking sigh, and settled down into his fur. Rulf did not bother even to chuckle. “And what are you to the Golden Queen of Gettland?”

Yarvi kept his voice level even though his heart was suddenly thumping. “Her younger son.”

And that gave them all some pause.

Yarvi the most, for it came to him then he could have stayed a cook’s boy, and gone anywhere. Traipsed after Rulf to say hello to his wife or followed Nothing to whatever madness his cracked mind settled on. Gone with Jaud to drink from that well in far Catalia, or on with Sumael to the wonders of the First of Cities. The two of them, together …

But now there was nowhere to go but into the Black Chair. Except through the Last Door.

“My name isn’t Yorv, it’s Yarvi. And I am the rightful King of Gettland.”

There was a long silence. Even Nothing had forgotten his polishing and twisted about on his stone to stare with eyes fever-bright.

Ankran softly cleared his throat. “That would explain your shitty cooking.”

“You’re not joking, are you?” asked Sumael.

Yarvi returned her gaze, long and level. “Do you hear me laughing?”

“Then if I may ask, what was the King of Gettland doing lashed to an oar on a rotting trading galley?”

Yarvi pulled his fleece tight about his shoulders and looked into the fire, the flames taking on the shapes of things done and faces past. “Because of my hand … or the lack of it, I was to give up my birthright and join the Ministry. But my father, Uthrik, was killed. Betrayed by Grom-gil-Gorm and his minister, Mother Scaer … or so I was told. I led twenty-seven ships on a raid against them. My uncle Odem laid the plans.” He found his voice was quivering. “Which included killing me and stealing my chair.”

“Prince Yarvi,” murmured Ankran. “Uthrik’s younger son. He had a crippled hand.” Yarvi held it up to the light and Ankran considered it, thoughtfully stroking the side of his crooked nose. “When we last passed through Thorlby there was talk of his death.”

“The announcement was made a little early. I fell from a tower, and Mother Sea washed me into the arms of Grom-gil-Gorm. I pretended to be a cook’s boy, and he put a collar on me and sold me to slavers in Vulsgard.”

“And there Trigg and I bought you,” mused Ankran, turning the story over for truth as a merchant might turn over a ring, trying to fathom how much gold was in the alloy. “Because you told me you could row.”

Yarvi could only shrug as he pushed his crippled hand back inside the warmth of his fleece. “As you can see, not the biggest lie I’ve ever told.”

Jaud puffed out his cheeks. “No doubt every man has his secrets, but that is larger than the average.”

“And a good deal more dangerous,” said Sumael, eyes narrowed. “Why break the silence?”

Yarvi thought about that for a moment. “You deserve to know the truth. And I deserve to tell it. And it deserves to be told.”

More silence. Jaud rubbed more fat into his feet. Ankran and Sumael exchanged a lingering frown. Then Rulf pushed his tongue between his lips and made a loud farting sound. “Does anyone believe this rubbish?”

“I believe.” Nothing stood, eyes black and huge, lifting his sword high. “And I now swear an oath!” He rammed the blade into the fire, sparks whirling and everyone shuffling back in surprise. “A sun-oath and a moon-oath. Let it be a chain about me and a goad within me. I will not rest until the rightful King of Gettland sits in the Black Chair once again!”

This silence was even longer, and no one was more stunned than Yarvi.

“Did you ever feel you were living in a dream?” muttered Rulf.

Jaud gave another of his sighs. “Often.”

“A nightmare,” said Sumael.

EARLY THE NEXT DAY they crested a ridge and were greeted by a sight straight out of a dream. Or perhaps a nightmare. Instead of white hills ahead they saw black, distant mountains ghostly in a haze of steam.

“The hot country,” said Ankran.

“A place where the gods of fire and ice make war upon each other,” whispered Nothing.

“Looks pleasant enough,” said Yarvi, “for a battlefield.”

There was a stretch of verdant green between the white land and the black, vegetation shifting with the breeze, clouds of colored birds wheeling above, water glimmering in the thin sun.

“A strip of spring cut out from the winter,” said Sumael.

“I do not trust it,” said Nothing.

“What do you trust?” asked Yarvi.

Nothing held up his sword, and did not so much smile as show his broken teeth. “Only this.”

No one mentioned yesterday’s revelation as they trudged on. As though they did not know whether to believe him, or what to do if they decided they did, and so had settled on pretending it had never happened and treating him just as they had before.

That was well enough with Yarvi, in the end. He always had felt more like a cook’s boy than a king.

The snow grew thin under his ragged boots, then melted and worked its way into them, then left him slipping in mud, then was gone altogether. The ground was patched with moss, then covered with tall green grass, then speckled with wildflowers that even Yarvi did not know the names of. Finally they stepped onto a shingle bank beside a wide pool, steam rising from the milky water, a twisted tree spreading rustling orange leaves over their heads.

“I have spent the last few years, and the last few days in particular, wondering what I did to earn such a punishment,” said Jaud. “Now I wonder how I deserved such a reward.”

“Life ain’t about deservings,” said Rulf, “so much as snatching what can be got. Where’s that fishing rod?”

And the old raider began to pluck pale fish from that cloudy water as quickly as he could bait his hook. It had started to snow again but it would not settle on the warm ground, and dry wood was everywhere, so they set a fire and Ankran cooked a banquet of fish on a flat stone above it.

Afterward Yarvi lay back with his hands on his full belly and his battered feet soaking in warm water and wondered when he was last this happy. Not taking yet another shameful beating in the training square, that was sure. Not hiding from his father’s slaps or wilting under his mother’s glare, for certain. Not even beside Mother Gundring’s fire. He lifted his head to look at the faces of his mismatched oarmates. Who would be worse off if he never went back? Surely an oath unfulfilled was not the same as an oath broken.…

“Perhaps we should just stay here,” he murmured.

Sumael had a mocking twist at the corner of her mouth. “Who’d lead the people of Gettland to a brighter tomorrow then?”

“I’ve a feeling they’d get by. I could be king of this pond, and you my minister.”

“Mother Sumael?”

“You always know the right path. You could find me the lesser evil and the greater good.”

She snorted. “Those aren’t on any map. I need to piss.” And Yarvi watched her stride off into the long grass.

“I’ve a feeling you like her,” murmured Ankran.

Yarvi’s head jerked toward him. “Well … we all like her.”

“Of course,” said Jaud, grinning broadly. “We’d be lost without her. Literally.”

“But you,” Rulf grunted, eyes closed and hands clasped behind his head, “like her.”

Yarvi worked his mouth sourly, but found he could not deny it. “I have a crippled hand,” he muttered. “The rest of me still works.”

Ankran gave something close to a chuckle. “I’ve a feeling she likes you.”

“Me? She’s harder on me than anyone!”

“Exactly.” Rulf was smiling too as he wriggled his shoulders contentedly into the ground. “Ah, I remember what it was, to be young …”

“Yarvi?” Nothing was standing tall and stiff on a rock beside that spreading tree, showing no interest in who liked who and staring off the way they had come. “My eyes are old and yours are young. Is that smoke?”

Yarvi was almost glad of the distraction as he clambered up beside Nothing, squinting southward. But the gladness did not last long. It rarely did. “I can’t tell,” he said. “Maybe.” Almost certainly. He could see faint smudges against the pale sky.

Sumael joined them, shading her eyes with one hand and giving no sign of liking anyone. Her jaw muscles tightened. “It’s coming from Shidwala’s steading.”

“Maybe they’ve made a bonfire,” said Rulf, but his smile was gone.

“Or Shadikshirram has,” said Nothing.

A good minister hopes always for the best, but prepares always for the worst. “We need to get up high,” said Yarvi. “See if anyone’s following.”

Nothing pursed his lips to gently blow a speck of dust from the bright blade of his sword. “You know she is.”

And she was.

Squinting through the strange round window of Sumael’s eyeglass from the rocky slope above the pool, Yarvi could see specks on the snow. Black specks moving, and the hope drained out of him like wine from a punctured skin. Where hope was concerned, he had long been a leaky vessel.

