Half a War

Clever Hands

Koll tapped out the last rune and smiled as he blew a puff of wood-dust away. The scabbard was finished, and he was good and proud of the outcome.

He’d always loved working with wood, which kept no secrets and told no lies and having been carved never came uncarved. Not like minister’s work, all smoke and guesses. Words were trickier tools than chisels, and people changeable as Mother Sea.

His back prickled as Rin reached around his shoulder, tracing one of the lines of runes with a fingertip. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Five names of Mother War.’

‘Gods, it’s fine work.’ Her hand slid down the dark wood, lingering on the carved figures, and animals, and trees, all flowing one into another. ‘You’ve got clever hands, Koll. None cleverer.’

She slipped the chape she’d made onto the scabbard’s point, bright steel hammered to look like a serpent’s head, fitting his work as perfectly as a key fits a lock. ‘Look at the beautiful things we can make together.’ Her iron-blackened fingers slid into the gaps between his wood-browned ones. ‘Meant to be, isn’t it? My sword. Your sheath.’ He felt her other hand sliding across his thigh and gave a little shiver. ‘And the other way around …’

‘Rin-’

‘All right, more dagger than sword.’ He could hear the laughter in her voice, could feel it tickling his neck. He loved it when she laughed.

‘Rin, I can’t. Brand’s like a brother to me-’

‘Don’t lie with Brand. Problem solved.’

‘I’m Father Yarvi’s apprentice.’

‘Don’t lie with Father Yarvi.’ He felt her lips brush his neck and send a sweaty shudder down his back.

‘He saved my mother’s life. Saved my life. He set us free.’

Her lips were at his ear now, her whisper so loud it made him hunch his shoulders, the weights rattling on their thong around his neck. ‘How did he set you free if you can’t make your own choices?’

‘I owe him, Rin.’ He could feel her chest pressing against his back with each breath. Her fingers had curled round to grip his hand tight. She was as strong as he was. Stronger, probably. He had to shut his eyes to think straight. ‘When this war’s done I’ll take the Minister’s Test, and swear the Minister’s Oath, and I’ll be Brother Koll, and have no family, no wife- ah.’

Her hand slid down between his legs. ‘Till then what’s stopping you?’

‘Nothing.’ He twisted around, pushing his free hand into her short-chopped hair and dragging her close. They laughed and kissed at once, hungrily, sloppily, stumbling against a bench and knocking a clutch of tools clattering across the floor.

It always ended up this way when he came here. That was why he kept coming.

Slick as a salmon she twisted free of him, darted to the clamp and snatched up her whetstone, peering down at the blade she was working on as if she’d done nothing else all morning.

Koll blinked. ‘What are-’

The door clattered open and Brand walked in, Koll marooned in the middle of the floor with a great tent in his trousers.

‘Hey, Koll,’ said Brand. ‘What’re you doing here?’

‘Came to finish the scabbard,’ he croaked, face burning as he turned quickly back to his table and brushed some shavings onto the floor.

‘Let’s see it.’ Brand put an arm around Koll’s shoulder. Gods, it was a big arm, heavy with muscle, rope scar coiling up the wrist. Koll remembered seeing Brand take the weight of a ship across his shoulders, a ship that had been on the point of crushing Koll dead, as it happened. Then he wondered what it’d be like getting punched by that arm if Brand found out everything his sister and Koll were up to. He swallowed with more than a little difficulty.

But Brand only pushed the stray hair out of his face and grinned. ‘Beautiful work. You’re blessed, Koll. Same gods as blessed my sister.’

‘She’s … a deeply spiritual girl.’ Koll shifted awkwardly to get his trousers settled while Rin stuck her lips out in a mad pout behind her brother’s back.

Gods, Brand was oblivious. Strong and loyal and good humoured as a cart-horse, but for obliviousness he set new standards. Probably you couldn’t be married to Thorn Bathu without learning to let a lot of things drift past.

‘How’s Thorn?’ asked Koll, aiming at a distraction.

Brand paused as if that was a puzzle that took considerable thought. ‘Thorn is Thorn. But I knew that when I married her.’ He gave Koll that helpless grin of his. ‘Wouldn’t have it any other way.’

‘Can’t be the easiest person to live with.’

‘I’ll let you know if it happens. She’s half her time with the queen and half the rest training harder than ever, so I tend to get her asleep or ready to argue.’ He scratched wearily at the back of his head. ‘Still, I knew that when I married her too.’

