by Kim Wilkins
He took a deep drink, placed his cup on the table, and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Cleared his throat. Tilted his head slightly to the right. ‘No,’ he said at last.
‘Why not?’ she demanded, too loudly. Linden jumped. She put a hand on his shoulder, her eyes never leaving Tolan’s. ‘Why not?’ she asked more softly.
Tolan pointed at Linden. ‘He finds things.’
‘Leave him be.’
‘There may yet be more treasure. There may yet be more occasions for me to use his skills. Certainly, if raiders hadn’t deposed your sister, I’d be a bit more cautious. But I can’t see a single good reason to let you go.’
Rose’s ribs seemed to tighten around her lungs like a cage. ‘Please, Tolan. Please.’
‘I am sorry, Rose,’ he said, tapping his empty cup on the table to let the brewer know to bring more mead. ‘But I’m keeping you.’
Twenty-one
Bluebell was always up before the others. They were loyal and they cared about the fate of the kingdom, but they did not have as much at stake as her and they never would. She was the king. The price for her privilege and power was sleepless nights, waking before dawn to lie listening to the restless sea.
Sometimes Ash woke soon after her, almost as though she could sense Bluebell’s need not to be alone. But today was not one of those days. Ash lay on her side, face illuminated gently by the low firelight, eyeballs moving behind her lids. Dreaming. Bluebell wondered what about. Something prophetic? Something meaningless? She tried to recall her own dreams, but they fled down the winding corridors of her memory and lost themselves.
Quietly, she rose and dressed, went outside to piss. Stars were still in the sky, fading as the sun approached. Another day away from home. Time was running through her fingers like sand. Five days now, exploring the crags and marshlands and grassy hills of the island, rowing to the other islands – some little more than rocks that poked their heads above the water – and finding nothing. A strange kind of fatalism was growing in her. This was the end. All of Ælmesse would eventually belong to the raiders, Thyrsland would turn entirely to the trimartyrs, and night and day would still come anyway. Her role in history would be not the marvellous heroic stories that delicious pagan bards such as Armax had told at Renward’s feast, by firelight and harp, but instead would be the story of the woman who did as Maava forbade, tried to rule, lost it all because she was weak and foolish as women are, and faded into obscurity.
No. She would die in battle. Not that history would care. But she cared.
Then, after a period of wallowing in such imaginings, her pride would spark back to life, and she would keep going. Keep looking. Shout orders. Demand faith and optimism.
The early morning breeze was chill, the water looked grey and cold. Hyld appeared from the tent, stretching and shaking herself. Bluebell turned and gazed back up towards the ridge, where Ash had found the little house. Bluebell had visited it a dozen times fruitlessly, failing to understand why anyone had lived there. Telling herself hopeless stories about how that person had come to find the giants, had made the statue herself, had died without ever seeing them because they did not exist.
Still, she was not going to sit here on the sand and wait for breakfast. She started walking, Hyld at her heels.
‘Good girl,’ Bluebell said, reaching down to rub her ears. How she wished to be a dog in that moment. Politics didn’t matter to dogs. They only needed food, warmth, love and purpose. They didn’t need dignity or reputation. What freedom that would be.
Up and over the ridge, then down towards the little cottage. She spent ten minutes turning over the objects she had already turned over, finding no new clues. She didn’t notice Hyld disappear outside, but heard her barking a few minutes later.
Bluebell emerged from the cottage and saw Hyld at the side of a waterhole. Rather than the marshy saltwater lakes that covered the islands, this was high enough up to be some kind of pool in a crater. Fresh water. Hyld had taken herself off for a drink.
‘What is it?’ Bluebell asked, jogging now because the things that made Hyld bark were things she wanted to kill. She had her sword in her hand as she arrived at Hyld’s location, under a tree with branches all turned westwards. The relentless easterly winds had shaped it as a potter might have shaped it out of clay.
Hyld stood her ground, barking at the water, and Bluebell knew what she had seen.
‘Pull back!’ she shouted at the dog, and as this was a common war command, Hyld obeyed quickly, moving back and sitting, licking her lips and whining with frustration.
