Koll swallowed. ‘I meant after that.’
Master frowned at apprentice. ‘We can ford that river when we reach it.’ And he turned and carried on.
Quite as if he hadn’t spared it a thought until now. But Koll knew Father Yarvi was not a man to leave the field of the future unsown with plans.
Gods, was Skifr right? Were they the same as the elves? Their little feet in mighty footprints, but on the same path? He thought of Thorlby made an empty ruin, a giant tomb, the people of Gettland burned away to leave only silence and dust, perhaps some fragment of his carved mast left, a ghostly echo for those who came long after to puzzle over.
Koll took one last glance back at that gloriously happy face thousands of years dead, and saw something glint among the shattered glass. A golden bangle, just like the one in the painting, and Koll darted out a hand and slipped it into his pocket.
He doubted the elf-woman would miss it.
Father Earth’s Guts
‘It will be dangerous,’ said Skara, grimly.
An apt moment for Raith to puff himself up with some hero’s bluster. There’d been a time he was an ever-gushing fountain of it, after all. That’s what I’m counting on, or danger’s my breakfast, or for our enemies, maybe! But all he could manage was a strangled, ‘Aye. But we have to stop that mine before it gets under the walls …’
No need to say more. They all knew what was at stake.
Everything.
Raith glanced about at the volunteers, their faces, their shield-rims, their weapons all smeared with ashes to keep them hidden in the night. Two dozen of the fastest Gettlanders, two dozen of the fiercest Vanstermen, and him.
The Breaker of Swords had drawn lots with King Uthil for the honour of leading them, and won. Now he stood smiling as they waited for their moment, savouring each breath as if the night smelled of flowers. The man showed no fear, not ever, Raith had to give him that. But where it used to feel like bravery, now it looked like madness.
‘No one will think less of you if you stay,’ said Skara.
‘I’ll think less of me.’ If that was even possible. Raith met his brother’s eye for an instant before Rakki looked away, ash-dark face fixed hard. Desperate to prove he could be the tough one, even if they both knew he couldn’t. ‘Got to watch my brother’s back.’
‘Even if he doesn’t want your help?’
‘Specially then.’
Rakki had one of the big clay jars over his shoulder that held Father Yarvi’s southern fire, Soryorn another. Raith thought of how that stuff had burst blazing over the High King’s ships, burning men toppling into the sea, then he thought of smearing it on timbers deep under the ground and setting a torch to it, and his courage took another hard knock. He wondered how many more it’d stand. Time was nothing scared him. Or had he always been pretending?
Gods, he wished they could go. ‘It’s the waiting hurts worst,’ he muttered.
‘Worse than being stabbed, or burned, or buried in that mine?’
Raith swallowed. ‘No. Not worse than those.’
‘You need not fear for me, my queen.’ Gorm had strode over with his thumbs wedged into his great belt, keen to make it all about him. There’s kings for you. Their towering opinions of themselves are generally both their making and their downfall. ‘Mother War breathed on me in my crib,’ he said, a tiresome refrain if ever there was one. ‘It has been foreseen no man can kill me.’
Skara raised a brow. ‘What about a vasty weight of dirt falling on your head?’
‘Oh, Father Earth fashioned me too large to squeeze into Yilling’s mine. Others will go delving while I guard the entrance. But you must learn to rejoice at the risks.’
Skara looked more likely to be sick at them. ‘Why?’
‘Without Death, war would be a dull business.’ Gorm slipped his great chain over his head and offered it to her. ‘Would you honour me by keeping this safe until the task is done? I would hate for its rattling to catch Death’s ear.’
As their owner swaggered away Skara blinked down at the pommels draped over her hands, silver and gold and precious stones shining with the torchlight.
‘Each of these is a dead man, then,’ she murmured, pale as if she stared into their faces. ‘Dozens of them.’
‘And that’s not counting all those he’s killed that didn’t have swords. Or all those that had no weapons at all.’
Time was Raith had looked at that chain and swelled with pride that he followed so great a warrior. Time was he’d dreamed of forging his own. Now he wondered how long a chain he might’ve forged already, and the thought made him feel almost as queasy as Skara seemed when she looked up.