“I count two dozen,” said Sumael. “Banyas, I think, and some of the sailors from the South Wind. They have dogs and they have sleds and more than likely are well armed.”

“And intent on our destruction,” muttered Yarvi.

“That or they’re very, very keen to wish us well on our journey,” said Rulf.

Yarvi lowered the eyeglass. It was hard to imagine they had been laughing just an hour before. His friends’ faces were back in the drawn and worried shapes which had become so wearyingly familiar.

Apart from Nothing, of course, who looked precisely as mad as he always did.

“How far back are they?”

“My guess is sixteen miles,” said Sumael.

Yarvi was used to counting her guesses as facts. “How long will it take them to cover that?”

Her lips moved silently as she worked through the sums. “Pushing hard with sleds, they might be here at first light tomorrow.”

“Then we’d better not be,” said Ankran.

“No.” Yarvi looked away from his placid little kingdom, up the hill of bare scree and shattered rock above. “In the hot land their sleds will be no help.”

Nothing frowned into the white sky, scratching at his neck with the backs of his filthy fingernails. “Sooner or later, steel must be the answer. It always is.”

“Later, then,” said Yarvi, hefting his pack. “Now, we run.”

Running

They ran.

Or they jogged. Or they waddled, and stumbled, and shuffled over a hellish landscape of blasted stone where not a plant grew or a bird flew, Father Earth tortured into a hot waste as empty of life as the cold had been.

“The winds of fate have blown me to some glamorous places of late,” mused Ankran as they crested a ridge and stared out at another vista of smoking rock.

“Are they still following?” asked Jaud.

“Hard to see men in this broken country.” Sumael peered through her eyeglass to scan the desolation behind them, which was misted with stinking steam. “Especially ones who’d rather not be seen.”

“Perhaps they’ve turned back.” Yarvi sent up a prayer to He Who Turns the Dice for a little rare luck. “Perhaps Shadikshirram couldn’t convince the Banyas to follow us.”

Sumael wiped grimy sweat across her face. “Who wouldn’t want to come here?”

“You do not know Shadikshirram,” said Nothing. “She can be most persuasive. A great leader.”

“I saw scant sign of it,” said Rulf.

“You were not at Fulku, when she led the fleet of the empress to victory.”

“But you were, I suppose?”

“I fought on the other side,” said Nothing. “I was champion to the King of the Alyuks.”

Jaud’s forehead wrinkled with disbelief. “You were a king’s champion?” Looking at him it was hard to imagine, but Yarvi had watched great warriors in the training square, and never seen the like of Nothing’s blade-work.

“Our flagship was aflame.” The old man’s knuckles were white about his sword’s grip as he remembered. “Roped by a dozen galleys, slick with the blood of the fallen, crawling with the soldiers of the empress when Shadikshirram and I first fought. I was tired from battle and sore with wounds and unused to the shifting deck. She played the helpless woman, and in my pride I believed her and she made me bleed. So I came to be her slave. The second time we fought I was weak from hunger, and she had steel in her hand and strong men at her back and I stood alone with only an eating knife. She made me bleed a second time, but in her pride she let me live.” His mouth twisted into that mad smile and made flecks of spit as he barked the words. “Now we shall meet a third time, and I have no pride to weigh me down, and the ground shall be of my choosing, and she shall bleed for me. Yes, Shadikshirram!”

He raised his sword high, cracked voice echoing from the bare rocks, bouncing about the valley. “The day is here! The time is now! The reckoning comes!”

“Could it come after I’m safely back in Thorlby?” asked Yarvi.

Sumael grimly tightened her belt a notch. “We have to move.”

“What have we been doing?”

“Dawdling.”

“What’s your plan?” asked Rulf.

“Kill you and leave your corpse as a peace offering?”

“Don’t think she’s come all this way for peace, do you?”

Sumael’s jaw muscles worked. “Sadly, no. My plan is to reach Vansterland ahead of them.” And she started down the slope, gravel trickling from every footstep.

The ordeal by steam was almost worse than the ordeal by ice had been. Though the snow was falling it grew hotter and hotter, and layer by layer they stripped off their jealously hoarded clothes until they were slogging along half-naked, sweat-soaked, dust-smeared as laborers emerging from a mine. Thirst took the place of hunger, Ankran rationing out the cloudy, foul-tasting water in their two bottles more stingily than ever he had the stores on the South Wind.

There had been fear before. Yarvi could not remember the last time he had been without it. But it had been the slow fear of cold and hunger and exhaustion. Now it was a crueler spur. The fear of sharpened steel, the sharp teeth of the Banyas’ dogs, the even sharper vengeance of their owner.

They struggled on until it was so dark Yarvi could scarcely see his withered hand before his face, Father Moon and all his stars lost in the gloom, and they crawled in silence into a hollow in the rocks. He fell into an ugly mockery of sleep and was shaken awake what felt like moments later, bruised and aching at the first gray glimmer of dawn, to struggle on again with the splinters of his nightmares still niggling at him.

To keep ahead was all they thought of. The world became no bigger than the stretch of bare rock between their heels and their pursuers, a space ever shrinking. For a while Rulf dragged a pair of sheepskins after them on ropes: an old poacher’s trick to put off the dogs. The dogs were not fooled. Soon enough they were all bruised, grazed, bloodied from a hundred slips and falls, but with only one good hand Yarvi did worse than the others. Yet each time he went down Ankran was there with a steadying hand, to help him up, to help him on.

“Thanks,” said Yarvi, once he had lost count of his falls.

“You’ll get your chance to repay me,” said Ankran. “In Thorlby, if not before.”

For a moment they scrambled on in awkward silence, then Yarvi said, “I’m sorry.”

“For falling?”

“For what I did on the South Wind. For telling Shadikshirram …” He winced at the memory of the wine bottle cracking into Ankran’s head. The heel of the captain’s boot crunching into his face.

Ankran grimaced, tongue wedged into the hole in his front teeth. “What I hated most about that ship wasn’t what was done to me, but what I was made to do. No. What I chose to do.” He stopped for a moment, bringing Yarvi to a halt and looking him in the eye. “I used to think I was a good man.”

Yarvi put a hand on his shoulder. “I used to think you were a bastard. Now I’m starting to have some doubts.”

“You can weep over each other’s hidden nobility when we’re safe!” called Sumael, a black outline on a boulder above them, pointing off into the misty gray. “For now, we have to turn south. If we reach the river ahead of them we’ll need some way to cross. We won’t make a raft from stones and steam.”

“Will we make it to the river before we die of thirst?” asked Rulf, licking the last drops from one of the bottles and peering hopefully into it as though some might be stuck in there.

“Thirst.” Nothing barked out a chuckle. “It’s a Banya spear in your back you need to worry about.”

They slid down endless slopes of scree, hopped between boulders as big as houses, clambered down spills of black rock like waterfalls frozen. They crossed valleys where the ground was painful to touch it was so hot, choking steam hissing from cracks like devils’ mouths, skirting pools of bubbling water slick with many-colored oil. They toiled upward, sending stones clattering down dizzy drops, clinging with cut fingertips, Yarvi pawing at cracks with his useless hand, finally looking back from the heights …

To see those black dots through Sumael’s eyeglass still following, and always slightly closer than before.

“Do they never tire?” asked Jaud, wiping the sweat from his face. “Will they never stop?”

Nothing smiled. “They will stop when they are dead.”

“Or we are,” said Yarvi.

Downriver

They heard the river before they saw it, a whisper through the woods that put a little lost spring in Yarvi’s ruined legs and a little lost hope in his aching heart. The whisper became a growl, then a surging roar as they finally burst from the trees, all filthy with sweat, dust, and ash. Rulf flung himself down the shingle onto his face and started lapping up water like a dog. The rest of them were not far behind him.

When the burning thirst of a day’s hard scrambling was quenched, Yarvi sat back and stared across the river to the trees on the far side, so like the ones about them, yet so different.

