Half the World

The echoes of his voice faded to leave the silence of a tomb. Now was the time to tell the truth. To do good. To stand in the light. Brand looked across the Godshall, the words tickling at his lips. He saw Rauk in his place, smiling. Sordaf too, his doughy face a mask. They didn’t make the faintest sound.

And nor did Brand.

‘It is a heavy thing to order the Death of one so young.’ Uthil stood from the Black Chair, mail rattling and skirts rustling as everyone but the queen knelt. ‘But we cannot turn from the right thing simply because it is a painful thing.’

Father Yarvi bowed still lower. ‘I will dispense your justice according to the law.’

Uthil held his hand out to Laithlin, and together they came down the steps of the dais. On the subject of Thorn Bathu, crushing with rocks was the last word.

Brand stared in sick disbelief. He’d been sure among all those lads someone would speak, for they were honest enough. Or Hunnan would tell his part in it, for he was a respected master-at-arms. The king or the queen would draw out the truth, for they were wise and righteous. The gods wouldn’t allow such an injustice to pass. Someone would do something.

Maybe, like him, they were all waiting for someone else to put things right.

The king walked stiffly, drawn sword cradled in his arms, his iron-grey stare wavering neither right nor left. The queen’s slightest nods were received like gifts, and with the odd word she let it be known that this person or that should enjoy the favour of visiting her counting house upon some deep business. They came closer, and closer yet.

Brand’s heart beat loud in his ears. His mouth opened. The queen turned her freezing gaze on him for an instant, and in shamed and shameful silence he let the pair of them sweep past.

His sister was always telling him it wasn’t up to him to put the world right. But if not him, who?

‘Father Yarvi!’ he blurted, far too loud, and then, as the minister turned towards him, croaked far too soft, ‘I need to speak to you.’

‘What about, Brand?’ That gave him a pause. He hadn’t thought Yarvi would have the vaguest notion who he was.

‘About Thorn Bathu.’

A long silence. The minister might only have been a few years older than Brand, pale-skinned and pale-haired as if the colour was washed out of him, so gaunt a stiff breeze might blow him away and with a crippled hand besides, but close up there was something chilling in the minister’s eye. Something that caused Brand to wilt under his gaze.

But there was no going back, now. ‘She’s no murderer,’ he muttered.

‘The king thinks she is.’

Gods, his throat felt dry, but Brand pressed on, the way a warrior was supposed to. ‘The king wasn’t on the sands. The king didn’t see what I saw.’

‘What did you see?’

‘We were fighting to win places on the raid—’

‘Never again tell me what I already know.’

This wasn’t running near as smoothly as Brand had hoped. But so it goes, with hopes. ‘Thorn fought me, and I hesitated … she should’ve won her place. But Master Hunnan set three others on her.’

Yarvi glanced towards the people flowing steadily out of the Godshall, and eased a little closer. ‘Three at once?’

‘Edwal was one of them. She never meant to kill him—’

‘How did she do against those three?’

Brand blinked, wrong-footed. ‘Well … she killed more of them than they did of her.’

‘That’s in no doubt. I was but lately consoling Edwal’s parents, and promising them justice. She is sixteen winters, then?’

‘Thorn?’ Brand wasn’t sure what that had to do with her sentence. ‘I … think she is.’

‘And has held her own in the square all this time against the boys?’ He gave Brand a look up and down. ‘Against the men?’

‘Usually she does better than hold her own.’

‘She must be very fierce. Very determined. Very hard-headed.’

‘From what I can tell her head’s bone all the way through.’ Brand realized he wasn’t helping and mumbled weakly, ‘But … she’s not a bad person.’

‘None are, to their mothers.’ Father Yarvi pushed out a heavy sigh. ‘What would you have me do?’

‘What … would I what?’

‘Do I free this troublesome girl and make enemies of Hunnan and the boy’s family, or crush her with stones and appease them? Your solution?’

Brand hadn’t expected to give a solution. ‘I suppose … you should follow the law?’

‘The law?’ Father Yarvi snorted. ‘The law is more Mother Sea than Father Earth, always shifting. The law is a mummer’s puppet, Brand, it says what I say it says.’

‘Just thought I should tell someone … well … the truth?’

‘As if the truth is precious. I can find a thousand truths under every autumn leaf, Brand: everyone has their own. But you thought no further than passing the burden of your truth to me, did you? My epic thanks, preventing Gettland sliding into war with the whole Shattered Sea gives me not enough to do.’