Bluebell didn’t approach the water too closely. There was no Frida to help her this time, and Hyld would be no use. Instead, she untied the length of rope around her waist. She had made this herself during one of the long boring weeks up at Harrow’s Fell. Rope making was pleasingly mindless. She tied one end around her chest and back, crossing under her arms for extra safety, and the other end around the tree.
‘Stay back,’ she cautioned Hyld, who rose and moved a few feet further away, then sat waiting.
Bluebell approached the edge of the waterhole. Nothing. The water here was clear. She could see bright green weed floating in it, rocks. Further out the water became deeper, murkier. She waited. Nothing happened.
She glanced back at Hyld. ‘Are you sure you saw something?’
In that moment, the tentacle snapped around her right ankle. She let out a shout and speared it with the end of her sword. That tentacle disappeared but a dozen or more shot out in its place, grasping her around the knees and thighs, one around her waist, and started to pull.
And so did Bluebell. With her free hand, she pulled against the thickest tentacle with all her might, the muscles in her arm and back bunching and burning. A tug of war. Hyld barked, familiar with the rules of the game from training, but stayed where she had been told to. Bluebell didn’t want her disappearing into the water. The gelatinous texture of the creature’s limb made it hard for Bluebell to retain her grip, so she sheathed her sword and brought her other arm into the battle. Immediately, its tendrils snaked around her ankles, trying to pull her off her feet. Bluebell heard the tree behind her creak, the snapping of bark. A frantic glance around told her the tree still held firm, but would not hold forever. The salt and wind on the islands made the trees grow small and weak. She needed a mighty oak, not a stunted and bent sea wych. Her feet began to slip. Her hands dug harder into the tentacle. The creature’s head appeared out of the water. It opened its horrible mouth, showing tiny needle-like teeth. It was gasping.
Choking on air.
Bluebell saw her advantage. She carefully repositioned her hands, which were now slimy and slippery with whatever it was that covered the creature’s skin. She crouched low, planting her feet against a rock, and heaved.
Heaved.
The creature, drowning on the sky, grew weak. Fought hard.
Not hard enough.
With a slopping, sucking sound, Bluebell dragged the creature out of the water and onto land. Hyld went wild with barking but Bluebell shouted for her to stay back. With her sword, Bluebell staked the creature to the ground through the shoulder of its largest tentacle, and she too pulled back, crouching next to Hyld, panting and exhausted and staying well clear of any tentacles still flailing.
It took five minutes for the creature to die. Not in a flurry of crushing limbs, but suffocating on the world outside the waterhole. Bluebell might have felt sorry for it, but they had both understood it was a fight to the death. It would have happily drowned her in its own realm. Slowly, its limbs went limp. Its head fell in, as though its pulsing blood had been holding up the shape of its skull. Its tentacles shrivelled and curled like dead spider legs.
Only then did Bluebell untie herself from the tree and let Hyld near the corpse to sniff it.
‘Don’t eat it,’ Bluebell said, retrieving her sword, and Hyld gave her a look as if to say she would never have considered such a thing.
Bluebell wipe
d her slimy hands on her trousers and stretched, eyes going to the other side of a stony plain, where a rocky peak stood. They had not climbed it yesterday, tired and all agreeing it was too narrow to house the homes of giants, but this morning Bluebell felt differently. No part of the island should remain unexplored.
‘Back to the camp,’ she told Hyld. Her dog was good at many things, but climbing rocks was not one of them.
Hyld rubbed herself against Bluebell’s thigh then trotted off. Bluebell watched her go then descended onto the stony plain, giving any waterholes a wide berth, and across to the bottom of the peak. She rounded it, looking for the easiest path up. There wasn’t one, but starting on the western side seemed a little less razor sharp and deadly. She was in shadow now: gloaming on this side of the peak, dawn on the other as the sun rose over the sea. She began to climb, at first picking over rocks, some that wobbled alarmingly under her feet. Then she had to scramble along a ridge that dropped sharply on either side. She stayed low, crawling, until she reached the rocky protrusion that constituted the apex of the peak. Here she had to climb, finding hand and footholds and using her already tired muscles to pull her up. Then she dragged herself to the top, perched her arse on a rock and took a moment to breathe.
