Joe Abercrombie - Half a King

“He is on his knees already,” said Odem, elbows upon the black arms of the Black Chair.

“He always has been,” said Isriun, smiling, smiling.

“We all serve someone,” said Grandmother Wexen, a hungry brightness in her eye.

“Enough!” hissed Yarvi. “Enough!”

And he flung open the hidden door and lashed out with the curved sword. Ankran’s eyes bulged as the blade slid through him. “Steel is the answer,” he croaked.

Shadikshirram grunted and elbowed and Yarvi punched at her, and metal squelched in flesh, and she smiled at him over her shoulder.

“He is coming,” she whispered. “He is coming.”

YARVI WOKE WET WITH SWEAT, tangled with his blankets, stabbing at his mattress.

A devil’s face loomed over him, made of flame and shadow and stinking of smoke. He shrank away, then gasped in relief as he realized it was Rulf, a torch in his hand against the darkness.

“Grom-gil-Gorm is coming,” he said.

Yarvi tore free of his blankets. Sounds echoed distorted through the shutters at the window. Crashing. Shouting. The clangour of bells.

“He’s crossed the border with more than a thousand men. Might be a hundred thousand depending on what rumor you listen to.”

Yarvi tried to blink away his dream. “Already?”

“He moves quick as fire and spreads as much chaos. The messengers barely outrode him. He’s only three days from the city. Thorlby’s in uproar.”

Downstairs the faintest gray of dawn was leaking through the shutters and across pale faces. The faintest smell of smoke tickled Yarvi’s nose. Smoke and fear. Faintly he could hear the priest outside calling in a broken voice for folk to kneel before the One God and be saved.

To kneel before the High King and be made slaves.

“Your crows fly swiftly, Sister Owd,” said Yarvi.

“I told you they would, my king.” Yarvi flinched at the word. It still sounded like a joke to him. It was a joke, and would be until Odem was dead.

He looked at the faces of his oarmates. Sumael and Jaud each nursing their own kind of fear. Nothing with hungry smile and polished sword both unsheathed.

“This is my fight,” said Yarvi. “If any of you want to leave, I won’t blame you.”

“I and my steel are sworn to the purpose.” Nothing rubbed a speck from his sword with a thumb-tip. “The only door that will stop me is the Last.”

Yarvi nodded, and with his good hand clasped Nothing’s arm. “I don’t pretend to understand your loyalty, but I’m grateful for it.”

The others were slower to the cause. “I’d be lying if I said the odds didn’t bother me,” said Rulf.

“They bothered you on the border,” said Nothing, “and that ended with the burning bodies of our enemies.”

“And of our friend. And our capture by a crowd of angry Vanstermen. Angry Vanstermen are again involved, and if this plan miscarries I doubt we’ll be talking our way clear, however nimble-tongued the young king may be.”

Yarvi put his twisted palm on the pommel of Shadikshirram’s sword. “Then our steel must talk for us.”

“Easy to say before it’s drawn.” Sumael frowned across to Jaud. “I think we had better head south before the swords begin to speak.”

Jaud looked from Yarvi to Sumael and back, and his big shoulders slumped. The wise wait for the moment. But never let it pass.

“You can go with my blessing, but I’d rather have you at my side,” said Yarvi. “Together we braved the South Wind . Together we escaped her. Together we faced the ice and came through. We’ll come through this as well. Together. Only take one more stroke with me.”

Sumael blinked at Jaud, then leaned close to him. “You’re not a warrior, not a king. You’re a baker.”

Jaud looked sidelong at Yarvi, and sighed. “And an oarsman.”

“Not by choice.”

“Not much in life that matters is by choice. What kind of oarsman abandons his mate?”

“This isn’t our fight!” hissed Sumael, low and urgent.

Jaud shrugged. “My friend’s fight is my fight.”

“What about the sweetest water in the world?”

“It will be just as sweet later. Sweeter still, maybe.” And Jaud gave Yarvi a weak smile. “When you have a load to lift, you’re better lifting than weeping.”

“We all might end up weeping.” Sumael took a slow step towards Yarvi, dark eyes fixed on his. She raised a hand to reach towards him, and the breath caught in his throat. “Please, Yorv-”

“My name is Yarvi.” And though it hurt to do it he met her gaze with flinty hardness, the way his mother might have. He would have liked to take her hand. To hold it the way he had in the snow. To be pulled far away by it to the First of Cities, and be Yorv again, and the Black Chair be damned.

He would have loved to take her hand, but he could not afford to weaken. Not for anything. He had sworn an oath, and he needed his oarmates beside him. He needed Jaud. He needed her.

“What about you, Rulf?” he asked

Rulf worked his mouth, carefully rolled his tongue, and neatly spat out of the window. “When the baker fights, what can the warrior do?” His broad face broke into a grin. “My bow’s yours.”

Sumael let her hand fall and stared at the floor, her scarred mouth twisted. “Mother War rules, then. What can I do?”

“Nothing,” said Nothing, simply.

The dovecote was still perched in the top of one of the citadel’s highest towers, still streaked inside and out with centuries of droppings, and still through its many windows a chill wind blew. More chill than ever.

“Gods damn this cold,” muttered Yarvi.

Sumael kept looking through her eyeglass, mouth fixed in a hard line. “You saying you haven’t been colder?”

“You know I have.” They both had, out there in the crushing ice. But it seemed there had been a spark between the two of them to warm him. He had well and truly snuffed it out now.

“I’m sorry,” he said, though it came out a grudging grunt. She kept her silence, and he found himself meandering on. “For what my mother said to you … for asking Jaud to stay … for not-”

Her jaw-muscles worked. “Surely a king need never apologize.”

He winced at that. “I’m the same man you slept beside on the South Wind . The same man you walked beside in the snow. The same man-”

“Are you?” She looked at him then, finally, but there was no softness in it. “Over the hill there.” She passed the eye-glass across. “Smoke.”

“Smoke,” croaked one of the doves. “Smoke.”

Sumael eyed it suspiciously, and from their cages ranged about the walls the doves eyed her unblinking back. All apart from the bronze eagle, huge and regal, which must have come from Grandmother Wexen with another offer-or demand-of marriage for Yarvi’s mother. It poked proudly at its plumage and did not deign to look down.

“Smoke, smoke, smoke …”

“Can you stop them doing that?” asked Sumael.

“They echo bits of the messages they’ve been trained to say,” said Yarvi. “Don’t worry. They don’t understand them.” Though as those dozens of eyes turned on him as one, heads attentively cocked, he was forced again to wonder whether they might understand more than he did. He turned back to the window and pressed the glass to his eye, saw the crooked thread of smoke against the sky.

“There is a steading that way.” The owner had been one among the procession of hand-wringing mourners at his father’s howing up. Yarvi tried not to wonder whether that man had been on his farm when Grom-gil-Gorm came visiting. And if he had not, who had been there to greet the Vanstermen, and what had happened to them since …