“Er …”
She started pounding at the bellows like Thorn used to pound Brand’s head in the training square. “Thorn Bathu ran the oars in the middle of an elf-ruin. Thorn Bathu saved his life in the shield wall. Thorn Bathu made an alliance that’ll put the world to rights. And when I could’ve bitten his face if I heard your name one more time, what do you think he told me next?”
“Er …”
“Thorn Bathu scarcely spoke a word to him the whole way back. Thorn Bathu cut him off like you’d trim a blister. I tell you what, Thorn Bathu sounds something of a bloody bitch to me, after all he’s done for her and, no, I don’t much fancy making a sword for—”
“Hold it there,” snapped Thorn. “You don’t have the first clue what happened between me and your brother.”
Rin let the bellows be and glared over. “Enlighten me.”
“Well …” Last thing Thorn needed was to rip that scab off again just when there was a chance of letting it heal. She wasn’t about to admit that she made a fool’s mistake, and burned herself bad, and had to make herself not look at Brand or talk to Brand or have anything to do with Brand every moment of every day in case she burned herself again. “You got it back to front is all!”
“Strange how people are always getting the wrong idea about you. How often does that have to happen, ’fore you start thinking maybe they got the right idea?” And Rin dragged the iron from the forge and set it back on the anvil.
“You don’t know me,” growled Thorn, working up the bellows on some anger of her own. “You don’t know what I’ve been through.”
“No doubt we’ve all had our struggles,” said Rin, lifting her hammer. “But some of us get to weep over ’em in a big house our daddy paid for.”
Thorn threw up her hands at the fine new forge behind the fine home near the citadel. “Oh, I see you and Brand have barely been scraping by!”
Rin froze, then, muscles bunching across her shoulders, and her eyes flicked over, and she looked angry. So angry Thorn took a little step back, a cautious eye on that hovering hammer.
Then Rin tossed it rattling down, pulled her gloves off and flung them on the table. “Come with me.”
“MY MOTHER DIED WHEN I was little.”
Rin had led them outside the walls. Downwind, where the stink of Thorlby’s rubbish wouldn’t bother the good folk of the city.
“Brand remembers her a little. I don’t.”
Some of the midden heaps were years covered over and turned to grassy mounds. Some were open and stinking, spilling bones and shells, rags and the dung of men and beasts.
“He always says she told him to do good.”
A mangy dog gave Thorn a suspicious eye, as though it considered her competition, and went back to sniffing through the rot.
“My father died fighting Grom-gil-Gorm,” muttered Thorn, trying to match ill-luck for ill-luck. Honestly, she felt a little queasy. From the look of this place, and the stink of it, and the fact she had scarcely even known it was here because her mother’s slaves had always carted their rubbish. “They laid him out in the Godshall.”
“And you got his sword.”
“Less the pommel,” grunted Thorn, trying not to breathe through her nose. “Gorm kept that.”
“You’re lucky to have something from your father.” Rin didn’t seem bothered by the stench at all. “We didn’t get much from ours. He liked a drink. Well. I say a drink. He liked ’em all. He left when Brand was nine. Gone one morning, and maybe we were better off without him.”
“Who took you in?” asked Thorn in a small voice, getting the sense she was far outclassed in the ill-luck contest.
“No one did.” Rin let that sink in a moment. “There were quite a few of us living here, back then.”
“Here?”
“You pick through. Sometimes you find something you can eat. Sometimes you find something you can sell. Winters.” Rin hunched her shoulders and gave a shiver. “Winters were hard.”