Half a King Read online

  FROM ROYSTOCK THEY TURNED NORTHWARDS.

  They passed lands that had no name, where fens of mirror pools stretched into unknown distances, thousands of fragments of sky sprinkled across this bastard offspring of earth and sea, lonely birds calling out over the desolation, and Yarvi breathed deep the salt chill and longed for home.

  He thought often of Isriun, trying to remember her scent as she leaned close, the brush of her lips, the shape of her smile, sun glowing through her hair in the doorway of the Godshall. Scant memories, turned over and over in his mind until they were worn threadbare as a beggar’s clothes.

  Was she promised to some better husband, now? Smiling at some other man? Kissing another lover? Yarvi clenched his teeth. He had to get home.

  His every idle moment was crowded with plans for escape.

  At a trading post where the buildings were so rough-hewn a man could get splinters just from walking by, Yarvi pointed out a servant-girl to Trigg, then among the salt and herbs acquired some extra supplies while the overseer was distracted. Enough tanglefoot leaf to make every guard on the ship slow and heavy, or even send them off to sleep if the dose was right.

  “What about the money, boy?” Trigg hissed as they headed back to the South Wind.

  “I have a plan for that,” and Yarvi gave a humble smile while he thought of rolling a slumbering Trigg over the side of the ship.

  He was a great deal more valued, respected and, being honest, useful as a storekeeper than he had been as a king. The oarslaves had enough to eat, and warmer clothes to wear, and grunted their approval as he passed. He had the run of the ship while they were on the salt, but like a miser with his profits that much freedom only sharpened his hunger for more.

  When Yarvi thought no one could see, he dropped crusts near Nothing’s hand, and saw him slip them quickly into his rags. Once their eyes met afterward, and Yarvi wondered if the scrubber could be grateful, for it hardly seemed there was anything human left behind those strange, bright, sunken eyes.

  But Mother Gundring always said, It is for one’s own sake that one does good things. He kept dropping crumbs when he could.

  Shadikshirram noted with pleasure the greater weight of her purse, and with even more the improvement in her wine, achieved in part because Yarvi was able to buy in such impressive bulk.

  “This is a better vintage than Ankran brought me,” she muttered, squinting at its color in the bottle.

  Yarvi bowed low. “One worthy of your achievements.” And behind the mask of his smile he considered how, when he sat in the Black Chair once more, he would see her head above the Screaming Gate and her cursed ship made ashes.

  Sometimes as darkness fell she would stick one foot at him so he could pull her boots off while she spouted some tale of past glories, the names and details shifting like oil with every telling. Then she would say he was a good and useful boy, and if he was truly lucky would give him scraps from her table and confess, “my soft heart will be my undoing.”

  When he could keep himself from cramming them in his mouth on the spot he would slip them to Jaud, who would pass them to Rulf, while Ankran sat frowning into nowhere between them, his scalp cut from his shaving and his scabbed face a very different shape than it had been before its argument with Shadikshirram’s boot.

  “Gods,” grunted Rulf. “Remove this two-handed fool from our oar and give us Yorv again!”

  The oarslaves about them laughed, but Ankran sat still as a man of wood, and Yarvi wondered whether he was turning over his own oath for vengeance. He glanced up and saw Sumael frowning down from her place on the yard. She was always watching, judging, as though at a course she could not approve. Even though they were chained at night to the same ring outside the captain’s cabin she said nothing to him beyond the odd grunt.

  “Get rowing,” snapped Trigg, shoving past and barging Yarvi into the oar he used to pull.

  It seemed he had made enemies as well as friends.

  But enemies, as his mother used to say, are the price of success.

  “BOOTS, YORV!”

  Yarvi flinched as if at a slap. His thoughts had wondered far away, as they often did. Back to the slopes above his father’s burning ship, swearing his oath of vengeance before the gods. Back to the roof of Amwend’s holdfast, the smell of burning in his nose. Back to his uncle’s calmly smiling face.

  You would have been a fine jester.

  “Yorv!”