‘I thought … this was doing good.’ Doing good seemed of a sudden less a burning light before him, clear as Mother Sun, and more a tricking glimmer in the murk of the Godshall.

‘Whose good? Mine? Edwal’s? Yours? As we each have our own truth so we each have our own good.’ Yarvi edged a little closer, spoke a little softer. ‘Master Hunnan may guess you shared your truth with me, what then? Have you thought on the consequences?’

They settled on Brand now, cold as a fall of fresh snow. He looked up, saw the gleam of Rauk’s eye in the shadows of the emptying hall.

‘A man who gives all his thought to doing good, but no thought to the consequences …’ Father Yarvi lifted his withered hand and pressed its one crooked finger into Brand’s chest. ‘That is a dangerous man.’

And the minister turned away, the butt of his elf staff tapping against stones polished to glass by the passage of years, leaving Brand to stare wide-eyed into the gloom, more worried than ever.

He didn’t feel like he was standing in the light at all.

JUSTICE

Thorn sat and stared down at her filthy toes, pale as maggots in the darkness.

She had no notion why they took her boots. She was hardly going to run, chained by her left ankle to one damp-oozing wall and her right wrist to the other. She could scarcely reach the gate of her cell, let alone rip it from its hinges. Apart from picking the scabs under her broken nose till they bled, all she could do was sit and think.

Her two least favourite activities.

She heaved in a ragged breath. Gods, the place stank. The rotten straw and the rat droppings stank and the bucket they never bothered to empty stank and the mould and rusting iron stank and after two nights in there she stank worst of all.

Any other day she would’ve been swimming in the bay, fighting Mother Sea, or climbing the cliffs, fighting Father Earth, or running or rowing or practising with her father’s old sword in the yard of their house, fighting the blade-scarred posts and pretending they were Gettland’s enemies as the splinters flew – Grom-gil-Gorm, or Styr of the Islands, or even the High King himself.

But she would swing no sword today. She was starting to think she had swung her last. It seemed a long, hard way from fair. But then, as Hunnan said, fair wasn’t a thing a warrior could rely on.

‘You’ve a visitor,’ said the key-keeper, a weighty lump of a woman with a dozen rattling chains about her neck and a face like a bag of axes. ‘But you’ll have to make it quick.’ And she hauled the heavy door squealing open.

‘Hild!’

This once Thorn didn’t tell her mother she’d given that name up at six years old, when she pricked her father with his own dagger and he called her ‘thorn’. It took all the strength she had to unfold her legs and stand, sore and tired and, suddenly, pointlessly ashamed of the state she was in. Even if she hardly cared for how things looked, she knew her mother did.

When Thorn shuffled into the light her mother pressed one pale hand to her mouth. ‘Gods, what did they do to you?’

Thorn waved at her face, chains rattling. ‘This happened in the square.’

Her mother came close to the bars, eyes rimmed with weepy pink. ‘They say you murdered a boy.’

‘It wasn’t murder.’

‘You killed a boy, though?’

Thorn swallowed, dry throat clicking. ‘Edwal.’

‘Gods,’ whispered her mother again, lip trembling. ‘Oh, gods, Hild, why couldn’t you …’

‘Be someone else?’ Thorn finished for her. Someone easy, someone normal. A daughter who wanted to wield nothing weightier than a needle, dress in southern silk instead of mail and harbour no dreams beyond wearing some rich man’s key.

‘I saw this coming,’ said her mother, bitterly. ‘Ever since you went to the square. Ever since we saw your father dead, I saw this coming.’

Thorn felt her cheek twitch. ‘You can take comfort in how right you were.’

‘You think there’s any comfort for me in this? They say they’re going to crush my only child with stones!’

Thorn felt cold then, very cold. It was an effort to take a breath. As though they were piling the rocks on her already. ‘Who said?’

‘Everyone says.’

‘Father Yarvi?’ The minister spoke the law. The minister would speak the judgment.

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not yet.’

Not yet; that was the limit of her hopes. Thorn felt so weak she could hardly grip the bars. She was used to wearing a brave face, however scared she was. But Death is a hard mistress to face bravely. The hardest.

‘You’d best go.’ The key-keeper started to pull Thorn’s mother away.

‘I’ll pray,’ she called, tears streaking her face. ‘I’ll pray to Father Peace for you!’

