Half the World

JUSTICE

Thorn sat and stared down at her filthy toes, pale as maggots in the darkness.

She had no notion why they took her boots. She was hardly going to run, chained by her left ankle to one damp-oozing wall and her right wrist to the other. She could scarcely reach the gate of her cell, let alone rip it from its hinges. Apart from picking the scabs under her broken nose till they bled, all she could do was sit and think.

Her two least favorite activities.

She heaved in a ragged breath. Gods, the place stank. The rotten straw and the rat droppings stank and the bucket they never bothered to empty stank and the mold and rusting iron stank and after two nights in there she stank worst of all.

Any other day she would’ve been swimming in the bay, fighting Mother Sea, or climbing the cliffs, fighting Father Earth, or running or rowing or practicing with her father’s old sword in the yard of their house, fighting the blade-scarred posts and pretending they were Gettland’s enemies as the splinters flew-Grom-gil-Gorm, or Styr of the Islands, or even the High King himself.

But she would swing no sword today. She was starting to think she had swung her last. It seemed a long, hard way from fair. But then, as Hunnan said, fair wasn’t a thing a warrior could rely on.

“You’ve a visitor,” said the key-keeper, a weighty lump of a woman with a dozen rattling chains about her neck and a face like a bag of axes. “But you’ll have to make it quick.” And she hauled the heavy door squealing open.

“Hild!”

This once Thorn didn’t tell her mother she’d given that name up at six years old, when she pricked her father with his own dagger and he called her “thorn.” It took all the strength she had to unfold her legs and stand, sore and tired and suddenly, pointlessly ashamed of the state she was in. Even if she hardly cared for how things looked, she knew her mother did.

When Thorn shuffled into the light her mother pressed one pale hand to her mouth. “Gods, what did they do to you?”

Thorn waved at her face, chains rattling. “This happened in the square.”

Her mother came close to the bars, eyes rimmed with weepy pink. “They say you murdered a boy.”

“It wasn’t murder.”

“You killed a boy, though?”

Thorn swallowed, dry throat clicking. “Edwal.”

“Gods,” whispered her mother again, lip trembling. “Oh, gods, Hild, why couldn’t you …”

“Be someone else?” Thorn finished for her. Someone easy, someone normal. A daughter who wanted to wield nothing weightier than a needle, dress in southern silk instead of mail and harbor no dreams beyond wearing some rich man’s key.

“I saw this coming,” said her mother, bitterly. “Ever since you went to the square. Ever since we saw your father dead, I saw this coming.”

Thorn felt her cheek twitch. “You can take comfort in how right you were.”

“You think there’s any comfort for me in this? They say they’re going to crush my only child with stones!”

Thorn felt cold then, very cold. It was an effort to take a breath. As though they were piling the rocks on her already. “Who said?”

“Everyone says.”

“Father Yarvi?” The minister spoke the law. The minister would speak the judgment.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not yet.”

Not yet, that was the limit of her hopes. Thorn felt so weak she could hardly grip the bars. She was used to wearing a brave face, however scared she was. But Death is a hard mistress to face bravely. The hardest.

“You’d best go.” The key-keeper started to pull Thorn’s mother away.

“I’ll pray,” she called, tears streaking her face. “I’ll pray to Father Peace for you!”

Thorn wanted to say, “Damn Father Peace,” but she could not find the breath. She had given up on the gods when they let her father die in spite of all her prayers, but a miracle was looking like her best chance.

“Sorry,” said the key-keeper, shouldering shut the door.

“Not near as sorry as me.” Thorn closed her eyes and let her forehead fall against the bars, squeezed hard at the pouch under her dirty shirt. The pouch that held her father’s fingerbones.

We don’t get much time, and time feeling sorry for yourself is time wasted. She kept every word he’d said close to her heart, but if there’d ever been a moment for feeling sorry for herself, this had to be the one. Hardly seemed like justice. Hardly seemed fair. But try telling Edwal about fair. However you shared out the blame, she’d killed him. Wasn’t his blood crusted up her sleeve?

She’d killed Edwal. Now they’d kill her.

She heard talking, faint beyond the door. Her mother’s voice-pleading, wheedling, weeping. Then a man’s, cold and level. She couldn’t quite catch the words, but they sounded like hard ones. She flinched as the door opened, jerking back into the darkness of her cell, and Father Yarvi stepped over the threshold.

He was a strange one. A man in a minister’s place was almost as rare as a woman in the training square. He was only a few years Thorn’s elder but he had an old eye. An eye that had seen things. They told strange stories of him. That he had sat in the Black Chair, but given it up. That he had sworn a deep-rooted oath of vengeance. That he had killed his Uncle Odem with the curved sword he always wore. They said he was cunning as Father Moon, a man rarely to be trusted and never to be crossed. And in his hands-or in his one good one, for the other was a crooked lump-her life now rested.

