‘He was with his brother in the tunnel when the oil caught fire.’ A thrall had brought Gorm water and he was wiping the ash from his face.
Skara could hardly speak her throat was suddenly so closed up. ‘He’s dead?’
Gorm gave a grim nod. ‘I taught him to fight, and kill, and die, and now he has done all three.’
‘Only two,’ she said, with a surge of relief that made her head spin.
Raith came shuffling from the shadows, his hair caked with dirt and his bloody teeth gritted, one arm over Blue Jenner’s shoulder.
‘Huh.’ Gorm raised his brows. ‘He always was the tough one.’
Skara darted forward, caught Raith by his elbow. His sleeve was ripped, scorched, strangely blistered. Then she realized to her horror it was not his sleeve, but his skin. ‘Gods, your arm! Mother Owd!’
Raith hardly seemed to notice. ‘Rakki’s dead,’ he whispered.
A slave had brought Gorm a bowl of meat fresh off the spit. The similarity between it and Raith’s arm as Mother Owd peeled the burned cloth away made Skara’s gorge rise.
But if the Breaker of Swords had any fears at all, he did not keep them in his stomach. ‘Fighting always gives me quite an appetite,’ he said around a mouthful of meat, spraying grease. ‘All in all, Mother War favoured us tonight.’
‘What about Rakki?’ snarled Raith, Owd hissing with annoyance as he jerked his half-bandaged arm from her hands.
‘I shall remember him fondly. Unlike others, he proved his loyalty.’
Skara saw the tendons starting from Raith’s fist as it clenched around his axe-haft, and she slipped quickly in front of him.
‘Your chain, my king.’ Lifting that rattling mass of dead men’s pommels up was such an effort her arms trembled.
Gorm stooped to duck his head inside and it brought them closer than they had ever been, her hands behind his neck, almost an awkward embrace. He had a damp-fur smell like the hounds her grandfather had kept.
‘It has grown long over the years,’ he said as he straightened.
This close he seemed bigger than ever. The top of her head could scarcely have reached his neck. Would she need to carry a step with her to kiss her husband? She might have laughed at the thought another time. She did not feel much like laughing then.
‘It was an honour to hold it.’ She wanted very much to back away but knew she could not, dropped her hands to arrange the gaudy, ghastly mementoes on his chest.
‘When we are married, I will cut off a length for you to wear.’
She blinked up at him, cold all over. A chain of dead men to be forever tethered with. ‘I have not earned the right,’ she croaked out.
‘No false modesty, please! Only half a war is fought with swords, my queen, and you have fought the other half with skill and courage.’ He was smiling as he turned away. ‘There will be hundreds dead for your brave work.’
Skara jerked awake, clutching at the furs on her bed, ears straining at the silence.
Nothing.
She hardly slept now. Two or three times every night Bright Yilling’s warriors would come.
They had tried to swim into the harbour, brave men fighting the surging waves in the darkness. But sentries on the towers above had riddled them with arrows, left their bodies tangled on the chains across the entrance.
They had charged up with a felled tree shod in iron as a ram, brave men holding shields above, and made a din upon the gates to wake the dead. But the gates had hardly been scratched.
They had shot swarms of burning arrows over the walls to fall on the yard like tiny shooting stars in the night. They had bounced harmless from flagstones and slates but some had caught among the thatch. Skara’s chest was sore from the billowing smoke, her voice cracked from shrieking orders to soak the roofs, her hands raw from dragging buckets from the well. The stables where she had first saddled a pony as a girl were a scorched shell, but they had managed to stop the fire from spreading.
In the end she had climbed to the walls, soot-smudged but triumphant to shriek, ‘thanks for the arrows!’ at the High King’s retreating bowmen.
By fire or by water, over the walls or under, nothing had worked. Bail’s Point was the strongest fortress in the Shattered Sea, its defenders the picked warriors of three warrior nations. Bright Yilling lost twenty to every one of theirs.
And yet the reinforcements kept coming. Every morning Mother Sun rose upon more warriors of Yutmark, Inglefold and the Lowlands. More mad-eyed, bone-pierced, painted Shends. More ships outside the harbour, stopping any help from coming to the defenders. Their spirits might be buoyed by little victories, but the terrible arithmetic had only worsened. Mother Owd’s cellars overflowed with wounded. Twice they had sent boats drifting out with crews of dead to burn upon the water.
Skara felt as if they were digging ditches to stop the tide. You might keep out one wave. You might keep out ten. But the tide always wins.