“For God’s sake: Vialine.” The empress had some scratches across her cheek, but no other sign of her brush with Death.
“I should—” Thorn winced as she tried to sit and Vialine put her hand on her shoulder, and gently but very firmly pushed her back onto the bed.
“Don’t get up. Consider that an imperial edict.” For once, Thorn decided not to fight. “Are you badly hurt?”
She thought about saying no, but the lie would hardly have been convincing. She shrugged, and even that was painful. “Father Yarvi says I’ll heal.”
The empress looked down as though she was the one in pain, her hand still on Thorn’s shoulder. “You will have scars.”
“They’re expected on a fighter.”
“You saved my life.”
“They would have killed me first.”
“Then you saved both our lives.”
“Brand played his part, I hear.”
“And I have thanked him. But I have not thanked you.” Vialine took a long breath. “I have dissolved the alliance with the High King. I have sent birds to Grandmother Wexen. I have let her know that, regardless of what gods we pray to, the enemy of Gettland is my enemy, the friend of Gettland is my friend.”
Thorn blinked. “You’re too generous.”
“I can afford to be, now. My uncle ruled an empire within the empire, but without him it has fallen like an arch without its keystone. I have taken your advice. To strike swiftly, and without mercy. Traitors are being weeded out of my council. Out of my guard.” There was a hardness in her face, and just then Thorn was glad she was on Vialine’s right side. “Some have fled the city, but we will hunt them down.”
“You will be a great empress,” croaked Thorn.
“If my uncle has taught me anything, it is that an empress is only as great as those around her.”
“You have Sumael, and you—”
Vialine’s hand squeezed her shoulder, and she looked down with that earnest, searching gaze. “Would you stay?”
“Stay?”
“As my bodyguard, perhaps? Queens have them, do they not, in the North? What do you call them?”
“A Chosen Shield,” whispered Thorn.
“As your father was. You have proved yourself more than qualified.”
A Chosen Shield. And to the Empress of the South. To stand at the shoulder of the woman who ruled half the world. Thorn fumbled for the pouch around her neck, felt the old lumps inside, imagining her father’s pride to hear of it. What songs might be sung of that in the smoky inns, and in the narrow houses, and in the high Godshall of Thorlby?
And at that thought a wave of homesickness surged over Thorn, so strong she nearly choked. “I have to go back. I miss the gray cliffs. I miss the gray sea. I miss the cold.” She felt tears in her eyes, then, and blinked them away. “I miss my mother. And I swore an oath.”
“Not all oaths are worth keeping.”
“You keep an oath not for the oath but for yourself.” Her father’s words, whispered long ago beside the fire. “I wish I could split myself in half.”
Vialine sucked at her teeth. “Half a bodyguard would be no good to me. But I knew what your answer would be. You are not one to be held, Thorn Bathu, even with a gilded chain. Perhaps one day you will come back of your own accord. Until then, I have a gift for you. I could only find one worthy of the service you have done me.”
And she brought out something that cast pale light across her face, and struck a spark in her eyes, and stopped Thorn’s breath in her throat. The elf-bangle that Skifr had dug from the depths of Strokom, where no man had dared tread since the Breaking of God. The gift the South Wind had carried all the long road down the Divine and the Denied. A thing too grand for an empress to wear.
“Me?” Thorn wriggled up the bed in an effort to get away from it. “No! No, no, no!”
“It is mine to give, well-earned and freely given.”
“I can’t take it—”
“One does not refuse the Empress of the South.” Vialine’s voice had iron in it, and she raised her chin and glared down her nose at Thorn with an authority that was not to be denied. “Which hand?”
Thorn mutely held out her left, and Vialine slipped the elf-bangle over it and folded the bracelet shut with a final sounding click, the light from its round window glowing brighter, shifting to blue-white, metal perfect as a cut jewel gleaming, and circles within circles slowly shifting beneath the glass. Thorn stared at it with a mixture of awe and horror. A relic beyond price. Beautiful beyond words. Sitting now, on her ridiculous bony wrist, with the bizarre magnificence of a diamond on a dung-heap.
Vialine smiled, and finally let go of her shoulder. “It looks well on you.”
THE SHEARS CLICK-CLICKED OVER the left side of Thorn’s scalp and the hair fluttered down onto her shoulder, onto her bandaged leg, onto the cobbles of the yard.
“Do you remember when I first clipped your head?” asked Skifr. “You howled like a wolf cub!”