Thorn wanted to say, ‘Damn Father Peace,’ but she could not find the breath. She had given up on the gods when they let her father die in spite of all her prayers, but a miracle was looking like her best chance.

‘Sorry,’ said the key-keeper, shouldering shut the door.

‘Not near as sorry as me.’ Thorn closed her eyes and let her forehead fall against the bars, squeezed hard at the pouch under her dirty shirt. The pouch that held her father’s fingerbones.

We don’t get much time, and time feeling sorry for yourself is time wasted. She kept every word he’d said close to her heart, but if there’d ever been a moment for feeling sorry for herself, this had to be the one. Hardly seemed like justice. Hardly seemed fair. But try telling Edwal about fair. However you shared out the blame, she’d killed him. Wasn’t his blood crusted up her sleeve?

She’d killed Edwal. Now they’d kill her.

She heard talking, faint beyond the door. Her mother’s voice – pleading, wheedling, weeping. Then a man’s, cold and level. She couldn’t quite catch the words, but they sounded like hard ones. She flinched as the door opened, jerking back into the darkness of her cell, and Father Yarvi stepped over the threshold.

He was a strange one. A man in a minister’s place was almost as rare as a woman in the training square. He was only a few years Thorn’s elder but he had an old eye. An eye that had seen things. They told strange stories of him. That he had sat in the Black Chair, but given it up. That he had sworn a deep-rooted oath of vengeance. That he had killed his Uncle Odem with the curved sword he always wore. They said he was cunning as Father Moon, a man rarely to be trusted and never to be crossed. And in his hands – or in his one good one, for the other was a crooked lump – her life now rested.

‘Thorn Bathu,’ he said. ‘You are named a murderer.’

All she could do was nod, her breath coming fast.

‘Have you anything to say?’

Perhaps she should’ve spat her defiance. Laughed at Death. They said that was what her father did, when he lay bleeding his last at the feet of Grom-gil-Gorm. But all she wanted was to live.

‘I didn’t mean to kill him,’ she gurgled up. ‘Master Hunnan set three of them on me. It wasn’t murder!’

‘A fine distinction to Edwal.’

True enough, she knew. She was blinking back tears, shamed at her own cowardice, but couldn’t help it. How she wished she’d never gone to the square now, and learned to smile well and count coins like her mother always wanted. But you’ll buy nothing with wishes.

‘Please, Father Yarvi, give me a chance.’ She looked into his calm, cold, grey-blue eyes. ‘I’ll take any punishment. I’ll do any penance. I swear it!’

He raised one pale brow. ‘You should be careful what oaths you make, Thorn. Each one is a chain about you. I swore to be revenged on the killers of my father and the oath still weighs heavy on me. That one might come to weigh heavy on you.’

‘Heavier than the stones they’ll crush me with?’ She held her open palms out, as close to him as the chains would allow. ‘I swear a sun-oath and a moon-oath. I’ll do whatever service you think fit.’

The minister frowned at her dirty hands, reaching, reaching. He frowned at the desperate tears leaking down her face. He cocked his head slowly on one side, as though he was a merchant judging her value. Finally he gave a long, unhappy sigh. ‘Oh, very well.’

There was a silence then, while Thorn turned over what he’d said. ‘You’re not going to crush me with stones?’

He waved his crippled hand so the one finger flopped back and forth. ‘I have trouble lifting the big ones.’

More silence, long enough for relief to give way to suspicion. ‘So … what’s the sentence?’

‘I’ll think of something. Release her.’

The jailer sucked her teeth as if opening any lock left a wound, but did as she was bid. Thorn rubbed at the chafe-marks the iron cuff left on her wrist, feeling strangely light without its weight. So light she wondered if she was dreaming. She squeezed her eyes shut, then grunted as the key-keeper tossed her boots over and they hit her in the belly. Not a dream, then.

She couldn’t stop herself smiling as she pulled them on.

‘Your nose looks broken,’ said Father Yarvi.

‘Not the first time.’ If she got away from this with no worse than a broken nose she would count herself blessed indeed.

‘Let me see.’

A minister was a healer first, so Thorn didn’t flinch when he came close, prodded gently at the bones under her eyes, brow wrinkled with concentration.

‘Ah,’ she muttered.

‘Sorry, did that hurt?’

