Half a King

They sat in silence, in the cold, in the darkness, as they had so many nights before. But, looking across by Father Moon’s pale light, Yarvi thought there was the rare hint of a smile at the corner of Sumael’s mouth.

He thought it suited her.

17

ONE FRIEND

Far north, now, the oarslaves dragged the South Wind, over the black sea with winter on the march. Snow fell often, settling on the roofs of the ship’s castles, across the shoulders of the shivering rowers, blowing smoke onto their numbed fingers with each stroke. All night the broken hull groaned. In the morning men leaned over the sides to crack ice from its wounded flanks. At sunset Shadikshirram would wander from her cabin wrapped in furs, eyes and nostrils rimmed with boozy pink, and say she didn’t think it overly cold.

“I try to keep love in my heart,” said Jaud, grasping with both hands at the soup Yarvi handed him. “But gods, I hate the North.”

“There’s nowhere more North than this,” answered Rulf, rubbing at the tips of his ears as he frowned out towards the white blanket of the coast.

Ankran, as usual, added nothing.

The sea was an ice-flecked emptiness, groups of lumpen seals watching them sadly from the rocky shoreline. They saw few other ships, and when they did Trigg glowered towards them, hand on his sword, until they were dots in the distance. However powerful the High King thought himself, his licence would not protect them out here.

“Most merchants lack the courage for these waters.” Shadikshirram wedged her boot carelessly on an oarsman’s leg, “but I am not most merchants.” Yarvi silently thanked the gods for that. “The Banyas who live out in this icy hell worship me as a goddess, for I bring pots and knives and iron tools which they treat like elf-magic, and ask only for pelts and amber which to them are so plentiful as to be next to worthless. They’ll do anything for me, poor brutes.” She rubbed her palms together with an eager hissing. “Here my best profits are made.”

And indeed the Banyas were waiting for the South Wind when she finally broke through the shore-ice to a slimy jetty at a gray beach. They made the Shends seem the height of civilization in Yarvi’s memory-all swathed in furs so they looked more bears or wolves than men, their shaggy faces pierced with splinters of polished bone and studs of amber, their bows fluttering with feathers and their clubs set with teeth. Yarvi wondered if they were human teeth, and decided people who scratched a living from this miserly land could afford to waste nothing.

“I will be four days away.” Shadikshirram vaulted over the ship’s side and clomped down the warped timbers of the jetty, the South Wind’s sailors following with her cargo lashed to clumsy sleds. “Trigg, you’re in charge!”

“She’ll be better’n when you left her!” the overseer called back with a grin.

“Four days of idleness,” Yarvi hissed as the last light stained the sky red, fretting at his thrall-collar with his withered thumb. Every night spent on this rotting tub it seemed to chafe him more.

“Patience.” Sumael spoke through closed teeth, scarred lips hardly moving, dark eyes on the guards, and on Trigg in particular. “A few weeks and we might be with your friends in Thorlby.” She turned her familiar frown on him. “You’d better have friends in Thorlby.”

“You’d be surprised who I know.” Yarvi wriggled down into his furs. “Trust me.”

She snorted. “Trust?”

Yarvi turned his back to her. Sumael might be spiky as a hedgehog but she was tough, and clever, and there was no one on this ship he would rather have had beside him. He needed an accomplice, not a friend, and she knew what to do and when.

He could see it as though it was already done. Every night he lulled himself to sleep with thoughts of it. The South Wind rocking gently at a wharf beneath the citadel of Thorlby. The guards snoring a drugged slumber beside their empty ale cups. The key turning smoothly in the lock. He and Sumael stealing together from the ship, chains muffled with rags, through the steep and darkened streets he knew so well, boot-printed slush on the cobbles, snow on the steep roofs.

He smiled as he pictured his mother’s face when she saw him. He smiled even more as he pictured Odem’s, just before he rammed the knife into his guts …

YARVI STABBED, AND CUT, and stabbed, his hands slippery hot with traitor’s blood and his uncle squealed like a slaughtered pig.

“The rightful King of Gettland!” came the shout and all applauded, none louder than Grom-gil-Gorm who smashed his great hands together with every squelch of the blade and Mother Scaer who shrieked and capered in her joy and turned into a cloud of clattering doves.

The squelching became a sucking and Yarvi looked over at his brother, white and cold on the slab. Isriun leaned over his face, kissing, kissing.

She smiled up at Yarvi through the shroud of her hanging hair. That smile. “I’ll expect a better kiss after your victory.”