Half a War

For Both of Us

Raith woke with a mad jolt to find someone pawing at him.

He grabbed that bastard around the throat and slammed him against the wall, snarling as he whipped his knife out.

‘Gods, Raith! It’s me! It’s me!’

Wasn’t until then Raith saw, in the flickering light of the torch just down the corridor, that he’d got his brother pinned and was about to cut his throat.

His heart was hammering. Took him a moment to work out he was in the citadel in Thorlby. In the corridor outside Gorm’s door, tangled with his blanket. Just where he was meant to be.

‘Don’t wake me like that,’ he snapped, forcing the fingers of his left hand open. They always ached worst just after he woke.

‘Wake you?’ whispered Rakki. ‘You would’ve woken the whole of Thorlby the way you were shouting out. You dreaming again?’

‘No,’ grunted Raith, sitting back against the wall and scrubbing at the sides of his head with his nails. ‘Maybe.’ Dreams full of fire. The smoke pouring up and the stink of destruction. Mad light in the eyes of the warriors, the eyes of the dogs. Mad light on that woman’s face. Her voice, as she shrieked for her children.

Rakki offered him a flask and Raith snatched it from him, rinsed out his mouth, cut and sore inside and out from Gorm’s slaps, but that was nothing new. He sloshed water into his hand, rubbed it over his face. He was cold with sweat all over.

‘I don’t like this, Raith. I’m worried for you.’

‘You, worried for me?’ Gorm’s sword must’ve been knocked clear in the scuffle, and Raith took it up, hugged it to his chest. If the king saw he’d let it lie in the cold he’d get another slap, and maybe worse. ‘That’s a new one.’

‘No, it isn’t. I’ve been worried for you a long time.’ Rakki glanced nervously towards the door of the king’s chamber, let his voice drop soft and eager as he leaned forward. ‘We could just go. We could find a ship to take us down the Divine and the Denied, like you always talk of. Like you used to talk of, anyway.’

Raith nodded towards the door. ‘You think he’d let us just go? You think Mother Scaer would wave us off smiling?’ He snorted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the clever one. It’s a pretty dream, but there’s no going back. You forgotten what things were like before? Being hungry, and cold, and afraid all the time?’

‘You’re not afraid all the time?’ Rakki’s voice was so small it brought Raith’s anger boiling up and chased the terror of his dreams away. Anger was the answer to most problems, when it came to it.

‘No I’m not!’ he snarled, shaking Gorm’s sword and making his brother flinch. ‘I’m a warrior, and I’m going to win a name for myself in this war, and enough ring-money we’ll never be hungry again. This is my right place. Fought for it, haven’t I?’

‘Aye, you’ve fought for it.’

‘We serve a king!’ Raith tried to feel the same pride he used to. ‘The greatest warrior in the Shattered Sea. Unbeaten in duel or battle. You like to pray. Give thanks to Mother War that we stand with the winners!’

Rakki stared at him across the hallway, his back against Gorm’s war-scarred shield, his eyes wide and glistening with the torchlight. Strange, how his face could be so like Raith’s but his expression so different. Sometimes seemed they were two prow-beasts carved alike, forever stuck to the same ship but always looking opposite ways.

‘There’s going to be killing,’ he muttered. ‘More than ever.’

‘Reckon so,’ said Raith, and he lay down, turning his back on his brother, hugging Gorm’s sword against him and drawing the blanket over his shoulder. ‘It’s a war, ain’t it?’

‘I just don’t like killing.’

Raith tried to sound like it was nothing, and couldn’t quite get there. ‘I can kill for both of us.’

A silence. ‘That’s what scares me.’