“Vansterland,” muttered Yarvi. “Thank the gods!”

“Thank ’em once we’re across,” said Rulf, clean mouth and patch of beard pale in his ash-streaked face. “That doesn’t look like friendly water to this sailor.”

Nor did it to Yarvi. His relief was already turning to dread as he took in the width of the Rangheld, the steep far bank perhaps twice a bowshot away, the river high with meltwater from the burning land at their backs. On the black surface patterns of frothing white showed swift currents and rippling eddies and hinted at hidden rocks, deadly as traitor’s knives.

“Can you build a raft to cross this?” he muttered.

“My father was the foremost shipwright in the First of Cities,” said Sumael, peering into the woods. “He could pick the best keel from a forest with one look.”

“Doubt we’ll have time for a carved figurehead,” said Yarvi.

“Maybe we could mount you on the front,” said Ankran.

“Six small trunks for the raft, then a larger one cut in half for crossbeams.” Sumael hurried to a nearby fir, running her hand up the bark. “This will do for one. Jaud, you hold it, I’ll chop.”

“I’ll keep watch for our old mistress and her friends.” Rulf shrugged the bow from his shoulder and turned back the way they came. “How far back do we reckon ’em now?”

“Two hours if we’re lucky, and we generally aren’t.” Sumael slid out her hatchet. “Yarvi, find the rope, then look for some wood that might make a paddle. Nothing, when we’ve felled the trunks, you trim the branches.”

Nothing hugged his sword tight. “This is no saw. I will need the blade keen when Shadikshirram comes.”

“We hope to be long gone by then,” said Yarvi, too much water sloshing in his aching belly as he rooted through the packs.

Ankran held out his hand. “If you won’t use it give me the sword—”

Faster than seemed possible the immaculate point was grazing Ankran’s stubbled throat. “Try to take it and I will give it to you point first, storekeeper,” murmured Nothing.

“Time presses,” hissed Sumael through her gritted teeth, sending splinters flying from the base of her chosen tree with short, quick blows. “Use your sword or snap them off in your arse, but trim the bloody branches. And leave some long so we have something to hold on to.”

Soon Yarvi’s right hand was cut and dirty from dragging lengths of timber, his left wrist, which he hooked underneath them, riddled with splinters. Nothing’s sword was slathered in sap, Jaud’s fuzzy growth of hair was full of wood dust, Sumael’s right palm was bloody from wielding the hatchet and still she chopped, chopped, chopped.

They sweated and strained, snapping at one another through bared teeth, not knowing when the Banyas’ dogs would be snapping at them instead, but knowing it could not be long.

Jaud heaved up the trunks with a grunting effort, veins bulging from his thick neck, and nimble as a dressmaker sewing a hem Sumael weaved the rope in and out while Nothing hauled out the slack. Yarvi stood and watched, startling at every sound and, not for the first or the last time, wishing he had two good hands.

Considering the tools they had and the time they didn’t, their raft was a noble effort. Considering the surging torrent they would have to navigate, it was a terrifying one — hacked and splintered timbers bound with a hairy tangle of wool rope, their moose-shoulder shovel as one paddle, Jaud’s shield as another, and a vaguely spoon-shaped branch Yarvi had found as a third.

With arms folded about his sword, Nothing gave voice to Yarvi’s thoughts. “I do not care for the look of this raft and this river together.”

The fibers in Sumael’s neck stood out starkly as she dragged at the knots one more time. “All it has to do is float.”

“No doubt it will, but will we still be on it?”

“That depends on how well you hold on.”

“And what will you say when it breaks up and floats out to sea in pieces?”

“I imagine I’ll be forever silent by then, but with the satisfaction of knowing as I drown that you were killed first by Shadikshirram, here, on this forsaken bank.” Sumael raised one brow at him. “Or are you coming with us?”

Nothing frowned at them, then off into the trees, weighing his sword in one hand, then he cursed and threw his weight in between Jaud and Yarvi. The raft began to grind slowly toward the water, their boots sliding in the shingle. Yarvi slipped into the mud in panic as someone came springing from the bushes.

Ankran, his eyes wild. “They’re coming!”

“Where’s Rulf?” asked Yarvi.

“Just behind me! This is it?”

“No, this is a joke,” hissed Sumael. “I have a war galley of ninety oars hidden behind that tree.”

“Only asking.”

“Stop asking and help us launch the bastard!”

Ankran flung his weight to the raft and with all of them pushing it slithered down the bank into the river. Sumael dragged herself on, her kicking foot catching Yarvi in the jaw and making him bite his tongue. He was up to his waist in water, thought he heard shouting behind him in the trees. Nothing was on now: he seized the wrist of Yarvi’s useless hand and hauled him up, one of the torn branches gouging his chest. Ankran snatched their packs from the beach and started to fling them onto the raft.

“Gods!” Rulf burst from the trees, cheeks puffing with every huge breath. Yarvi could see shadows in the woods beyond him, could hear wild calls in a language he did not know. Then the barking of dogs.

“Run, you old fool!” he screeched. Rulf charged down the shingle and sloshed out into the water and between them Yarvi and Ankran hauled him aboard while Jaud and Nothing began to paddle like madmen.

The only effect was that they began to slowly spin.

“Keep us straight!” snapped Sumael as the raft picked up speed.

“I’m trying!” growled Jaud, digging away with his shield and showering them all with water.

“Try harder! Do you know any decent oarsmen?”

“Do you have any decent oars?”

“Shut your mouth and paddle!” snarled Yarvi, water washing across the raft and soaking his knees. Dogs spilled from the forest — huge dogs, the size of sheep they seemed, all snarling teeth and drool, bounding up and down the shingle, barking.

Then men came. Yarvi could not have said how many in that snatched glance over his shoulder. Ragged shapes among the trees, kneeling on the bank, the curve of a bow.

“Get down!” roared Jaud, clambering to the back of the raft and huddling behind his shield.

Yarvi heard the bowstrings, saw the black splinters drifting up. He crouched, fascinated, his eyes fixed on them. They seemed to take an age to fall, each with a gentle whisper. One plopped in the water a couple of strides away. Then there were two quiet clicks as arrows stuck into Jaud’s shield. A fourth lodged shuddering in the raft beside Yarvi’s knee. A hand’s width to one side and it would have been through his thigh. He blinked at it, mouth open.

There the difference between one side of the Last Door and the other.

He felt Nothing’s hand at the scruff of his neck, forcing him to the edge of the raft. “Paddle!”

More men were spilling from the trees. There might have been a score of them. There might have been more.

“Thanks for the arrows!” Rulf bellowed at the bank.

One of the archers let fly another but they were moving out into swifter water now and his arrow fell well short. A figure stood with hands on hips, looking after them. A tall figure, with a curved sword, and Yarvi caught a glimpse of gleaming crystal on a dangling belt.

“Shadikshirram,” murmured Nothing. He had been right. She had been tracking them all along. And though Yarvi did not hear her make a sound, could not even see her face over that distance, he knew then she would not stop.

Not ever.

Only a Devil

They might have escaped a fight with Shadikshirram, but soon enough the river was giving them more fight than even Nothing could have hoped for.

It showered them with cold water, soaked them and all their gear right through, made the raft buck and twist like an unbroken horse. Rocks battered at them, overhanging trees clutched at them, caught Ankran’s hood and might have plucked him from the raft had Yarvi not been clinging to his shoulder.

The banks grew steeper, higher, narrowed, until they were hurtling down a rocky gorge between broken cliffs, water spurting up through the gaps between the logs, their raft spinning like a leaf in spite of Jaud’s effort to use his arrow-stuck shield as a rudder. The river soaked the ropes and tore at the knots and began to work them loose, the raft flexing with the current, threatening to rip apart altogether.

Yarvi could not hear Sumael’s screamed orders over the thunder of the river, and he gave up all pretense of influencing the outcome, closed his eyes and clung on for his life, good hand and bad hand burning with the clenched effort, one moment cursing the gods for putting him on this raft, the next begging them to get him off it with his life. There was a wrench, a drop, the raft tipped under Yarvi’s knees, and he squeezed his eyes shut, waiting for the end.

