Half a King

Yarvi stopped still as stone. Her shirt had come open at the collar and the chain slipped from it. Glinting on the furs beside her neck was the key to every lock on the ship.

He looked towards the door, open a crack, snow flitting outside. He opened the lamp and blew out the flame, and the room sank into darkness. It was an awful risk, but a man with time against him must sometimes throw the dice.

The wise wait for their moment, but never let it pass.

He inched to the bed, skin prickling. and slipped his fingerless hand under Shadikshirram’s head.

Gently, gently he lifted it, shocked at the dead weight, teeth clenched with the effort of moving so slowly. He winced as she twitched and snorted, sure her eyes would flick open, thinking of her heel smashing his face as it had smashed Ankran’s.

He took a breath and held it, reached across her for the key, caught by a gleam of Father Moon’s light from one of the narrow windows. He strained for it … but his itching fingertips came up just short.

There was a choking pressure around his neck. His chain had snagged on something. He turned, thinking to yank it free, and there in the doorway, jaw locked tight and Yarvi’s chain gripped firmly in both fists, stood Sumael.

For a moment they were frozen there. Then she began to reel him in.

He let Shadikshirram’s head fall as gently as he could, gripped the chain with his good hand and tried to drag it back, breath hissing. Sumael only pulled harder, the collar grinding into Yarvi’s neck, the links of the chain cutting into his hand, making him bite his lip to keep from crying out.

It was like the rope contest that the boys used to play on the beach in Thorlby, except only one of them had both hands and one end was around Yarvi’s neck.

He twisted and struggled but Sumael was too strong for him, and in silence she dragged him closer, and closer, his boots slipping on the floor, catching a bottle and sending it rolling, until in the end she caught him by the collar and hauled him out into the night, dragging him close.

“You damn fool!” she snarled in his face. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“What do you care?” he hissed back, her knuckles white around his collar and his knuckles white around her fist.

“I care if they change all the locks because you stole the key, idiot!”

There was a long pause, then, while they stared at each other in the darkness, and it settled on him just how very close they were. Close enough for him to see the angry creases at the bridge of her nose, to see her teeth gleaming through the notch in her lip, to feel her warmth. Close enough for him to smell her quick breath, a little sour, but none the worse for that. Close enough, almost, to kiss. It must have settled on her at the same moment, because she let go his collar as if it was hot, pulled away and twisted her wrist free of his grip.

He turned her words over, and looked at them this way and that, and the realization settled on him.

“Changing the locks would only bother someone who had a key already. Who found a way to copy a key, perhaps?” He sat down in his usual place, rubbing at the chafe marks and the half-healed burns on his neck with his good hand, tucking his bad one into the warmth of his armpit. “But the only reason a slave would need a key is to escape.”

“Shut your mouth!” She slid down beside him, and there was another pause. The snow drifted, settled upon her hair, across his knees.

It was not until he was giving up hope of her ever speaking again that she finally did, so softly he could scarcely hear it over the wind. “A slave with a key might free some other slaves. All of them, perhaps. In the confusion, who knows who might slip away?”

“A lot of blood could be spilled,” murmured Yarvi. “In the confusion, who knows whose? Far safer to put the guards to sleep.” Sumael looked sharply over at him, he could see the gleam of her eyes, the mist of her breath. “A slave who knew plants, and poured the guards’ ale and brought the captain’s wine might find a way.” A risk, he knew, but with her help things could be so much easier, and a man with time against him must sometimes throw the dice. “Perhaps two slaves together could achieve-”

“What one alone couldn’t,” she finished for him. “Best to slip from the ship while in port.”

Yarvi nodded. “I’d have thought so.” He’d been thinking about little else for days.

“Skekenhouse would be the best chance. The city’s busy but the guards are lazy, the captain and Trigg spend a lot of time off the ship-”

“Unless one had friends somewhere around the Shattered Sea.” He let the bait hang there.

She swallowed it whole. “Friends that might shelter a pair of escaped slaves?”

“Exactly. In, say … Thorlby?”

“The South Wind will be back through Thorlby within a month or two.” Yarvi could hear the excitement, squeaky in her whisper.

He could not keep it from his own. “As soon as that a slave with a key … and a slave who knew plants … could be free.”