Mithrid wiped her nose, leaving a long streak of blood from her finger to her wrist, and stared at the door as if her eyes were augers.
CHAPTER 3
BROKEN THINGS
The Outlaw King, the Outlaw King.
He’ll steal your soul and boil your skin!
The Outlaw King, the Outlaw King.
Pluck your bones and make them sing!
POPULAR ARKA NURSERY RHYME
They say there is serenity to be found in watching a rainy day from the comfort of the warm and dry.
Mithrid could not have disagreed more.
Her day had been spent pressing her nose up against the glass of her cottage. The shutters had been slammed, reopened, and then slammed again in angst. Only planting the white flower had given her some distraction, at least for a half an hour. It looked at home between the clump of herbs and the red seagrass that was constantly attempting to crawl from the trough. Even her miniature garden could only hold her attention for so long. Before long, she was pressed to the window once more, her nose numb against the frigid glass.
From the vantage point of the cottage she was forced to watch the old ones pick apart the wreckage, building piles of various – and wholeheartedly interesting – things on the beach. With the spyglass she could pick out father hauling up plank after plank, gathering almost enough for two houses by the time the rain came in the afternoon. At least he would be worn out.
Sparking a candle against the gloom of the dying day, Mithrid caught her reflection in the smudged glass. She wanted to ignore it but that was easier said than done entrenched in boredom. The mark of her father’s fist had begun to darken around her left cheek and eye. A fine match to the cobweb scar that reached from her temple to the corner of her lip. There was a cut on her chin, too, which bled profusely once she’d grown bored enough to pick it.
Once the wood piles were safe beyond the tideline, the elders retreated to sip stew and natter under the wall of the ochre cliff. Mithrid watched their mouths moving from afar, trying to guess words, grinding her teeth all the while.
When her father finally returned, the sun was fading behind the ceiling of slate clouds. He stood in the doorway, dripping with rain. There was a sack slung over his shoulder. Anything was a weapon in her father’s hands, so Mithrid remained curled up by the window, spyglass threatening to break in her stiff grip.
Father regarded her with those eyes of his: always enshrouded in dark rings of tiredness yet refusing to burn out, like pearls at the bottom of a bucket. The mark of the weight of the world, he called it. His stare seemed stuck on her bruises.
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked gruffly.
‘No.’
‘Good.’
Mithrid huffed, ignoring him. She listened to the clomping rhythm of the sack meeting the floorboard, his boots being kicked away, and the door shutting out the night.
Something nudged her arm. Mithrid looked away and she was whacked instead.
‘Ow.’
Mithrid saw a box at her side, a flat construction of green wood, engraved with strands of ivy. She traced the carving.
‘Open it,’ her father grunted.
It took some doing. The wood had swollen in the water, thankfully keeping the seawater out but making Mithrid struggle. She denied her father’s help and with a growl of effort, pried it open.
Three small pale cakes sat inside, nestled in hollows carved in wood. Each was decorated with a beetle so lifelike that Mithrid almost threw the box aside. Emerald, sapphire, and ruby were their sugared carapaces. Spindly black legs, dusted in sugar, clutched each cake.
‘Some officer has fancy tastes,’ said Father. He tried an awkward smile. It didn’t fit. ‘Just like my daughter.’
‘We’ll share them,’ Mithrid replied, meeting his eyes for the first time. ‘What colour?’
‘Green for me.’
Mithrid chose blue. The horned beetle was the hue of summer skies. It crumbled at the first touch of her tongue, fizzing away like a sandcastle falling to the waves. The sugar spread over her tongue as Mithrid bit down, halving the beetle. For all her stewing, she hadn’t realised how ravenous she had become. It was like nothing she had ever tasted, full of flavours that set her mind afire.
It was no surprise the cake was demolished in moments. The only evidence of its existence were the pale crumbs spread across her knees and trews.
Father took his time. Once he had picked the morsels from his wiry beard, he gently closed the box and chose a place for it on the shelf beneath a shrine of shells and whetstones.
‘For you,’ he whispered, but not to his daughter.
Mithrid’s stomach protested loudly.
‘Almost time for the burn.’
‘I guess I have to stay here,’ she grumbled.
Father sighed as if he’d been holding his breath all day. ‘As much as I despise it, you ain’t a child no more despite what my eyes tell me, daughter. You don’t know much of the world, but you’ve tasted its ugliness. As much as I tried to keep you from it, you learned young.’ Father’s eyes strayed to the small carved effigy sitting in the centre of the shrine. It was where most families kept their gods: Hurricane. Jötun. Njord. Not in this house. This was no god but a woman, as slender as the pine it was carved from. Her hair was stained red with sap, as wild as Mithrid’s. The faintest smile lingered on the statue’s face.
‘Surely it’s too wet?’ asked Mithrid in an effort to distract both of them. She knew his hurt ran deeper than hers, a knife wound that refused to heal. Mithrid has been too young and the blade of sorrow had only raked her.
‘Reesta donated some of his fishpickle grog. The stuff burns better than whale tallow or peat. It’ll see to the bodies,’ Father answered. ‘Come now. We’ll be late.’
Mithrid sought her boots quickly, before he changed his mind. The man had the moods of a winter gale. Even in this weather, he would have climbed the ladders to the clifftops and hacked down a tree to exercise his pain. Better than using his fists upon her, Mithrid knew, but she hated to see him hurting. He might not have been a shining example of a father, but she had none spare.
‘Is the pit dug?’ she asked.
‘Pit’s dug.’
‘Then what are we waiting for?’ she offered a smile.
His fingers trembled, but he reached out to rest a hand on her tangle of hair. He made it halfway before clearing his throat and seeking his pocket instead. ‘You behave yourself.’
Even with their cloth-wrapped handles, the ladders were slippery that night. The sky was charcoal and the sea angry. The waves crashed first on the reef then second on the shore, deprived of their power but still seething with froth and foam. With the turning tide, more wreckage had appeared. Work for the morning.
The wet, charred wood took on a glasslike texture in the ragged light of the torches staked in the sand. They led a path along the beach, to where the denizens of Troughwake had formed a circle of seal hide and lemming fur around the pit.
Father found a gap for them and stood Mithrid at the edge. He timidly laid a hand on her shoulder as her morbid curiosity dragged her gaze down, to where the bodies lay in a puzzle of limbs and torsos. Driftwood planks crisscrossed half of them, green branches covered others, but Mithrid could still see gawping faces wedged into helmets, or hands still grasping for air.