Resisting the High King is a very poor idea.
“I must say it surprises me,” Father Yarvi was saying, “to find the Breaker of Swords serving as the High King’s doorman.”
Gorm frowned sideways. “We all must kneel to someone.”
“Some of us kneel more easily than others, though.”
Gorm frowned harder but his minister spoke first. “Grandmother Wexen can be most persuasive.”
“Has she persuaded you to pray to the One God, yet?” asked Yarvi.
Scaer gave a snort so explosive it was a wonder she didn’t blow snot down her chest.
“Nothing will pry me from the bloody embrace of Mother War,” growled Gorm. “That much I promise you.”
Yarvi smiled as if he chatted with friends. “My uncle uses just those words. There is so much that unites Gettland and Vansterland. We pray the same way, speak the same way, fight the same way. Only a narrow river separates us.”
“And hundreds of years of dead fathers and dead sons,” muttered Thorn, under her breath.
“Shush,” hissed Rulf, beside her.
“We have a bloody past,” said Yarvi. “But good leaders must put the past at their backs and look to the future. The more I think on it, the more it seems our struggles only weaken us both and profit others.”
“So after all our battles shall we link arms?” Thorn saw the corner of Gorm’s mouth twisted in a smile. “And dance over our dead together into your brave future?”
Smiles, and dancing, and Thorn glanced to the weapons on the walls, wondering whether she could tear a sword from its brackets and stove Gorm’s skull in before Rulf stopped her. There would be a deed worthy of a warrior of Gettland.
But then Thorn wasn’t a warrior of Gettland, and never would be.
“You weave a pretty dream, Father Yarvi.” Gorm puffed out a sigh. “But you wove pretty dreams for me once before. We all must wake, and whether it pleases us to kneel or no, the dawn belongs to the High King.”
“And to his minister,” said Mother Scaer.
“To her most of all.” And the Breaker of Swords pushed wide the great doors at the hallway’s end.
Thorn remembered the one time she had stood in Gettland’s Godshall, staring at her father’s pale, cold corpse, trying to squeeze her mother’s hand hard enough that she would stop sobbing. It had seemed the biggest room in the world, too big for man’s hands to have built. But elf hands had built the Chamber of Whispers. Five Godshalls could have fit inside with floor left over to plant a decent crop of barley. Its walls of smooth elf-stone and black elf-glass rose up, and up, and were lost in the dizzying gloom above.
Six towering statues of the tall gods frowned down, but the High King had turned from their worship and his masons had been busy. Now a seventh stood above them all. The southerners’ god, the One God, neither man nor woman, neither smiling nor weeping, arms spread wide in a smothering embrace, gazing down with bland indifference upon the petty doings of mankind.
People were crowded about the far-off edges of the floor, and around a balcony of gray elf-metal at ten times the height of a man, and a ring of tiny faces at another as far above again. Thorn saw Vanstermen with braids in their long hair, Throvenmen with silver ring-money stacked high on their arms. She saw Islanders with weathered faces, stout Lowlanders and wild-bearded Inglings. She saw lean women she reckoned Shends and plump merchants of Sagenmark. She saw dark-faced emissaries from Catalia, or the Empire of the South, or even further off, maybe.
All the people in the world, it seemed, gathered with the one purpose of licking the High King’s arse.
“Greatest of men!” called Father Yarvi, “between gods and kings! I prostrate myself before you!” And he near threw himself on his face, the echoes of his voice bouncing from the galleries above and shattering into the thousand thousand whispers which gave the hall its name.
The rumors had in fact been overly generous to the greatest of men. The High King was a shrivelled remnant in his outsize throne, withered face sagging off the bone, beard a few gray straggles. Only his eyes showed some sign of life, bright and flinty hard as he glared down at Gettland’s minister.
“Now you kneel, fool!” hissed Rulf, dragging Thorn down beside him by her belt. And only just in time. An old woman was already walking out across the expanse of floor toward them.
She was round-faced and motherly, with deep laughter lines about her twinkling eyes, white hair cut short, her coarse gray gown dragging upon the floor so heavily its hem was frayed to dirty tatters. About her neck upon the finest chain, crackling papers scrawled with runes were threaded.
“We understand Queen Laithlin is with child.” She might have looked no hero, but by the gods she spoke with a hero’s voice. Deep, soft, effortlessly powerful. A voice that demanded attention. A voice that commanded obedience.