‘Truly? I thought … you might be angry with me.’
‘That you spoke for yourself and your country? I might as well be angry at the snow for falling. You are eighteen winters old, yes?’
‘I will be, this year …’
Laithlin slowly shook her head. ‘Seventeen. You have a gift.’
‘Mother Kyre and my grandfather … all my life they tried to teach me how to lead. How to speak and what to say. How to make arguments, read faces, sway hearts … I always thought myself a poor pupil.’
‘I very much doubt that, but war can force strengths from us we never expected. King Fynn and his minister prepared you well, but one cannot teach what you have. You are touched by She Who Spoke the First Word. You have that light in you that makes people listen.’ The queen frowned at Druin, who was staring at the carnage in wide-eyed silence. ‘I have a feeling my son’s future may hang on that gift.’
Skara blinked. ‘My gifts beside yours are like a candle beside Mother Sun. You are the Golden Queen—’
‘Of Gettland.’ Her eyes flicked to Skara’s, bright and sharp. ‘The gods know I have tried to steer this alliance, first to counsel peace and then to urge action, but to King Uthil I am a wife and to King Gorm I am an enemy.’ She pushed a strand of hair from Skara’s face. ‘You are neither. Fate has made you the balance between them. The pin on which the scales of this alliance hang.’
Skara stared at her. ‘I do not have the strength for that.’
‘Then you must find it.’ Laithlin leaned close and took Prince Druin from her arms. ‘Power is a weight. You are young, cousin, I know, but you must learn to carry it, or it will crush you.’
Sister Owd puffed out her cheeks, making her round face look even rounder as she watched the queen glide away, her thralls and servants and guards trailing after her. ‘Queen Laithlin has always been a well of good humour.’
‘Good humour I can live without, Sister Owd. What I need is good advice.’
It surprised her how glad she was to see Raith alive, but then as things stood he was one whole third of her household, and by far the best-looking third. He and his brother sat laughing beside a fire, and Skara felt a strange pang of jealousy, they seemed so utterly at ease with each other. For two men sprung at once from the same womb they were easily told apart. Raith was the one with the wrinkle to his lip and the fresh cut down his face. The one with a challenge in his eye, even when he met Skara’s, that she could not seem to look away from. Rakki was the one who hardly met her eye at all, and scrambled to rise with the proper respect as she drew close.
‘You’ve earned your rest,’ she said, waving him down. ‘I hardly deserve to be among such blood-letters.’
‘You spilled a little blood yourself in that moot,’ said Raith, glancing down at Skara’s bandaged hand.
She found herself hiding it with the other. ‘Only my own.’
‘It’s spilling your own takes the courage.’ Raith winced as he prodded at the long scratch down his white-stubbled jaw. He looked no worse for the mark. Better, if anything.
‘I hear you fought well,’ she said.
‘He always does, princess.’ Rakki grinned as he punched his brother on the arm. ‘First through the gate! Without him we might still be squatting outside.’
Raith shrugged. ‘Fighting’s no hardship when you love to fight.’
‘Even so. My grandfather always told me those who fight well should be rewarded by those they fight for.’ And Skara twisted one of the silver rings Laithlin had given her from her wrist and held it out.
Rakki and Raith both stared. The armring had been much pecked with a knife to test its purity some time in the past, but Skara had been taught well the value of things. She saw that neither brother wore ring-money and knew this was no light matter to them. Raith swallowed as he reached to take it, but Skara kept her grip. ‘You fight for me, don’t you?’
She felt a nervous tingle as their eyes met, their fingers almost touching. Then he nodded. ‘I fight for you.’ He was rough and he was rude, and for some reason she found herself wondering what it might be like to kiss him. She heard Sister Owd clear her throat, felt her face burning and quickly let go.
Raith squeezed the ring closed, his wrist so thick the ends barely met around it. A reward for good service. But also a sign that he served, and a mark of whom he served. ‘I should have come to find you after the battle, but …’
‘I needed you to fight.’ Skara pushed thoughts of kissing away and put a little iron into her voice. ‘Now I need you to come with me.’