But suddenly the waters were calm.

He pried one eye open. They all were huddled in the middle of the flopping, foundering raft, clinging to the branches, clinging to one another, shivering and bedraggled, water lapping at their knees as they ever so gently spun.

Sumael stared at Yarvi, hair plastered to her face, gulping for air.

“Shit.”

Yarvi could only nod. Unclenching the fingers of his good hand from their branch was an aching effort.

“We’re alive,” croaked Rulf. “Are we alive?”

“If I’d known,” muttered Ankran, “what this river would be like … I would’ve taken my chances … with the dogs.”

Daring to look past the ring of haggard faces, Yarvi saw the river had widened and slowed. It grew much broader still ahead, smooth water with barely a ripple, trees on wooded slopes reflected in the mirror surface.

And off on their right, flat and inviting, lay a wide beach scattered with rotting driftwood.

“Get paddling,” said Sumael.

One by one they slid from their disintegrating raft, hauled it between them as far onto the beach as they could, dragged off their sodden gear, tottered a few steps and without a word flopped on the shingle among the rest of the flotsam, no strength left even to celebrate their escape, unless lying still and breathing counted.

“Death waits for us all,” said Nothing. “But she takes the lazy first.” By some magic he was standing, frowning upriver for any sign of pursuit. “They will be following.”

Rulf worked himself up onto his elbows. “Why the hell would they?”

“Because this is just a river. That some men call this side Vansterland will mean nothing to the Banyas. It will certainly mean nothing to Shadikshirram. They are as bound together now in their pursuit as we are in our escape. They will build their own rafts and follow, and the river will be too swift for them to land just as it was for us. Until they come here.” Nothing smiled. Yarvi was starting to get nervous when Nothing smiled. “And they will come ashore, tired and wet and foolish, just as we have, and we will fall upon them.”

“Fall upon them?” said Yarvi.

“We six?” asked Ankran.

“Against their twenty?” muttered Jaud.

“With a one-handed boy, a woman and a storekeeper among us?” said Rulf.

“Exactly!” Nothing smiled wider. “You think just as I do!”

Rulf propped himself on his elbows. “There is no one, ever, who’s thought as you do.”

“You are afraid.”

The old raider’s ribs shook with chuckles. “With you on my side? You’re damn right I am.”

“You told me Throvenlanders had fire.”

“You told me Gettlanders had discipline.”

“For pity’s sake, anything but that!” snarled Yarvi as he stood. It was not a hot and mindless anger that came upon him, as his father’s rages had been, or his brother’s. It was his mother’s anger, calculating and patient, cold as winter, and for the time being it left no room for fear.

“If we have to fight,” he said, “we’ll need better ground than this.”

“And where will we find this field of glory, my king?” asked Sumael, with her notched lip curled.

Yarvi blinked into the trees. Where indeed?

“There?” Ankran was pointing up toward a rocky bluff above the river. It was hard to say with the sky bright behind but, squinting toward it, Yarvi thought there might be ruins at the summit.

“WHAT WAS THIS PLACE?” asked Jaud, easing through the archway, and at the sound of his voice birds clattered from perches high in the broken walls and away.

“It’s an elf-ruin,” said Yarvi.

“Gods,” muttered Rulf, making a sign against evil, and badly.

“Don’t worry.” Sumael kicked heedlessly through a heap of rotten leaves. “I doubt there’ll be any elves here now.”

“Not for thousands upon thousands of years.” Yarvi ran his hand over one of the walls. Not made from mortared stone but smooth, and hard, without joint or edge as though it had been molded more than built. From its crumbling top rods of rusted metal sprouted, unruly as an idiot’s hair. “Not since the Breaking of God.”

There had been a great hall here, with pillars proudly marching down both sides and archways to rooms on the right and left. But the pillars had toppled long ago, and the walls were thickly webbed with dead creeper. Part of the far wall had vanished entirely, claimed by the hungry river far below. The roof had fallen centuries since and above them was only the white sky and a shattered tower wreathed in ivy.

“I like it,” said Nothing, striding across the rubble-strewn ground, thick with dead leaves, rot and bird-droppings.

“You were all for staying on the beach,” said Rulf.

“I was, but this is a stronger place.”

“I’d like it better with a good gate.”

“A gate only postpones the inevitable.” Nothing made a ring with filthy thumb and forefinger and peered with one bright eye through it toward the empty archway. “That invitation will be their undoing. They will be funneled through, without room to make their numbers count. Here we have a chance of winning!”

“So your last plan was certain death?” said Yarvi.

Nothing grinned. “Death is life’s only certainty.”

“You surely know how to build morale,” muttered Sumael.

“We are outnumbered four to one and most of us are no fighters!” Ankran’s bulging eyes had a desperate look. “I can’t afford to die here! My family are—”

“Have more faith, storekeeper!” Nothing hooked one arm about Ankran’s neck and one about Yarvi’s and dragged them close with shocking strength. “If not in yourself, then in the rest of us. We are your family now!”

It was even less reassuring, if anything, than it had been when Shadikshirram told them as much aboard the South Wind. Ankran stared at Yarvi and all Yarvi could do was stare back.

“And anyway, there is no way out now, and that is good. People fight hardest when they have no way out.” Nothing gave them a parting squeeze then hopped up onto the base of a broken pillar, pointing toward the entrance with his naked sword. “Here I shall stand, and take the brunt of their attack. Their dogs at least cannot have made the river journey. Rulf, you will climb that tower with your bow.”

Rulf peered up at the crumbling tower, then around the others, and finally blew his gray-bearded cheeks out with a heavy sigh. “I daresay it’s sad to think of a poet’s death, but I’m a fighting man, and in that trade you’re bound to go sooner or later.”

Nothing laughed, a strange and jagged sound. “I daresay we’ve both lasted longer than we deserve! Together we braved the snow and the hunger, the steam and the thirst, together we will stand. Here! Now!”

It was hard to believe this man, standing straight and tall with steel in hand, wild hair pushed back and eyes burning bright, could be the pitiful beggar Yarvi had stepped over on his way onto the South Wind. He seemed a king’s champion indeed now, with an air of command none questioned, an air of mad confidence that gave even Yarvi some courage.

“Jaud, take your shield,” said Nothing. “Sumael your hatchet, and guard our left. That is our weaker side. Let none get around me. Keep them where I and my sword may look them in the eyes. Ankran, you and Yarvi will guard our right. That shovel will do as a club: anything can kill if you swing it hard enough. Give Yarvi the knife since he has just one hand to hold it. One hand, perhaps, but the blood of kings in his veins!”

“It’s keeping it there that worries me,” said Yarvi under his breath.

“You and I, then.” Ankran offered out the knife. A makeshift thing without so much as a crosspiece, wooden handle wrapped with leather cord and the blade greened down the back but the edge keen enough.

“You and I,” said Yarvi, taking it from him and gripping it tight. He would never have believed when he first looked on the storekeeper in the stinking slave-pits of Vulsgard that he might one day stand as his shoulder-man, but he found in spite of his fear he was proud to do it.

“With a good bloody ending this journey will make a fine song, I think.” Nothing held his free arm out, fingers spread, toward the archway through which Shadikshirram and her Banyas would no doubt soon be spilling, fixed on murder. “A band of brave companions escorting the rightful king of Gettland to his stolen chair! A last stand amid the elf-ruins of yore! You cannot expect all the heroes to survive a good song, you know.”

“He’s a damn devil,” murmured Sumael, jaw muscles clenching and unclenching as she weighed her hatchet in her hand.

“When you’re in hell,” murmured Yarvi, “only a devil can point the way out.”

The Last Stand

Rulf’s voice split the quiet. “They’re coming!” And it felt as if Yarvi’s guts would drop out of his arse.

“How many?” called Nothing eagerly.

A pause. “Might be twenty!”

