‘I don’t feel like a queen,’ muttered Skara. She took a sip and winced as she felt the spirits burn all the way down her sore throat. ‘I feel like a coward.’
‘Then act as if you’re brave. No one ever feels ready. No one ever feels grown up. Do the things a great queen would do. Then you are one, however you feel.’
Skara stood tall, and pushed her shoulders back. ‘You are a wise woman and a great minister, Mother Owd.’
‘I am neither one.’ The minister leaned close, rolling her sleeves up a little further. ‘But I have become quite good at pretending to be both. Do you need to be sick again?’
Skara shook her head, took another burning sip from the flask and handed it back, watched Owd take a lengthy swig of her own. ‘I hear I have the blood of Bail in my veins—’
‘Forget the blood of Bail.’ Owd gripped Skara’s arm. ‘Your own is good enough for anyone.’
Skara took a shuddering breath. Then she followed her minister back into the darkness.
Sprouted a Conscience
Raith stood on the man-built stretch of wall near Gudrun’s Tower, staring across the scarred, trampled, arrow-prickled turf towards the stakes that marked the High King’s lines.
He’d hardly slept. Dozed outside Skara’s door. Dreamed again of that woman and her children, and started up in a chill sweat with his hand on his dagger. Nothing but silence.
Five days since the siege began and every day they’d come at the walls. Come with ladders, and wicker screens to guard them from the shower of arrows, the hail of stones. Come bravely, with their fiercest faces and their fiercest prayers, and bravely been beaten back. They hadn’t killed many of the thousand defenders but they’d made their mark even so. Every warrior in Bail’s Point was pink-eyed from sleeplessness, grey-faced from fear. Facing Death for a wild moment is one thing. Her cold breath on your neck day in and day out is more than men were made to bear.
Great humps of fresh-turned earth had been thrown up just out of bowshot. Barrows for the High King’s dead. They were still digging now. Raith could hear the scraping of distant shovels, some priest’s song warbled in the southerner’s tongue to the southerner’s One God. He lifted his chin, winced as he scratched at his neck with the backs of his fingernails. A warrior should rejoice in the corpses of his enemies, but Raith had no rejoicing left in him.
‘Beard bothering you?’ Blue Jenner strolled up yawning, smoothing down his few wild strands of hair and leaving them wilder than before.
‘Itchy. Strange, how little things still find a way to niggle at you, even in the midst of all this.’
‘Life’s a queue of small irritations with the Last Door at the end. You could just shave.’
Raith kept scratching. ‘Always pictured myself dying with a beard. Like most things long anticipated, turns out rather a disappointment.’
‘A beard’s just a beard,’ said Jenner, scratching at his own. ‘Keeps your face warm in a snowstorm and catches food from time to time, but I knew a man grew his long and got it caught in his horse’s bridle. Dragged through a hedge and broke his neck.’
‘Killed by his own beard? That’s embarrassing.’
‘The dead feel no shame.’
‘The dead feel no anything,’ said Raith. ‘No coming back through the Last Door, is there?’
‘Maybe not. But we always leave a bit of ourselves on this side.’
‘Eh?’ muttered Raith, not caring much for that notion.
‘Our ghosts stick in the memories of those that knew us. Those that loved us, hated us.’
Raith thought of that woman’s face, lit by flames, tears glistening, still so clear after all this time, and he worked his fingers and felt the old ache there. ‘Those that killed us.’
‘Aye.’ Blue Jenner’s eyes were fixed far off. On his own tally of dead folk, maybe. ‘Them most of all. You all right?’
‘Broke my hand once. Never quite healed.’
‘Nothing ever quite heals.’ Blue Jenner sniffed, hawked noisily, worked his mouth, and sent spittle spinning over the walls. ‘Seems Thorn Bathu introduced herself in the night.’
‘Aye,’ said Raith. There was a charred scar through one side of Bright Yilling’s camp, and by the faint smell of burning straw it seemed she’d done for a good deal of his fodder. ‘Reckon it was an even more painful experience than my first meeting with her.’
‘A good friend to have, that girl, and a bad, bad enemy.’ Jenner chuckled. ‘Liked her since I first ran into her out on the Denied.’