She watched Raith give his brother a parting hug, then stand, her silver glinting on his wrist, and follow her. He might not truly be her man, but she began to understand why queens had Chosen Shields. There is nothing for your confidence like a proven killer at your shoulder.
When Skara played in the great hall of Bail’s Point as a child it had seemed grand beyond reckoning. Now it was narrow, and dim, and smelled of rot, the roof leaking and the walls streaked with damp, three dusty shafts of light falling across the cold floor from windows looking over grey Mother Sea. The great painting of Ashenleer as warrior-queen that covered one wall was peeled and blistered, a bloom of mould across her mail and the adoring expressions of her hundred guards faded to smudges. A fitting image for the fallen fortunes of Throvenland.
Bail’s Chair still stood upon the dais, though, made of pale oak-wood cut from a ship’s keel, the twisted grain polished to a sheen by years of use. Kings had once sat there. Until Skara’s grandfather’s great-grandfather decided the chair was too narrow to hold all his arse, and the hall too narrow to hold all his boasting, and had a new chair made in Yaletoft, and began to build a fine new hall around it that would be the wonder of the world. It took twenty-eight years to finish the Forest, by which time he was dead and his son was an old man.
Then Bright Yilling burned it in a night.
‘Seems the fighting’s not quite done,’ grunted Raith.
Gorm and Uthil glowered at each other over Bail’s Chair, their ministers and warriors bristling about them. The brotherhood of battle had lasted no longer than the life of their last enemy.
‘We could draw lots—’ King Uthil grated out.
’You had the satisfaction of killing Dunverk,’ said Gorm, ‘I should have the chair.’
Father Yarvi rubbed at one temple with the knuckles of his shrivelled hand. ‘For the gods’ sake, it is a chair. My apprentice can carve you another.’
‘It is not just any chair.’ Skara swallowed her nerves as she stepped up onto the dais. ‘Bail the Builder once sat here.’ King Uthil and his minister stood frowning on her left, Gorm and his minister on her right. She was the balance between them. She had to be. ‘How many ships did we take?’
‘Sixty-six,’ said Mother Scaer. ‘Among them a gilded beast of thirty oars a side which we hear is Bright Yilling’s own.’
Father Yarvi gave Skara an appreciative nod. ‘It was a deep-cunning plan, princess.’
‘I only sowed the seed,’ said Skara, bowing low to the two kings. ‘Your bravery reaped the harvest.’
‘Mother War was with us and our weaponluck held good.’ Gorm turned one of the pommels on his chain around and around. ‘But this fortress is far from safe. Grandmother Wexen knows well its importance, in strategy and as a symbol.’
‘It is a splinter pushed into her flesh,’ said Uthil, ‘and it will not be long before she tries to pluck it out. You should return to Thorlby with my wife, princess. You will be far from danger there.’
‘My respect for you is boundless, King Uthil, but you are wrong. My father knew well the importance of this fortress too. So much so he died to defend it, and is buried in the barrows outside the walls, beside my mother.’ Skara lowered herself into the chair where her forefathers had once sat, painfully upright, the way Mother Kyre had taught her. Her guts were churning, but she had to be strong. Had to lead. There was no one else. ‘This is Throvenland. This is my land. This is the very
place I should be.’
Father Yarvi gave a tired smile. ‘Princess—’
‘In fact, I am a queen.’
There was a silence. Then Sister Owd began to climb the steps. ‘Queen Skara is quite right. She sits in Bail’s Chair as King Fynn’s only living descendant. There is precedent for an unmarried woman to take the chair alone.’ Her voice quavered under Mother Scaer’s deadly glare but she went on, nodding up towards the faded painting that loomed over them. ‘Queen Ashenleer herself, after all, was unmarried when she won victory against the Inglings.’
‘Is there another Ashenleer among us, then?’ sneered Mother Scaer.
Sister Owd stood at Skara’s left hand where a minister belongs, and resolutely folded her arms. ‘That remains to be seen.’
‘Whether you are princess or queen will mean nothing to Bright Yilling,’ rumbled Gorm, and Skara felt a surge of that familiar fear at the name. ‘He kneels to no woman but Death.’
‘He will already be on his way,’ said Uthil, ‘and with vengeance in mind.’