‘Can’t be the easiest person not to live with.’

‘Huh.’ Brand stared off into space like a veteran still struggling to make sense of the horrors he’d seen. ‘She surely can cook a fight from the most peaceful ingredients. But nothing worth doing is easy. I love her in spite of it. I love her because of it. I love her.’ And his face broke out in that grin again. ‘Every day’s a new adventure, that’s for sure.’

There was a harsh knocking at the door and Brand shook himself and went to answer. Rin mimed blowing a kiss and Koll mimed clutching it to his heart and Rin mimed puking all over her work-bench. He loved it when she did that.

‘Good to see you, Brand.’ Koll looked up, surprised to see his master in Rin’s forge.

‘Likewise, Father Yarvi.’

You get a special kind of kinship when you take a long journey with a man, and though Brand and Yarvi could hardly have been less alike they hugged each other, and the minister slapped the smith’s broad back affectionately with his withered hand.

‘How are things in the blade business?’ he called to Rin.

‘Men always need good blades, Father Yarvi,’ she said. ‘And the word business?’

‘Men always need good words too.’ The minister traded his smile for the usual sternness when he looked at Koll. ‘I had a feeling you’d be here. It’s past midday.’

‘Already?’ Koll pulled his apron off, got caught in the straps, tore free and tossed it down, slapping the wood dust from his hands.

‘Usually the apprentice comes to the master.’ The tip of the minister’s elf-metal staff rang against the floor as he walked over. ‘You are my apprentice, aren’t you?’

‘Of course, Father Yarvi,’ said Koll, shifting guiltily away from Rin.

Yarvi narrowed his eyes as he glanced from one of them to the other, plainly missing nothing. Few men were less oblivious than he. ‘Tell me you fed the doves.’

‘And cleaned out their cages, and sorted the new herbs, and read twenty more pages of Mother Gundring’s history of Gettland, and learned fifty words in the tongue of Kalyiv.’ Koll’s endless questions had always driven his mother mad, but studying for the Ministry he had so many answers he felt his head was going to burst.

‘The food of fear is ignorance, Koll. The death of fear is knowledge. What about the movements of the stars? Did you copy the charts I gave you?’

Koll clutched at his head. ‘Gods, I’m sorry, Father Yarvi. I’ll do it later.’

‘Not today. The great moot begins in an hour and there is a cargo that needs unloading first.’

Koll looked hopefully at Brand. ‘I’m not much at shifting boxes-’

‘Jars. And they need shifting very carefully. A gift from the Empress Vialine, brought all the way up the Denied and the Divine.’

‘A gift from Sumael, you mean?’ said Brand.

‘A gift from Sumael.’ Father Yarvi had a faraway grin at the name. ‘A weapon for us to use against the High King …’ He trailed off as he stepped between Koll and Rin, balanced his staff in the crook of his arm and with his good hand lifted up the scabbard, turning it to the light to peer at the carvings.

‘Mother War,’ he murmured. ‘Mother of Crows. She Whose Feathers Are Swords. She Who Gathers the Dead. She Who Makes the Open Hand a Fist. Did you carve this?’

‘Who else is good enough?’ asked Rin. ‘Scabbard’s just as important as the blade. A good sword’s rarely drawn. It’s this folk’ll see.’

‘When you finally swear your Minister’s Oath, Koll, it will be a loss to wood-carving.’ Yarvi gave a weighty sigh. ‘But you cannot change the world with a chisel.’

‘You can change it a little,’ said Rin, folding her arms as she looked up at the minister. ‘And for the better.’

‘His mother asked me to make him the best man he could be.’

Koll shook his head frantically behind his master’s back, but Rin was not to be shut up. ‘Some of us quite like the man he is,’ she said.

‘And is that all you want, Koll? To carve wood?’ Father Yarvi tossed the scabbard rattling down on the bench and put his withered hand on Koll’s shoulder. ‘Or do you want to stand at the shoulder of kings, and guide the course of history?’

Koll blinked from one of them to the other. Gods, he didn’t want to let either of them down, but what could he do? Father Yarvi set him free. And what slave’s son wouldn’t want to stand at the shoulder of kings and be safe, and respected, and powerful?

‘History,’ he muttered, looking guiltily at the floor. ‘I reckon …’