‘Handsome gift.’
‘Don’t think he’ll be sailing anywhere for a while. I’ve a mind to take her back down the Divine and Denied, all the way to the First of Cities and beyond, maybe. If I leave in the next few days, I reckon I can stay ahead of the ice. So I’m putting a crew together. Got my old friend Fror as helmsman, my old friend Dosduvoi as storekeeper, my old friend Skifr to pick the course.’
‘You’re surely blessed with friends for a woman as unfriendly as you are.’ Raith watched the gold glint on the water as Mother Sun sank behind them. ‘You’ll row away, and leave your sorry self here on the docks, eh? I wish you luck.’
‘I’m not a big believer in luck.’ Thorn gave a long sniff and spat into the water. But she didn’t leave. ‘I learned something worth knowing, the other day.’
‘My nose breaks easily as anyone’s?’
‘I’m someone who sometimes needs to be told no.’ She looked sideways at him. ‘That means I’m someone who needs someone around with the guts to tell me no. Aren’t many of them around.’
Raith raised his brows. ‘Fewer than there used to be, too.’
‘I can always find a use for a bloody little bastard, and I’ve got a back oar free.’ Thorn Bathu stood, and offered him her hand. ‘You coming?’
Raith blinked at it. ‘You want me to join the crew of someone I always hated, someone nearly killed me a couple of days back, to sail half the world away from all I’ve ever known or wanted on the promise of nothing but hard work and bad weather?’
‘Aye, that’s it.’ She grinned down. ‘Why, you beating away better offers?’
Raith opened his fist and looked down at the empty vial. Then he turned his palm over and let it fall into the water. ‘Not really.’
He took Thorn’s hand, and let her pull him to his feet.
The Rise
‘There!’ bellowed Koll, stabbing his open palm towards the drover to halt the dozen straining oxen, the great chain creaking and twitching. There was a grinding, then a mighty clonk as the feet of the vast gable dropped into their stone-carved sockets.
‘Stake it!’ shouted Rin, and teams of carpenters who not long ago had been warriors, and not long before that farmers, began to hammer posts into the ground, hauling tight a web of ropes that would keep the great truss from falling.
Skara stared up, neck aching it reared so high above them. It stood over the ruined steps of different-coloured marble where Mother Kyre had once greeted visitors to Yaletoft. Just where the great gable of her grandfather’s hall had stood. The one she had watched fall the night Bright Yilling came. Could it only have been a few months ago? It felt a hundred years and more. It felt as if a different girl had watched it happen in a different world, and Skara had only heard the story.
Blue Jenner showed his gap-toothed smile as he stared up at it. ‘Stands just where the old hall did.’
‘But higher, and wider, and far more graceful,’ said Skara. Each of the two posts and two rafters had been fashioned from a spear-straight pine-trunk, floated downriver from the high hills above Throvenland where the trees grew oldest and tallest, stripped to the pale wood and beautifully shaped. ‘It’s fine work.’ And Skara set her gloved hand on Rin’s shoulder. ‘I swear I could not have found a better smith and carpenter anywhere in the whole Shattered Sea.’
Rin grinned over her shoulder. ‘A well-known fact, my queen. You’re lucky we were tired of making swords.’
‘All this and modest too?’ murmured Mother Owd.
Rin twitched her apron straight. ‘Modesty’s for folk with nothing to boast of.’
‘Hold them here!’ Koll called to the drovers, catching the long chain that linked their yoke to the very top of the truss and swinging underneath it.
Rin started towards him. ‘Where the hell are you going, you fool?’
‘Up!’ he called, and swarmed off underneath the chain with his legs crossed over it, nimble and fearless as a squirrel, soon far overhead and swinging in the breeze.
Rin clutched at her head with both hands, hair sticking out between her fingers, the two keys she wore rattling together on her chest. ‘Get down from there before you kill yourself!’
‘This is an excellent chain!’ called Koll as he climbed higher and higher. ‘You should be proud!’
‘Gods damn it!’ Rin screamed up at him, near-jumping in the air to shake her fist, then giving Skara a begging look. ‘Can’t you order him to come down, my queen?’
‘I could.’ Skara watched him clamber onto the highest point of the truss where the two massive beams crossed, remembering Mother Kyre’s words to her on this very ground. ‘But the secret to keeping authority is to give only orders that you know will be obeyed.’
‘The joints all look good!’ Koll slapped happily at the smooth meeting of the two rafters. ‘Your new bolts are all holding, Rin!’