Half a King

They spilled from the stone building like bees from a broken hive. He counted seven, each well-wrapped in furs, each with a spear. Three of them had stone points rather than metal, but all were gripped with grim purpose. Silently they rushed to make half a circle around him, spears pointing in.

All Yarvi could do was lift his hands, empty apart from their swaddlings of filthy sailcloth, send up a silent prayer to Father Peace and croak out, “I need your help.”

The figure in the center planted their spear butt-down in the snow, and walked slowly up to Yarvi. She pushed her hood back to show a shag of yellow-gray hair and a face deep-lined, worn by work and weather. For a moment, she studied him.

Then she stepped forward and, before Yarvi could cringe away, threw her arms about him and hugged him tight.

“I am Shidwala,” she said in the Tongue. “Are you alone?”

“No,” he whispered, fighting to hold back his tears of relief. “My oarmates are with me.”

THE INSIDE OF THE HOUSE was low, and narrow, and stank of sweat and woodsmoke, and it seemed a palace. An oily stew of roots and mutton was doled out from a blackened pot into a wooden bowl polished with years of use. Yarvi dug into it with his fingers and had never tasted anything finer. Benches followed the curving walls, and Yarvi and his friends sat on one side of the sizzling firepit and their hosts on the other-Shidwala, and four men he took to be her sons, and the boy from the ice pool, who stared at Sumael and Jaud as if they were elves stepped out of legend.

Back in Thorlby, these people would have seemed beyond poor. Now the room was crammed with riches. Tools of wood and bone were bracketed on the walls, cunning instruments for hunting, and fishing, and digging shelter, and teasing a living from the ice, skins of wolf and goat and bear and seal on every surface. One of the hosts, a man with a thick brown beard, scraped out the pot to hand Jaud a second bowl, and the big man nodded his thanks and started to stuff it in, eyes closed in ecstasy.

Ankran leaned close to him. “I think we have eaten all their dinner.”

Jaud froze with his fingers in his mouth and the bearded man laughed and leaned across the fire to clap him on the shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” said Yarvi, putting his own bowl aside.

“You are hungrier than us, I think,” said Shidwala. They spoke the Tongue with a strange accent. “And also remarkably far from your way.”

“We are heading to Vulsgard from the land of the Banyas,” said Ankran.

The woman considered that a moment. “Then you are remarkably close to your way, but I find your way a very strange one.”

Yarvi could only agree with that. “If we had known the hardship of it, we might have chosen another.”

“So it is with many choices.”

“All we can do now is see it through.”

“So it is with many choices.”

Nothing leaned close to Yarvi and whispered in his ground-down stub of a voice. “I do not trust them.”

“He wants to thank you for your hospitality,” said Yarvi, quickly.

“We all do,” said Ankran. “You, and the gods of your house.”

Yarvi brushed ashes from the prayer stone that was set into the hearth and read the runes there. “And She Who Breathes Out the Snows.”

“Well said and well reckoned.” Shidwala narrowed her eyes. “Where you come from she is a small god, eh?”

Yarvi nodded. “But here a tall one, I think.”

“Like many things, gods seem bigger when you are closer to them. Here, She Who Breathes Out the Snows is ever at our elbows.”

“She shall have our first prayers waking,” said Ankran.

“Wise,” said Shidwala.

“And you’ll have our second,” said Yarvi. “You’ve saved our lives.”

“Here all the living must be friends.” She smiled, and the deep creases in her face reminded Yarvi of Mother Gundring, and for a moment he was sick for home. “The winter is enemy enough for all of us.”

“We know it.” Yarvi looked over at Sumael, hunched close to the fire with her eyes shut, rocking gently with a blanket about her shoulders. Most of the color had come back to her face.

“You could wait with us, until winter passes.”

“I cannot,” said Ankran, voice cracking as he set his jaw hard. “I must get to my family.”

“And I to mine,” said Yarvi, though his pressing need was to kill one of his rather than save them. “We must go on, but there are many things we need …”

Shidwala took in their wretched state and raised her brows. “Indeed there are. We would happily trade.”

At the word “trade” Shidwala’s sons smiled, and nodded their approval.

Yarvi glanced at Ankran, and Ankran spread his empty palms. “We have nothing to trade.”

“There is the sword.”

Nothing frowned even harder, cradled the blade a little closer, and Yarvi was painfully aware he had been happy to kill these people a few moments before.

“He will not part with it,” said Yarvi.

“There is one thing I could make good use of.” The man with the brown beard was staring across the fire at Sumael.

Jaud stiffened, and Rulf gave an unhappy grunt, and Ankran’s voice had a harsh edge when he spoke. “We will not sell one of our own. Not at any price.”