Half a King

by Joe Abercrombie

  Yarvi pulled the fur collar of his borrowed cloak up against the wind and wrinkled his nose at the salt tang of the sea. That and the stink of the slaves pulling the oars. He had grown used to it when he was one of them, slept with his face in Rulf’s armpit and scarcely noticed. He had stunk just as bad as the rest, he knew. But that made their smell no better now.

  All the worse, in fact.

  “Poor dogs.” Jaud frowned over the rail of the aftcastle at them struggling below. For such a strong man he had a weak heart.

  Rulf scrubbed at the gray-brown hair that had sprouted above his ears, though his pate was bald as ever. “Be nice to set ’em free.”

  “Then how would we get to Thorlby?” said Yarvi. “Someone has to row. Will you pull an oar?”

  His old oarmates both looked sharply across at him. “You have changed,” said Jaud.

  “I’ve had to.” And he turned away from them and the benches where he had once struggled. Sumael stood at the rail, a huge smile on her face as the salt wind tore at her hair, grown longer now than it had been, black as raven’s feathers.

  “You look pleased,” said Yarvi, happy to see her happy. He had not seen it often enough.

  “Glad to be on the sea again.” She spread her arms wide, wriggling her fingers. “And with no chains!”

  He felt his smile fade, for he still had a chain he could not break. The one he had forged himself with his own oath. The one that drew him back to Thorlby, and bound him to the Black Chair. And he knew then that sooner or later Sumael would stand at the rail of another ship. One that would carry her back to the First of Cities, and away from him forever.

  Her smile faltered too, as though she had the same thought at the same moment, and they looked away from each other to watch Father Earth grinding by in awkward silence.

  For two lands so bitterly opposed, Vansterland and Gettland looked very much the same. Barren beaches, forest and fen. He had seen few people, and those hurrying inland, fearful at the sight of a ship. Narrowing his eyes to the south, he saw a little tooth upon a headland, the smoke of houses smudging the white sky.

  “What’s that town?” he asked Sumael.

  “Amwend,” she said. “Near the border.”

  Amwend, where he had led the raid. Or flopped from a ship without a shield and straight into a trap, at least. That was the tower, then, where Keimdal had died. Where Hurik had betrayed him. From which Odem had thrown him down, down into the bitter sea, and even more bitter slavery.

  Yarvi realized he had ground his shrivelled hand into the rail until it hurt. He turned his eyes away from land, towards the white-churned water in their wake, the marks of the oars quickly fading to leave no sign of their passing. Would it be so with him? Faded and forgotten?

  Sister Owd, the apprentice Mother Scaer had sent with them, was looking straight at him. A furtive sort of look, then quickly down at something she was writing on a tiny slip of paper, tugged and twitched under her charcoal by the wind.

  Yarvi walked slowly to her. “Keeping an eye on me?”

  “You know I am,” she said, without looking up. “That’s what I’m here for.”

  “Do you doubt me?”

  “I just tell Mother Scaer what I see. She chooses what to doubt.”

  She was small and round-faced, one of those people whose age is hard to guess, but even so Yarvi did not think she could be older than him. “When did you take the Minister’s Test?”

  “Two years ago,” she said, shielding the little slip of paper with her shoulder.

  He gave up trying to see it. Ministers have their own signs anyway: he doubted he could read them. “What was it like?”

  “Not hard, if you’re prepared.”

  “I was prepared,” said Yarvi, thinking back to that night Odem came in out of the rain. The flames reflected in the jars, the creases in Mother Gundring’s smile, the purity of question and answer. He felt a surge of longing, then, for that simple life with no uncles to kill or oaths to keep or hard choices to be made. For the books and the plants and the soft word spoken. He had to force it away to the back of his mind with an effort. He could not afford it now. “But I never got the chance to take it.”

  “You didn’t miss much. A lot of fussing outside the door. A lot of being stared at by old women.” She finished the message and began to roll it up into a tiny pellet. “Then the honor of being kissed by Grandmother Wexen.”

  “How was that?”