“Gods,” whispered Ankran, chewing at his lip.

Until that moment there had been the hope that some might have turned back or drowned in the river but, as with so many of Yarvi’s hopes, it had withered before bearing fruit.

“The greater their numbers, the greater our glory!” shouted Nothing. The blacker their plight the happier he grew. At that moment there seemed a lot to be said for inglorious survival, but the choice was made now, if there had ever been a choice.

No more running, no more tricks.

Yarvi might have mouthed a dozen prayers over the last few moments, to every god, tall or small, that might be the slightest help. But now he closed his eyes and sent up one more. Perhaps he had been touched by Father Peace, but this one he sent to Mother War alone. To guard his friends, his oarmates, his family. For each in their own way had proved themselves worth saving.

That, and to bring his enemies a red day. For Mother War likes a prayer with blood in it, that’s no secret.

“Fight or die,” murmured Ankran, and he offered out his hand and Yarvi gave his own, useless though it was. They looked into each other’s faces, he and this man that he had hated, plotted against, seen beaten, then struggled through the wastes beside and come to understand.

“If I don’t get glory but … the other thing,” said Ankran, “would you find a way to help my family?”

Yarvi nodded. “I swear it.” What difference if he failed to keep a second oath, after all? He could only be damned once. “If I get the other thing …” Asking Ankran to kill his uncle seemed too high an expectation. He shrugged. “Weep me a river?”

Ankran grinned. A shaky grin with the front teeth missing, but he managed it still, and it seemed at that moment high heroism to marvel at. “Mother Sea will rise with my tears.”

The long silence stretched out, split into aching moments by the pounding of Yarvi’s heart.

“What if we both die?” he whispered.

Nothing’s grating voice came before the answer. “Ebdel Aric Shadikshirram! Welcome to my parlor!”

“Like you, it’s a little past its best.” Her voice.

Yarvi pressed himself to a crack in the wall, eyes straining toward the archway.

“We all are less than we used to be,” called Nothing. “You were an admiral once. Then a captain. And now—”

“Now I am nothing, just like you.” Yarvi saw her, in the shadows of the archway, eyes gleaming as she peered in. Trying to make out what was inside, and who. “An empty jug. A broken vessel with all the hopes leaked out.” He knew she couldn’t see him, but even so he shrank away behind the crumbling elf-stone.

“I sympathize,” called Nothing. “It hurts to lose everything. Who knows better than I?”

“And what do you think the sympathy of nothing for nothing is worth?”

Nothing laughed. “Nothing.”

“Who’s with you in there? That lying little bitch who used to cap my mastheads? That sneaking maggot with the turnip for a hand?”

“I have a higher opinion of them than you, but no. They went on ahead. I am alone.”

Shadikshirram barked a laugh at that, and as she leaned forward into the archway Yarvi saw the glimmer of drawn steel. “No, you’re not. But you soon will be.” He peered up toward the tower, saw the curve of Rulf’s bow, the string full drawn. But Shadikshirram was too canny to offer him a shot. “I am too merciful! That has always been my fault. I should have killed you years ago.”

“You can try today. Twice we have met before in battle, but this time I—”

“Tell it to my dogs.” And Shadikshirram gave a shrill whistle.

Men spilled through the archway. Or things that looked like men. The Banyas. Wild and ragged shadows, glimpses of white faces gaping, studs of amber and bone and bared teeth shining, weapons of polished rock and walrus tooth and whale jaw. They screeched and gibbered, whooped and wailed, mad sounds, like beasts, like devils, as if that archway was a gate to hell and what lay beyond was vomiting into the world.

The foremost dropped gurgling with one of Rulf’s arrows in his chest but the others plunged into the ruin and Yarvi stumbled from the crack as though slapped. The urge to run was almost more than he could stand, but he felt Ankran’s hand on his shoulder then, and stood, shaking like a leaf, every breath a wheezing whimper.

But he stood.

The screaming started. Crashes, the sounds of steel, of rage, of pain, almost worse for not being able to see who made them, or why. He heard the shrieking of the Banyas, but more horrible still was Nothing’s voice. A bubbling moan, a whispering sigh, a jagged growl. The rattle of final breath.

Or could it be laughter?

“Do we help?” whispered Yarvi, though he doubted he could move his rooted feet.

“He said wait.” Ankran’s crooked face was chalk-white. “Should we wait?”

Yarvi turned to look at him, and over his shoulder saw a figure drop from the wall.

He was more boy than man, hardly older than Yarvi. One of the sailors from the South Wind. Yarvi had seen him laughing on the rigging, but had never known his name. It seemed a little late for introductions now.

“There,” he croaked, and Ankran turned just as another man dropped down. Another of the sailors, bigger, bearded, and he held a mace in his hand, its heavy head spiked with steel. Yarvi felt his eyes drawn to the awful weight of that weapon, wondering what it might do to his skull, swung in anger. The man smiled as though guessing his thoughts, then leaped at Ankran, the two of them going down and rolling in a snarling tangle.

Yarvi knew he had a debt to pay, knew he should plunge to help his friend, his shoulder-man, but instead he turned to face the lad, as if they were couples pairing off at a harvest dance, somehow sensing who was their proper partner.

Like dancers they circled, knives held out before them, prodding at the air as if testing for the right bit of it. They circled, circled, the snarling and snapping of Ankran and the bearded man ignored, their struggle for life and death dismissed in the pressing need to survive the next few moments. Beyond the dirt and the bared teeth, he looked scared, this lad. Almost as scared as Yarvi felt. They circled, circled, eyes flickering between the glinting knife and—

The lad darted forward, stabbing, and Yarvi stumbled back, caught his heel on a root and only just kept his balance. The boy came at him again but Yarvi slipped away, cut at nothing and made the lad totter against the wall.

Could it really be one of them had to kill the other? To end everything he was, everything he might ever be?

So it seemed. But it was hard to see the glory in it.

The boy lunged again and Yarvi saw the knife flash through a shaft of daylight. By some dim instinct of the training square he caught it on his own, gasping, blades scraping. The lad crashed into him with a shoulder and Yarvi fell against the wall.

They spat and snarled in each other’s faces, close enough that Yarvi could see the black pores on the lad’s nose, the red veins in the whites of his bulging eyes, close enough that Yarvi could have stuck his tongue out and licked him.

They strained, grunting, trembling, and Yarvi knew he was the weaker. He tried to push his finger into the lad’s face but his crooked wrist was caught, twisted away. The blades scraped again and Yarvi felt a burning cut on the back of his hand, felt the point of the knife brush his stomach, cold through his clothes.

“No,” he whispered. “Please.”

Then something scratched Yarvi’s cheek and the pressure was gone. The lad tottered back, lifting a trembling hand to his throat, and Yarvi saw an arrow there, its dripping head toward him, a line of blood running down the lad’s neck into his collar. His face was going pink, cheeks quivering as he dropped to his knees.

Through a notch in the crumbling elf-wall behind him Yarvi saw Rulf squatting on top of the tower, nocking another arrow to his bow. The lad’s face was turning purple and he gulped and clucked — cursing Yarvi, or begging him for help, or asking the gods for mercy, but all he could say was blood.

“I’m sorry,” whispered Yarvi.

“You will be.”

Shadikshirram stood a few strides away in a fallen archway.

“I thought you were a clever boy,” she said. “But you turn out something of a disappointment.”

Her finery was crusted with mud, and her hair fell across her face in a filthy tangle, the pins lost, one fever-bright eye showing in its sunken socket. But the long, curved blade of her sword was deadly clean.

“Only the latest in a lengthy string of them.” She kicked the dying lad onto his back and stepped over his jerking legs. Strutted, strolled, without fuss or hurry. Just as she had used to walk on the deck of the South Wind. “But I suppose I have brought it on myself.”

Yarvi edged back, crouching, breathing hard, eyes darting between the ruined walls for some way out, but there was none.

He would have to fight her.

