“What do you think?”
“She is wretched. She is all pride and anger. She has too much confidence and too little. She does not know herself.” The figure pushed back her hood. A black-skinned old woman with a face lean as famine and hair shaved to gray fuzz. She picked her nose with one long forefinger, carefully examined the results, then flicked them away. “The girl is stupid as a stump. Worse. Most stumps have the dignity to rot quietly without causing offense.”
“I’m right here,” Thorn managed to hiss from her hands and knees.
“Just where the drunk boy put you.” The woman flashed a smile at Brand that seemed to have too many teeth. “I like him, though: he is pretty and desperate. My favorite combination.”
“Can anything be done with her?” asked Yarvi.
“Something can always be done, given enough effort.” The woman peeled herself away from the wall. She had the strangest way of walking—wriggling, jerking, strutting—as though she was dancing to music only she could hear. “How much effort will you pay for me to waste upon her worthless carcass, is the question? You owe me already, after all.” A long arm snaked from her cloak with something in the hand.
It was a box perhaps the size of a child’s head—dark, square, perfect, with golden writing etched into the lid. Brand found his eyes drawn to it. It took an effort not to step closer, to look closer. Thorn was staring too. And Rulf. And the queen’s thralls. All fascinated and afraid at once, as if by the sight of a terrible wound. None of them could read, of course, but you did not have to be a minister to know those were elf-letters on the box. Letters written before the Breaking of God.
Father Yarvi swallowed, and with the one finger of his crippled hand eased the box open. Whatever was inside, a pale light shone from it. A light that picked out the hollows of the minister’s face as his mouth fell open, that reflected in Queen Laithlin’s widening eyes which a moment before Brand had thought nothing could surprise.
“By the gods,” she whispered. “You have it.”
The woman gave an extravagant bow, the hem of her cloak sending up a wash of straw-dust from the storehouse floor. “I deliver what I promise, my most gilded of queens.”
“Then it still works?”
“Shall I make it turn?”
“No,” said Father Yarvi. “Make it turn for the Empress of the South, not before.”
“There is the question of—”
Without taking her eyes from the box, the Queen held out a folded paper. “Your debts are all canceled.”
“The very question I had in mind.” The black-skinned woman frowned as she took it between two fingers. “I have been called a witch before but here is sorcery indeed, to trap such a weight of gold in a scrap of paper.”
“We live in changing times,” murmured Father Yarvi, and he snapped the box shut, putting the light out with it. Only then Brand realized he’d been holding his breath, and slowly let it out. “Find us a crew, Rulf, you know the kind.”
“Hard ones, I’m guessing,” said the old warrior.
“Oarsmen and fighters. The outcasts and the desperate. Men who don’t get weak at the thought of blood or the sight of it. The journey is long and the stakes could not be higher. I want men with nothing to lose.”
“My kind of crew!” The black-skinned woman slapped her thigh. “Sign me up first!” She slipped between the stools and strutted over toward Brand, and for a moment her cloak of rags came open and he saw the glint of steel. “Can I buy you a drink, young man?”
“I think the boy has drunk enough.” Queen Laithlin’s gray eyes were on him, and the eyes of her four slaves as well, and Brand swallowed, his sick-tasting mouth suddenly very dry. “Though my first husband gave me two sons, for which I will always be grateful, he drank too much. It spoils a bad man. It ruins a good one.”
“I … have decided to stop, my queen,” mumbled Brand. He knew then he wasn’t going back. Not to the ale-cup, nor to begging, nor to lifting on the docks.
The black woman puffed out her cheeks in disappointment as she made for the door. “Young people these days have no ambition in them.”
Laithlin ignored her. “The way you fight reminds me of an old friend.”
“Thank you—”
“Don’t. I had to kill him.” And the queen of Gettland swept out, her slaves following in her wake.
“I’ve a crew to gather.” Rulf took Brand under the arm. “And no doubt your gutter’s missing you—”