“I wouldn’t have lost my place on the king’s raid,” said Brand. “I’d be a proud warrior of Gettland now, doing just as Master Hunnan told me.”
“And my mother would have married me off to some old fool, and I’d be wearing his key all wrong and sewing very badly.”
“You wouldn’t be facing Grom-gil-Gorm.”
“No. But we’d never have had … whatever we’ve got.”
He looked into her eyes for a moment. “I’m glad I hesitated.”
“So am I.” She kissed him, then. One last kiss before the storm. Her lips soft against his. Her breath hot in the dawn chill.
“Thorn?” Koll was standing beside them. “Gorm’s in the square.”
Brand wanted to scream, then, but he forced himself to smile instead. “The sooner you start, the sooner you kill him.”
He drew Odda’s sword and started beating on Rulf’s shield with the hilt, and others did the same with their own weapons, their own armor, noise spreading out through the ranks, and men began to shout, to roar, to sing out their defiance. She was nowhere near the champion they’d have picked, but she was Gettland’s champion even so.
And Thorn strode tall through a thunder of clashing metal, the warriors parting before her like the earth before the plow.
Striding to her meeting with the Breaker of Swords.
STEEL
“I have been waiting for you,” said Grom-gil-Gorm in his sing-song voice.
He sat upon a stool with his white-haired blade-and shield-bearers kneeling to either side, one of them smiling at Thorn, the other scowling as if he might fight her himself. Behind them, along the eastern edge of the square, twenty of Gorm’s closest warriors were ranged, Mother Isriun glaring from their midst, hair stirred about her gaunt face by a breath of wind, Sister Scaer sullen beside her. Behind them were hundreds more fighting men, black outlines along the top of the ridge, Mother Sun bright as she rose beyond Amon’s Tooth.
“Thought I’d give you a little more time alive.” Thorn put on her bravest face as she stepped between Queen Laithlin and Father Yarvi. Stepped out in front of Gettland’s twenty best and into that little plot of close-cut grass. A square just like the many she’d trained in, eight strides on a side, a spear driven into the ground at each corner.
A square where either she or Grom-gil-Gorm would die.
“No gift to me.” The Breaker of Swords shrugged his great shoulders and his heavy mail, forged with zigzag lines of gold, gave an iron whisper. “Time drags when the Last Door stands so near.”
“Perhaps it stands nearer for you than for me.”
“Perhaps.” He toyed thoughtfully with one of the pommels on his chain. “You are Thorn Bathu, then?”
“Yes.”
“This one they sing the songs of?”
“Yes.”
“The one who saved the Empress of the South?”
“Yes.”
“The one who won a priceless relic from her.” Gorm glanced down at the elf-bangle, glowing red as a burning coal on Thorn’s wrist, and raised his brows. “I had taken those songs for lies.”
She shrugged. “Some of them.”
“However grand the truth, it is never enough for the skalds, eh?” Gorm took his shield from the smiling boy, a mighty thing, painted black with a rim scored and dented by a hundred old blows. Gifts from the many men he had killed in squares like this one. “I think we met before.”
“In Skekenhouse. Where you knelt before the High King.”
His cheek gave the faintest twitch of displeasure. “We all must kneel to someone. I should have known you sooner, but you have changed.”
“Yes.”
“You are Storn Headland’s daughter.”
“Yes.”
“That was a glorious duel.” The frowning boy offered Gorm’s sword and he curled his great fingers about the grip and drew it. A monstrous blade, Thorn would have needed both hands to swing it but he carried it lightly as a willow switch. “Let us hope ours will make as jolly a song.”
“Don’t count on the same outcome,” said Thorn, watching Mother Sun’s reflection flash down his steel. He would have the reach, the strength, the armor but, weighed down by all that metal, she would have the speed. She would last the longer. Who would have the upper hand in the contest of wits, it remained to be seen.
“I have fought a score of duels, and put a score of brave men in their howes, and learned one thing. Never count on the outcome.” Gorm’s eyes moved over her clothes, her weapons, judging her as she was judging him. She wondered what strengths he saw. What weaknesses. “I never fought a woman before, though.”
“Nor will you again. This is your last fight.” She raised her chin at him. “Mother War’s breath will not shield you from me.”