  Sister Owd puffed out her cheeks and gave a long sigh. “Wisest of all women she may be, but I was hoping my last kiss would be from someone younger. I saw the High King, from a distance.”

  “So did I, once. He seemed small, and old, and greedy, and complained about everything, and was scared of his food. But he had many strong warriors with him.”

  “Time hasn’t changed him much, then. Except he worships the One God now, he’s more gripped with his own power than ever, and by all accounts can’t stay awake longer than an hour at a time. And those warriors have multiplied.” She rolled up the canvas cover on the cage. The birds inside did not move, did not startle at the light, only stared levelly at Yarvi with half a dozen pairs of unblinking eyes. Black birds.

  Yarvi frowned at them. “Crows?”

  “Yes.” Sister Owd pulled up her sleeve, unhooked the tiny door and skilfully wormed a white arm inside the cage, took a crow about the body and drew it out, still and calm as a bird made from coal. “Mother Scaer hasn’t used doves for years.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not since I’ve been her apprentice.” She made the message fast about the bird’s ankle and spoke softly. “The rumor is a dove sent from Mother Gundring tried to claw her face. She doesn’t trust them.” She leaned close to the black bird and cooed, “We are a day from Thorlby.”

  “Thorlby,” spoke the crow in its croaking voice, then Sister Owd flicked it into the skies where it clattered away to the north.

  “Crows,” murmured Yarvi, watching it skim the white-flecked waves.

  “Promises of obedience to your master, Grom-gil-Gorm?” Nothing stood beside Yarvi, still hugging his sword like a lover even though he had a perfectly good sheath for it now.

  “He’s my ally, not my master,” answered Yarvi.

  “Of course. You are a slave no longer.” Nothing rubbed gently at the scars all about his stubbled neck. “I remember our collars coming off, in that friendly farmstead. Before Shadikshirram burned it. No slave, you. And yet you made the deal with the Vanstermen kneeling.”

  “We were all on our knees at the time,” growled Yarvi.

  “My question is, are we still? You will win few friends when you take back the Black Chair with the help of Gettland’s worst enemy.”

  “I can win friends once I’m in the chair. It’s getting enemies out of it that concerns me now. What should I have done? Let the Vanstermen burn us?”

  “Perhaps there was middle ground between letting Gorm kill us and selling him the land of our birth.”

  “Middle ground has been hard to find of late,” Yarvi forced through gritted teeth.

  “It always is, but a king’s place is upon it. There will be a price for this, I think.”

  “You are quick with the questions but tardy on the answers, Nothing. Did you not swear an oath to help me?”

  Nothing narrowed his eyes at Yarvi, the wind blowing up and lashing the gray hair about his battle-beaten face. “I swore an oath, and mean to see it through or die.”

  “Good,” said Yarvi, turning away. “I will hold you to it.”

  Below them the oar-slaves were working up a sweat, teeth clenched at their benches, grunting in time as the overseer stalked between them, whip coiled behind his back. Just as Trigg had done on the deck of the South Wind. Yarvi remembered well enough the burning in his muscles, the burning of the lash across his back.

  But the closer he came to the Black Chair the heavier weighed his oath, and the shorter grew his patience.

  Someone has to row.
>
  “More speed!” he growled at the overseer.

  31.

  YOUR ENEMY’S HOUSE

  Sumael sprang from ship to jetty and shoved through the press to the table where Thorlby’s dockmistress sat flanked by guards. Yarvi followed with a little less agility and a lot less authority across the gangplank, onto the ground that should have been his kingdom, eyes down and hood up, the others at his back.

  “My name is Shadikshirram,” Sumael said, flicking the paper carelessly open and dropping it onto the table, “and I carry a licence to trade from the High King, stamped with the rune of Grandmother Wexen herself.”

  They had waited until the most junior dockmistress took her turn at the table in the hope she would wave them through. Instead she frowned at the licence long enough for everyone to get twitchy, fingering the two keys about her neck, one of her household and one of her office. Yarvi noticed with a wave of sick nerves that one corner of the licence was brown with old blood. The blood of its rightful owner, indeed, and spilled by Yarvi’s own hand. The dockmistress peered up at Sumael, and spoke the words he had been dreading.