You can only conquer your fears by facing them. Hide from them, and they conquer you. Skara let them wait, taking a moment to settle her thumping heart before she answered. ‘Oh, I am counting on it.’
Young Love
She pushed her hand into his hair, pulled him down so their foreheads were pressed hard together, quick breath hot on his face. For a long while they lay tangled with each other, the furs kicked down around their ankles, in silence.
Not one word spoken since Koll said his goodbyes to Thorn on the docks and strode up like a thief after a promising purse through the darkened city. In silence Rin had opened her door, taken him into her house, into her arms, into her bed.
Koll had always loved words, but to be a minister’s apprentice was to drown in them. True words, false words, words in many tongues. Right words, wrong words, written and spoken and unspoken. For now silence suited him. To forget for a moment what he owed Father Yarvi, and what he owed Rin, and how there was no way he could settle both debts. Whatever words he said, he felt like a liar.
Rin put one rough hand on his cheek, gave him a parting kiss and slithered out from under him. He loved to watch her move, so strong and sure, shadows shifting between her ribs as she fished his shirt from the floor and pulled it on. He loved it when she wore his clothes, not asking, not needing to ask. It made them feel so close together, somehow. That and he loved the way the hem only came halfway down her bare backside.
She squatted, the key she wore to her own locks swinging free on its chain, tossed a log on the fire, sparks drifting up and the light flaring on her face. Not one word spoken all that time but, like everything good, the silence couldn’t last.
‘You’re back, then,’ she said.
‘Only for tonight.’ Koll probed gently at the bridge of his nose, still not quite healed from its sharp meeting with Raith’s head. ‘The Prince of Kalyiv has come to Roystock. Queen Laithlin is sailing to an audience and needs a minister beside her. Father Yarvi’s busy trying to bail out our foundering alliances, so …’
‘She calls on the mighty Koll! Changing the world, just like you always wanted.’ Rin drew his shirt tight about her, the flames reflected in the corners of her eyes. ‘Minister to the Golden Queen and you never even took the Minister’s Test.’
‘No, but … I will have to. And swear the Minister’s Oath too.’
That fell between them like gull’s droppings from a great height. But if Rin was hurt she didn’t show it. That wouldn’t have been her way at all. He loved that about her.
‘What was Bail’s Point like?’
‘It reminded me very much of a big elf-stone fortress by the sea.’
‘You’re almost as funny as you think you are. I mean, what was it like climbing into it?’
‘Heroes never think about the danger.’
She grinned. ‘So you pissed yourself?’
‘I tried, but I was so scared my bladder clenched up tight as King Uthil’s fist. Couldn’t get a drip out for days afterward.’
‘Koll the warrior, eh?’
‘I thought it best to leave the fighting to others.’ Koll tapped at his head. ‘Half a war is fought up here, Queen Skara is always saying.’
‘Queen Skara, now.’ Rin snorted. ‘I’ve yet to meet a man who isn’t much taken with that girl’s wisdom.’
‘I expect a lot of it’s in the, you know …’ Koll waved a hand about. ‘Jewellery and so on.’
Rin raised one brow at him. ‘Oh, you expect that, do you?’
‘No doubt she looks like something from the songs.’ He put his arms over his head, quivering as he stretched out. ‘But I reckon a stiff breeze could blow her away. I like a woman with both feet on Father Earth.’
‘That’s your notion of a compliment? Earthy?’ She made a tube of her tongue and spat hissing into the fire. ‘Some honeyed minister’s mouth you have.’
His mother’s weights clicked around his neck as Koll rolled onto one elbow. ‘What makes a woman beautiful to me isn’t her blood or her clothes but what she can do. I like a woman with strong hands who isn’t afraid of sweat or hard work or anything else. I like a woman with pride, and ambition, and quick wit, and high skill.’ Just words, maybe, but he meant them. Or half-meant them, anyway. ‘That’s why I never saw a woman anywhere so beautiful as you, Rin. And that’s before I even get to your arse, which I can’t imagine has an equal anywhere around the Shattered Sea.’
She looked back to the fire, lips curling at the corner. ‘That’s better, I’ll admit. Even if it is all a hatful of winds.’