‘You’ve been down the Denied?’ asked Raith.
‘Three times.’
‘What’s it like?’
‘It’s very much like a big river.’
Raith was looking past Blue Jenner towards the crumbling doorway in the side of Gudrun’s Tower. Rakki had just stepped out of it, his white hair ruffled by the breeze as he frowned towards Yilling’s great gravedigging.
Jenner raised one grey brow. ‘Anything I can do?’
‘Some things you have to do alone.’ And Raith patted the old raider on the shoulder as he walked past.
‘Brother.’
Rakki didn’t look at him, but a muscle at his temple twitched. ‘Am I?’
‘If you’re not you look surprisingly like me.’
Rakki didn’t smile. ‘You should go.’
‘Why?’ But even as he said it Raith felt the great presence, and turned reluctantly to find the Breaker of Swords stooping through the doorway and into the dawn, Soryorn at his shoulder.
‘Look who comes strolling,’ sang Gorm.
Soryorn carefully adjusted his garnet-studded thrall-collar. ‘It is Raith.’ He’d always been a man of few words and those the obvious.
Gorm stood with eyes closed, listening to the distant songs of the One God priests. ‘Can there be more soothing music of a morning than an enemy’s prayers for his dead?’
‘A harp?’ said Raith. ‘I like a harp.’
Gorm opened his eyes. ‘Do you truly think jokes will mend what you have broken?’
‘Can’t hurt, my king. I wanted to congratulate you on your betrothal.’ Though few betrothals could’ve delighted him less. ‘Skara will be the envy of the world as a queen, and she brings all of Throvenland for a dowry—’
‘Great prizes indeed.’ Gorm raised an arm and swept it towards the warriors that encircled them on every side. ‘But there is the small matter of defeating the High King before I claim them. Your disloyalty has forced me to gamble everything on Father Yarvi’s cunning, rather than bartering a peace with Grandmother Wexen, as I and Mother Scaer had planned.’
Raith glanced at Rakki, but his eyes were on the ground. ‘I didn’t think—’
‘I do not keep dogs to think. I keep them to obey. I have no use for a cur who does not come when he is whistled for. Who does not bite who I tell him to bite. There is no place in my household for such a wretched thing as that. I warned you that I saw a grain of mercy in you. I warned you it might crush you. Now it has.’ Gorm shook his head as he turned away. ‘All those eager boys who would have killed a hundred times for your place, and I chose you.’
‘Disappointing,’ said Soryorn, then with a parting sneer he followed his master down the walkway.
Raith stood there in silence. There’d been a time he admired Grom-gil-Gorm beyond all other men. His strength. His ruthlessness. He used to dream of being like him. ‘Hard to believe I ever looked up to that bastard.’
‘There’s one difference between us,’ muttered Rakki. ‘I’ve always hated him. Here’s another, though. I know I still need him. What’s your plan now?’
‘Can’t say I’ve been working to a plan.’ Raith frowned at his brother. ‘Ain’t easy, killing someone who’s done you no harm.’
‘No one said it was easy.’
‘Well it’s easier if you’re not the one has to do it. Seems it’s always you that wants the hard thing done,’ snapped Raith, trying to keep his voice down, and his fists down too, ‘but it??
?s me has to do it!’
‘Well you can’t help me now, can you?’ Rakki stabbed towards Bail’s Hall with one finger. ‘Since you chose that little bitch over your own—’
‘Don’t talk about her that way!’ snarled Raith, bunching his fists. ‘All I chose was not to kill her!’
‘And now look where we are. Some time to sprout a conscience.’ Rakki looked back to the graves. ‘I’ll pray for you, brother.’
Raith snorted. ‘Those folk on the border, I reckon they prayed when we came in the night. I reckon they prayed hard as anyone can.’
‘So?’
‘Their prayers didn’t save them from me, did it? Why would yours save me from some other bastard?’ And Raith stalked off down the walls, back to Blue Jenner.
‘Problem?’ asked the old raider.
‘Hatful of ’em.’
‘Well, family’s family. Daresay your brother will come around.’