‘I didn’t choose this.’
Gods, she was beautiful. It was like there was a light in her, and the darker things got the brighter she seemed to shine. He wondered, and not for the first time, what might’ve happened if they were different people, in a different place, at a different time. If she wasn’t a queen and he wasn’t a killer. But you can’t choose who you are.
‘Who’d choose this?’ he croaked out.
‘It’s time.’ Gorm took a prim little nibble from the last loaf, passed it on and stooped to fit his great frame into the narrow passageway.
Each man took his own bite as he followed, each no doubt wondering if it truly would be his last. Raith came at the back, took his mouthful and crumbled the rest in his fist, tossed it behind him as a gift for Mother War’s children, the crows. He might be no great believer in luck, but he knew they’d need every bit they could get.
Down the passage through the elf-walls, echoing with their quick breath. The same one Raith had come charging up a few weeks before with no doubts and no fears, burning with battle-joy. Blue Jenner stood beside the hand-thick door, ready to triple bolt it after them, slapping each man on the back as they slipped past.
‘Come back alive,’ hissed the old raider. ‘That’s all that matters.’ And he pushed Raith through the archway and out into the chill night.
A shroud of fog had drifted in from Mother Sea and Raith muttered his thanks to her. He reckoned it a gift that tripled his chances of living out the night. The fires of Bright Yilling’s men were gloomy smears in the murk on their left. The walls of Bail’s Point a black mass on their right.
They wore no mail so they’d run the swifter, all bent double and black as coal, ghosts in the darkness, quick and silent. Raith’s every sense was sharpened double-keen by the whetstone of danger, every grunt and footfall seeming loud as a drum-beat, his nose full of the damp night and the distant campfires.
One after another they slid into the ditch, picking their way along the boggy bottom. Raith’s boot hit something hard and he realized it was a corpse. They were everywhere, unclaimed, unburned, unburied, tangled with the shattered remains of ladders, rocks flung from above, dead men’s fallen shields.
He saw Gorm’s smiling teeth in the darkness, leaning towards Soryorn, heard him whisper, ‘Here was Mother War’s good work done.’
The last loaf had left Raith’s mouth sour and he spat as they struggled up from the ditch, men silently offering their hands to help each other climb, hissing curses as they slipped and slid, boots mashing the earth to sticky mud.
On they went, over ground prickled everywhere with arrows, the harvest of Bright Yilling’s failed attacks, dense as the wind-slanted sedge on the high moors of Vansterland. Raith heard shouting in the distance as they left the fortress behind, the clashing of steel. King Uthil was sallying from the main gate, hoping to draw Bright Yilling’s attention from his mine.
Shapes shifted in the mist, whipped into tricking shadows by the hurrying men. Snakes, twisting together and breaking apart. Wolf faces. Man faces. The faces of those he’d killed, shrieking silently for vengeance. Raith wafted them away with his shield but they formed anew. He tried to tell himself the dead are dead, but he knew Jenner had been right. Their ghosts stick in the minds of those that knew them, loved them, hated them. Those that kill
ed them most of all.
The sharpened stakes loomed from the murk and Raith slipped sideways between them and crouched in the darkness beyond, straining into the night.
He saw the humps of the fresh barrows, or at any rate the spoil of Yilling’s mines, firelight at their edges. Gorm pointed with his sword and the men split, scuttling silently around the nearest hillock. Not a word spoken. Not a word needed to be spoken. They all knew their work.
Two men sat beside a campfire. The way Raith and Rakki used to sit. One working on a belt with a needle, the other with a blanket around his shoulders, frowning off towards the faint sounds of Uthil’s diversion. He turned as Raith rushed up.
‘What are—’
Soryorn’s arrow took him silently through the mouth. The other man started to scramble up, tangled with his belt. Gorm’s ash-black blade hissed and the warrior’s head spun away into the darkness.
Raith sprang over his body as it toppled, slithered down into a trench between heaps of spoil, squatting beside a dark entrance flanked by torches.
