Half the World

III
LUCK

The gods knew, there’d been a stack of disappointments on that journey high as Brand’s head. Plenty of things sadly different from the tales whispered and the songs sung back in Thorlby. And plenty of things folk tended to leave out altogether.

The vast bogs about the mouth of the Denied, for one-clouds of stinging insects haunting banks of stinking sludge where they’d woken to gray mornings soaked with marshwater and bloated with itching bites.

The long coast of the Golden Sea, for another-mean little villages in mean little fences where Father Yarvi argued in strange tongues with shepherds whose faces were tanned to leather by the sun. Beaches of pebbles where the crew pitched rings of spitting torches and lay watching the night, startling at every sound, sure bandits were waiting just beyond the light.

The memory of the battle with the Horse People prowled in their wake, the face of the man Brand killed haunting his thoughts, the hammering of steel on wood finding him in his sleep.

“Your death comes!”

Jerking awake in the sticky darkness to nothing but the quick thud of his heart and the slow chirp of crickets. There was nothing in the songs about regrets.

The songs were silent on the boredom too. The oar, the oar, and the buckled shoreline grinding by, week after week. The homesickness, the worry for his sister, the weepy nostalgia for things he’d always thought he hated. Skifr’s endless barking and Thorn’s endless training and the endless beatings she gave out to every member of the crew and Brand especially. Father Yarvi’s endless answers to Koll’s endless questions about plants, and wounds, and politics, and history, and the path of Father Moon across the sky. The chafing, the sickness, the sunburn, the heat, the flies, the thirst, the stinking bodies, the worn-through seat of his trousers, Safrit’s rationing, Dosduvoi’s toothache, the thousand ways Fror got his scar, the bad food and the running arses, the endless petty arguments, the constant fear of every person they saw and, worst of all, the certain knowledge that, to get home, they’d have to suffer through every mile of it again the other way.

Yes, there’d been a stack of frustrations, hardships, hurts, and disappointments on that journey.

But the First of Cities exceeded every expectation.

It was built on a wide promontory that jutted miles out into the straits, covered from sea to sea with buildings of white stone, with proud towers and steep roofs, with lofty bridges and strong walls within strong walls. The Palace of the Empress stood on the highest point, gleaming domes clustered inside a fortress so massive it could have held the whole of Thorlby with room for two Roystocks left over.

The whole place blazed with lights, red and yellow and white, so many they tinged the blue evening clouds with welcoming pink and set a thousand thousand reflections dancing in the sea, where ships from every nation of the world swarmed like eager bees.

Perhaps they’d seen greater buildings up there on the silence of the Divine, but this was no elf-ruin but the work of men alone, no crumbling tomb to lost glories but a place of high hopes and mad dreams, bursting with life. Even this far distant Brand could hear the city’s call. A hum at the edge of his senses that set his very fingertips tingling.

Koll, who’d swarmed up the half-carved mast to cling to the yard for the best view, started flailing his arms and whooping like a madman. Safrit clutched her head below muttering, “I give up. I give up. He can plunge to his death if he wants to. Get down from there, you fool!”

“Did you ever see anything like it?” Brand whispered.

“There is nothing like it,” said Thorn, a crazy grin on a face grown leaner and tougher than ever. She had a long pale scar through the stubble on the shorn side of her head, and rings of red gold to go with the silver in her tangled hair, clipped from the coin Varoslaf had given her. A hell of an indulgence to wear gold on your head, Rulf had said, and Thorn had shrugged and said it was as good a place to keep your money as any.

Brand kept his own in a pouch around his neck. It was a new life for Rin, and he didn’t plan on losing that for anything.

“There she is, Rulf!” called Father Yarvi, clambering between the smiling oarsmen toward the steering platform. “I’ve a good feeling.”

“Me too,” said the helmsman, a cobweb of happy lines cracking the skin at the corners of his eyes.

Skifr frowned up at the wheeling birds. “Good feelings, maybe, but poor omens.” Her mood had never quite recovered from the battle on the Denied.

Father Yarvi ignored her. “We will speak to Theofora, the Empress of the South, and we will give her Queen Laithlin’s gift, and we shall see what we shall see.” He turned to face the crew, spreading his arms, tattered coat flapping in the breeze. “We’ve come a long and dangerous way, my friends! We’ve crossed half the world! But the end of the road is ahead!”

“The end of the road,” murmured Thorn as the crew gave a cheer, licking her cracked lips as if she was a drunk and the First of Cities a great jug of ale on the horizon.

Brand felt a childish rush of excitement and he splashed water from his flask all over them, spray sparkling as she slapped it away and shoved him off his sea-chest with her boot. He punched her on the shoulder, which these days was like punching a firmly-held shield, and she caught a fistful of his frayed shirt, the two of them falling in a laughing, snarling, sour-smelling wrestle in the bottom of the boat.

“Enough, barbarians,” said Rulf, wedging his foot between them and prying them apart. “You are in a civilized place, now! From here on we expect civilized behavior.”

The docks were one vast riot.

