Half the World

‘Storn Headland.’

She had expected taunts, threats, fury, but instead his craggy face lit up. ‘Ah, but that was a duel to sing of! I remember every step and cut of it. Headland was a great warrior, a worthy enemy! On chill mornings like that one I still feel the wound he gave me in my leg. But Mother War was by my side. She breathed upon me in my crib. It has been foreseen that no man can kill me, and so it has proved.’ He beamed down at Thorn, spinning one of the pommels idly around and around on his chain between great finger and thumb. ‘Storn Headland’s daughter, grown so tall! The years turn, eh, Mother Scaer?’

‘Always,’ said the minister, staring at Thorn through blue, blue narrowed eyes.

‘But we cannot pick over old glories all day.’ Gorm swept his hand out with a flourish to offer them the way. ‘The High King awaits, Father Yarvi.’

Grom-gil-Gorm led them across the wet docks and Thorn slunk after, cold, wet, bitter, and powerless, the excitement of seeing the Shattered Sea’s greatest city all stolen away. If you could kill a man by frowning at his back, the Breaker of Swords would have fallen bloody through the Last Door that day, but a frown is no blade, and Thorn’s hatred cut no one but her.

Through a pair of towering doors trudged the South Wind’s crew, into a hallway whose walls were covered from polished floor to lofty ceiling with weapons. Ancient swords, eaten with rust. Spears with hafts shattered. Shields hacked and splintered. The weapons that once belonged to the mountain of corpses Bail the Builder climbed to his place as the first High King. The weapons of armies his successors butchered spreading their power from Yutmark into the Lowlands, out to Inglefold and halfway around the Shattered Sea. Hundreds of years of victories, and though swords and axes and cloven helms had no voice, together they spoke a message more eloquent than any minister’s whisper, more deafening than any master-at-arms’ bellow.

Resisting the High King is a very poor idea.

‘I must say it surprises me,’ Father Yarvi was saying, ‘to find the Breaker of Swords serving as the High King’s doorman.’

Gorm frowned sideways. ‘We all must kneel to someone.’

‘Some of us kneel more easily than others, though.’

Gorm frowned harder but his minister spoke first. ‘Grandmother Wexen can be most persuasive.’

‘Has she persuaded you to pray to the One God, yet?’ asked Yarvi.

Scaer gave a snort so explosive it was a wonder she didn’t blow snot down her chest.

‘Nothing will prise me from the bloody embrace of Mother War,’ growled Gorm. ‘That much I promise you.’

Yarvi smiled as if he chatted with friends. ‘My uncle uses just those words. There is so much that unites Gettland and Vansterland. We pray the same way, speak the same way, fight the same way. Only a narrow river separates us.’

‘And hundreds of years of dead fathers and dead sons,’ muttered Thorn, under her breath.

‘Shush,’ hissed Rulf, beside her.

‘We have a bloody past,’ said Yarvi. ‘But good leaders must put the past at their backs and look to the future. The more I think on it, the more it seems our struggles only weaken us both and profit others.’

‘So after all our battles shall we link arms?’ Thorn saw the corner of Gorm’s mouth twisted in a smile. ‘And dance over our dead together into your brave future?’

Smiles, and dancing, and Thorn glanced to the weapons on the walls, wondering whether she could tear a sword from its brackets and stove Gorm’s skull in before Rulf stopped her. There would be a deed worthy of a warrior of Gettland.

But then Thorn wasn’t a warrior of Gettland, and never would be.

‘You weave a pretty dream, Father Yarvi.’ Gorm puffed out a sigh. ‘But you wove pretty dreams for me once before. We all must wake, and whether it pleases us to kneel or no, the dawn belongs to the High King.’

‘And to his minister,’ said Mother Scaer.

‘To her most of all.’ And the Breaker of Swords pushed wide the great doors at the hallway’s end.

Thorn remembered the one time she had stood in Gettland’s Godshall, staring at her father’s pale, cold corpse, trying to squeeze her mother’s hand hard enough that she would stop sobbing. It had seemed the biggest room in the world, too big for man’s hands to have built. But elf hands had built the Chamber of Whispers. Five Godshalls could have fit inside with floor left over to plant a decent crop of barley. Its walls of smooth elf-stone and black elf-glass rose up, and up, and were lost in the dizzying gloom above.

Six towering statues of the Tall Gods frowned down, but the High King had turned from their worship and his masons had been busy. Now a seventh stood above them all. The southerners’ god, the One God, neither man nor woman, neither smiling nor weeping, arms spread wide in a smothering embrace, gazing down with bland indifference upon the petty doings of mankind.