  He struggled from his blankets, tugging a length of chain after him, stepping over Sumael, hunched in her own bundle, dark face twitching silently in her sleep. It was growing colder as they headed north, and specks of snow whirled from the night on a keen wind, dotting the furs the oarslaves huddled under with white. The guards had given up patrolling and the only two awake hunched over a brazier by the forward hatch into the hold, pinched faces lit in orange.

  “These boots are worth more than you, damn it!”

  Shadikshirram was sitting on her bed, eyes shining wet, straining forward and trying to grab her foot but so drunk she kept missing. When she saw him she sagged back.

  “Give me a hand, eh?”

  “As long as you don’t need two,” said Yarvi.

  She gurgled with laughter. “You’re a clever little crippled bastard, aren’t you? I swear the gods sent you. Sent you … to get my boots off.” Her chuckles became like snores, and by the time he wrestled her second boot off and heaved her leg onto the bed she was sound asleep, head back, hair fluttering over her mouth with each snorting breath.

  Yarvi stopped still as stone. Her shirt had come open at the collar and the chain slipped from it. Glinting on the furs beside her neck was the key to every lock on the ship.

  He looked towards the door, open a crack, snow flitting outside. He opened the lamp and blew out the flame, and the room sank into darkness. It was an awful risk, but a man with time against him must sometimes throw the dice.

  The wise wait for their moment, but never let it pass.

  He inched to the bed, skin prickling. and slipped his fingerless hand under Shadikshirram’s head.

  Gently, gently he lifted it, shocked at the dead weight, teeth clenched with the effort of moving so slowly. He winced as she twitched and snorted, sure her eyes would flick open, thinking of her heel smashing his face as it had smashed Ankran’s.

  He took a breath and held it, reached across her for the key, caught by a gleam of Father Moon’s light from one of the narrow windows. He strained for it … but his itching fingertips came up just short.

  There was a choking pressure around his neck. His chain had snagged on something. He turned, thinking to yank it free, and there in the doorway, jaw locked tight and Yarvi’s chain gripped firmly in both fists, stood Sumael.

  For a moment they were frozen there. Then she began to reel him in.

  He let Shadikshirram’s head fall as gently as he could, gripped the chain with his good hand and tried to drag it back, breath hissing. Sumael only pulled harder, the collar grinding into Yarvi’s neck, the links of the chain cutting into his hand, making him bite his lip to keep from crying out.

  It was like the rope contest that the boys used to play on the beach in Thorlby, except only one of them had both hands and one end was around Yarvi’s neck.

  He twisted and struggled but Sumael was too strong for him, and in silence she dragged him closer, and closer, his boots slipping on the floor, catching a bottle and sending it rolling, until in the end she caught him by the collar and hauled him out into the night, dragging him close.

  “You damn fool!” she snarled in his face. “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

  “What do you care?” he hissed back, her knuckles white around his collar and his knuckles white around her fist.

  “I care if they change all the locks because you stole the key, idiot!”

  There was a long pause, then, while they stared at each other in the darkness, and it settled on him just how very close they were. Close enough for him to see th
e angry creases at the bridge of her nose, to see her teeth gleaming through the notch in her lip, to feel her warmth. Close enough for him to smell her quick breath, a little sour, but none the worse for that. Close enough, almost, to kiss. It must have settled on her at the same moment, because she let go his collar as if it was hot, pulled away and twisted her wrist free of his grip.

  He turned her words over, and looked at them this way and that, and the realization settled on him.

  “Changing the locks would only bother someone who had a key already. Who found a way to copy a key, perhaps?” He sat down in his usual place, rubbing at the chafe marks and the half-healed burns on his neck with his good hand, tucking his bad one into the warmth of his armpit. “But the only reason a slave would need a key is to escape.”

  “Shut your mouth!” She slid down beside him, and there was another pause. The snow drifted, settled upon her hair, across his knees.

  It was not until he was giving up hope of her ever speaking again that she finally did, so softly he could scarcely hear it over the wind. “A slave with a key might free some other slaves. All of them, perhaps. In the confusion, who knows who might slip away?”

