‘Of Gettland.’ Her eyes flicked to Skara’s, bright and sharp. ‘The gods know I have tried to steer this alliance, first to counsel peace and then to urge action, but to King Uthil I am a wife and to King Gorm I am an enemy.’ She pushed a strand of hair from Skara’s face. ‘You are neither. Fate has made you the balance between them. The pin on which the scales of this alliance hang.’
Skara stared at her. ‘I do not have the strength for that.’
‘Then you must find it.’ Laithlin leaned close and took Prince Druin from her arms. ‘Power is a weight. You are young, cousin, I know, but you must learn to carry it, or it will crush you.’
Sister Owd puffed out her cheeks, making her round face look even rounder as she watched the queen glide away, her thralls and servants and guards trailing after her. ‘Queen Laithlin has always been a well of good humour.’
‘Good humour I can live without, Sister Owd. What I need is good advice.’
It surprised her how glad she was to see Raith alive, but then as things stood he was one whole third of her household, and by far the best-looking third. He and his brother sat laughing beside a fire, and Skara felt a strange pang of jealousy, they seemed so utterly at ease with each other. For two men sprung at once from the same womb they were easily told apart. Raith was the one with the wrinkle to his lip and the fresh cut down his face. The one with a challenge in his eye, even when he met Skara’s, that she could not seem to look away from. Rakki was the one who hardly met her eye at all, and scrambled to rise with the proper respect as she drew close.
‘You’ve earned your rest,’ she said, waving him down. ‘I hardly deserve to be among such blood-letters.’
‘You spilled a little blood yourself in that moot,’ said Raith, glancing down at Skara’s bandaged hand.
She found herself hiding it with the other. ‘Only my own.’
‘It’s spilling your own takes the courage.’ Raith winced as he prodded at the long scratch down his white-stubbled jaw. He looked no worse for the mark. Better, if anything.
‘I hear you fought well,’ she said.
‘He always does, princess.’ Rakki grinned as he punched his brother on the arm. ‘First through the gate! Without him we might still be squatting outside.’
Raith shrugged. ‘Fighting’s no hardship when you love to fight.’
‘Even so. My grandfather always told me those who fight well should be rewarded by those they fight for.’ And Skara twisted one of the silver rings Laithlin had given her from her wrist and held it out.
Rakki and Raith both stared. The armring had been much pecked with a knife to test its purity some time in the past, but Skara had been taught well the value of things. She saw that neither brother wore ring-money and knew this was no light matter to them. Raith swallowed as he reached to take it, but Skara kept her grip. ‘You fight for me, don’t you?’
She felt a nervous tingle as their eyes met, their fingers almost touching. Then he nodded. ‘I fight for you.’ He was rough and he was rude, and for some reason she found herself wondering what it might be like to kiss him. She heard Sister Owd clear her throat, felt her face burning and quickly let go.
Raith squeezed the ring closed, his wrist so thick the ends barely met around it. A reward for good service. But also a sign that he served, and a mark of whom he served. ‘I should have come to find you after the battle, but …’
‘I needed you to fight.’ Skara pushed thoughts of kissing away and put a little iron into her voice. ‘Now I need you to come with me.’
She watched Raith give his brother a parting hug, then stand, her silver glinting on his wrist, and follow her. He might not truly be her man, but she began to understand why queens had Chosen Shields. There is nothing for your confidence like a proven killer at your shoulder.
When Skara played in the great hall of Bail’s Point as a child it had seemed grand beyond reckoning. Now it was narrow, and dim, and smelled of rot, the roof leaking and the walls streaked with damp, three dusty shafts of light falling across the cold floor from windows looking over grey Mother Sea. The great painting of Ashenleer as warrior-queen that covered one wall was peeled and blistered, a bloom of mould across her mail and the adoring expressions of her hundred guards faded to smudges. A fitting image for the fallen fortunes of Throvenland.
Bail’s Chair still stood upon the dais, though, made of pale oak-wood cut from a ship’s keel, the twisted grain polished to a sheen by years of use. Kings had once sat there. Until Skara’s grandfather’s great-grandfather decided the chair was too narrow to hold all his arse, and the hall too narrow to hold all his boasting, and had a new chair made in Yaletoft, and began to build a fine new hall around it that would be the wonder of the world. It took twenty-eight years to finish the Forest, by which time he was dead and his son was an old man.
Then Bright Yilling burned it in a night.
‘Seems the fighting’s not quite done,’ grunted Raith.
Gorm and Uthil glowered at each other over Bail’s Chair, their ministers and warriors bristling about them. The brotherhood of battle had lasted no longer than the life of their last enemy.