Half the World

Her two least favourite 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 mould 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 practising 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 harbour 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, grey-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.