Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

“Oh, we thank you for making us safer.” The captain peered at Yarvi’s neck, then twitched Jaud’s collar back to show the scars. “Slaves.”

“Freed men,” said Sumael. “I was their mistress. I am a merchant.” And she reached into her coat to carefully produce a crumpled piece of parchment. “My name is Ebdel Aric Shadikshirram.”

The man frowned at the High King’s licence, but recently removed from its rightful owner’s corpse. “You are ragged for a merchant.”

“I didn’t say I was a good one.”

“And young,” said the captain.

“I didn’t say I was an old one.”

“Where is your ship?”

“At sea.”

“Why are you not aboard?”

“I thought it wise to leave before it touched the bottom.”

“A poor merchant indeed,” muttered one of the men.

“With a cargo of lies,” said another.

The captain shrugged. “The king can decide what to believe. Bind them.”

“King?” asked Yarvi, as he offered his wrists.

The man gave the thinnest of smiles. “Grom-gil-Gorm has come north to hunt.”

So it seemed that Rulf was right. The next enemy was closer than any of them had thought.

Yarvi was no stranger to hard men. His father had been one. His brother another. Dozens more had taken their turn in the training square each day in Thorlby. There had been hundreds gathered on the sand to see King Uthrik howed. To sail with young King Yarvi on his ill-fated raid to Amwend. Faces that smiled only in battle and hands worn to the shape of their weapons.

But he had never seen such a gathering as Grom-gil-Gorm had brought with him to hunt.

“I never saw so many Vanstermen in one place,” muttered Rulf. “And I spent a year in Vulsgard.”

“An army,” grunted Nothing.

“And an ugly one,” said Jaud.

They bristled with weapons and puffed with menace, glared daggers and spoke swords. They wore their scars as proudly as a princess might her jewels while, by way of music, a woman’s voice shrill as a whetstone keened out a love song to Mother War, of spilled blood and notched steel and lives lost too soon.

Into the midst of this bear pit, roped and hobbled helpless, between fires over which fresh carcasses dripped red gravy, Yarvi and his friends were herded stumbling at spearpoint.

“If you have a plan,” hissed Sumael from the corner of her mouth, “now would be the time.”

“I have a plan,” said Nothing.

“Does it involve a sword?” asked Jaud.

A pause. “All my plans do.”

“Do you have a sword?”

Another. “No.”

“How will your plan work without one?” muttered Sumael.

A third. “Death waits for us all.”

Where this company of killers was tightest knotted Yarvi saw the outline of a great chair, and upon it a great figure with a great cup in his great fist, but instead of the fear that might once have gripped him Yarvi felt the ticklings of opportunity. Not a plan, scarcely even an idea but, as Mother Gundring used to tell him, drowning men must clutch at whatever twigs they find floating .

“There are better things one can do with enemies than kill them,” he whispered.

Nothing snorted. “And what would that be?”

“Make allies of them.” And Yarvi took a deep breath and roared out, “Grom-gil-Gorm!” His voice smoked shrill and cracked and as far from kingly as could be imagined, but loud enough to be heard all about the camp, and that was what mattered. A hundred firelit faces turned towards him. “King of Vansterland! Bloodiest son of Mother War! Breaker of Swords and maker of orphans, we meet again! I-”

A well-judged blow in the stomach drove his breath out in a mournful sigh. “Stop your tongue before I rip it out, boy!” snarled the captain, shoving Yarvi coughing onto his knees.

But his words had their effect.

First a heavy silence settled, then an even heavier tread approached, and finally the sing-song voice of Grom-gil-Gorm himself. “You bring guests!”

“Though they look like beggars.” And though he had not heard it since they put the collar on him, Yarvi knew the icy tone of Mother Scaer from his dreams.

“We found them in the elf-ruin above the river, my king,” said the captain.

“They do not have the look of elves,” said Gorm’s minister.

“They were burning corpses.”

“A noble enterprise if they are the right ones,” said Gorm. “You speak as though I know you, boy. Would you have me play a guessing game?”

Struggling for breath to speak, Yarvi raised his head, once again taking in the boots, the belt, the thrice-looped chain, and finally far above the craggy head of the King of Vansterland, most bitter enemy to his father, his country, his people.

“Last time we met … you offered me your knife.” And Yarvi fixed Gorm with his eye. On his knees, ragged and bloodied, beaten and bound, but fixed him still. “You told me to seek you out if I changed my mind. Would you give it to me now?”

The King of Vansterland frowned, fingering that chain of dead men’s pommels about his trunk of a neck, and with the other hand pushed his many blades carefully into his belt. “That might not be prudent.”

“I thought Mother War breathed on you in your crib, and it had been foreseen no man could kill you?”

“The gods help those who help themselves.” Mother Scaer grabbed Yarvi’s jaw with bruising fingers and twisted his face into the light. “It is the cook’s boy caught at Amwend.”

“That it is,” murmured Gorm. “But he is changed. He has a stern eye upon him now.”

Mother Scaer narrowed her own eyes. “And you have lost the collar I gave you.”

“It chafed. I wasn’t born to be a slave.”

“And yet you kneel again before me,” said Gorm. “What were you born to be?”

His men spilled lickspittle laughs, but Yarvi had been laughed at all his life and it had lost its sting.

“The King of Gettland,” he said, and this time his voice was cold and hard as the Black Chair itself.

“Oh, gods,” he heard Sumael breathe. “We’re dead.”

Gorm gave a huge smile. “Odem! You are younger than I remember.”

“I am Odem’s nephew. Uthrik’s son.”

The captain cuffed Yarvi across the back of the head and knocked him on his broken nose. Which was particularly galling, since with hands bound he could do nothing to break his fall. “Uthrik’s son died with him!”

“He had another son, fool!” Yarvi wriggled back onto his knees, mouth salty with blood. A taste he was tiring of.

Fingers were twisted in Yarvi’s hair and he was dragged up. “Shall I hire him for a jester or hang him for a spy?”

“That is not your place to decide.” Mother Scaer merely raised one finger, elf-bangles on her long arm rattling, but the captain let go as if he had been slapped. “Uthrik did have a second son. Prince Yarvi. He was training for the Ministry.”

“But never took the test,” said Yarvi. “I took the Black Chair instead.”

“So that the Golden Queen might keep her grip on power.”

“Laithlin. My mother.”

Mother Scaer considered him for a long moment, and Yarvi raised his chin and stared back in as close to a kingly manner as his bleeding nose, bound hands and stinking rags would allow. Perhaps it was enough, at least to plant the seed of doubt.

“Free his hands.”

Yarvi felt his ropes cut and, with a suitable sense of theatre, slowly held his left hand to the light. The muttering about the campfires at the sight of the twisted thing seemed for once most gratifying.

“Was this what you were looking for?” he asked.

Mother Scaer took it in hers, and turned it over, and kneaded at it with strong fingers. “If you were student to Mother Gundring, whose student was she?”