Folk shoved and tugged and tore at each other, lit by garish torchlight, the crowd surging like a thing alive as fights broke out, fists and even blades flashing above the crowd. Before a gate a ring of warriors stood, dressed in odd mail like fishes’ scales, snarling at the mob and occasionally beating at them with the butts of their spears.

“Thought this was a civilized place?” muttered Brand as Rulf guided the South Wind toward a wharf.

“The most civilized place in the world,” murmured Father Yarvi. “Though that mostly means folk prefer to stab each other in the back than the front.”

“Less chance of getting blood on your fine robe that way,” said Thorn, watching a man hurry down a wharf on tiptoe holding his silken skirts above his ankles.

A huge, fat boat, timbers green with rot, was listing badly in the harbor, half its oars clear of the water, evidently far overloaded and with panicked passengers crammed at its rail. While Brand pulled in his oar two jumped-or were pushed-and tumbled flailing into the sea. There was a haze of smoke on the air and a smell of charred wood, but stronger still was the stink of panic, strong as hay-reek and catching as the plague.

“This has the feel of poor luck!” called Dosduvoi as Brand clambered onto the wharf after Thorn.

“I’m no great believer in luck,” said Father Yarvi. “Only in good planning and bad. Only in deep cunning and shallow.” He strode to a grizzled northerner with a beard forked and knotted behind his neck, frowning balefully over the loading of a ship much like theirs.

“A good day to-” the minister began.

“I don’t think so!” the man bellowed over the din. “And you won’t find many who do!”

“We’re with the South Wind,” said Yarvi, “come down the Denied from Kalyiv.”

“I’m Ornulf, captain of the Mother Sun.” He nodded toward his weatherbeaten vessel. “Came down from Roystock two years hence. We were trading with the Alyuks in spring, and had as fine a cargo as you ever saw. Spices, and bottles, and beads, and treasures our womenfolk would’ve wept to see.” He bitterly shook his head. “We had a storehouse in the city and it was caught up in the fire last night. All gone. All lost.”

“I’m sorry for that,” said the minister. “Still, the gods left you your lives.”

“And we’re quitting this bloody place before we lose those too.”

Yarvi frowned at a particularly blood-curdling woman’s shriek. “Are things usually like this?”

“You haven’t heard?” asked Ornulf. “The Empress Theofora died last night.”

Brand stared at Thorn, and she gave a grimace and scratched at the scar on her scalp.

The news sucked a good deal of the vigor from Father Yarvi’s voice. “Who rules, then?”

“I hear her seventeen-year-old niece Vialine was enthroned as thirty-fifth Empress of the South this morning.” Ornulf snorted. “But I received no invitation to the happy event.”

“Who rules, then?” asked Yarvi, again.

The man’s eyes swiveled sideways. “For now, the mob. Folk taking it upon themselves to settle scores while the law sleeps.”

“Folk love a good score down here, I understand,” said Rulf.

“Oh, they hoard ’em up for generations. That’s how that fire got started, I hear, some merchant taking vengeance on another. I swear they could teach Grandmother Wexen a thing or two about old grudges here.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” muttered Father Yarvi.

“The young empress’s uncle, Duke Mikedas, is having a stab at taking charge. The city’s full of his warriors. Here to keep things calm, he says. While folk adjust.”

“To having him in power?”

Ornulf grunted. “I thought you were new here.”

“Wherever you go,” murmured the minister, “the powerful are the powerful.”

“Perhaps this duke’ll bring order,” said Brand, hopefully.

“Looks like it’d take five hundred swords just to bring order to the docks,” said Thorn, frowning toward the chaos.

“The duke has no shortage of swords,” said Ornulf, “but he’s no lover of northerners. If you’ve a license from the High King you’re among the flowers but the rest of us are getting out before we’re taxed to a stub or worse.”

Yarvi pressed his thin lips together. “The High King and I are not on the best of terms.”

“Then head north, friend, while you still can.”

“Head north now you’ll find yourself in Prince Varoslaf’s nets,” said Brand.

“He’s still fishing for crews?” Ornulf grabbed his forked beard with both fists as though he’d tear it from his jaw. “Gods damn it, so many wolves! How’s an honest thief to make a living?”

Yarvi passed him something and Brand saw the glint of silver. “If he has sense, he presents himself to Queen Laithlin of Gettland, and says her minister sent him.”

Ornulf stared down at his palm, then at Yarvi’s shrivelled hand, then up, eyes wide. “You’re Father Yarvi?”

“I am.” The line of warriors had begun to spread out from their gate, shoving folk ahead of them though there was nowhere to go. “And I have come for an audience with the empress.”

Rulf gave a heavy sigh. “Unless Theofora can hear you through the Last Door, it’ll have to be this Vialine we speak to.”

“The empress dies the very day we turn up,” Brand leaned close to mutter. “What do you think about luck now?”

Father Yarvi gave a long sigh as he watched a loaded cart heaved off the docks and into the sea, the uncoupled horse kicking out wildly, eyes rolling with terror. “I think we could use some.”