Half a King

Afterwards Yarvi lay back with his hands on his full belly and his battered feet soaking in warm water and wondered when he was last this happy. Not taking yet another shameful beating in the training square, that was sure. Not hiding from his father’s slaps or wilting under his mother’s glare, for certain. Not even beside Mother Gundring’s fire. He lifted his head to look at the faces of his mismatched oarmates. Who would be worse off if he never went back? Surely an oath unfulfilled was not the same as an oath broken …

“Perhaps we should just stay here,” he murmured.

Sumael had a mocking twist at the corner of her mouth. “Who’d lead the people of Gettland to a brighter tomorrow then?”

“I’ve a feeling they’d get by. I could be king of this pond, and you my minister.”

“Mother Sumael?”

“You always know the right path. You could find me the lesser evil and the greater good.”

She snorted. “Those aren’t on any map. I need to piss.” And Yarvi watched her stride off into the long grass.

“I’ve a feeling you like her,” murmured Ankran.

Yarvi’s head jerked towards him. “Well … we all like her.”

“Of course,” said Jaud, grinning broadly. “We’d be lost without her. Literally.”

“But you,” Rulf grunted, eyes closed and hands clasped behind his head, “like her.”

Yarvi worked his mouth sourly, but found he could not deny it. “I have a crippled hand,” he muttered. “The rest of me still works.”

Ankran gave something close to a chuckle. “I’ve a feeling she likes you.”

“Me? She’s harder on me than anyone!”

“Exactly.” Rulf was smiling too as he wriggled his shoulders contentedly into the ground. “Ah, I remember what it was, to be young …”

“Yarvi?” Nothing was standing tall and stiff on a rock beside that spreading tree, showing no interest in who liked who and staring off the way they had come. “My eyes are old and yours are young. Is that smoke?”

Yarvi was almost glad of the distraction as he clambered up beside Nothing, squinting southwards. But the gladness did not last long. It rarely did. “I can’t tell,” he said. “Maybe.” Almost certainly. He could see faint smudges against the pale sky.

Sumael joined them, shading her eyes with one hand and giving no sign of liking anyone. Her jaw muscles tightened. “It’s coming from Shidwala’s steading.”

“Maybe they’ve made a bonfire,” said Rulf, but his smile was gone.

“Or Shadikshirram has,” said Nothing.

A good minister hopes always for the best, but prepares always for the worst. “We need to get up high,” said Yarvi. “See if anyone’s following.”

Nothing pursed his lips to gently blow a speck of dust from the bright blade of his sword. “You know she is.”

And she was.

Squinting through the strange round window of Sumael’s eyeglass from the rocky slope above the pool, Yarvi could see specks on the snow. Black specks moving, and the hope drained out of him like wine from a punctured skin. Where hope was concerned, he had long been a leaky vessel.

“I count two dozen,” said Sumael. “Banyas I think, and some of the sailors from the South Wind. They have dogs and they have sleds and more than likely are well armed.”

“And intent on our destruction,” muttered Yarvi.

“That or they’re very, very keen to wish us well on our journey,” said Rulf.

Yarvi lowered the eyeglass. It was hard to imagine they had been laughing just an hour before. His friends’ faces were back in the drawn and worried shapes which had become so wearyingly familiar.

Apart from Nothing, of course, who looked precisely as mad as he always did.

“How far back are they?”

“My guess is sixteen miles,” said Sumael.

Yarvi was used to counting her guesses as facts. “How long will it take them to cover that?”

Her lips moved silently as she worked through the sums. “Pushing hard with sleds, they might be here at first light tomorrow.”

“Then we’d better not be,” said Ankran.

“No.” Yarvi looked away from his placid little kingdom, up the hill of bare scree and shattered rock above. “In the hot land their sleds will be no help.”

Nothing frowned into the white sky, scratching at his neck with the backs of his filthy fingernails. “Sooner or later, steel must be the answer. It always is.”

“Later, then,” said Yarvi, hefting his pack. “Now, we run.”

24

RUNNING

They ran.

Or they jogged. Or they waddled, and stumbled, and shuffled over a hellish landscape of blasted stone where not a plant grew or a bird flew, Father Earth tortured into a hot waste as empty of life as the cold had been.

“The winds of fate have blown me to some glamorous places of late,” mused Ankran as they crested a ridge and stared out at another vista of smoking rock.

“Are they still following?” asked Jaud.

“Hard to see men in this broken country.” Sumael peered through her eyeglass to scan the desolation behind them, which was misted with stinking steam. “Especially ones who’d rather not be seen.”