by Kim Wilkins
‘Then Wermod and Withowind are still alive,’ she cried. ‘You still have time to save them. To save us all. If you do not, if you make me stay here with you and take up my service, I will do it with loathing in my heart. As long as I live, I will owe you no further love or reverence. I will do what I have to, but with the resentment of a slave.’ This last word she spat so fiercely that the Great Mother recoiled.
‘We do not go into the world,’ she said.
‘Maava is in the world.’
‘It requires sacrifice. We do not ask for sacrifices.’
‘Four of your children are dead,’ Ash said. ‘Is the blood of giants not enough for you?’
The Horse God placed his hand on Ash’s shoulder. She could feel warmth, pressure, but she knew the hand was not real. ‘She is right,’ he said to the Great Mother. ‘We ought to have known that our peace would be disrupted, when the daughter of a king, the sister of a queen, became our keeper of the way. We cannot do nothing.’
The Great Mother’s eyes turned to the sky, and tears began to fall from her eyes. ‘I hate war.’
‘I hate Maava.’
Ash watched them as they stood speechless a few moments. It seemed already she could hear the battle again, as though distant and behind a veil.
The Great Mother palmed away her tears and fixed Ash in her gaze. ‘We will go, but you must stay here.’
‘No.’
‘We cannot protect you if we are in the world. Who would answer the call of your god stone if you were in danger? You must stay in Meregard where you will be safe.’
‘But I need to say goodbye to … everyone.’
‘There is no other way, Ash,’ the Horse God said, and he flickered in front of her eyes then resolved again in full war gear – helm and byrnie, sash and spear – mounted on a white destrier. She glanced at the Great Mother and saw that she was dressed the same. For half a moment, she almost looked like Bluebell.
They urged their horses forward, speeding past either side of Ash, stirring the hem of her cloak. She turned to watch them go, but the air had already closed behind them, leaving her alone in Meregard.
When Wermod fell, Bluebell lost hope. The raiders had formed a ring around Willow and her god, and Bluebell’s forces pushed hard against it, but they had become as strong as the fortified wall that surrounded the city. Delighted with their sudden strength, the raiders laughed at the soldiers who rammed themselves against them.
But Bluebell did not stop. She hacked and slashed at the raiders, no matter that every blow bounced off them as though they were made of stone. The raiders, however, seemed able to make every blow land. Bluebell sheathed her sword and seized the shield of a dead soldier and stood her ground. Every last drop of blood. She would give every last drop of blood in this fight for Blicstowe, no matter what monster Willow had summoned up.
Now Wermod was dead, Maava turned his lightning hands on Bluebell’s army. A thunderous crack sounded behind her, and she knew that a dozen men must now be flattened and bloody. Bluebell redoubled her efforts to push through the ring. She knew she couldn’t kill Maava; she knew she was probably going to die. But by fuck she was going to take Willow with her.
Rowan’s army were at the very back of the throng, so when somebody started calling out that the giants were falling, she could neither see it nor believe it. How could it be possible? The confusion and noise were disorienting, but Heath managed to call the movements and orders as though he could see the whole battle from above. They had been the last force to encircle the raiders, but none were getting through the first defences for her battle-hungry soldiers to kill.
‘I’m going up to see,’ Rowan said, indicating the tall alehouse across the other side of the square. ‘A good view from up there.’
‘No,’ Heath said, pointing across to the ramparts next to the gate the giants had destroyed. ‘A good view of you from there.’ His face was caked in dirt, and blood stained his golden beard.
‘Their archers are useless.’
He grasped her arm to restrain her. ‘I saw men dead in the flanking ditches from raiders’ arrows.’
She shook him off irritably. ‘I will be careful.’ She pushed her way through the bodies, and soon had her hand around the sill above the shutter. She yanked herself up, reaching for handholds in the wooden beams. She was hanging from the second-storey window when an arrow whizzed past and lodged itself in the plaster.