“I have too soft a heart for this hard world of ours.” She glanced sideways, toward the notch Rulf’s arrow had come through, then ducked smoothly under it. “That has always been my one weakness.”

Yarvi scrambled back through the rubble, the grip of the knife sweaty in his palm. He could hear screams, the sounds of fighting. The others, more than busy with their own final bloody steps through the Last Door. He snatched a glance over his shoulder, saw the place where the broken elf-walls ended at the brink, sapling trees spreading their branches into empty air above the river.

“I cannot tell you how it pleases me to have the chance to say goodbye.” Shadikshirram smiled. “Goodbye.”

No doubt she was far better armed than him. And taller, stronger, more skillful, more experienced. Not to mention her considerable advantage in number of hands. And in spite of her protestations he did not think she would be too weighed down by softness of heart.

There is always a way, his mother used to say, but where would he find a way to beat Shadikshirram? He, who in a hundred shameful showings in the training square had never won a match?

She raised her brows, as though she had been working at the same sum and happened upon the same answer. “Perhaps you should just jump.”

She took another step, slowly herding him backward, the point of her sword glinting as it passed through a chink of sunlight. He was running out of ground, could sense the space opening behind him, could feel the high breeze on the back of his neck, could hear the angry river chewing at the rocks far below.

“Jump, cripple.”

He edged back again and heard stones clattering into the void, the verge dissolving at his heels.

“Jump!” screamed Shadikshirram, spit flecking from her teeth.

And Yarvi caught movement at the corner of his eye. Ankran’s pale face sliding around the crumbling wall, creeping up with his tongue pressed into the gap in his bared teeth and his club raised. Yarvi couldn’t stop his eyes flickering across.

Shadikshirram’s forehead creased.

She spun quick as a cat, twisted away from the moose-bone shovel so that it whistled past her shoulder and without much effort, without much sound, slid her sword straight through Ankran’s chest.

He gave a shuddering breath, eyes bulging.

Shadikshirram cursed, pulling back her sword arm.

Mercy is weakness, Yarvi’s father used to say. Mercy is failure.

In an instant he was on her. He drove his claw of a hand under her armpit, pinned her sword, his knobbly palm pushing up into her throat, and with his right fist he hit her, punched her, dug at her.

They drooled and spat and snorted, whimpering, squealing, lurching, her hair in his mouth. She twisted and growled and he clung to her, punching, punching. She tore free and her elbow caught him in the nose with a sick crunch, snapped his head up and the ground hit him in the back.

Calls far away. The echo of steel.

A distant battle. Something important.

Had to stand. Could not let his mother down.

Had to be a man. His uncle would be waiting.

He tried to shake the dizziness away, the sky flashed as he rolled over.

His arm flopped out into space, black river far below, white water on rocks.

Like the sea beneath the tower of Amwend. The sea he had plunged into.

Breath whooped in as he came back to himself. He scrabbled from the crumbling brink, head spinning, face throbbing, heels clumsy, mouth salty with blood.

He saw Ankran, twisted on his back, arms wide. Yarvi gave a whimper, scrambling toward him, reaching out. But his trembling fingertips stopped short of Ankran’s blood-soaked shirt. The Last Door had opened for him. He was past help.

Shadikshirram lay on the rubble beside his body, trying to sit up and looking greatly surprised that she could not. The fingers of her left hand were tangled with the grip of her sword. Her right was clasped against her side. She peeled it away and her palm was full of blood. Yarvi blinked down at his own right hand. The knife was still in it, the blade slick, his fingers, his wrist, his arm red to the elbow.

“No,” she snarled. She tried to lift the sword but the weight of it was too much.

“Not like this. Not here.” Her bloody lips twisted as she looked up at him. “Not you.”

“Here,” said Yarvi. “Me. What was it you said? You may need two hands to fight someone. But only one to stab them in the back.”

And he realized then that he had not lost all those times in the training square because he lacked the skill, or the strength, or even a hand. He had lacked the will. And somewhere on the South Wind, somewhere in the trackless ice, somewhere in this ancient ruin, he had found it.

“But I commanded the ships of the empress,” Shadikshirram croaked, her whole right side dark with blood. “I was a favored lover … of Duke Mikedas. The world was at my feet.”

“That was long ago.”

“You’re right. You’re a clever boy. I am too soft.” Her head dropped back and she stared at the sky. “That’s … my one …”

The hall of the elf-ruin was scattered with bodies.

The Banyas had been devils from a distance. Close up they were wretched. Small and scrawny as children, bundles of rags, decked with whalebone holy signs that had been no shield against Nothing’s pitiless steel.

One that still breathed reached toward Yarvi, his other hand clutching at an arrow lodged in his ribs. His eyes held no hate, only doubt, and fear, and pain. Just as Ankran’s had done when Shadikshirram killed him.

Only people, then, who Death ushered through the Last Door like any others.

He tried to make a word as Nothing walked up to him. The same word, over and over, shaking his head.

Nothing put a finger to his lips. “Shhhh.” And he stabbed the Banya through the heart.

“Victory!” roared Rulf as he leapt the last distance to the ground. “I never saw sword work like it!”

“Nor I such archery!” said Nothing, folding Rulf in a crushing embrace. The closest of friends now, united in slaughter.

Sumael stood in an archway, gripping one shoulder, blood streaking her arm to the fingertips. “Where’s Ankran?” she asked.

Yarvi shook his head. He didn’t dare speak in case he was sick. Or started crying. Or maybe both at once. With the pain and the fading fury. With relief that he was alive. With sorrow that his friend was not. Sorrow that weighed heavier with every moment.

Jaud sank down onto a fallen lump of elf-stone, and let the scarred shield drop from his arm, and Sumael put one bloody hand on his shaking shoulder.

“I freely acknowledge now that Gettlanders are the best!” frothed Rulf.

“Just as I begin to doubt it!” Nothing frowned. “I was expecting Shadikshirram.”

Yarvi looked down at her curved sword in his hand, as if for evidence. “I killed her.”

Perhaps he should have fallen to his knees and given thanks to the gods for their unlikely victory, but the red harvest sword-hacked and arrow-stuck about that ruin did not look like a thing to give thanks for.

So he sat down beside the others, and picked the crusted blood from under his broken nose.

He was the King of Gettland, after all, was he not?

He had knelt enough.

Burning the Dead

The dead burned.

The flames that wreathed them made strange shadows flow across the walls of the elf-ruin. They sent a roiling of smoke into the pinking sky, the proper thing to thank Mother War for their victory. So Nothing said, and few were on such friendly terms with her as he. If Yarvi squinted hard enough he fancied he could still see the bones in the fire, of the nine dead Banyas and the three dead sailors, of Ankran and Shadikshirram.

“I will miss him,” said Yarvi, struggling to hold back his tears.

“We all will,” said Jaud, wiping his on the heel of his hand.

Nothing let his spill freely down his scarred cheeks as he nodded at the flames. “I will miss her.”

Rulf snorted. “I bloody won’t.”

“Then you are more a fool than I first took you for. The gods give no finer gift than a good enemy. Like a good whetstone on the blade,” and Nothing frowned down at his sword, clean of blood though his fingernails were still crusted with it, and gave the steel another shrieking lick with his stone. “A good enemy keeps you ever sharp.”

“I’m happier blunt,” grunted Jaud.

“Pick your enemies more carefully than your friends,” Nothing was muttering at the flames. “They will be with you longer.”

“Don’t worry.” Rulf clapped Nothing on the shoulder. “If life has taught me one thing it’s that your next enemy is never far away.”

“You can always make enemies of your friends,” said Sumael, pulling Shadikshirram’s coat tight about her shoulders. “Making friends of your enemies is harder labor.”

Yarvi knew that to be true enough. “Do you think this is what Ankran would have wanted?” he muttered.

“To be dead?” said Jaud. “I doubt it.”

“To be burned,” said Yarvi.

Jaud glanced over at Nothing, and shrugged. “Once the men of violence get a notion it is hard to put them off. Especially when they still have the smell of blood in their noses.”