  “You’re not Shadikshirram.” One of the guards shifted his gloved hand slightly on the haft of his spear, and Nothing shifted his thumb in his belt towards his sword, and Yarvi’s sickness swelled to dread. Would it all end here, in an ugly little brawl on the docks? “I saw her come ashore here often, usually drunk—”

  Sumael dealt the tabletop a fearsome blow, snarling into the dockmistress’s face and making her shrink back, astonished. “You speak of my mother, Ebdel Aric Shadikshirram, and you’ll speak with more respect! She is gone through the Last Door. Drowned in the icy waters of the North.” Her voice cracked, and she dabbed at her dry eyes with the back of her hand. “Her business she entrusted to me, her loving daughter Sumael Shadikshirram.” She snatched the licence back from the table and shouted again, flecking dockmistress, guards, and Yarvi too with spit. “And I have business with Queen Laithlin!”

  “She is queen no—”

  “You know who I speak of! Where is Laithlin?”

  “Usually at her counting house—”

  “I will have words with her!” And Sumael turned on her heel and stalked off up the jetty.

  “She may not take visitors …” the dockmistress muttered weakly after her.

  Sister Owd gave the table a friendly pat as Yarvi and the rest filed past. “If it’s any consolation, she’s like this with everyone.”

  “A winning performance,” said Yarvi as he caught up to Sumael, hurrying past the fish hanging and the nets heaped and the fishers shouting prices for the morning’s catch. “What would we do without you?”

  “I nearly wet myself,” she hissed back. “Is anyone following?”

  “Not even looking.” The dockmistress was busy venting her frustrations on the next arrival and they soon left her behind.

  Home at last, but Yarvi felt like a stranger. It all seemed smaller than he remembered, less busy, berths and stalls standing empty, buildings abandoned. His heart leapt whenever he saw a familiar face and, like a thief passing the place of his crime, he shrank further into his hood, back prickling with sweat despite the cold.

  If he was recognized King Odem would soon hear of it, and lose no time in finishing what began on the roof of Amwend’s tower.

  “Those are the howes of your ancestors, then?”

  Nothing was staring through his tangle of hair towards the north, down the long and lonely sweep of beach and the file of grassy humps above it, the nearest with just a few months of patchy green on its fallow flanks.

  “Of my murdered father Uthrik.” Yarvi worked his jaw. “And my drowned uncle Uthil, and kings of Gettland back into the darkness of history.”

  Nothing scratched at his grizzled cheek. “Before them you swore your oath.”

  “As before me you swore yours.”

  “Never fear.” Nothing grinned as they threaded through a crowded gate in the outermost wall of the city. That mad, bright-eyed grin that gave Yarvi more fears rather than less. “Flesh may forget, but steel never does.”

  Sister Owd seemed to know the ways of Thorlby better even than Yarvi, its native son. Its king. She led them up narrow streets zigzagging the steep hillside, houses crammed tall and narrow between outcroppings of rock, the gray bones of Gettland showing through the city’s skin. She led them across bridges over surging streams where slaves leaned out to fill the jugs of the wealthy. She led them finally to a long, slim yard in the shadow of the lowering citadel where Yarvi had been born, and raised, and daily humiliated, and studied to be a minister, and found out he was a king.

  “The house is here,” said Sister Owd. It was in plain sight. One Yarvi had often walked past.

  “Why does Gorm’s minister keep a house in Thorlby?”

  “Mother Scaer says the wise minister knows her enemy’s house better than her own.”

  “Mother Scaer is as prone to pithy phrases as Mother Gundring,” grunted Yarvi.

  Owd turned the key. “It’s what the Ministry is all about.”

  “Take Jaud with you,” Yarvi drew Sumael to one side and spoke softly to her. “Go to the counting house and speak to my mother.” If his luck held, Hurik would be at the training square now.

  “And say what?” asked Sumael. “That her dead son has come calling?”

  “And that he’s finally learned to fasten his cloak-buckle. Bring her here.”

  “What if she doesn’t believe me?”

