Mother Kyre stared down at her master’s corpse. ‘Grandmother Wexen gave me her promise,’ she stammered out.
Pit pat, pit pat, the blood dripped from the point of Yilling’s sword. ‘Promises only bind the weak.’
He spun, neat as a dancer, steel flickering in the shadows. There was a black gout and Mother Kyre’s head clonked across the floor, her body dropping as though it had no bones in it at all.
Skara gave a shuddering gasp. It had to be a nightmare. A fever-trick. She wanted to lie down. Her eyelids fluttered, her body sagged, but Blue Jenner’s hand was around her arm, painfully tight.
‘You’re a slave,’ he hissed, giving her a stiff shake. ‘You say nothing. You understand nothing.’
She tried to still her whimpering breath as light footsteps tapped across the floor towards them. Far away, someone had started screaming, and would not stop.
‘Well, well,’ came Bright Yilling’s soft voice. ‘This pair does not belong.’
‘No, lord. My name is Blue Jenner.’ Skara could not comprehend how he could sound so friendly, firm and reasonable. If she had opened her mouth all that would have come out were slobbering sobs. ‘I’m a trader carrying the High King’s licence, lately returned up the Divine River. We were heading for Skekenhouse, blown off course in a gale.’
‘You must have been fast friends with King Fynn, to be a guest in his hall.’
‘A wise trader is friendly with everyone, lord.’
‘You are sweating, Blue Jenner.’
‘Honestly, you terrify me.’
‘A wise trader indeed.’ Skara felt a gentle touch under her chin and her head was tipped back. She looked into the face of the man who had just murdered the two people who had raised her from a child, his bland smile still spotted with their blood, close enough that she could count the dusting of freckles across his nose.
Yilling pushed his plump lips out and made a high, clean whistle. ‘And a trader in fine goods too.’ He brushed one hand through her hair, wound a strand of it around his long fingers, pushed it out of her face so that his thumb tip brushed her cheek.
You must live. You must lead. She smothered her fear. Smothered her hate. Forced her face dead. A thrall’s face, showing nothing.
‘Would you trade this to me, trader?’ asked Yilling. ‘For your life, maybe?’
‘Happily, lord,’ said Blue Jenner. Skara had known Mother Kyre was a fool to trust this rogue. She took a breath to curse him and his gnarled fingers dug tighter into her arm. ‘But I cannot.’
‘In my experience, and I have much and very bloody …’ Bright Yilling raised his red sword and let it rest against his cheek as a girl might her favourite doll, the diamond pommel on fire with sparks of red and orange and yellow. ‘One sharp blade severs a whole rope of cannots.’
The lump on Jenner’s grizzled throat bobbed as he swallowed. ‘She isn’t mine to sell. She’s a gift. From Prince Varoslaf of Kalyiv to the High King.’
‘Ack.’ Yilling slowly let his sword fall, leaving a long red smear down his face. ‘I hear Varoslaf is a man a wise man fears.’
‘He has precious little sense of humour, it’s true.’
‘As a man’s power swells, his good humour shrivels.’ Yilling frowned towards the trail of bloody footprints he had left between the columns. Between the corpses. ‘The High King is much the same. It would not be prudent to snaffle a gift between those two.’
‘My very thought all the way from Kalyiv,’ said Jenner.
Bright Yilling snapped his fingers as loudly as a whipcrack, eyes suddenly bright with boyish enthusiasm. ‘Here is my thought! We will toss a coin. Heads, you can take this pretty thing on to Skekenhouse and let her wash the High King’s feet. Tails, I kill you and make better use of her.’ He slapped Jenner on the shoulder. ‘What do you say, my new friend?’
‘I say Grandmother Wexen may take this ill,’ said Jenner.
‘She takes everything ill.’ Yilling smiled wide, the smooth skin about his eyes crinkling with friendly creases. ‘But I bend to the will of one woman only. Not Grandmother Wexen, nor Mother Sea, nor Mother Sun, nor even Mother War.’ He flicked a coin high in the hallowed spaces of the Forest, gold flashing. ‘Only Death.’
He snatched it from the shadows. ‘King or peasant, high or low, strong or weak, wise or foolish. Death waits for us all.’ And he opened his hand, the coin glinting in his palm.
‘Huh.’ Blue Jenner peered down at it, eyebrows high. ‘Guess she can wait a little longer for me.’
They hurried away through the wreckage of Yaletoft, flaming straw fluttering on the hot wind, the night boiling over with screaming and pleading and weeping. Skara kept her eyes on the ground like a good slave should, no one now to tell her not to slouch, her fear thawing slowly into guilt.
They sprang aboard Jenner’s ship and pushed off, the crew muttering prayers of thanks to Father Peace that they had been spared from the carnage, oars creaking out a steady rhythm as they slid between the boats of the raiders and out to sea. Skara slumped among the cargo, the guilt pooling slowly into sorrow as she watched the flames take King Fynn’s beautiful hall and her past life with it, the great carved gable showing black against the fire, then falling in a fountain of whirling sparks.
The burning of all she had known dwindled away, Yaletoft a speckling of flame in the dark distance, sailcloth snapping as Jenner ordered the ship turned north, towards Gettland. Skara stood and looked behind them, into the past, the tears drying on her face as her sorrow froze into a cold, hard, iron weight of fury.
‘I’ll see Throvenland free,’ she whispered, clenching her fists. ‘And my grandfather’s hall rebuilt, and Bright Yilling’s carcass left for the crows.’
‘For now, let’s stick to seeing you alive, princess.’ Jenner took the thrall collar from her neck, then wrapped his cloak around her shivering shoulders.
She looked up at him, rubbing gently at the marks the silver wire had left. ‘I misjudged you, Blue Jenner.’
‘Your judgment’s shrewd. I’ve done far worse than you thought I might.’
‘Why risk your life for mine, then?’
He seemed to think a moment, scratching at his jaw. Then he shrugged. ‘Because there’s no changing yesterday. Only tomorrow.’ He pressed something into her hand. Bail’s armring, the ruby gleaming bloody in the moonlight. ‘Reckon this is yours.’
No Peace
‘When will they be here?’
Father Yarvi sat slumped against a tree with his legs crossed and an ancient-looking book propped on his knees. He might almost have seemed asleep had his eyes not been flickering over the writing beneath heavy lids. ‘I am a minister, Koll,’ he murmured, ‘not a seer.’
Koll frowned up at the offerings about the glade. Headless birds and drained jars of ale and bundles of bones swinging on twine. A dog, a cow, four sheep, all dangling head-down from rune-carved branches, flies busy at their slit throats.
There was a man too. A thrall, by the chafe marks on his neck, a ring of runes written clumsily on his back, his knuckles brushing the bloody ground. A fine sacrifice to He Who Sprouts the Seed from some rich woman eager for a child.