“And why make the attempt?” Sumael scratched again at the dirty bandages Yarvi had bound around her cut arm. “These are the dead. Their complaints are easily brushed aside.”

“You fought well, Yarvi,” called Nothing. “Like a king indeed.”

“Does a king let his friends die for him?” Yarvi glanced guiltily across at Shadikshirram’s sword, and remembered the feeling, punching, punching, the red knife in his red hand, and shivered under his stolen cloak. “Does a king stab women in the back?”

The tears were still wet on Nothing’s wasted face. “A good one sacrifices everything to win, and stabs whom he must however he can. The great warrior is the one who still breathes when the crows feast. The great king is the one who watches the carcasses of his enemies burn. Let Father Peace spill tears over the methods. Mother War smiles upon results.”

“That’s what my uncle would have said.”

“A wise man, then, and a worthy enemy. Perhaps you will stab him in the back and we can watch him burn together.”

Yarvi rubbed gently at the swollen bridge of his nose. The thought of more corpses on fire gave him scant comfort, no matter who they belonged to. Over and over the moment went through his mind, his eyes flicking to Ankran, giving him away, Shadikshirram spinning, the blade darting out. Over and over he sorted through the things he might have done differently, the things that might have left his friend alive, but he knew it was all wasted effort.

There was no going back.

Sumael turned, frowning into the night. “Did anyone hear—”

“Hold!” echoed a voice from the darkness, harsh as a whip crack. Yarvi twisted about, heart leaping, and saw a tall warrior step through the archway. Huge, he seemed, in the light of the corpse-fire, bright helm and mail, strong sword and shield all gleaming.

“Give up your weapons!” came another call and a second man slipped from the shadows, a drawn bow leveled, long braids hanging about his face. A Vansterman, then. Others came after, and more, and within a breath or two a dozen warriors had formed a crescent about them.

Yarvi had not thought his spirits could drop further. Now he discovered the scale of his error.

Rulf’s eyes drifted to his bow, well out of reach, and he slumped back on one elbow. “Where do Vanstermen come on your list of the most worthy?”

Nothing nodded at them appraisingly. “In these numbers, high enough.”

What strength the gods had given Yarvi he had more than used up that day. He poked Shadikshirram’s sword away with his toe. Jaud raised his empty hands. Sumael held up her hatchet between finger and thumb and tossed it into the shadows.

“What about you, old man?” asked the first of the Vanstermen.

“I am considering my position.” Nothing gave his sword another grating stroke with the stone. It might as well have been applied directly to Yarvi’s nerves.

“If steel is the answer they have a great deal of it,” he muttered.

“Put it down.” The second Vansterman full drew his bow. “Or we’ll burn your corpse with the rest.”

Nothing stabbed his sword point down into the earth, and sighed. “He makes a persuasive case.”

Three of the Vanstermen started forward to gather the weapons and search them for more while their captain watched. “What brings you five to Vansterland?”

“We are travelers …” said Yarvi, as he watched one of the warriors shake out the sorry contents of his pack. “On our way to Vulsgard.”

The archer raised his brows at the pyre. “Travelers burning corpses?”

“What is the world coming to when an honest man cannot burn corpses without suspicion?” asked Nothing.

“We were waylaid by bandits,” ventured Yarvi, thinking as fast as he was able.

“You should keep your country safe to travel,” said Rulf.

“Oh, we thank you for making us safer.” The captain peered at Yarvi’s neck, then twitched Jaud’s collar back to show the scars. “Slaves.”

“Freed men,” said Sumael. “I was their mistress. I am a merchant.” And she reached into her coat to carefully produce a crumpled piece of parchment. “My name is Ebdel Aric Shadikshirram.”

The man frowned at the High King’s license, but recently removed from its rightful owner’s corpse. “You are ragged for a merchant.”

“I didn’t say I was a good one.”

“And young,” said the captain.

“I didn’t say I was an old one.”

“Where is your ship?”

“At sea.”

“Why are you not aboard?”

“I thought it wise to leave before it touched the bottom.”

“A poor merchant indeed,” muttered one of the men.

“With a cargo of lies,” said another.

The captain shrugged. “The king can decide what to believe. Bind them.”

“King?” asked Yarvi, as he offered his wrists.

The man gave the thinnest of smiles. “Grom-gil-Gorm has come north to hunt.”

So it seemed that Rulf was right. The next enemy was closer than any of them had thought.

Floating Twigs

Yarvi was no stranger to hard men. His father had been one. His brother another. Dozens more had taken their turn in the training square each day in Thorlby. There had been hundreds gathered on the sand to see King Uthrik howed. To sail with young King Yarvi on his ill-fated raid to Amwend. Faces that smiled only in battle and hands worn to the shape of their weapons.

But he had never seen such a gathering as Grom-gil-Gorm had brought with him to hunt.

“I never saw so many Vanstermen in one place,” muttered Rulf. “And I spent a year in Vulsgard.”

“An army,” grunted Nothing.

“And an ugly one,” said Jaud.

They bristled with weapons and puffed with menace, glared daggers and spoke swords. They wore their scars as proudly as a princess might her jewels while, by way of music, a woman’s voice shrill as a whetstone keened out a love song to Mother War, of spilled blood and notched steel and lives lost too soon.

Into the midst of this bear pit, roped and hobbled helpless, between fires over which fresh carcasses dripped red gravy, Yarvi and his friends were herded stumbling at spearpoint.

“If you have a plan,” hissed Sumael from the corner of her mouth, “now would be the time.”

“I have a plan,” said Nothing.

“Does it involve a sword?” asked Jaud.

A pause. “All my plans do.”

“Do you have a sword?”

Another. “No.”

“How will your plan work without one?” muttered Sumael.

A third. “Death waits for us all.”

Where this company of killers was tightest knotted Yarvi saw the outline of a great chair, and upon it a great figure with a great cup in his great fist, but instead of the fear that might once have gripped him Yarvi felt the ticklings of opportunity. Not a plan, scarcely even an idea but, as Mother Gundring used to tell him, Drowning men must clutch at whatever twigs they find floating.

“There are better things one can do with enemies than kill them,” he whispered.

Nothing snorted. “And what would that be?”

“Make allies of them.” And Yarvi took a deep breath and roared out, “Grom-gil-Gorm!” His voice smoked shrill and cracked and as far from kingly as could be imagined, but loud enough to be heard all about the camp, and that was what mattered. A hundred firelit faces turned toward him. “King of Vansterland! Bloodiest son of Mother War! Breaker of Swords and Maker of Orphans, we meet again! I—”

A well-judged blow in the stomach drove his breath out in a mournful sigh. “Stop your tongue before I rip it out, boy!” snarled the captain, shoving Yarvi coughing onto his knees.

But his words had their effect.

First a heavy silence settled, then an even heavier tread approached, and finally the singsong voice of Grom-gil-Gorm himself. “You bring guests!”

“Though they look like beggars.” And though he had not heard it since they put the collar on him, Yarvi knew the icy tone of Mother Scaer from his dreams.

“We found them in the elf-ruin above the river, my king,” said the captain.

“They do not have the look of elves,” said Gorm’s minister.

“They were burning corpses.”

“A noble enterprise if they are the right ones,” said Gorm. “You speak as though I know you, boy. Would you have me play a guessing game?”

Struggling for breath to speak, Yarvi raised his head, once again taking in the boots, the belt, the thrice-looped chain, and finally, far above, the craggy head of the King of Vansterland, most bitter enemy to his father, his country, his people.

“Last time we met … you offered me your knife.” And Yarvi fixed Gorm with his eye. On his knees, ragged and bloodied, beaten and bound, but fixed him still. “You told me to seek you out if I changed my mind. Would you give it to me now?”

The King of Vansterland frowned, fingering that chain of dead men’s pommels about his trunk of a neck, and with the other hand pushed his many blades carefully into his belt. “That might not be prudent.”

“I thought Mother War breathed on you in your crib, and it had been foreseen no man could kill you?”