‘He might. I doubt the Breaker of Swords will be so giving.’
‘He doesn’t strike me as a giver.’
‘I’m done with him.’ Raith spat over the walls. ‘I’m done with me too, the way I was.’
‘Did you like what you were?’
‘Plenty at the time. Now it seems I was more than a bit of a bastard.’ That woman’s face wouldn’t leave him alone, and he swallowed and looked down at the old stones under his feet. ‘How does a man know what’s right to do?’
Jenner puffed out his cheeks. ‘I’ve spent half my life doing the wrong thing. Most of the rest trying to work out the least wrong thing. The few times I’ve done the right thing it’s mostly been by accident.’
‘And you’re about the best man I know.’
Blue Jenner’s eyebrows shot up. ‘I thank you for the compliment. And I pity you.’
‘So do I, old man. So do I.’ Raith watched the little figures moving in Bright Yilling’s camp. Men crawling from their beds, gathered about their fires, picking at their breakfasts, maybe somewhere an old man and a young, looking up to where they stood on the walls and talking about nothing. ‘Reckon they’ll come again today?’
‘Aye, and that concerns me somewhat.’
‘They’ll never get over these walls with ladders. Not ever.’
‘No, and Yilling must know it. So why waste his strength trying?’
‘Keep us nervous. Keep us worried. It’s a siege, isn’t it? He wants to get in somehow.’
‘And in such a way as will burnish his fame.’ Jenner nodded out towards the graves. ‘After a battle, do you dig big howes for every man?’
‘Most of ’em we’d burn in a heap, but these One God-worshippers got odd ways with their dead.’
‘Why so close to our walls, though? You hide your hurts from an enemy. You don’t shove your losses under his nose, even if you can afford them.’
Raith reached up and rubbed at that old notch out of his ear. ‘I’m taking it you’ve got some clever explanation?’
‘You’re getting to know and admire me, I see.’ Jenner pushed his chin forward to scratch at his neck. ‘It had occurred to me Yilling might be ordering these mad attacks just so he’s got bodies to bury.’
‘He’s what?’
‘Worships Death, don’t he? And he’s got men to spare.’
‘Why kill men just to bury them?’
‘So we’d think that’s all he’s doing. But I don’t reckon Bright Yilling’s digging graves all night, just out of bowshot from where we’re weakest.’
Raith stared at him a moment, and then out towards those brown humps, and felt a cold shiver up his back. ‘They’re digging under the walls.’
Dust
For a boy who was reluctantly starting to consider himself a man, Koll had seen a few cities. Stern Vulsgard in spring and sprawling Kalyiv in summer, majestic Skekenhouse in its elf-walls and beautiful Yaletoft before they burned it. He’d made the long journey down the winding Divine, over the tall hauls and across the open steppe, finally to gape in wonder at the First of Cities, greatest settlement of men.
Beside the elf-ruins of Strokom they were all pinpricks.
He followed Skifr and the two ministers down black roads as wide as the market square in Thorlby, bored into the ground in echoing tunnels or stacked one upon the other on mighty pillars of stone, tangled up into giant madman’s knots while broken eyes of glass peered sadly down on the ruin. In silence they walked, each of them alone with their own worries. For the world, for those they knew, for themselves. Nothing lived. No plant, no bird, no crawling insect. There was only silence and slow decay. All around them, for mile upon mile, the impossible achievements of the past crumbled into dust.
‘What was this place like when the elves lived?’ whispered Koll.
‘Unimaginable in its scale and its light and its noise,’ said Skifr, leading the way with her head high, ‘in its planned confusion and its frenzied competition. All thousands of years silent.’
She let her fingertips trail along a crooked rail then lifted them, peered at the grey dust that coated them, tasted it, rubbed it against her thumb, frowned off down the cracked and buckled roadway.
‘What do you see?’ asked Koll.
Skifr raised one burned brow at him. ‘Only dust. There are no other omens here, for there is no future to look into but dust.’
From a high perch between two buildings a great snake of metal had fallen to lie twisted across the road.