‘Go!’ whispered Gorm, as his warriors spread out to form a crescent. Rakki muttered a quick prayer to She Who Lights the Way, then he was down into Father Earth’s guts with the jar of southern fire over his shoulder, Soryorn and Raith just behind him.
Darkness, and the flickering shadows of the crooked logs that held up the earth above, roots brushing at Raith’s hair. He was no miner but he could tell it had been dug hastily, trickles of soil falling as they worked their way down the passage, his eyes fixed on Soryorn’s bent back.
‘Gods,’ he whispered, ‘this is apt to fall without our help.’
Hot, and growing hotter, sweat trickling from Raith’s brows, sticky under his clothes as he laboured on. He slid his axe through the loop at his belt and drew his dagger. If it came to a fight down here there was no room to swing. They’d settle it close enough to smell your enemy’s breath.
They scrambled into a chamber lit by one guttering lamp. The earthen floor was scattered with picks and shovels and barrows, roof held up with a clumsy tangle of timbers, others stacked in heaps. Two more shadowy tunnels went deeper, towards the roots of Gudrun’s Tower, no doubt, and Raith hurried over to one, peering into the darkness.
Could he hear scraping somewhere in there? Digging? Rakki was already fumbling the stopper from his jar, starting to slosh what was inside over anything made of wood.
‘Careful o’ that flame!’ snapped Raith at Soryorn, who’d brushed the flickering lamp and set it swinging on its hook. ‘One slip and we’re all buried.’
‘Fair point,’ croaked out the standard-bearer, tipping up his own deadly jar in the crook of one long arm, other hand across his face. Gods, the stuff stank in the stillness, a burning stink that set them all to coughing. Raith stumbled to the other tunnel, rubbing the tears from his stinging eyes on his forearm, looked up to see two men staring at him. One held a pick, the other a shovel, both stripped to the waist and smeared with grime.
‘Are you the new diggers?’ said one, frowning at Raith’s shield.
The best fighters don’t think too much. Not much before the fight, not much after, and not at all during. Tends to be the one strikes first that still stands in the end. So Raith knocked the man’s pick away with his shield and stabbed him in the neck, blood spraying across the passageway.
The other miner swung his shovel but Raith was carried forward, stumbling into him, shrugging the blow off his shield, shoving the man against the wall so they were left snarling in one another’s faces, so close Raith could have stuck his tongue out and licked him. He stabbed under the rim of his shield, wild, vicious, punches with steel on the end, and the digger gurgled and snorted with each one until Raith stepped back and let him drop, left him sitting with his hands clutched to his ripped-up belly and his blood black on Raith’s shield, on his fist, on his dagger.
Rakki was staring, mouth hanging open, the way he always did when Raith set to killing, but there’d be time to pile the regrets up later.
‘Finish it!’ Raith scuttled to the passage they came in by to snatch a breath of clean air. His head was spinning from the reek. He could hear the sounds of fighting coming faint from outside. ‘Now!’
Rakki tipped up the jar, coughing, soaking the props, the walls, the ground. Soryorn tossed his jar down, oil still gurgling from it across the floor, pushed past Raith and into the passageway, the shouts coming louder from above.
‘Gods!’ he heard Rakki croak, and spun around.
One of the miners was staggering across the room, mad eyes bulging, still clutching at his torn guts with one red hand. He caught Rakki with the other, growling through his clenched teeth, spraying red spit.
By every rule he should’ve been gone through the Last Door. But Death is a fickle mistress and has her own rules. Only she could say why it pleased her to give him a few more moments.
Rakki’s jar tumbled down as he wrestled with the wounded miner, shattered against a timber, oil spattering the pair of them as they stumbled back.
Raith took a step, jaw dropping, but he was too far away.
They blundered into one of the props, and Rakki pulled his arm back for a punch, and his elbow clipped the lamp and knocked it from its hook.
It fell so slow, leaving a bright smear across Raith’s sight, and not a thing he could do. He heard his own breath whoop in. He saw the light from that little flame bright across the oily floor. He saw Rakki turn, caught one glimpse of his face, eyes wide.