  “A lot of blood could be spilled,” murmured Yarvi. “In the confusion, who knows whose? Far safer to put the guards to sleep.” Sumael looked sharply over at him, he could see the gleam of her eyes, the mist of her breath. “A slave who knew plants, and poured the guards’ ale and brought the captain’s wine might find a way.” A risk, he knew, but with her help things could be so much easier, and a man with time against him must sometimes throw the dice. “Perhaps two slaves together could achieve—”

  “What one alone couldn’t,” she finished for him. “Best to slip from the ship while in port.”

  Yarvi nodded. “I’d have thought so.” He’d been thinking about little else for days.

  “Skekenhouse would be the best chance. The city’s busy but the guards are lazy, the captain and Trigg spend a lot of time off the ship—”

  “Unless one had friends somewhere around the Shattered Sea.” He let the bait hang there.

  She swallowed it whole. “Friends that might shelter a pair of escaped slaves?”

  “Exactly. In, say … Thorlby?”

  “The South Wind will be back through Thorlby within a month or two.” Yarvi could hear the excitement, squeaky in her whisper.

  He could not keep it from his own. “As soon as that a slave with a key … and a slave who knew plants … could be free.”

  They sat in silence, in the cold, in the darkness, as they had so many nights before. But, looking across by Father Moon’s pale light, Yarvi thought there was the rare hint of a smile at the corner of Sumael’s mouth.

  He thought it suited her.

  17.

  ONE FRIEND

  Far north, now, the oarslaves dragged the South Wind, over the black sea with winter on the march. Snow fell often, settling on the roofs of the ship’s castles, across the shoulders of the shivering rowers, blowing smoke onto their numbed fingers with each stroke. All night the broken hull groaned. In the morning men leaned over the sides to crack ice from its wounded flanks. At sunset Shadikshirram would wander from her cabin wrapped in furs, eyes and nostrils rimmed with boozy pink, and say she didn’t think it overly cold.

  “I try to keep love in my heart,” said Jaud, grasping with both hands at the soup Yarvi handed him. “But gods, I hate the North.”

  “There’s nowhere more North than this,” answered Rulf, rubbing at the tips of his ears as he frowned out towards the white blanket of the coast.

  Ankran, as usual, added nothing.

  The sea was an ice-flecked emptiness, groups of lumpen seals watching them sadly from the rocky shoreline. They saw few other ships, and when they did Trigg glowered towards them, hand on his sword, until they were dots in the distance. However powerful the High King thought himself, his licence would not protect them out here.

  “Most merchants lack the courage for these waters.” Shadikshirram wedged her boot carelessly on an oarsman’s leg, “but I am not most merchants.” Yarvi silently thanked the gods for that. “The Banyas who live out in this icy hell worship me as a goddess, for I bring pots and knives and iron tools which they treat like elf-magic, and ask only for pelts and amber which to them are so plentiful as to be next to worthless. They’ll do anything for me, poor brutes.” She rubbed her palms together with an eager hissing. “Here my best profits are made.”

  And indeed the Banyas were waiting for the South Wind when she finally broke through the shore-ice to a slimy jetty at a gray beach. They made the Shends seem the height of civilization in Yarvi’s memory—all swathed in furs so they looked more bears or wolves than men, their shaggy faces pierced with splinters of polished bone and studs of amber, their bows fluttering with feathers and their clubs set with teeth. Yarvi wondered if they were human teeth, and decided people who scratched a living from this miserly land could afford to waste nothing.

  “I will be four days away.” Shadikshirram vaulted over the ship’s side and clomped down the warped timbers of the jetty, the South Wind’s sailors following with her cargo lashed to clumsy sleds. “Trigg, you’re in charge!”

  “She’ll be better’n when you left her!” the overseer called back with a grin.

  “Four days of idleness,” Yarvi hissed as the last light stained the sky red, fretting at his thrall-collar with his withered thumb. Every night spent on this rotting tub it seemed to chafe him more.

  “Patience.” Sumael spoke through closed teeth, scarred lips hardly moving, dark eyes on the guards, and on Trigg in particular. “A few weeks and we might be with your friends in Thorlby.” She turned her familiar frown on him. “You’d better have friends in Thorlby.”