“Thorn Bathu,” he said. “You are named a murderer.”

All she could do was nod, her breath coming fast.

“Have you anything to say?”

Perhaps she should’ve spat her defiance. Laughed at Death. They said that was what her father did, when he lay bleeding his last at the feet of Grom-gil-Gorm. But all she wanted was to live.

“I didn’t mean to kill him,” she gurgled up. “Master Hunnan set three of them on me. It wasn’t murder!”

“A fine distinction to Edwal.”

True enough, she knew. She was blinking back tears, shamed at her own cowardice, but couldn’t help it. How she wished she’d never gone to the square now, and learned to smile well and count coins like her mother always wanted. But you’ll buy nothing with wishes.

“Please, Father Yarvi, give me a chance.” She looked into his calm, cold, gray-blue eyes. “I’ll take any punishment. I’ll do any penance. I swear it!”

He raised one pale brow. “You should be careful what oaths you make, Thorn. Each one is a chain about you. I swore to be revenged on the killers of my father and the oath still weighs heavy on me. That one might come to weigh heavy on you.”

“Heavier than the stones they’ll crush me with?” She held her open palms out, as close to him as the chains would allow. “I swear a sun-oath and a moon-oath. I’ll do whatever service you think fit.”

The minister frowned at her dirty hands, reaching, reaching. He frowned at the desperate tears leaking down her face. He cocked his head slowly on one side, as though he was a merchant judging her value. Finally he gave a long, unhappy sigh. “Oh, very well.”

There was a silence then, while Thorn turned over what he’d said. “You’re not going to crush me with stones?”

He waved his crippled hand so the one finger flopped back and forth. “I have trouble lifting the big ones.”

More silence, long enough for relief to give way to suspicion. “So … what’s the sentence?”

“I’ll think of something. Release her.”

The jailer sucked her teeth as if opening any lock left a wound, but did as she was bid. Thorn rubbed at the chafe-marks the iron cuff left on her wrist, feeling strangely light without its weight. So light she wondered if she was dreaming. She squeezed her eyes shut, then grunted as the key-keeper tossed her boots over and they hit her in the belly. Not a dream, then.

She couldn’t stop herself smiling as she pulled them on.

“Your nose looks broken,” said Father Yarvi.

“Not the first time.” If she got away from this with no worse than a broken nose she would count herself blessed indeed.

“Let me see.”

A minister was a healer first, so Thorn didn’t flinch when he came close, prodded gently at the bones under her eyes, brow wrinkled with concentration.

“Ah,” she muttered.

“Sorry, did that hurt?”

“Just a litt-”

He jabbed one finger up her nostril, pressing his thumb mercilessly into the bridge of her nose. Thorn gasped, forced down onto her knees, there was a crack and a white-hot pain in her face, tears flooding more freely than ever.

“That got it,” he said, wiping his hand on her shirt.

“Gods!” she whimpered, clutching her throbbing face.

“Sometimes a little pain now can save a great deal later.” Father Yarvi was already walking for the door, so Thorn tottered up and, still wondering if this was some trick, crept after him.

“Thanks for your kindness,” she muttered as she passed the key-keeper

The woman glared back. “I hope you never need it again.”

“No offense, but so do I.” And Thorn followed Father Yarvi along the dim corridor and up the steps, blinking into the light.

He might have had one hand but his legs worked well enough, setting quite a pace as he stalked across the yard of the citadel, the breeze making the branches of the old cedar whisper above them.

“I should speak to my mother-” she said, hurrying to catch up.

“I already have. I told her I had found you innocent of murder but you had sworn an oath to serve me.”

“But … how did you know I’d-”

“It is a minister’s place to know what people will do.” Father Yarvi snorted. “As yet you are not too deep a well to fathom, Thorn Bathu.”

They passed beneath the Screaming Gate, out of the citadel and into the city, down from the great rock and towards Mother Sea. They went by switching steps and narrow ways, sloping steeply between tight-crammed houses and the people tight-crammed between them.

“I’m not going on King Uthil’s raid, am I?” A fool’s question, doubtless, but now Thorn had stepped from Death’s shadow there was light enough to mourn her ruined dreams.

Father Yarvi was not in a mourning mood. “Be thankful you’re not going in the ground.”

They passed down the Street of Anvils, where Thorn had spent long hours gazing greedily at weapons like a beggar child at pastries. Where she had ridden on her father’s shoulders, giddy-proud as the smiths begged him to notice their work. But the bright metal set out before the forges only seemed to mock her now.

“I’ll never be a warrior of Gettland.” She said it soft and sorry, but Yarvi’s ears were sharp.

