“Your death comes,” she whispered.
Vialine shrieked as she leapt between the pillars and onto the short man’s back, grabbing him around his bull neck, clutching at the wrist of his sword arm. He tried to throw her off, shield flailing, but that left a gap. Thorn dived at him, her left knee buckled, pain stabbing through her leg but she caught his armor as she fell and dragged herself up, snarled as she drove the broken sword blade up under his jaw. He spoke blood, the empress squealing as they crashed down on top of her.
Thorn rolled just in time, the Vansterman’s heavy ax flashing past, thudding through Thick Neck’s mail and deep into his chest. Thorn half-scrambled, half hopped up as he struggled to drag his ax free, the breath burning in her heaving chest.
“Brand!” she screamed in a broken voice. She heard a step behind her, lurched around and saw a flash of metal. The duke punched her in the cheek, made her head jolt, but it was a feeble sort of blow, barely even staggering her.
She clutched at his gilded breastplate. “That your best?” she hissed, but the words were blood, drooling down her chin. There was something in her mouth. Cold, and hard, across her tongue. That was when she realized he’d stabbed her. He’d stabbed her and the dagger was right through her face, between her jaws, his hand still around the grip.
They stared at each other in the darkness, neither quite believing what had happened. Neither quite believing she was still standing. Then, by the glimmering of torchlight, she saw his eyes go hard.
She felt the blade shift in her mouth as he tried to tear it free and she bit down on it, kneed him in his side with her wounded leg, twisted her head, twisting the bloody grip of the dagger out of his limp hand. She shoved him clumsily away, staggering sideways as the Vansterman swung at her, his ax grazing her shoulder and ripping a shower of leaves from the bushes as she hopped back toward the fountain.
Everyone’s got a plan until they start bleeding and she was bleeding now. Her leg was hot with it, her face sticky with it. No plans any more. She snorted and blew a red mist.
She caught the grip and dragged the dagger out of her face. Came out easy enough. Might have been a tooth came with it, though. Gods, she was dizzy. Her leg had stopped throbbing. Just numb. Numb and wet and her knee trembling. She could hear it flapping inside her blood-soaked trousers.
Drowsy.
She shook her head, trying to shake the dizziness out but it only made things worse, the blurry gardens tipping one way then back the other.
Duke Mikedas had drawn his sword, was dragging the corpse of the thick-necked man away so he could get at the empress.
Thorn waved the knife around but it was so heavy. As if there was an anvil hanging off the point. The torches flashed and flickered and danced.
“Come on,” she croaked, but her tongue was all swollen, couldn’t get the words around it.
The Vansterman smiled as he herded her back toward the fountain.
She tripped, clutched at something, knee buckling, just staying upright.
Kneeling in water. Fish flitting in the darkness.
Vialine screamed again. Her voice was getting hoarse from it.
The Vansterman wafted his ax back and forward and the big blade caught the light and left orange smears across Thorn’s blurred sight.
The empress said don’t kneel but she couldn’t get up.
She could hear her own breath, wheezing, wheezing.
Didn’t sound too good.
Gods, she was tired.
“Brand,” she mumbled.
HE CAME UP THE steps running.
Caught a glimpse of a darkened garden, a path of white stones between flowering trees, and statues, and dead men scattered in the shadows about a torchlit fountain—
He saw Thorn kneeling in it, clutching at wet stone carved like snakes, a dagger in her other hand. Her face was tattered red and her clothes torn and stuck to her dark and the water pink with blood.
A man stood over her with an ax in his hand. The Vansterman from the market.
Brand made a sound like a boiling kettle. A sound he never made before and never heard a man make.
He tore down that path like a charging bull and as the Vansterman turned, eyes wide, Brand caught him, snatched him off his feet like the north gale snatches up a leaf and rammed him at a full sprint into a statue.
They hit it so hard the world seemed to shake. So hard it rattled Brand’s teeth in his head. So hard the statue broke at the waist and the top fell in dusty chunks across the grass.