Raith dropped down huddled behind his shield. What else could he do?
Then the narrow chamber was brighter than day.
Brave Work
No doubt a woman should be tearful with relief when her betrothed comes back alive from battle, but Skara found herself dry-eyed when the Breaker of Swords was the first through the little gate.
His great shield had a broken shaft stuck in it near the rim, but otherwise he was unhurt. He slapped the arrow out, looked around as if for someone to hand the shield to, then frowned.
‘Huh.’ And he set it down against the wall.
Skara forced a smile onto her face. ‘I am glad to see you returned, my king.’ Though there were others she would rather have greeted.
‘In truth I am glad to be back, Queen Skara. Fighting at night is little fun. We brought down their mine, however.’
‘Thank the gods. What happens now?’
He smiled, teeth white in his ash-blacked face. ‘Now they dig another.’
Men were straggling back into the fortress. All exhausted. Several hurt. Mother Owd started forward to help, Rin squatting beside her with some heavy pincers, already cutting a man’s bloody jerkin open around a wound.
‘Where is Raith?’
‘He was with his brother in the tunnel when the oil caught fire.’ A thrall had brought Gorm water and he was wiping the ash from his face.
Skara could hardly speak her throat was suddenly so closed up. ‘He’s dead?’
Gorm gave a grim nod. ‘I taught him to fight, and kill, and die, and now he has done all three.’
‘Only two,’ she said, with a surge of relief that made her head spin.
Raith came shuffling from the shadows, his hair caked with dirt and his bloody teeth gritted, one arm over Blue Jenner’s shoulder.
‘Huh.’ Gorm raised his brows. ‘He always was the tough one.’
Skara darted forward, caught Raith by his elbow. His sleeve was ripped, scorched, strangely blistered. Then she realized to her horror it was not his sleeve, but his skin. ‘Gods, your arm! Mother Owd!’
Raith hardly seemed to notice. ‘Rakki’s dead,’ he whispered.
A slave had brought Gorm a bowl of meat fresh off the spit. The similarity between it and Raith’s arm as Mother Owd peeled the burned cloth away made Skara’s gorge rise.
But if the Breaker of Swords had any fears at all, he did not keep them in his stomach. ‘Fighting always gives me quite an appetite,’ he said around a mouthful of meat, spr
aying grease. ‘All in all, Mother War favoured us tonight.’
‘What about Rakki?’ snarled Raith, Owd hissing with annoyance as he jerked his half-bandaged arm from her hands.
‘I shall remember him fondly. Unlike others, he proved his loyalty.’
Skara saw the tendons starting from Raith’s fist as it clenched around his axe-haft, and she slipped quickly in front of him.
‘Your chain, my king.’ Lifting that rattling mass of dead men’s pommels up was such an effort her arms trembled.
Gorm stooped to duck his head inside and it brought them closer than they had ever been, her hands behind his neck, almost an awkward embrace. He had a damp-fur smell like the hounds her grandfather had kept.
‘It has grown long over the years,’ he said as he straightened.
This close he seemed bigger than ever. The top of her head could scarcely have reached his neck. Would she need to carry a step with her to kiss her husband? She might have laughed at the thought another time. She did not feel much like laughing then.
‘It was an honour to hold it.’ She wanted very much to back away but knew she could not, dropped her hands to arrange the gaudy, ghastly mementoes on his chest.
‘When we are married, I will cut off a length for you to wear.’
She blinked up at him, cold all over. A chain of dead men to be forever tethered with. ‘I have not earned the right,’ she croaked out.
‘No false modesty, please! Only half a war is fought with swords, my queen, and you have fought the other half with skill and courage.’ He was smiling as he turned away. ‘There will be hundreds dead for your brave work.’
Skara jerked awake, clutching at the furs on her bed, ears straining at the silence.
Nothing.
She hardly slept now. Two or three times every night Bright Yilling’s warriors would come.
They had tried to swim into the harbour, brave men fighting the surging waves in the darkness. But sentries on the towers above had riddled them with arrows, left their bodies tangled on the chains across the entrance.