‘The elves thought themselves all-powerful,’ said Skifr, as they picked their way over it. ‘They thought themselves greater than God. They thought they could remake all things according to a grand design. Look now upon their folly! No matter how great and glorious the making, time will unmake it. No matter how strong the word, strong the thought, strong the law, all must return to chaos.’
Skifr jerked her head back and sent spit spinning high into the air, arcing neatly down and spattering on rusted metal. ‘King Uthil says steel is the answer. I say his sight is short. Dust is the last answer to every question, now and always.’
Koll gave a sigh. ‘You’re a tower of laughs, aren’t you?’
Skifr’s jagged laughter split the silence, bouncing back from the dead faces of the buildings and making Koll jump. A strange sound here. It made him absurdly worried she’d somehow cause offence, though there’d been no one to offend for a hundred hundred years.
The old woman clapped him on the shoulder as she walked after Father Yarvi and Mother Scaer. ‘That all depends on what you find funny, boy.’
As the light faded they crept between buildings so high the street was made a shaded canyon between them. Spires that pierced the heavens even in their ruin, endless planes of elf-glass still winking pink and orange and purple with the darkly reflected sunset, twisted beams of metal sprouting from their shattered tops like thorns from a thistle.
That brought Thorn to Koll’s thoughts and he muttered a prayer for her, even if the gods weren’t here to listen. When Brand died, it seemed as if something had died in her. Maybe no one comes through a war quite as alive as they were.
The road was gouged and slumping, choked with things of crumpled metal, their blistered paint flaking. There were masts as tall as ten men, festooned with skeins of wires that hung between the buildings like the cobwebs of colossal spiders. There were elf-letters everywhere, signs daubed on the roads, twisted about poles, banners proudly unfurled over every broken window and doorway.
Koll stared up at one set blazoned wide across a building, the last man-high letter fallen down to swing sadly from its corner.
‘All this writing,’ he murmured, neck stiff from staring up at it.
‘The elves did not limit the word to the few,’ said Skifr. ‘They let knowledge spread to all, like fire. Eagerly they fanned the flames.’
‘And were all burned by them,’ murmured Mother Scaer. ‘Burned to ashes.’
Koll blinked up at the great sign. ‘Do you understand it?’
‘I might know the characters,’ said Skifr.
‘I might even know the words. But the world they spoke of is utterly gone. Who could plumb their meaning now?’
They passed by a shattered window, shards of glass still clinging to its edge, and Koll saw a woman grinning at him from inside.
He was so shocked he couldn’t even scream, just stumbled back into Skifr’s arms, pointing wildly at that ghostly figure. But the old woman only chuckled.
‘She cannot hurt you now, boy.’
And Koll saw it was a painting of amazing detail, stained and faded. A woman, holding up her wrist to show a golden elf-bangle, smiling wildly as though it gave her impossible joy to wear such a thing. A woman, long and thin and strangely dressed, but a woman still.
‘The elves,’ he muttered. ‘Were they … like us?’
‘Terribly like and terribly unlike,’ said Skifr, Yarvi and Scaer coming to stand beside her, all gazing at that faded face from beyond the long fog of the past. ‘They were far wiser, more numerous, more powerful than us. But, just like us, the more powerful they became, the more powerful they wished to become. Like men, the elves had holes in them that could never be filled. All of this …’ And Skifr spread her arms wide to the mighty ruins, her cloak of rags billowing in the restless breeze. ‘All of this could not satisfy them. They were just as envious, ruthless and ambitious as us. Just as greedy.’ She raised one long arm, one long hand, one long finger to point at the woman’s radiant smile. ‘It is their greed that destroyed them. Do you hear me, Father Yarvi?’
‘I do,’ he said, shouldering his pack and, as always, pressing onwards, ‘and could live with fewer elf-lessons and more elf-weapons.’
Mother Scaer frowned after him, fingering her own collection of ancient bangles. ‘I say he could use the opposite.’
‘What happens after?’ called Koll.
There was a pause before Father Yarvi looked back. ‘We use the elf-weapons against Bright Yilling. We carry them across the straits to Skekenhouse. We find Grandmother Wexen and the High King.’ His voice took on a deadly edge. ‘And I keep my sun-oath and my moon-oath to be revenged upon the killers of my father.’