‘Then I stay too.’ Mother Owd sighed. ‘A healer’s place is among the wounded. A minister’s place is beside her queen.’
Skara felt a rush of gratitude that almost brought tears to her eyes. They were hardly the advisors she would have picked but she would not have traded them for anyone now. ‘The gods may have taken my grandfather.’ Skara put one arm around Mother Owd, and one around Blue Jenner, and hugged them tight. ‘But they sent me two pillars to lean upon.’
Mother Owd frowned down at herself. ‘I am a little squat for a pillar.’
‘You hold me up admirably even so. Now go.’ Skara pushed them off towards the fortress. ‘Pick me the hundred warriors who’ll kick Bright Yilling hardest in his balls.’
‘We’ll pick ’em, my queen,’ said Blue Jenner, grinning back. ‘And find ’em the heaviest boots we can.’
Skara was left standing on the sward with Raith. The birds continued to twitter. The calls of the labourers in the ditch floated towards them. The breeze fumbled across the grass. Skara did not look sideways. But she liked knowing he was there, at her shoulder.
‘You can go,’ she said. ‘If you want to.’
‘I said I’d die for you. I meant it.’
He had some of that old swagger as she looked around, daring and dangerous and making no apologies, and she smiled to see it. ‘No need quite yet. I still need someone to threaten my visitors with.’
‘I can do that too.’ He smiled back. That hard and hungry smile that showed all his teeth. Long enough for it to be no accident. Long enough for that warm nervousness to set her skin tingling.
There was a part of her that would have liked to follow Gudrun’s example. To piss on the proper thing and go rolling in the hay with her stable-boy. At least to know what it felt like.
But there was a much larger part of her that laughed at the notion. She was no romantic. She could not afford to be. She was a queen, and promised to Grom-gil-Gorm, the Breaker of Swords. A nation relied on her. However she had railed at and complained to and rebelled against Mother Kyre, after all, in the end she had always done her duty.
So instead of clutching hold of Raith like a drowning girl to a log and kissing him as if the secret of life was in his mouth, she swallowed, and frowned back at Gudrun’s Tower.
‘It means a lot,’ she said. ‘That you’d fight for me.’
‘Not that much.’ The sun had been covered by cloud for a moment and the jewels in the grass were turned to cold water. ‘Every good killer needs someone to kill for.’
The Thousand
Soryorn was a grand archer and cut a hero’s figure against the bloody sunset, one foot up on the battlements at the top of Gudrun’s tower, back curved as he bent his great bow, the light from the flaming arrow shifting on his hard-set face.
‘Burn it,’ said Gorm.
The eyes of the thousand picked warriors of Throvenland, Vansterland and Gettland followed the streak of fire as the shaft curved through the still evening and thudded into the deck of Bright Yilling’s ship. Blue flame shot from it as the southern oil caught with a gentle whomp. In a moment the whole boat was alight in a blaze Raith could almost feel the heat of, even up here on the wall.
He glanced sideways and saw the warm glow light up Skara’s smile. It had been her idea. A warrior’s ship is his heart and his home, after all.
It had been a bastard of a job hauling it out of the harbour and on rollers up the long ramp to the yard. Raith’s back was aching and his hands raw from his part in it. Queen Skara had given the gilded weathervane to Blue Jenner, King Gorm had torn out the silver fittings to melt down and make cups, King Uthil had taken the red-dyed sail to spare the women of Gettland some weaving. They’d pulled the mast down to fit it through the entrance passage and they’d gouged the fine carvings when it got wedged in the gateway, but they’d got it outside in the end.
Raith hoped Bright Yilling would appreciate the effort they’d made to welcome him to Bail’s Point. But either way the defenders enjoyed the sight of his ship in flames. There was cheering, there was laughter, there were insults spat at Yilling’s scouts, sat calmly on horseback far out of bowshot. The high spirits were shortlived, though.
Grandmother Wexen’s army was beginning to arrive.
They tramped down the road from the north in an orderly column, an iron snake of men with the High King’s great standard at their head, the seven-rayed sun of the One God bobbing here and there above the crowd, and the marks of a hundred heroes and more hanging limp in the evening stillness. On they came, through the ruins of the village, more, and more, stretching away into the haze of distance.
‘When do they stop coming?’ Raith heard Skara whisper, one arm across her chest to nervously twist her armring.
‘I’d been hoping the scouts got their numbers wrong,’ muttered Blue Jenner.