“The gods help those who help themselves.” Mother Scaer grabbed Yarvi’s jaw with bruising fingers and twisted his face into the light. “It is the cook’s boy caught at Amwend.”

“That it is,” murmured Gorm. “But he is changed. He has a stern eye upon him now.”

Mother Scaer narrowed her own eyes. “And you have lost the collar I gave you.”

“It chafed. I wasn’t born to be a slave.”

“And yet you kneel again before me,” said Gorm. “What were you born to be?”

His men spilled lickspittle laughs, but Yarvi had been laughed at all his life and it had lost its sting.

“The King of Gettland,” he said, and this time his voice was cold and hard as the Black Chair itself.

“Oh, gods,” he heard Sumael breathe. “We’re dead.”

Gorm gave a huge smile. “Odem! You are younger than I remember.”

“I am Odem’s nephew. Uthrik’s son.”

The captain cuffed Yarvi across the back of the head and knocked him on his broken nose. Which was particularly galling, since with hands bound he could do nothing to break his fall. “Uthrik’s son died with him!”

“He had another son, fool!” Yarvi wriggled back onto his knees, mouth salty with blood. A taste he was tiring of.

Fingers were twisted in Yarvi’s hair and he was dragged up. “Shall I hire him for a jester or hang him for a spy?”

“That is not your place to decide.” Mother Scaer merely raised one finger, elf-bangles on her long arm rattling, but the captain let go as if he had been slapped. “Uthrik did have a second son. Prince Yarvi. He was training for the Ministry.”

“But never took the test,” said Yarvi. “I took the Black Chair instead.”

“So that the Golden Queen might keep her grip on power.”

“Laithlin. My mother.”

Mother Scaer considered him for a long moment, and Yarvi raised his chin and stared back in as close to a kingly manner as his bleeding nose, bound hands and stinking rags would allow. Perhaps it was enough, at least to plant the seed of doubt.

“Free his hands.”

Yarvi felt his ropes cut and, with a suitable sense of theater, slowly held his left hand to the light. The muttering about the campfires at the sight of the twisted thing seemed for once most gratifying.

“Was this what you were looking for?” he asked.

Mother Scaer took it in hers, and turned it over, and kneaded at it with strong fingers. “If you were student to Mother Gundring, whose student was she?”

Yarvi did not hesitate. “She was taught by Mother Wexen, then minister to King Fynn of Throvenland, now Grandmother of the Ministry and first servant of the High King himself.”

“How many doves does she keep?”

“Three dozen, and one more with a black patch upon its brow that will carry news to Skekenhouse when Death opens the Last Door for her.”

“Of what wood is the door to the King of Gettland’s bedchamber?”

Yarvi smiled. “There is no door, for the king is one with the land and its people, and can have no secrets from them.”

The look of disbelief on Mother Scaer’s gaunt face was the source of much rare satisfaction for Yarvi.

Grom-gil-Gorm raised one crag of brow. “He spoke pure answers?”

“He did,” murmured his minister.

“Then … this crippled pup is truly Yarvi, son of Uthrik and Laithlin, the rightful king of Gettland?”

“So it would appear.”

“It’s true?” croaked Rulf.

“It’s true,” breathed Sumael.

Gorm was busy laughing. “Then this has been my best hunting trip in many long years! Send a bird, Mother Scaer, and find out what King Odem will pay us for the return of his wayward nephew.” The King of Vansterland began to turn away.

Yarvi stopped him with a snort. “The great and terrible Grom-gil-Gorm! In Gettland they call you a madman, drunk on blood. In Throvenland they call you a savage king of a savage land. In Skekenhouse, in the elf-built halls of the High King … why, there you hardly warrant mention.”

Yarvi heard Rulf give a worried grunt, the captain growling with suppressed fury, but Gorm only stroked thoughtfully at his beard. “If you aim to flatter me you miss the mark. Your point?”

“Would you prove them right, and make so small a profit from the golden chance the gods have sent you?”

The King of Vansterland raised a brow at his minister. “My ears are open to greater gains.”

Sell them what they want, Yarvi’s mother always said, not what you have. “Every spring you gather your warriors and raid across the border into Gettland.”

“It has been known.”

“And this spring?”

Gorm pursed his lips. “A small jaunt perhaps. Mother War demands vengeance for your uncle’s outrages at Amwend.”

Yarvi thought it best not to point out that he had been king at the start of those outrages if not their end. “All I ask is that you push a little farther this year. All the way to the walls of Thorlby itself.”

Mother Scaer hissed her disgust. “Only that?”

But Gorm’s curiosity was tickled. “What would I gain for granting such a favor?”

Proud men like Yarvi’s dead father, and his murdered brother, and his drowned uncle Uthil, would no doubt have spat their last breath in Grom-gil-Gorm’s face rather than sought his help. But Yarvi had no pride. It had been shamed out of him by his father. Tricked out of him by Odem. Beaten out of him on the South Wind. Frozen out of him in the wasteland.

He had been kneeling all his life, to kneel a little longer was no hardship.

“Help me take back my throne, Grom-gil-Gorm, and I shall kneel in Odem’s blood before you as King of Gettland, your vassal and subject.”

Nothing leaned close, hissing angrily through clenched teeth, “Too high a price!”

Yarvi ignored him. “Uthil, Uthrik, and Odem. The brothers that have been your great enemies shall all three be gone through the Last Door and around the Shattered Sea you shall stand second in power only to the High King himself. Perhaps … in time … higher yet.”

The more powerful a man is, Mother Gundring always used to say, the more he craves power.

Gorm’s voice was slightly hoarse. “That would be a fine thing.”

“A fine thing indeed,” agreed Mother Scaer, her eyes narrower than ever as she glared at Yarvi. “If it could be managed.”

“Only give me and my companions passage to Thorlby and I will make the attempt.”

“They are strange retainers you have gathered,” said Mother Scaer, eyeing them without enthusiasm.

“Strange circumstances demand them.”

“Who is this crooked creature?” asked Gorm. The others were wisely looking to the ground, but Nothing stared back unbowed, bright eyes burning.

“I am a proud Gettlander.”

“Ah, one of those.” Gorm smiled. “Up here we prefer our Gettlanders shamed and bloody.”

“Pay him no mind, my king. He is Nothing.” And Yarvi brought Gorm’s eyes back to his with the honeyed tone his mother used to use, for men of violence thrive on rage but know not what to do with reason and good sense. “If I fail, you’ll still have the plunder taken on your march south.”

Nothing growled his disgust, and small wonder. The towns of Gettland burning, the land ravaged, the people driven off or made slaves. Yarvi’s land and Yarvi’s people, but he was too deep in the mire now to return. The only way out was through, and to drown in the attempt or rise filthy but breathing on the other side. To take back the Black Chair he needed an army, and Mother War now placed their swords in his withered hand. Or their boots on his scarred neck, at least.

“You have all to gain,” he coaxed, softly, softly, “nothing to lose.”

“There is the High King’s favor,” said Mother Scaer. “He has commanded that there be no war until his temple is finished—”

“There was a time Grandmother Wexen’s eagles brought requests.” Gorm’s singsong voice held a note of anger now. “Then they brought demands. Now she sends commands. Where does it end, Mother Scaer?”

His minister spoke softly. “The High King has the Lowlanders and most of the Inglings praying to his One God now, ready to fight and die at his order—”

“And does the High King rule Vansterland too?” scoffed Yarvi. “Or does Grom-gil-Gorm?”

Mother Scaer’s lip wrinkled. “Don’t play too close to the fire, boy. We all answer to someone.”

But Gorm was far away, already spreading flame and murder across the steadings of Gettland, no doubt. “Thorlby has strong walls,” he murmured, “and many strong warriors to man them. Too many. If I could take that city my skalds would already be singing of my victory.”

“Never,” whispered Nothing, but no one listened. The deal was done.

“That is the best thing of all,” crooned Yarvi. “You need only wait outside. I will give you Thorlby.”