She ducked her head defensively, glancing towards the ramparts. But none of the archers were paying her any attention. They were firing into the throng of Thyrslanders pushing towards the hall. An impossibly tall, ghostly figure stood there, and giants lay dead all around. Was it a demon of some kind, summoned by Willow? It had a face like a thundercloud, overly long, emaciated arms. Another arrow landed, shocking her out of her awe. This time closer.
Rowan hoisted herself up to sit on the sill and looked down, where a single raider stood in the threshold of a house, reaching for another arrow.
‘Rowan!’ This was Heath calling. He had spotted the archer too and was running towards him, sword drawn.
She wanted to call out to leave her be, that she was fine. In fact, she already had her bow out and was reaching for an arrow.
But the archer on the ground let forth a high whistle, some kind of signal to the other archers on the ramparts. Rowan saw them turn, found herself mortally exposed.
‘Down here!’ Heath cried. ‘She is just a girl. I am the king of the Ærfolc!’
Suddenly it wasn’t her they trained their bows on.
‘Heath, no!’ she cried, fumbling the arrow into place, loosing it at the first archer. He fell but Heath still stood without cover, in the line of fire he had deliberately drawn away from her. Over the noise, she could not hear the arrows in the air, she could not hear them thwack into his chest, she could not hear if he called out in pain.
She saw Heath collapse in a heap on the stones, and he did not get up.
Hollow heat surged through her. She shouldered her bow again, pulled herself up on top of the shutter and from there onto the roof. Arrows sailed past her from the ramparts. She sat up, three arrows between her fingers. One, two, three, in quick succession, knocking one of Heath’s killers off the ramparts. More arrows. Firing them senselessly, hitting nobody, flattening herself on the roof to avoid retaliation.
As the demon giant-killer began to turn his attention to killing the assembled Thyrslanders, Rowan thought with relief that if she died, at least she wouldn’t have to tell her mother Heath was gone.
The line would not break and Bluebell dragged Sighere and Sal and Gytha away from the front line to huddle among the men and women still surging forward.
‘I need to know you think I am doing the right thing,’ she said. ‘If we withdrew …’
‘She’d bring her monster after us, now that it is loose,’ Sal said. ‘No mercy for anyone. No farmer nor hunter nor simple nor child will survive it.’
‘Or if they do, it will be under tyranny,’ Gytha said. ‘I do not want to live in such a world, nor will I tolerate my child to live in it.’ Her voice broke, and Bluebell clenched her guts, thinking about the child that grew in her own womb. She remembered Beorin’s face from the vision on the clifftop, and heavy sadness engulfed her.
Sighere laid his hand on Bluebell’s shoulder. ‘It is much more honourable to die alongside you than to live under the yoke of the trimartyrs.’
She looked at their bloodied faces, their battered helms. ‘I truly have known the best of men,’ she said. ‘If this is the end of Thyrsland, so let it be the end. Our ancestors await us and they will say our deeds were glorious.’
She dropped her second shield and drew her sword, ready to run onto the spears of her enemies. But then the sky cracked with a deafening sound.
All around her, soldiers raised their hands over their ears, shields and spears jostling against the sky, to block out the noise. It blasted out for four seconds, then stopped and blasted out again an
d again. Three times in all. Bluebell knew that sound, though she’d never heard it at such a volume.
It was a war horn, and it was coming from the sky.
The gathered soldiers on both sides temporarily forgot they were fighting as their eyes went skywards, where something like steam poured out of a rent in the blue air. Behind it was visible a sliver of a mysterious other sky; deeper, darker blue. The steam continued to pour from it, a cloud forming at impossible speed. Shapes began to form. Hooves, spears, helms, flanks … Bluebell was put in mind of the cloud pictures she had imagined as a child, when once she had named what she saw it became more clearly that shape. Two riders were coming.
On the horizon, dark clouds began to roll in. Thunder sounded. At the corner of her vision, Bluebell was aware that Maava was moving, growing. The light changed as the sun was blotted out by the rolling clouds. Her army was shadowless. She turned to see the monster now stood, twenty feet high, on the peak of her father’s hall, one foot on the gable finishings that had been carved by her great-grandfather.