“As long as you live, what you might come to be is in your own hands, first of all.” The minister rubbed gently at some faded marks on his neck. “There is always a way, Queen Laithlin used to tell me.”

Thorn found herself walking a little taller at the name alone. Laithlin might not be a fighter, but Thorn could think of no one she admired more. “The Golden Queen is a woman no man dares take lightly,” she said.

“So she is.” Yarvi looked at Thorn sidelong. “Learn to temper stubbornness with sense and maybe one day you will be the same.”

It seemed that day was still some way off. Wherever they passed people bowed, and muttered softly, “Father Yarvi,” and stepped aside to give the minister of Gettland room, but shook their heads darkly at Thorn as she skulked after him, filthy and disgraced, through the gates of the city and out onto the swarming dockside. They wove between sailors and merchants from every nation around the Shattered Sea and some much farther off, Thorn ducking under fishermen’s dripping nets and around their glittering, squirming catches.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Skekenhouse.”

She stopped short, gaping, and was nearly knocked flat by a passing barrow. She had never in her life been further than a half-day’s walk from Thorlby.

“Or you could stay here,” Yarvi tossed over his shoulder. “They have the stones ready.”

She swallowed, then hurried again to catch him up. “I’ll come.”

“You are as wise as you are beautiful, Thorn Bathu.”

That was either a double compliment or a double insult, and she suspected the latter. The old planks of the wharf clonked under their boots, salt water slapping at the green-furred supports below. A ship rocked beside it, small but sleek and with white-painted doves mounted at high prow and stern. Judging by the bright shields ranged down each side, it was manned and ready to sail.

“We’re going now?” she asked.

“I am summoned by the High King.”

“The High … King?” She looked down at her clothes, stiff with dungeon filth, crusted with her blood and Edwal’s. “Can I change, at least?”

“I have no time for your vanity.”

“I stink.”

“We will haul you behind the ship to wash away the reek.”

“You will?”

The minister raised one brow at her. “You have no sense of humor, do you?”

“Facing Death can sap your taste for jokes,” she muttered.

“That’s the time you need it most.” A thickset old man was busy casting off the prow rope, and tossed it aboard as they walked up. “But don’t worry. Mother Sea will have given you more washing than you can stomach by the time we reach Skekenhouse.” He was a fighter: Thorn could tell that from the way he stood, his broad face battered by weather and war.

“The gods saw fit to take my strong left hand.” Yarvi held up his twisted claw and wiggled the one finger. “But they gave me Rulf instead.” He clapped it down on the old man’s meaty shoulder. “Though it hasn’t always been easy, I find myself content with the bargain.”

Rulf raised one tangled brow. “D’you want to know how I feel about it?”

“No,” said Yarvi, hopping aboard the ship. Thorn could only shrug at the gray-bearded warrior and hop after. “Welcome to the South Wind.”

She worked her mouth and spat over the side. “I don’t feel too welcome.”

Perhaps forty grizzled-looking oarsmen sat upon their sea chests, glaring at her, and she had no doubts what they were thinking. What is this girl doing here?

“Some ugly patterns keep repeating,” she murmured.

Father Yarvi nodded. “Such is life. It is a rare mistake you make only once.”

“Can I ask a question?”

“I have the sense that if I said no, you would ask anyway.”

“I’m not too deep a well to fathom, I reckon.”

“Then speak.”

“What am I doing here?”

“Why, holy men and deep-cunning women have been asking that question for a thousand years and never come near an answer.”

“Try talking to Brinyolf the Prayer-Weaver on the subject,” grunted Rulf, pushing them clear of the wharf with the butt of a spear. “He’ll bore your ears off with his talk of whys and wherefores.”

“Who is it indeed,” muttered Yarvi, frowning off toward the far horizon as though he could see the answers written in the clouds, “that can plumb the gods’ grand design? Might as well ask where the elves went!” And the old man and the young grinned at each other. Plainly this act was not new to them.

“Very good,” said Thorn. “I mean, why have you brought me onto this ship?”

“Ah.” Yarvi turned to Rulf. “Why do you think, rather than taking the easy road and crushing her, I have endangered all our lives by bringing the notorious killer Thorn Bathu onto my ship?”

Rulf leaned on his spear a moment, scratching at his beard. “I’ve really no idea.”

Yarvi looked at Thorn with his eyes very wide. “If I don’t share my thinking with my own left hand, why ever would I share it with the likes of you? I mean to say, you stink.”

Thorn rubbed at her temples. “I need to sit down.”

Rulf put a fatherly hand on her shoulder. “I understand.” He shoved her onto the nearest chest so hard she went squawking over the back of it and into the lap of the man behind. “This is your oar.”