Brand might’ve heard the Vansterman’s shattered groan if it wasn’t for the blood pounding in his skull like Mother Sea on a storm day, blinding him, deafening him. He seized the Vansterman’s head with both hands and rammed it into the marble pedestal, two times, three, four, chips of stone flying until his skull was bent and dented and flattened and Brand flung him down ruined onto the path.
Thorn was slumped against the fountain, her face all the wrong colors, skin waxy pale and streaked with blood and her torn cheeks and her mouth and her chin all clotted black.
“Stay back!” someone shrieked. An older man in a gilded breastplate with a sheen of sweat across his face. He had the Empress Vialine about the neck, a jewelled sword to her throat, but it was too long for the task. “I am Duke Mikedas!” he bellowed, as if the name was a shield.
But a name’s just a name. Brand’s lips curled back and he took a step forwards, the growling in his throat hot as dragon’s fire, kicking a corpse out of his way.
The duke whipped the sword from Vialine’s neck and pointed it wobbling towards Brand. “I’m warning you, stay—”
The empress grabbed his hand and bit it, twisting free as he screamed. He raised his sword but Brand was on him, making that sound again, that shrieking, keening, gurgling sound, not thinking of doing good, or of standing in the light, or anything but breaking this man apart with his hands.
The sword grazed his head and bounced off his shoulder. Maybe it cut him and maybe it didn’t and Brand didn’t care. His arms closed tight about the duke like a lock snapping shut. He was a big man, but Brand once held the weight of a ship across his shoulders. He hoisted Duke Mikedas into the air as if he was made of straw.
Four charging steps he took, thudding across the dark lawn, lifting the duke higher and higher.
“You can’t—” he screeched, then Brand flung him into space. Over the stone rail he tumbled. He seemed to hang there for a moment against the dusky sky, astonished, sword still in his hand. His screech turned to a coughing gurgle and he plummeted flailing out of sight.
“God,” croaked Vialine.
There was a crunch far below as her uncle hit the ground. Then a long clatter.
Then silence.
DEBTS AND PROMISES
Thorn’s eyes opened and it was dark.
The darkness beyond the Last Door?
She tried to move, and gasped at the pain.
Surely the one good thing about death was that the pain stopped?
She felt bandages across her face, remembered the jolt as Duke Mikedas’s knife punched through her mouth, gave a rusty groan, her throat dry as old bones.
She squinted toward a slit of brightness, fumbled back blankets and slowly, ever so slowly, swung her legs down, everything bruised and battered and stabbed through with cramps. She moaned as she tried to put weight on her left leg, pain catching fire in her thigh, creeping up into her back, down through her knee.
She hopped and she shuffled, clutching at the wall. Gods, the pain in her leg, but when she winced at that, gods, the pain in her face, and when she whimpered at that, gods, the pain in her chest, up her throat, in her eyes as the tears flowed, and she made it to that strip of light, the light under a door, and pawed it open.
She shuffled forward with one hand up to shield her sore eyes, like staring into the blinding sun even though it was only a single candle. A thick candle with long, jewelled pins stuck into the wax. She saw crumbling plaster, fallen clothes casting lo
ng shadows across the boards, the dark folds on a rumpled bed—
She froze. A dark-skinned back, a bare back, lean muscles shifting. She heard a slow grunting, a woman’s voice and a man’s, together, and Thorn saw a pale arm slip up that back, a long, wasted arm and on the end was a shrivelled hand with just one stump of a finger.
“Uh,” she croaked, eyes wide, and the woman’s head jerked around. Black hair across her face, and a scar through her top lip, and a notch of white tooth showing. Sumael, and with Father Yarvi underneath her.
“Uh.” Thorn couldn’t go forward, couldn’t go back, and she stared at the floor, burning with pain and embarrassment, trying to swallow but feeling as if she’d never have spit again in the aching hole of her mouth.
“You’re awake.” Father Yarvi scrambled from the bed and into his trousers.
“Am I?” she wanted to ask, but it came out, “Uh.”
“Back to bed before you set that leg bleeding.” And the minister slipped his arm around her and started helping her to hop and shuffle back toward the dark doorway.