‘Just a litt—’

He jabbed one finger up her nostril, pressing his thumb mercilessly into the bridge of her nose. Thorn gasped, forced down onto her knees, there was a crack and a white-hot pain in her face, tears flooding more freely than ever.

‘That got it,’ he said, wiping his hand on her shirt.

‘Gods!’ she whimpered, clutching her throbbing face.

‘Sometimes a little pain now can save a great deal later.’ Father Yarvi was already walking for the door, so Thorn tottered up and, still wondering if this was some trick, crept after him.

‘Thanks for your kindness,’ she muttered as she passed the key-keeper.

The woman glared back. ‘I hope you never need it again.’

‘No offence, but so do I.’ And Thorn followed Father Yarvi along the dim corridor and up the steps, blinking into the light.

He might have had one hand but his legs worked well enough, setting quite a pace as he stalked across the yard of the citadel, the breeze making the branches of the old cedar whisper above them.

‘I should speak to my mother—’ she said, hurrying to catch up.

‘I already have. I told her I had found you innocent of murder but you had sworn an oath to serve me.’

‘But … how did you know I’d—’

‘It is a minister’s place to know what people will do.’ Father Yarvi snorted. ‘As yet you are not too deep a well to fathom, Thorn Bathu.’

They passed beneath the Screaming Gate, out of the citadel and into the city, down from the great rock and towards Mother Sea. They went by switching steps and narrow ways, sloping steeply between tight-crammed houses and the people tight-crammed between them.

‘I’m not going on King Uthil’s raid, am I?’ A fool’s question, doubtless, but now Thorn stepped from Death’s shadow there was light enough to mourn her ruined dreams.

Father Yarvi was not in a mourning mood. ‘Be thankful you’re not going in the ground.’

They passed down the Street of Anvils, where Thorn had spent long hours gazing greedily at weapons like a beggar child at pastries. Where she had ridden on her father’s shoulders, giddy-proud as the smiths begged him to notice their work. But the bright metal set out before the forges only seemed to mock her now.

‘I’ll never be a warrior of Gettland.’ She said it soft and sorry, but Yarvi’s ears were sharp.

‘As long as you live, what you might come to be is in your own hands, first of all.’ The minister rubbed gently at some faded marks on his neck. ‘There is always a way, Queen Laithlin used to tell me.’

Thorn found herself walking a little taller at the name alone. Laithlin might not be a fighter, but Thorn could think of no one she admired more. ‘The Golden Queen is a woman no man dares take lightly,’ she said.

‘So she is.’ Yarvi looked at Thorn sidelong. ‘Learn to temper stubbornness with sense and maybe one day you will be the same.’

It seemed that day was still some way off. Wherever they passed people bowed, and muttered softly, ‘Father Yarvi,’ and stepped aside to give the minister of Gettland room, but shook their heads darkly at Thorn as she skulked after him, filthy and disgraced, through the gates of the city and out onto the swarming dockside. They wove between sailors and merchants from every nation around the Shattered Sea and some much further off, Thorn ducking under fishermen’s dripping nets and around their glittering, squirming catches.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

‘Skekenhouse.’

She stopped short, gaping, and was nearly knocked flat by a passing barrow. She had never in her life been further than a half-day’s walk from Thorlby.

‘Or you could stay here,’ Yarvi tossed over his shoulder. ‘They have the stones ready.’

She swallowed, then hurried again to catch him up. ‘I’ll come.’

‘You are as wise as you are beautiful, Thorn Bathu.’

That was either a double compliment or a double insult, and she suspected the latter. The old planks of a wharf clonked under their boots, salt water slapping at the green-furred supports below. A ship rocked beside it, small but sleek and with white-painted doves mounted at high prow and stern. Judging by the bright shields ranged down each side, it was manned and ready to sail.

‘We’re going now?’ she asked.

‘I am summoned by the High King.’

‘The High … King?’ She looked down at her clothes, stiff with dungeon filth, crusted with her blood and Edwal’s. ‘Can I change, at least?’

‘I have no time for your vanity.’

‘I stink.’

‘We will haul you behind the ship to wash away the reek.’

‘You will?’

The minister raised one brow at her. ‘You have no sense of humour, do you?’

‘Facing Death can sap your taste for jokes,’ she muttered.

‘That’s the time you need it most.’ A thickset old man was busy casting off the prow rope, and tossed it aboard as they walked up. ‘But don’t worry. Mother Sea will have given you more washing than you can stomach by the time we reach Skekenhouse.’ He was a fighter: Thorn could tell that from the way he stood, his broad face battered by weather and war.