  “You’d be surprised who I know.” Yarvi wriggled down into his furs. “Trust me.”

  She snorted. “Trust?”

  Yarvi turned his back to her. Sumael might be spiky as a hedgehog but she was tough, and clever, and there was no one on this ship he would rather have had beside him. He needed an accomplice, not a friend, and she knew what to do and when.

  He could see it as though it was already done. Every night he lulled himself to sleep with thoughts of it. The South Wind rocking gently at a wharf beneath the citadel of Thorlby. The guards snoring a drugged slumber beside their empty ale cups. The key turning smoothly in the lock. He and Sumael stealing together from the ship, chains muffled with rags, through the steep and darkened streets he knew so well, boot-printed slush on the cobbles, snow on the steep roofs.

  He smiled as he pictured his mother’s face when she saw him. He smiled even more as he pictured Odem’s, just before he rammed the knife into his guts …

  YARVI STABBED, AND CUT, and stabbed, his hands slippery hot with traitor’s blood and his uncle squealed like a slaughtered pig.

  “The rightful King of Gettland!” came the shout and all applauded, none louder than Grom-gil-Gorm who smashed his great hands together with every squelch of the blade and Mother Scaer who shrieked and capered in her joy and turned into a cloud of clattering doves.

  The squelching became a sucking and Yarvi looked over at his brother, white and cold on the slab. Isriun leaned over his face, kissing, kissing.

  She smiled up at Yarvi through the shroud of her hanging hair. That smile. “I’ll expect a better kiss after your victory.”

  Odem propped himself up on his elbows. “How long is this going to take?”

  “Kill him,” said Yarvi’s mother. “One of us at least must be a man.”

  “I am a man!” snarled Yarvi, stabbing and stabbing, his arms burning with the effort. “Or … half a man?”

  Hurik raised an eyebrow. “That much?”

  The knife was slippery in Yarvi’s grip and all the doves were a terrible distraction, staring at him, staring, and the bronze-feathered eagle in their midst with a message from Grandmother Wexen.

  “Have you considered the Ministry?” it croaked at him.r />
  “I am a king!” he snarled, cheeks burning, hiding his useless clown’s hand behind his back.

  “A king sits between gods and men,” said Keimdal, blood leaking from his cut throat.

  “A king sits alone,” said Yarvi’s father, leaning forward in the Black Chair, the wounds that had been dry all dripping fresh and spilling a slick of blood across the floor of the Godshall.

  Odem’s screams had turned to giggles. “You would have made a fine jester.”

  “Damn you!” snarled Yarvi, trying to stab harder but the knife was so heavy he could hardly lift it.

  “What are you doing?” asked Mother Gundring. She sounded scared.

  “Shut up, bitch,” said Odem, and he caught Yarvi around the neck, and squeezed …

  YARVI WOKE WITH A HORRIBLE jolt to find Trigg’s hands around his throat.

  A crescent of fierce grins swam above him, teeth shining in torchlight. He retched and twisted but he was held fast as a fly in honey.

  “You should’ve taken the deal, boy.”

  “What are you doing?” asked Sumael again. He’d never heard her sound scared before. But she sounded nowhere near as scared as Yarvi was.

  “I told you to shut your mouth!” one of the guards snarled in her face. “Unless you want to go with him!”

  She shrank back into her blankets. She knew what to do, and when. Perhaps a friend would’ve been better than an accomplice after all, but it was a little late now to find one.

  “I told you clever children drown just like stupid ones.” Trigg slid his key into the lock and unfastened Yarvi’s chain. Freedom, but not quite how he had pictured it. “We’re going to put you in the water and see if it’s true.”

  And Trigg dragged Yarvi down the deck like a chicken plucked and ready for the pot. Past the oarsmen sleeping on their benches, the odd one peering from his bald furs. None of them stirred to help him. Why would they? How could they?

  Yarvi’s heels kicked pointlessly at the deck. Yarvi’s hands fumbled at Trigg’s, good and bad equally useless. Perhaps he should have bargained, bluffed, flattered his way free, but his bursting chest could only gather the air to make a small wet sound, like a fart.