She was possessed by sudden uncontrollable rage. How dare he? She snatched a spear from a corpse beside her and dislodged it, threw it with all her might at Maava. It found its mark in his ankle, but he barely blinked. He was too fixated on the riders in the sky, and Bluebell realised with joy that he was afraid of them. They hadn’t come to help him; they had come to stop him.
She whirled around and now they had taken full form and she knew them. She knew them. They were her gods, the Horse God and the Great Mother, both armed and riding down the sky towards Maava. The black clouds had consumed the sky. Lightning ran under it, pulsing out like spider legs then withdrawing. The war horn came again, and the Horse God galloped towards Maava.
But it was the Great Mother who threw the spear. Strong, unerring, directly for Maava’s head. It struck him through the eye, then exited through the back of his monstrous skull.
He fell to one knee. A blast of thunder sent out a ring of energy that knocked Bluebell sideways. All around, soldiers fell to their knees, dropping their weapons to cover their ears as the war horn rang out again. The sky riders galloped closer and closer, until Bluebell could see the underside of their gleaming white horses. The Horse God loosed his spear on the fallen Maava, penetrating through his throat.
Somebody screamed. Perhaps it was Willow.
Maava raised one hand, then his arm collapsed and turned to water, raining on the hall. His whole body began to shiver and shudder, shred apart and dissolve, become nothing but cloud then fell as nothing but rain. The Horse God and the Earth Mother swooped back upwards. Another sliver in the sky opened. Bluebell wanted to cry out for them not to leave, to stay here among them where they would be worshipped and loved. But who was she to command the gods?
They disappeared. The clouds stayed. Rain fell. Fat, icy drops of rain.
‘Finish it!’ Bluebell shouted.
Her army surged forward and, in mud and rain, finished the rest of the raiders.
Willow felt Maava die. She felt it in her bones and blood, as though all the fire within them flashed out, leaving only empty cold. Rain fell on her, and she stood for a moment with her mouth open, hoping to drink Him in. But it was only ordinary rain. Nothing of the mystic, the divine, the heat of passionate presence was in it. Maava was lost from the world; she knew it. She felt it in the hollow pit of her being.
What did it matter if Bluebell’s army now pressed forward to destroy them all? She may as well be dead if her god was dead.
Then one small golden thought lit her way. Avaarni. Avaarni was still alive.
Willow used the confusion around her to sink among her troops, then further among the frightened deserters, into the dark corner where two buildings met. Here she quickly divested herself of her armour and dashed away down a muddy side alley in her shirt and bare legs, sword clenched in her right hand. In the yawning abyss of grief, she found new purpose. Get her child back; not because she loved Avaarni, but because Avaarni belonged to her. She would not have everything of value taken from her.
Willow burst into the nearest house where a woman and a child cowered under the table, waiting for the noise of the battle to end. Willow brought up the tip of her sword. ‘Clothes, woman. Get me clothes.’
The woman shrieked with fear, and it was the little boy that scooted out from beneath the table and indicated to Willow a box in the corner. Willow flipped up the lid with the point of her sword. It was full of folded material. She pulled out blankets and trousers, then found a dress.
‘Help me pin it on,’ she shouted at the woman. The woman, mad with fear, began to sob and did not move.
‘Help me or I’ll kill your son.’
Now she scrambled to her feet and, with shaking hands, dressed Willow.
‘You never saw me,’ Willow said, shoving her sword into a rope belt and pulling a cloak over herself. ‘Be warned. I will remember where you live and I will return for you and kill you both.’
‘Yes, my queen,’ the woman said, and Willow felt a monstrous pang of regret. She was no longer this woman’s queen. She had lost. She had lost everything.
Willow slammed open the door and strode out, determined to have something that was hers returned to her.
Thirty-seven
While the rain made the job of cleaning up colder and more miserable, it washed the blood into the grass and the dirt, and along the grooves between the flagstones. Bluebell had never seen a sight as sad as Withowind sitting by the collected bodies of the fallen giants, and left her alone a long time while forces were sent out to clean up deserters and find Willow, who had disappeared.