Thorn couldn’t help glancing over her shoulder as they passed the threshold, saw Sumael stretched out naked as though nothing could be more ordinary, looking sideways at her through narrowed eyes.
“In pain?” asked Father Yarvi as he lowered her onto the bed.
“Uh,” she grunted.
Water sloshed into a cup, a spoon rattled as he mixed something in. “Drink this.”
It tasted beyond foul and her ripped mouth and her swollen tongue and her dry throat burned from it, but she fought it down, and at least she could make words afterward.
“I thought,” she croaked, as he swung her legs back into the bed and checked the bandages around her thigh, “you swore … an oath.”
“I swore too many. I must break some to keep another.”
“Who decides which ones you keep?”
“I’ll keep my first one.” And he closed the fingers of his good hand and made a fist of it. “To be revenged upon the killers of my father.”
She was growing drowsy. “I thought … you did that … long ago.”
“On some of them. Not all.” Yarvi pulled the blankets over her. “Sleep, now, Thorn.”
Her eyes drifted closed.
“DON’T GET UP.”
“Your radiance—”
“For God’s sake: Vialine.” The empress had some scratches across her cheek, but no other sign of her brush with Death.
“I should—” Thorn winced as she tried to sit and Vialine put her hand on her shoulder, and gently but very firmly pushed her back onto the bed.
“Don’t get up. Consider that an imperial edict.” For once, Thorn decided not to fight. “Are you badly hurt?”
She thought about saying no, but the lie would hardly have been convincing. She shrugged, and even that was painful. “Father Yarvi says I’ll heal.”
The empress looked down as though she was the one in pain, her hand still on Thorn’s shoulder. “You will have scars.”
“They’re expected on a fighter.”
“You saved my life.”
“They would have killed me first.”
“Then you saved both our lives.”
“Brand played his part, I hear.”
“And I have thanked him. But I have not thanked you.” Vialine took a long breath. “I have dissolved the alliance with the High King. I have sent birds to Grandmother Wexen. I have let her know that, regardless of what gods we pray to, the enemy of Gettland is my enemy, the friend of Gettland is my friend.”
Thorn blinked. “You’re too generous.”
“I can afford to be, now. My uncle ruled an empire within the empire, but without him it has fallen like an arch without its keystone. I have taken your advice. To strike swiftly, and without mercy. Traitors are being weeded out of my council. Out of my guard.” There was a hardness in her face, and just then Thorn was glad she was on Vialine’s right side. “Some have fled the city, but we will hunt them down.”
“You will be a great empress,” croaked Thorn.
“If my uncle has taught me anything, it is that an empress is only as great as those around her.”
“You have Sumael, and you—”
Vialine’s hand squeezed her shoulder, and she looked down with that earnest, searching gaze. “Would you stay?”
“Stay?”
“As my bodyguard, perhaps? Queens have them, do they not, in the North? What do you call them?”
“A Chosen Shield,” whispered Thorn.
“As your father was. You have proved yourself more than qualified.”
A Chosen Shield. And to the Empress of the South. To stand at the shoulder of the woman who ruled half the world. Thorn fumbled for the pouch around her neck, felt the old lumps inside, imagining her father’s pride to hear of it. What songs might be sung of that in the smoky inns, and in the narrow houses, and in the high Godshall of Thorlby?
And at that thought a wave of homesickness surged over Thorn, so strong she nearly choked. “I have to go back. I miss the gray cliffs. I miss the gray sea. I miss the cold.” She felt tears in her eyes, then, and blinked them away. “I miss my mother. And I swore an oath.”
“Not all oaths are worth keeping.”
“You keep an oath not for the oath but for yourself.” Her father’s words, whispered long ago beside the fire. “I wish I could split myself in half.”
Vialine sucked at her teeth. “Half a bodyguard would be no good to me. But I knew what your answer would be. You are not one to be held, Thorn Bathu, even with a gilded chain. Perhaps one day you will come back of your own accord. Until then, I have a gift for you. I could only find one worthy of the service you have done me.”
