Joe Abercrombie - Half a War

‘Huh.’ She pulled the drum from her elf-weapon and tossed it back to Koll, made him juggle it in a panic before he clutched it desperately to his chest. ‘It seems the day is ours.’

Slowly, weakly, hesitantly as a moth breaking from its cocoon, Skara pushed Raith’s limp arm away and, using the rim of his shield like a crutch, wobbled to her feet.

The sounds all seemed strange. Screaming, and shouts, and the calls of birds. Now and again the stuttering bark of elf-weapons. But all far away, as though it happened in another time and place.

Mother Scaer stood rubbing her bruised shoulder. With a grimace of disgust she tossed her still-smoking relic to the ground.

‘Are you hurt, my queen?’ Blue Jenner’s voice. It took Skara a moment to realize he was talking to her. She looked stupidly down at herself. Her mailshirt was all twisted and she tried to drag it straight, brushed mud from her side.

‘Dirty,’ she mumbled, as though that mattered, her tongue clumsy in her dry mouth as she blinked across the battlefield. If it could be called a battle.

The line of stakes was buckled and torn, great pits dug from it and broken earth and broken gear and broken bodies flung into smouldering heaps. The High King’s army, so terrible a few moments before, was burned away like the morning fog before Mother Sun.

Father Yarvi gazed down at the shattered bodies of Yilling’s Companions, his elf-staff, his elf-weapon, tucked under one arm. Not frowning or smiling. Not weeping, or laughing. A studied calmness on his face. A craftsman well-satisfied with his morning’s work.

‘Up, Mother Adwyn,’ he said.

From among the corpses the minister lifted her head, red hair plastered to her scalp with clotted blood.

‘What have you done?’ She stared at Yarvi in slack disbelief, tear-streaks on her mud-spattered face. ‘What have you done?’

Yarvi twisted his withered hand in her coat and dragged her up by it. ‘Exactly what you accused me of!’ he snarled. ‘Where is your court for this? Where is the jury? Who will judge me now?’ And he rattled his elf-staff, his elf-weapon, in her face, and threw her down cringing among the bodies.

One of them had somehow staggered up, blinking about him like a man woken from a dream. Vorenhold, though Skara hardly recognized him now. His mail was as tattered as a beggar’s coat, his shield hanging in splinters from its bent rim, one earless side of his face all scored and bloody and the arm that had held a spear gone at the elbow.

He fumbled the horn from his belt, lifted it as though to give a blast, then saw the mouthpiece was broken off. ‘What happen?’ he mumbled.

‘Your death.’ Gorm put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him gently down to his knees, then with a sweep of his sword sent his head spinning away.

‘Where is Yilling?’ murmured Skara, tottering to the corpses. Gods, she could hardly tell one from another. Those who had stood so proud a few moments before, made butcher’s offal. Perhaps she should have felt triumph, but all she felt was terror.

‘This is the end of the world,’ she whispered. The end of the world she had known, anyway. What had been strong was strong no longer. What had been certain was wreathed in a fog of doubt.

‘Careful, my queen,’ Raith muttered, but she hardly heard him, let alone marked him.

She had seen Bright Yilling’s body, wedged among the others, arms flung wide, one leg folded beneath him, mail soaked dark with blood.

She crept closer. She saw the smooth cheek, the long scratch Uthil had given him.

Closer yet, fascinated, fearful. She saw the bland little smile on the plump lips, even in death.

She leaned down over him. The same blank eyes that had haunted her dreams ever since that night in the Forest. The night she had sworn vengeance.

Did his cheek twitch?

She gasped as his eyes flicked to hers, gave a squawk of shock as his hand clutched her mail and dragged her down. So her ear was pressed to his face. So she heard his rasping breath. But not just breath. Words too. And words can be weapons.

Her hand was on her dagger’s grip. She could have drawn it. Could have sent him through the Last Door with a flick of her wrist. She had dreamed of it often enough. But she thought of her grandfather, then. Be as generous to your enemies as your friends. Not for their sake, but for your own.

She heard Raith growl, felt his shadow fall across them, stabbed her palm out behind her to stop him. Bright Yilling’s hand fell, and she pulled away from him to see his red-spotted face.

He pressed something weakly into Skara’s palm. A leather pouch, and inside she saw slips of paper. Slips like the ones Mother Kyre used to unfold from the talons of Grandmother Wexen’s eagles.

She leaned down over Bright Yilling, the fear gone, and the hate gone too. She took his hand in hers, slipped her other around the back of his head and gently lifted it towards her.

‘Tell me the name,’ she murmured, and turned her ear to his lips. Close enough to hear his final breath. His final word.

It was a great affair.

Many powerful Gettlanders who had not gone to war would be angered that King Uthil was howed up at Bail’s Point, denying them the chance to have their importance noted at an event that would live so long in the memory.

But Laithlin forced through clenched teeth, ‘Their anger is dust to me.’ Her husband’s death had made her queen-regent, the young King Druin clinging to her skirts and her power greater than ever. Thorn Bathu hovered at her shoulder with an eye so vicious and vengeful only the bravest dared meet it even for a moment. Once Laithlin spoke it was a thing already done.

And, after all, there was no shortage of famed figures to attend the Iron King’s funeral.

There was the young Queen Skara of Throvenland, lately a pitiful refugee, now celebrated for her courage, her compassion, and her deep-cunning most of all, her white-haired bodyguard frowning silent behind her chair.

There was her betrothed, Grom-gil-Gorm, the Breaker of Swords and Maker of Orphans, his chain of pommels grown longer than ever, his feared minister Mother Scaer brooding at his side.

There was the infamous sorceress Skifr, who had killed more warriors in a few moments than King Uthil in a bloody lifetime, sitting with her cloak of rags drawn tight about her, reckoning the omens in the dirt between her crossed legs.

There was Svidur, a high priestess of the Shends, a green elf-tablet on a thong around her neck. It turned out Father Yarvi had once begged guest-right at her fire after a storm, then convinced her to make an alliance with Grandmother Wexen, then, when it suited him, to break it.

There was the deep-cunning Minister of Gettland himself, of course, who had brought elf-weapons from the forbidden depths of Strokom, and used them to destroy the High King’s army, and changed the Shattered Sea for ever.

And there was his apprentice, Koll, whose coat was too thin for the season, and so sat cold and mournful in the sea wind feeling as if he had no business being there.

The king’s ship, the best in the crowded harbour of Bail’s Point, twenty-four oars upon a side, was dragged by honoured warriors to the chosen place, keel grinding against the stones in the yard of the fortress. The same ship in which King Uthil had sailed across the Shattered Sea on his famous raid to the Islands. The same ship which had wallowed low in the water with slaves and plunder when he returned in triumph.

On its deck they laid the body of the king, wrapped in the captured standard of Bright Yilling, rich offerings arranged about him in the manner Brinyolf the Prayer-Weaver judged the gods would most appreciate.