Finally, Bluebell came to kneel before the giant, and removed her helm. Rain immediately plastered her hair to her face. ‘I am sorry that you have lost your friends.’
Withowind was speechless, her eyes haunted.
‘You yet live, my lady.’
‘Not for long,’ she said. ‘For Wermod is dead and he was my other half.’
Bluebell remembered vaguely that Withowind had said something like this before. Perhaps it was not a romantic notion. ‘You mean …’
‘I will die within the next week or so.’ She met Bluebell’s gaze and took her hand in big fingers. ‘Bluebell, I would return their bodies to the Brencis, and go there to die. Will you do all in your power to make that happen?’
‘Of course I will. I owe you my kingdom. If it weren’t for you …’
‘We do not know,’ Withowind said. ‘We do not know what would have happened.’
Bluebell thought of Nepsed and Cammoc’s test, of the lights and the million variations on how they might organise themselves, how they might wink out of life unexpectedly.
‘Do you suppose Ash is already there?’ Bluebell asked. ‘Nobody has seen her.’
‘I am certain of it.’
‘Then I will accompany you and your fallen companions myself, so that I may say goodbye to her.’ Bluebell’s chest ached. She felt the full weight of her kingship on her weary body.
‘Bluebell!’
Bluebell glanced up and saw Rowan running towards her, sodden and bedraggled and looking nothing like the young queen who had left with her archers that morning.
Bluebell stood and caught her, and Rowan leaned into her, sobbing.
‘What is it?’ she asked, panicked. Had she found Snowy’s body? Had he not made it to safety?
‘Heath,’ she managed. ‘Heath.’
Bluebell put both arms around Rowan and held her and, while she was relieved for herself, she knew that her sister Rose would feel the dark gravity of the loss of a husband instead. Thunder rumbled overhead. People moved, dragging bodies out of the city to be piled on funeral pyres that would not ignite for days after this rain. A messy, stinking time awaited them, in this city of the dead without any gates.
But it was her city. The city of her forefathers. Mighty and beautiful Blicstowe. She needed to show Rowan how to be a queen.
She gently pushed the girl
out to arm’s length. ‘Rowan, you must go directly to Æcstede and tell your mother.’
‘How can I? How can I? She will break.’
‘Gather yourself. You are Connacht’s heir. Gather yourself now.’ Bluebell infused her voice with an edge of sternness. ‘Who else would you rather she heard it from? A stranger? Gossip on the wind?’
‘I can’t, I can’t,’ Rowan said, but Bluebell could hear in her voice that she was starting to realise she must.
‘Being a queen does not just mean wearing a crown of antlers, chicken. You know that. The longer Rose goes without news, the longer she will wait and hope. Use a crossing. Be well ahead of the messengers, who won’t be there before nightfall.’
Rowan took a deep shuddering breath, then nodded once and said, ‘I will.’
‘Good lass. Any news of Snowy?’
‘The old barracks,’ she said. ‘The raiders were using it as an infirmary. Our worst wounded are pouring in and he is helping.’
Bluebell smiled over her relief. ‘Of course he is helping,’ she said. She looked around. What else was there to do? What other problems to solve? She saw Gytha, mail discarded in a puddle beside her, blissfully breastfeeding her baby in the rain. Withowind, crouched next to the bodies with an infinitely gentle hand on Wermod’s brow. Sighere and Sal directing the removal of the dead.
‘Go to him,’ Rowan said softly. ‘Nobody will notice, and you won’t be away long.’
Bluebell slapped Rowan’s shoulder companionably and began to run.
Skalmir could hear the rain hammering overhead. The fires would not light, but the amount of bodies in the room made it warm and claustrophobic. The smell of blood was a hard tang in the air. Thorkel was in charge, healing his enemy’s army now. Skalmir had sent for every healer in the city to come, but so far only a handful of enthusiastic volunteers had shown up. Thorkel was up to his elbows in blood, and Skalmir stayed by his side to defend and protect him, if anyone asked why a raider was in charge of the infirmary.