People were crowded about the far-off edges of the floor, and around a balcony of grey elf-metal at ten times the height of a man, and a ring of tiny faces at another as far above again. Thorn saw Vanstermen with braids in their long hair, Throvenmen with silver ring-money stacked high on their arms. She saw Islanders with weathered faces, stout Lowlanders and wild-bearded Inglings. She saw lean women she reckoned Shends and plump merchants of Sagenmark. She saw dark-faced emissaries from Catalia, or the Empire of the South, or even further off, maybe.

All the people in the world, it seemed, gathered with the one purpose of licking the High King’s arse.

‘Greatest of men!’ called Father Yarvi, ‘between gods and kings! I prostrate myself before you!’ And he near threw himself on his face, the echoes of his voice bouncing from the galleries above and shattering into the thousand thousand whispers which gave the hall its name.

The rumours had in fact been overly generous to the greatest of men. The High King was a shrivelled remnant in his outsize throne, withered face sagging off the bone, beard a few grey straggles. Only his eyes showed some sign of life, bright and flinty hard as he glared down at Gettland’s minister.

‘Now you kneel, fool!’ hissed Rulf, dragging Thorn down beside him by her belt. And only just in time. An old woman was already walking out across the expanse of floor towards them.

She was round-faced and motherly with deep laughter lines about her twinkling eyes, white hair cut short, her coarse grey gown dragging upon the floor so heavily its hem was frayed to dirty tatters. About her neck upon the finest chain, crackling papers scrawled with runes were threaded.

‘We understand Queen Laithlin is with child.’ She might have looked no hero, but by the gods she spoke with a hero’s voice. Deep, soft, effortlessly powerful. A voice that demanded attention. A voice that commanded obedience.

Even on his knees, Yarvi found a way to bow lower. ‘The gods have blessed her, most honoured Grandmother Wexen.’

‘An heir to the Black Chair, perhaps?’

‘We can but hope.’

‘Convey our warm congratulations to King Uthil,’ scratched out the High King, no trace of either warmth or congratulation on his withered face.

‘I will be delighted to convey them, and they to receive them. May I rise?’

The first of ministers gave the warmest smile, and raised one palm, and tattooed upon it Thorn saw circles within circles of tiny writing.

‘I like you there,’ she said.

‘We hear troubling tales from the north,’ croaked out the High King, and curling back his lip licked at a yawning gap in his front teeth. ‘We hear King Uthil plans a great raid against the Islanders.’

‘A raid, my king?’ Yarvi seemed baffled by what was common knowledge in Thorlby. ‘Against our much-loved fellows on the Islands of the Shattered Sea?’ He waved his arm so his crippled hand flopped dismissively. ‘King Uthil is of a warlike temper, and speaks often in the Godshall of raiding this or that. It always comes to nothing for, believe me, I am ever at his side, smoothing the path for Father Peace, as Mother Gundring taught me.’

Grandmother Wexen threw her head back and gave a peal of laugher, rich and sweet as treacle, echoes ringing out as if she were a chuckling army. ‘Oh, you’re a funny one, Yarvi.’

She struck him with a snake’s speed. With an open hand, but hard enough to knock him on his side. The sound of it bounced from the balconies above, sharp as a whip cracks.

Thorn’s eyes went wide and without thinking she sprang to her feet. Or halfway there, at least. Rulf’s hand shot out and caught a fistful of her damp shirt, dragging her back to her knees, her curse cut off in an ugly squawk.

‘Down,’ he growled under his breath.

It felt suddenly a very lonely place, the centre of that huge, empty floor, and Thorn realized how many armed men were gathered about it, and came over very dry in the mouth and very wet in the bladder.

Grandmother Wexen looked at her, neither scared nor angry. Mildly curious, as though at a kind of ant she did not recognize. ‘Who is this … person?’

‘A humble halfwit, sworn to my service.’ Yarvi pushed himself back up as far as his knees, good hand to his bloody mouth. ‘Forgive her impudence, she suffers from too little sense and too much loyalty.’

Grandmother Wexen beamed down as warmly as Mother Sun, but the ice in her voice froze Thorn to her bones. ‘Loyalty can be a great blessing or a terrible curse, child. It all depends on to whom one is loyal. There is a right order to things. There must be a right order, and you Gettlanders forget your place in it. The High King has forbidden swords to be drawn.’