‘No.’ Skara squeezed him tighter. ‘I can hold him.’ Having his little arms around her neck made her feel strong. And the gods knew, she had need of strength then.
Bail’s Point, shining symbol of Throvenland united, was not what she remembered. The village in the shadow of the fortress, where she had once danced at the summer festival, lay in ruins, houses burned or abandoned. The orchard before the crumbling man-built stretch of wall was throttled with ivy, last year’s fruit rotting in the weeds. The great gateway between two soaring elf-built towers had once been decorated with bright banners. Now a hanged man swung on a creaking rope from the battlements, his bare feet dangling.
His fine gold armrings, his shining mail, his gilded weapons had been stripped away, but Skara knew his face at once.
‘One of Bright Yilling’s Companions.’ She gave a shiver in spite of the fur about her shoulders. ‘One of those who burned Yaletoft.’
‘Yet here he swings,’ said Laithlin. ‘It seems praying to Death does not put off a meeting with her.’
‘Nothing puts off that meeting,’ whispered Skara. Probably she should have revelled in his death, spat on his corpse, given thanks to Mother War that this splinter of Throvenland at least was freed, but all she felt was a sick echo of her fear when she last saw him, and a dread that she would never be free of it.
Someone had chopped down the great oak that once grew in the yard of the fortress, the buildings crowding within the ancient elf-walls bare and ugly without its shade. Warriors lounged on the buckled cobbles around the stump, most drunk and getting more drunk, comparing wounds and trophies, cleaning weapons, trading stories.
A would-be skald was composing a verse, shouting the same line over and over while others offered choices for the next word to gales of laughter. A prayer-weaver droned out an elaborate thanks to the gods for their victory. Somewhere, someone was howling in pain.
Skara wrinkled her nose. ‘What is that smell?’
‘Everything men contain,’ murmured Sister Owd, watching a pair of thralls haul something past between them.
Skara realized with a cold shock that it was a corpse, and then to her horror that they were dragging it onto a whole heap of others. A pale tangle of bare limbs, stained and spattered, mouths lolling silent, eyes unseeing. A pile of meat which last night had been men. Men who had taken years of work to birth, and nurse, and teach to walk, speak, fight. Skara held Prince Druin close, trying to shield his eyes.
‘Should he see this?’ she murmured, wishing she had not seen it herself.
‘He will be king of Gettland. This is his destiny.’ Laithlin glanced dispassionately at the bodies, and Skara wondered if she had ever met so formidable a woman. ‘He should learn to rejoice in it. So should you. This is your victory, after all.’
Skara swallowed. ‘Mine?’
‘The men will argue over whose was the hairiest chest and the loudest roar. The bards will sing of the flashing steel and the blood spilled. But yours was the plan. Yours was the will. Yours were the words that set these men to your purpose.’
Words are weapons, Mother Kyre had told her. Skara stared at the dead men in the yard of Bail’s Point, and thought of the dead men in her grandfather’s hall, and rather than a crime avenged she saw two crimes, and felt the guilt of one piled on the pain of the other.
‘It does not feel like victory,’ she whispered.
‘You have seen defeat. Which do you prefer?’ Skara remembered standing at the Black Dog’s stern, watching the gable of her grandfather’s hall sag into the towering flames, and found she could not argue.
‘I was very impressed with you at the moot,’ said Laithlin.
‘Truly? I thought … you might be angry with me.’
‘That you spoke for yourself and your country? I might as well be angry at the snow for falling. You are eighteen winters old, yes?’
‘I will be, this year …’
Laithlin slowly shook her head. ‘Seventeen. You have a gift.’
‘Mother Kyre and my grandfather … all my life they tried to teach me how to lead. How to speak and what to say. How to make arguments, read faces, sway hearts … I always thought myself a poor pupil.’
‘I very much doubt that, but war can force strengths from us we never expected. King Fynn and his minister prepared you well, but one cannot teach what you have. You are touched by She Who Spoke the First Word. You have that light in you that makes people listen.’ The queen frowned at Druin, who was staring at the carnage in wide-eyed silence. ‘I have a feeling my son’s future may hang on that gift.’
Skara blinked. ‘My gifts beside yours are like a candle beside Mother Sun. You are the Golden Queen—’