‘Never again tell me what I already know.’
This wasn’t running near as smoothly as Brand had hoped. But so it goes, with hopes. ‘Thorn fought me, and I hesitated … she should’ve won her place. But Master Hunnan set three others on her.’
Yarvi glanced towards the people flowing steadily out of the Godshall, and eased a little closer. ‘Three at once?’
‘Edwal was one of them. She never meant to kill him—’
‘How did she do against those three?’
Brand blinked, wrong-footed. ‘Well … she killed more of them than they did of her.’
‘That’s in no doubt. I was but lately consoling Edwal’s parents, and promising them justice. She is sixteen winters, then?’
‘Thorn?’ Brand wasn’t sure what that had to do with her sentence. ‘I … think she is.’
‘And has held her own in the square all this time against the boys?’ He gave Brand a look up and down. ‘Against the men?’
‘Usually she does better than hold her own.’
‘She must be very fierce. Very determined. Very hard-headed.’
‘From what I can tell her head’s bone all the way through.’ Brand realized he wasn’t helping and mumbled weakly, ‘But … she’s not a bad person.’
‘None are, to their mothers.’ Father Yarvi pushed out a heavy sigh. ‘What would you have me do?’
‘What … would I what?’
‘Do I free this troublesome girl and make enemies of Hunnan and the boy’s family, or crush her with stones and appease them? Your solution?’
Brand hadn’t expected to give a solution. ‘I suppose … you should follow the law?’
‘The law?’ Father Yarvi snorted. ‘The law is more Mother Sea than Father Earth, always shifting. The law is a mummer’s puppet, Brand, it says what I say it says.’
‘Just thought I should tell someone … well … the truth?’
‘As if the truth is precious. I can find a thousand truths under every autumn leaf, Brand: everyone has their own. But you thought no further than passing the burden of your truth to me, did you? My epic thanks, preventing Gettland sliding into war with the whole Shattered Sea gives me not enough to do.’
‘I thought … this was doing good.’ Doing good seemed of a sudden less a burning light before him, clear as Mother Sun, and more a tricking glimmer in the murk of the Godshall.
‘Whose good? Mine? Edwal’s? Yours? As we each have our own truth so we each have our own good.’ Yarvi edged a little closer, spoke a little softer. ‘Master Hunnan may guess you shared your truth with me, what then? Have you thought on the consequences?’
They settled on Brand now, cold as a fall of fresh snow. He looked up, saw the gleam of Rauk’s eye in the shadows of the emptying hall.
‘A man who gives all his thought to doing good, but no thought to the consequences …’ Father Yarvi lifted his withered hand and pressed its one crooked finger into Brand’s chest. ‘That is a dangerous man.’
And the minister turned away, the butt of his elf staff tapping against stones polished to glass by the passage of years, leaving Brand to stare wide-eyed into the gloom, more worried than ever.
He didn’t feel like he was standing in the light at all.
Thorn sat and stared down at her filthy toes, pale as maggots in the darkness.
She had no notion why they took her boots. She was hardly going to run, chained by her left ankle to one damp-oozing wall and her right wrist to the other. She could scarcely reach the gate of her cell, let alone rip it from its hinges. Apart from picking the scabs under her broken nose till they bled, all she could do was sit and think.
Her two least favourite activities.
She heaved in a ragged breath. Gods, the place stank. The rotten straw and the rat droppings stank and the bucket they never bothered to empty stank and the mould and rusting iron stank and after two nights in there she stank worst of all.
Any other day she would’ve been swimming in the bay, fighting Mother Sea, or climbing the cliffs, fighting Father Earth, or running or rowing or practising with her father’s old sword in the yard of their house, fighting the blade-scarred posts and pretending they were Gettland’s enemies as the splinters flew – Grom-gil-Gorm, or Styr of the Islands, or even the High King himself.
But she would swing no sword today. She was starting to think she had swung her last. It seemed a long, hard way from fair. But then, as Hunnan said, fair wasn’t a thing a warrior could rely on.
‘You’ve a visitor,’ said the key-keeper, a weighty lump of a woman with a dozen rattling chains about her neck and a face like a bag of axes. ‘But you’ll have to make it quick.’ And she hauled the heavy door squealing open.
‘Hild!’
This once Thorn didn’t tell her mother she’d given that name up at six years old, when she pricked her father with his own dagger and he called her ‘thorn’. It took all the strength she had to unfold her legs and stand, sore and tired and, suddenly, pointlessly ashamed of the state she was in. Even if she hardly cared for how things looked, she knew her mother did.
When Thorn shuffled into the light her mother pressed one pale hand to her mouth. ‘Gods, what did they do to you?’
Thorn waved at her face, chains rattling. ‘This happened in the square.’
Her mother came close to the bars, eyes rimmed with weepy pink. ‘They say you murdered a boy.’
‘It wasn’t murder.’
‘You killed a boy, though?’
Thorn swallowed, dry throat clicking. ‘Edwal.’
‘Gods,’ whispered her mother again, lip trembling. ‘Oh, gods, Hild, why couldn’t you …’
‘Be someone else?’ Thorn finished for her. Someone easy, someone normal. A daughter who wanted to wield nothing weightier than a needle, dress in southern silk instead of mail and harbour no dreams beyond wearing some rich man’s key.
‘I saw this coming,’ said her mother, bitterly. ‘Ever since you went to the square. Ever since we saw your father dead, I saw this coming.’
Thorn felt her cheek twitch. ‘You can take comfort in how right you were.’
‘You think there’s any comfort for me in this? They say they’re going to crush my only child with stones!’
Thorn felt cold