And she brought out something that cast pale light across her face, and struck a spark in her eyes, and stopped Thorn’s breath in her throat. The elf-bangle that Skifr had dug from the depths of Strokom, where no man had dared tread since the Breaking of God. The gift the South Wind had carried all the long road down the Divine and the Denied. A thing too grand for an empress to wear.
“Me?” Thorn wriggled up the bed in an effort to get away from it. “No! No, no, no!”
“It is mine to give, well-earned and freely given.”
“I can’t take it—”
“One does not refuse the Empress of the South.” Vialine’s voice had iron in it, and she raised her chin and glared down her nose at Thorn with an authority that was not to be denied. “Which hand?”
Thorn mutely held out her left, and Vialine slipped the elf-bangle over it and folded the bracelet shut with a final sounding click, the light from its round window glowing brighter, shifting to blue-white, metal perfect as a cut jewel gleaming, and circles within circles slowly shifting beneath the glass. Thorn stared at it with a mixture of awe and horror. A relic beyond price. Beautiful beyond words. Sitting now, on her ridiculous bony wrist, with the bizarre magnificence of a diamond on a dung-heap.
Vialine smiled, and finally let go of her shoulder. “It looks well on you.”
THE SHEARS CLICK-CLICKED OVER the left side of Thorn’s scalp and the hair fluttered down onto her shoulder, onto her bandaged leg, onto the cobbles of the yard.
“Do you remember when I first clipped your head?” asked Skifr. “You howled like a wolf cub!”
Thorn picked up a tuft of hair and blew it from her fingers. “Seems you can get used to anything.”
“With enough work.” Skifr tossed the shears aside and brushed the loose hair away. “With enough sweat, blood, and training.”
Thorn worked her tongue around the unfamiliar inside of her mouth, rough with the stitches, and leaned forward to spit pink. “Blood I can give you.” She grimaced as she stretched her leg out, the elf-bangle flaring angry purple with her pain. “But training might be difficult right now.”
Skifr sat, one arm about Thorn’s shoulders, rubbing her hand over her own stubbled hair. “We have trained for the last time, my dove.”
&nb
sp; “What?”
“I have business I must attend to. I have ignored my own sons, and daughters, and grandsons, and granddaughters too long. And only the most wretched of fools would dare now deny that I have done what Father Yarvi asked of me, and made you deadly. Or helped you make yourself deadly, at least.”
Thorn stared at Skifr, an empty feeling in her stomach. “You’re leaving?”
“Nothing lasts forever. But that means I can tell you things I could not tell you before.” Skifr folded her in a tight, strange-smelling hug. “I have had twenty-two pupils in all, and never been more proud of one than I am of you. None worked so hard. None learned so fast. None had such courage.” She leaned back, holding Thorn at arm’s length. “You have proved yourself strong, inside and out. A loyal companion. A fearsome fighter. You have earned the respect of your friends and the fear of your enemies. You have demanded it. You have commanded it.”
“But …” muttered Thorn, rocked far more by compliments than blows, “I’ve still got so much to learn …”
“A fighter is never done learning. But the best lessons one teaches oneself. It is time for you to become the master.” And Skifr held out her ax, letters in five languages etched on the bearded blade. “This is for you.”
Thorn had dreamed of owning a weapon like that. A thing fit for a hero’s song. Now she took it numbly, and laid it on her lap, and looked down at the bright blade. “To the fighter, everything must be a weapon,” she muttered. “What will I do without you?”
Skifr leaned close, her eyes bright, and gripped her tight. “Anything! Everything! I am no mean prophet and I foresee great things for you!” Her voice rose higher and higher, louder and louder, and she pointed one clawing finger toward the sky. “We will meet again, Thorn Bathu, on the other side of the Last Door, if not on this one, and I will thrill to the tales of your high deeds, and swell with pride that I played my own small part in them!”
“Damn right you will,” said Thorn, sniffing back her tears. She had held this strange woman in contempt. She had hated her, and feared her, and cursed her name all down the Divine and the Denied. And now she loved her like a mother.