There were no giants up here, and now somehow she had to get down. Yet, for all these miserable thoughts, her heart lifted at the sight below her. The sea, the dawn, the uninterrupted view. She let her heart slow, watched the sun rise.
As it did, it hit the water – all the lakes and marshes and waterholes – dazzling off them so brightly she almost couldn’t look at them directly. But she saw it. They formed a perfect circle around the stony plain.
Nature was never this neat.
From the north, where the marsh monster had nearly drowned her, to the south, where she had just hauled a similar creature to its death, pools both large and small had been laid out in a ring. Almost as though they were protecting something.
Bluebell smiled. She didn’t know yet what precisely she had found, but she was sure it was something.
Ash was used to being watched.
Every day, when Bluebell and her band left to explore the islands, one thane would be left behind. It was always Frida. Ash was starting to resent Frida. She had begged Bluebell that morning to leave her be, to let her roam. But Bluebell was grim as ever.
‘If you had seen the creature I had to kill this morning, and how hard it was to kill, you would understand.’
It wasn’t Frida’s fault she was too earnest. Ash tried to make conversation, but Frida was very careful about her place in the hierarchy. After one too many unsmiling ‘Yes, Princess Ash’ responses, Ash had given up.
The camp was positioned over the first ridge, huddling away from the sea wind: a collection of tents secured tightly from the elements, split by a communal bonfire with a roasting spit. So far they’d eaten a lot of fish and a few seagulls. A waterproof cover held up by oars kept the firewood dry. Tents catching fire was a constant danger, so buckets of seawater stood outside the entrance to each. The whole area smelled of ash and fish and the hastily dug latrine a hundred yards away.
‘I want to go and sit by the water,’ Ash said.
‘Yes, Princess Ash.’ Frida rose from her post and made to follow her.
‘I would like to go alone,’ Ash said. ‘You can watch me from here.’
‘I don’t have a clear line of sight,’ Frida said.
A dull rage knocked Ash’s ribs. Sighere, Sal, all the experienced thanes had known how powerful Ash had once been. Frida had only ever seen Ash as a small, unarmed woman. Again, it wasn’t Frida’s fault but Ash wanted to scream at her, ‘I am mighty. Stand back!’
Instead, she swallowed her sharp words and said, ‘If you don’t mind, then, stay well back.’
‘As you wish.’
Ash longed for isolation. Here on this windswept beach, her magic hung in the air, rolled in the sea. All she had to do was be open and wait, and it would seep back inside her. But having someone nearby, especially someone on high alert and armed, was making it difficult.
Ash closed her eyes, bare feet in the wash on the shore. The sea air bristled; the water was icy.
The elementals were there, just on the edge of her perception. She had grasped too hard after them for too long, so today she merely waited.
Time passed. The wash became more forceful as the tide began to move in. Still she waited, and the elementals waited too. But she felt their attention turn, as the tide was turning. She felt them notice her.
Connection. A frisson over her bones, from toes to skull.
‘Princess Ash, the tide is coming in!’
Damn Frida! Ash had to get rid of her somehow.
No sooner had she thought it than Frida let out a shout.
Ash whirled around, opening her eyes. Frida was hurrying back up to the camp, where one of the tents was ablaze.
Ash’s heart hammered. They were here. They were listening. She turned her eyes desperately to the sea, the water rushing onto the shore. Her mind told her to be cautious but her body had other plans. She waded in. She spread her arms.
She fell into the sea.
The cold shock against her skin. The sound of bubbling water past her ears. The momentary regret. And then …
Slam! Bright tensile magic hit her, ran over her, into her. Into her ears and nose and mouth and eyes and pores. She gasped and the sea ran into her lungs, but she didn’t care because here it was, all of it, flowing through her, turning her over in the water, signalling to every element that she was their queen and they must obey. All over the island, all through the ocean, and all over Thyrsland she felt them kneel, and the thundering of them hitting the ground made the world shake, then settle.