  Yarvi pictured his mother’s face, then, as she used to frown down at him, and thought it very likely she would doubt. “Then we must think of something else.”

  “And if she doesn’t believe me, and orders me dead for the insult?”

  Yarvi paused. “Then I must think of something else.”

  “Who among you has been sent bad weatherluck or bad weaponluck?” came a ringing voice from across the square. A crowd had gathered before a grand building, new-raised, pillars of white marble at its front, and before them a priest in robes of humble sack cloth stood with arms spread and wailed his message. “Who among you finds their prayers to the many gods ignored?”

  “My prayers were ignored so much I stopped making ’em,” muttered Rulf.

  “It would be small wonder!” called out the priest. “For there are not many gods but one! All the arts of the elves could not break her! The arms of the One God, and the gates of her temple, are flung wide for all!”

  “Temple?” Yarvi frowned. “My mother built that place to be a mint. They were going to stamp coins there, every one the same weight.” Now the seven-rayed sun of the One God—the High King’s god—was raised above the doorway.

  “Her comfort, her mercy, her shelter, is freely given!” roared the priest. “Her only demand is that you love her as she loves you!”

  Nothing spat on the stones. “What have gods to do with love?”

  “Things have changed here,” said Yarvi, glancing about the square and pulling his hood a little lower.

  “New king,” said Sumael, licking at her scarred lip, “new ways.”

  32.

  GREAT STAKES

  They heard the door open, and Yarvi stiffened. They heard footsteps in the hallway, and Yarvi swallowed with an effort. The door swung open and Yarvi took a halting step towards it, hardly able to breathe—

  Two slaves ducked through, hands on their swords. Two huge-shouldered Inglings with silver collars. Nothing bristled, steel glinting as he drew.

  “No!” said Yarvi. He knew these two. Slaves of his mother’s.

  And now their owner swept into the room with Sumael just behind.

  She was not changed.

  Tall and stern, golden hair oiled and piled in shining coils. She wore few jewels but those of humbling size. The great Queen’s Key, key to the treasury of Gettland, was gone from her chain, and in its place was a smaller, set with dark rubies like drops of spilled blood.

  Yarvi might have had trouble convincing his c
ompanions he was a king, but his mother filled that small room to its corners with an effortless majesty.

  “Gods,” croaked Rulf, and with a wince lowered himself to his knees, and Sister Owd, and Jaud and Sumael, and the two slaves hurried to follow him. Nothing knelt last, eyes and sword’s point on the floor, so that only Yarvi and his mother were left standing.

  She did not so much as acknowledge them. She stared at Yarvi, and he at her, as though they were alone. She walked to him, neither smiling nor frowning, until she stood but a stride away, and she seemed to him so beautiful it hurt his eyes to look at her, and he felt in them the burning of tears.

  “My son,” she whispered, and folded him in her arms. “My son.” And she held him so tight that it was almost painful, and her tears wetted his head while his wetted her shoulder.

  Yarvi had come home.

  It was some time before his mother let him go, and held him at arm’s length, and carefully wiped her cheeks. He realized he looked up into her face no longer. He had grown, then. Grown in many ways.

  “It seems your friend spoke the truth,” she said.

  Yarvi slowly nodded. “I am alive.”

  “And have learned to fasten your cloak-buckle,” she said, giving it a searching tug and finding it secure.

  IN SILENCE SHE LISTENED to his story.

  In silence she heard of the raid and the burning of Amwend. Of Odem’s betrayal and Yarvi’s long fall into the bitter sea.

  Shall Gettland have half a king?

  In silence she heard him made a slave, and sold a slave, only her eyes moving to the faint scars on his neck.

  These are some wretched leavings.

  In silence he made his escape, endured the long ordeal in the ice, fought for his life in the elf-ruin, and all the while Yarvi thought what a song it would make if he lived to have it set to music.

  You cannot expect all the heroes to survive a good song.

  And when it came to Ankran’s death and then to Shadikshirram’s, Yarvi thought of the red knife in his hand, and his grunting and hers, and his throat closed, and he shut his eyes and could not speak.

  You may need two hands to fight someone, but only one to stab them in the back.