Koll was much pleased with himself. He loved it when he made her smile. ‘Sweet smelling breezes at least, I hope?’
‘Better than your usual farts. Will you be charming Prince Varoslaf’s nose with your flattery?’
That dented his smugness considerably. By all accounts the Prince of Kalyiv’s taste ran less to funny men and more to skinned ones. ‘I doubt I’ll comment on his arse, at least. I may keep my mouth shut altogether and leave the talking to Queen Laithlin. Silent men rarely cause offence.’
‘You can probably find a way. What does Varoslaf want?’
‘What the powerful always want. More power. Or so Thorn says. This trip to Roystock isn’t to her taste at all. She wanted to fight.’
Rin stood up. ‘She usually does.’
‘She’s in a bastard of a mood now. Wouldn’t want to be Brand tonight.’
‘He’ll manage.’ She slid back into the bed beside him, propping herself on one elbow, his shirt rumpled across her chest. ‘They love each other.’
Rin’s eyes, fixed on him so close, were making Koll quite uncomfortable. He felt cornered in that narrow bed. Trapped by the heat of her. ‘Maybe.’ He kicked over onto his back, frowning at the ceiling. He had great things to do. Stand at the shoulder of kings and so on. How could he change the world with Rin smothering him? ‘Love’s hardly the answer to every question, though, is it?’
She turned away, drawing the furs up to her waist. ‘Certainly seems not.’
With so many men away there were more women working on the docks of Thorlby than usual, busy at nets and sorting through the morning’s squirming catches. Fewer guards about too – older men, and boys Koll’s age yet to take their warrior’s tests, and some of the girls that Thorn had been training – but otherwise you might never have known there was any war at all.
Six battered ships had landed the night before from the long journey up the Divine, and their sunburned crews were bringing ashore silks, and wine, and all manner of fine curiosities from the south. Queen Laithlin’s men were loading her four ships for the voyage to Roystock and the air rang with their cries, and the barking of a stray being beaten away from the fish, and the laughter of children ducking among the wagons, and the calls of the scavenging gulls as they drifted in lazy circles, watching for spilled grain.
Mother Sun was bright as ever in the east, and Koll shaded his eyes as he gazed off tow
ards Roystock, and sucked in a long, salty breath through his nostrils.
‘Smells like good luck!’
‘That and fish.’ Rin wrinkled her nose. ‘Four ships? To carry one woman?’
‘And her minister!’ Koll puffed up his chest and jabbed at it with his thumb. ‘A man of that stature must be properly attended.’
‘They’re going to lash two ships together just to carry his swollen head, are they?’
‘That and the Chosen Shield’s temper,’ he muttered, as Thorn’s angry orders came chopping through the hubbub. ‘You can tell a woman’s importance by the gifts she gives and the company she keeps. Queen Laithlin means to make a deep impression on Varoslaf by taking plenty of both.’
Rin glanced sideways. ‘What does it say about me that I keep company with you?’
Koll slipped his arm about her waist, grinning at how well it seemed to fit there. ‘That you’re a woman of high taste and refinement, not to mention excellent luck, and— Gods!’ As the crowd shifted Koll caught a glimpse of Brand, hefting a great crate as if it had nothing in it at all. He ducked behind a rack where fish big as boys had been hung glittering in the sunlight. One that still had a little life in it twitched about, seeming to give him a rather disapproving stare.
So did Rin, looking down with hands on hips. ‘The conqueror of Bail’s Point.’ And she stuck her tongue between her lips and blew a long fart at him.
‘Strong men are many, wise men are few. Did he see us?’
‘If you climbed inside one of those fish I think you could make sure.’
‘You’re almost as funny as you think you are.’ He pushed a fish aside with a fingertip to peer past. ‘We’d best part now.’
‘There’s always a reason to rush the parting, isn’t there? Young love. Not quite the joy they sing of.’ She caught him by the collar and half dragged him up, gave him the quickest of kisses and left him frozen with lips puckered and eyes closed. When he opened them he was disappointed to see her already walking away, an unexpected twinge of guilt and longing making him suddenly, stupidly desperate to stretch the parting out.