Half a War

Brave Work

No doubt a woman should be tearful with relief when her betrothed comes back alive from battle, but Skara found herself dry-eyed when the Breaker of Swords was the first through the little gate.

His great shield had a broken shaft stuck in it near the rim, but otherwise he was unhurt. He slapped the arrow out, looked around as if for someone to hand the shield to, then frowned.

‘Huh.’ And he set it down against the wall.

Skara forced a smile onto her face. ‘I am glad to see you returned, my king.’ Though there were others she would rather have greeted.

‘In truth I am glad to be back, Queen Skara. Fighting at night is little fun. We brought down their mine, however.’

‘Thank the gods. What happens now?’

He smiled, teeth white in his ash-blacked face. ‘Now they dig another.’

Men were straggling back into the fortress. All exhausted. Several hurt. Mother Owd started forward to help, Rin squatting beside her with some heavy pincers, already cutting a man’s bloody jerkin open around a wound.

‘Where is Raith?’

‘He was with his brother in the tunnel when the oil caught fire.’ A thrall had brought Gorm water and he was wiping the ash from his face.

Skara could hardly speak her throat was suddenly so closed up. ‘He’s dead?’

Gorm gave a grim nod. ‘I taught him to fight, and kill, and die, and now he has done all three.’

‘Only two,’ she said, with a surge of relief that made her head spin.

Raith came shuffling from the shadows, his hair caked with dirt and his bloody teeth gritted, one arm over Blue Jenner’s shoulder.

‘Huh.’ Gorm raised his brows. ‘He always was the tough one.’

Skara darted forward, caught Raith by his elbow. His sleeve was ripped, scorched, strangely blistered. Then she realized to her horror it was not his sleeve, but his skin. ‘Gods, your arm! Mother Owd!’

Raith hardly seemed to notice. ‘Rakki’s dead,’ he whispered.

A slave had brought Gorm a bowl of meat fresh off the spit. The similarity between it and Raith’s arm as Mother Owd peeled the burned cloth away made Skara’s gorge rise.

But if the Breaker of Swords had any fears at all, he did not keep them in his stomach. ‘Fighting always gives me quite an appetite,’ he said around a mouthful of meat, spraying grease. ‘All in all, Mother War favoured us tonight.’

‘What about Rakki?’ snarled Raith, Owd hissing with annoyance as he jerked his half-bandaged arm from her hands.

‘I shall remember him fondly. Unlike others, he proved his loyalty.’

Skara saw the tendons starting from Raith’s fist as it clenched around his axe-haft, and she slipped quickly in front of him.

‘Your chain, my king.’ Lifting that rattling mass of dead men’s pommels up was such an effort her arms trembled.

Gorm stooped to duck his head inside and it brought them closer than they had ever been, her hands behind his neck, almost an awkward embrace. He had a damp-fur smell like the hounds her grandfather had kept.

‘It has grown long over the years,’ he said as he straightened.

This close he seemed bigger than ever. The top of her head could scarcely have reached his neck. Would she need to carry a step with her to kiss her husband? She might have laughed at the thought another time. She did not feel much like laughing then.

‘It was an honour to hold it.’ She wanted very much to back away but knew she could not, dropped her hands to arrange the gaudy, ghastly mementoes on his chest.

‘When we are married, I will cut off a length for you to wear.’

She blinked up at him, cold all over. A chain of dead men to be forever tethered with. ‘I have not earned the right,’ she croaked out.

‘No false modesty, please! Only half a war is fought with swords, my queen, and you have fought the other half with skill and courage.’ He was smiling as he turned away. ‘There will be hundreds dead for your brave work.’

Skara jerked awake, clutching at the furs on her bed, ears straining at the silence.

Nothing.

She hardly slept now. Two or three times every night Bright Yilling’s warriors would come.

They had tried to swim into the harbour, brave men fighting the surging waves in the darkness. But sentries on the towers above had riddled them with arrows, left their bodies tangled on the chains across the entrance.

They had charged up with a felled tree shod in iron as a ram, brave men holding shields above, and made a din upon the gates to wake the dead. But the gates had hardly been scratched.

They had shot swarms of burning arrows over the walls to fall on the yard like tiny shooting stars in the night. They had bounced harmless from flagstones and slates but some had caught among the thatch. Skara’s chest was sore from the billowing smoke, her voice cracked from shrieking orders to soak the roofs, her hands raw from dragging buckets from the well. The stables where she had first saddled a pony as a girl were a scorched shell, but they had managed to stop the fire from spreading.

In the end she had climbed to the walls, soot-smudged but triumphant to shriek, ‘thanks for the arrows!’ at the High King’s retreating bowmen.

By fire or by water, over the walls or under, nothing had worked. Bail’s Point was the strongest fortress in the Shattered Sea, its defenders the picked warriors of three warrior nations. Bright Yilling lost twenty to every one of theirs.

And yet the reinforcements kept coming. Every morning Mother Sun rose upon more warriors of Yutmark, Inglefold and the Lowlands. More mad-eyed, bone-pierced, painted Shends. More ships outside the harbour, stopping any help from coming to the defenders. Their spirits might be buoyed by little victories, but the terrible arithmetic had only worsened. Mother Owd’s cellars overflowed with wounded. Twice they had sent boats drifting out with crews of dead to burn upon the water.

Skara felt as if they were digging ditches to stop the tide. You might keep out one wave. You might keep out ten. But the tide always wins.

She gave an acid burp, choked back sick and swung her legs from the bed, pushed her head into her hands and gave a long growl.

She was a queen. Her blood worth more than gold. She had to hide her fear and show her deep-cunning.She could not use a sword, so she had to fight theother half of the war, and fight it better than Bright Yilling. Better than Father Yarvi and Mother Scaer too. There were people looking to her. People who had gambled their futures on her. She was hedged in by the hopes and needs and expectations of the living and the dead as if she slipped through a maze of thorns. A dozen opinions to consider and a hundred lessons to remember and a thousand proper things that had to be done and ten thousand improper ones she could never contemplate …

Her eyes slid to the door. On the other side, she knew, Raith would be sleeping. Or lying awake.

She did not know what she felt for him. But she knew she had never felt it for anyone else. She remembered the cold shock when she had thought him dead. The warm relief when she had seen him living. The spark of heat when their eyes met. The strength she felt when he was beside her. Her head knew he was a wretched match in every possible way.

But the rest of her felt otherwise.

She stood, heart thudding as she padded across the floor, stone cold against her bare feet. She glanced towards the little room where her thrall slept, but she would have better sense than to meddle in her mistress’s business.

Her hand froze just short of the door, fingertips tingling.

His brother was dead. She told herself he needed her, when she knew she needed him. Needed to forget her duty. Needed to forget her land and her people and have something for herself. Needed to know what it felt like to be kissed, and held, and wanted by someone she chose, before it was too late.

Mother Kyre would have torn her hair out at the thought of it, but Mother Kyre was gone through the Last Door. Now, in the night, with Death scratching at the walls, what was proper no longer seemed so important.

Skara slid the bolt back with trembling fingers, biting at her lip with the need to stay silent.

Gently, gently, she eased open her door.