Then Frida was pulling her out of the water. Ash limply complied, allowing herself to be thrown roughly on the sand on her front, while Frida thumped her back until she gagged up the sea.
Ash looked up. The tent was still on fire. No, it’s not. Then she rolled over and lay back, wet and cold and elated.
‘Why did you go in the water?’ Frida asked in a loud, frightened voice. But before Ash could answer she was running towards the camp, not realising yet that the fire was extinguished. Ash had extinguished it with a thought.
‘I’m back,’ she said to herself, and half a laugh escaped her lips before she realised something. Her magic had gone when she fell in love with Sighere. Her magic came back when she was apart from him.
Love or magic. Perhaps she could only have one.
A day spent scrabbling over rocks, poking in and out of caves, searching on their hands and knees through long, spiky grass, and tramping warily in and out of marshy puddles, but Bluebell’s team had not found any giants. If she’d been in a merry mood, Bluebell might even have laughed at how well the giants had been able to hide, given the size of them.
Bluebell was not in a merry mood.
The weather was clear, and the sky a blue-pink blush when they approached the camp. Bluebell could see Ash, her green cloak wrapped tightly around her, her hair whipping across her face in the stiff sea breeze. Her sister’s posture told her she was waiting for Bluebell. Perhaps she would complain about Frida again; the idea that Frida could annoy anyone was beyond Bluebell. She was strong, loyal, gently spoken. Not like the new boys, Hroth and Hregen, who were even now horsing around and shouting their inane laughter.
But then, perhaps Bluebell was exhausted and prickly. Too desperate to smile.
Ash saw her and began walking briskly towards her. Frida rose and followed. Ash turned and spoke to Frida. Bluebell couldn’t hear the words but Frida hesitated, and Ash marched away.
Bluebell cursed herself for not bringing more than a single barrel of ale.
‘Bluebell!’ Ash called, hurrying her steps.
‘Sal, take the others back to camp,’ she said wearily. ‘I need to speak to my sister.’
‘Yes, my lord,’ Sal said, and gestured for the hearthband and the sold
iers to follow him. Bluebell stood and waited. A few moments later, Ash’s small soft hand was in her bony calloused one.
‘Come with me.’
‘Have you upset Frida?’
‘One of the tents caught fire today. I’ll explain later. Come.’ Ash tugged her hand and Bluebell found herself heading down the grassy slope and on to the sand.
‘I don’t understand why you dislike Frida.’
‘I like her fine. I don’t need her.’
‘We don’t know what kind of –’
‘Bluebell, hush. Wait and see.’
Nobody told Bluebell to hush, ever. Only Ash could get away with that. Not even Rose could. Bluebell grumbled a few curses but continued to follow Ash until they came to a carefully organised pile of driftwood and peat blocks in a hollow in the sand. A bonfire, unlit.
Ash stopped and turned to her, a smile tugging at the corners of her lips. ‘Frida helped me build this. Well, she didn’t have a choice because I refused to stay at the camp. We spent the afternoon on it.’ She reached into the pocket at the front of her dress and pulled out a bottle of fire oil, which she liberally splashed onto the kindling. Then she handed Bluebell the flint.
‘Your turn,’ she said.
‘Ash, why are we –’
‘Please, Bluebell. I have been waiting all day. I dragged driftwood for miles. Do you know how hard it is to find dry driftwood on this beach?’
Bluebell took a deep breath.
‘I know you have all come home with long faces. I know you haven’t found the giants. But I promise, this fire will cheer you up.’
‘Unlikely,’ Bluebell muttered as she crouched by the unlit fire and struck the flint. The fire caught. She stood back.
A gust of wind fed it and the flames leapt high. Embers on the breeze, bright against the pale dusk. A blizzard of gulls swooped across the water and Ash’s eyes followed them, then returned to Bluebell.
‘Watch,’ she said.
A moment later the fire was out.
Bluebell’s heart caught on a hook. She stared at the driftwood. Ash let out a little laugh.