‘The gods saw fit to take my strong left hand.’ Yarvi held up his twisted claw and wiggled the one finger. ‘But they gave me Rulf instead.’ He clapped it down on the old man’s meaty shoulder. ‘Though it hasn’t always been easy, I find myself content with the bargain.’

Rulf raised one tangled brow. ‘D’you want to know how I feel about it?’

‘No,’ said Yarvi, hopping aboard the ship. Thorn could only shrug at the grey-bearded warrior and hop after. ‘Welcome to the South Wind.’

She worked her mouth and spat over the side. ‘I don’t feel too welcome.’

Perhaps forty grizzled-looking oarsmen sat upon their sea-chests, glaring at her, and she had no doubts what they were thinking. What is this girl doing here?

‘Some ugly patterns keep repeating,’ she murmured.

Father Yarvi nodded. ‘Such is life. It is a rare mistake you make only once.’

‘Can I ask a question?’

‘I have the sense that if I said no, you would ask anyway.’

‘I’m not too deep a well to fathom, I reckon.’

‘Then speak.’

‘What am I doing here?’

‘Why, holy men and deep-cunning women have been asking that question for a thousand years and never come near an answer.’

‘Try talking to Brinyolf the Prayer-Weaver on the subject,’ grunted Rulf, pushing them clear of the wharf with the butt of a spear. ‘He’ll bore your ears off with his talk of whys and wherefores.’

‘Who is it indeed’, muttered Yarvi, frowning off towards the far horizon as though he could see the answers written in the clouds, ‘that can plumb the gods’ grand design? Might as well ask where the elves went!’ And the old man and the young grinned at each other. Plainly this act was not new to them.

‘Very good,’ said Thorn. ‘I mean, why have you brought me onto this ship?’

‘Ah.’ Yarvi turned to Rulf. ‘Why do you think, rather than taking the easy road and crushing her, I have endangered all our lives by bringing the notorious killer Thorn Bathu onto my ship?’

Rulf leaned on his spear a moment, scratching at his beard. ‘I’ve really no idea.’

Yarvi looked at Thorn with his eyes very wide. ‘If I don’t share my thinking with my own left hand, why ever would I share it with the likes of you? I mean to say, you stink.’

Thorn rubbed at her temples. ‘I need to sit down.’

Rulf put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. ‘I understand.’ He shoved her onto the nearest chest so hard she went squawking over the back of it and into the lap of the man behind. ‘This is your oar.’

FAMILY

‘You are late.’

Rin was right. Father Moon was smiling bright, and his children the stars twinkling on heaven’s cloth, and the narrow hovel was lit only by the embers of the fire when Brand ducked through the low doorway.

‘Sorry, sister.’ He went in a stoop to his bench and sank down with a long groan, worked his aching feet from his boots and spread his toes at the warmth. ‘But Harper had more peat to cut, then Old Fen needed help carrying some logs in. Wasn’t like she was chopping them herself, and her axe was blunt so I had to sharpen it, and on the way back Lem’s cart had broke an axle so a few of us helped out—’

‘Your trouble is you make everyone’s trouble your trouble.’

‘You help folk, maybe when you need it they’ll help you.’

‘Maybe.’ Rin nodded towards the pot sitting over the embers of the fire. ‘There’s dinner. The gods know, leaving some hasn’t been easy.’

He slapped her on the knee as he leaned to get it. ‘But bless you for it, sister.’ Brand was fearsome hungry, but he remembered to mutter a thanks to Father Earth for the food. He remembered how it felt to have none.

‘It’s good,’ he said, forcing it down.

‘It was better right after I cooked it.’

‘It’s still good.’

‘No, it’s not.’

He shrugged as he scraped the pot out, wishing there was more. ‘Things’ll be different now I’ve passed the tests. Folk come back rich from a raid like this one.’

‘Folk come to the forge before every raid telling us how rich they’re going to be. Sometimes they don’t come back.’

Brand grinned at her. ‘You won’t get rid of me that easily.’

‘I’m not aiming to. Fool though y’are, you’re all the family I’ve got.’ She dug something from behind her and held it out. A bundle of animal skin, stained and tattered.

‘For me?’ he said, reaching through the warmth above the dying fire for it.

‘To keep you company on your high adventures. To remind you of home. To remind you of your family. Such as it is.’