Safrit waved the shears towards Brand. “I’ll give that beard of yours a trim while I’m about it.”
“Long as you don’t bring the shears near me,” said Fror, fingering one of the braids beside his scar.
“Warriors!” snorted Safrit. “Vainer than maidens! Most of these faces are best kept from the world, but a good-looking lad like you shouldn’t be hidden in all that undergrowth.”
Brand pushed his fingers through his beard. “Surely has thickened up these past few weeks. Starting to itch a little, if I’m honest.”
A cheer went up as Dosduvoi lifted his sword high and Thorn dived between his wide-set legs, spun, and gave him a resounding kick in the arse, sending the big man staggering.
Rulf scratched at a cluster of raw insect bites on the side of his neck. “We’re all itching a little.”
“No avoiding some passengers on a voyage like this.” Odda had a good rummage down the front of his trousers. “They’re only striving to find the easiest way south, just as we are.”
“They fear a war is brewing with the High King of lice,” said Safrit, “and seek allies among the midges.” And she slapped one against the back of her neck.
Her son scrubbed a shower of sandy clippings from his hair, which still seemed wild as ever. “Are there really allies to be found out here?”
“The Prince of Kalyiv can call on so many riders the dust of their horses blots out the sun,” said Odda.
Fror nodded. “And I hear the Empress of the South has so many ships she can fashion a footbridge across the sea.”
“It’s not about ships or horses,” said Brand, rubbing gently at the callouses on his palms. “It’s about the trade that comes up the Divine. Slaves and furs go one way, silver and silk come the other. And it’s silver wins wars, just as much as steel.” He realized everyone was looking at him and trailed off, embarrassed. “So Gaden used to tell me … at the forge …”
Safrit smiled, toying with the weights strung about her neck. “It’s the quiet ones you have to watch.”
“Still pools are the deepest,” said Yarvi, his pale eyes fixed on Brand. “Wealth is power. It is Queen Laithlin’s wealth that is the root of the High King’s jealousy. He can shut the Shattered Sea to our ships. Cut off Gettland’s trade. With the Prince of Kalyiv and the empress on his side, he can close the Divine to us too. Throttle us without drawing a blade. With the prince and the empress as our allies, the silver still flows.”
“Wealth is power,” muttered Koll to himself, as though testing the words for truth. Then he looked over at Fror. “How did you get the scar?”
“I asked too many questions,” said the Vansterman, smiling at the fire.
Safrit bent over Brand, tugging gently at his beard, shears snipping. It was strange, having someone so close, fixed on him so carefully, gentle fingers on his face. He always told Rin he remembered their mother, but it was only stories told over and over, twisted out of shape by time until he remembered the stories but not the memories themselves. It was Rin who’d always cut his hair, and he touched the knife she’d made for him then and felt a sudden longing for home. For the hovel they’d worked so hard for, and the firelight on his sister’s face, and worry for her rushed in so sharp he winced at the sting of it.
Safrit jerked back. “Did I nick you?”
“No,” croaked Brand. “Missing home is all.”
“Got someone special waiting, eh?”
“Just my family.”
“Handsome lad like you, I can hardly believe it.”
Dosduvoi had finally put a stop to Thorn’s dodging by grabbing a handful of her unruly hair, and now he caught her belt with his other hand, jerked her up like a sheaf of hay and flung her bodily into a ditch.
“Some of us are cursed with bad love-luck,” said Rulf mournfully, as Skifr called a halt to the bout and peered into the ditch after her pupil. “I was gone from my farm too long and my wife married again.”
“Bad love-luck for you, maybe,” muttered Safrit, tossing a tuft of Brand’s beard into the fire, “but good for her.”
“Bad love-luck is swearing an oath not to have any love at all.” Father Yarvi gave a sigh. “The older I get, the less the tender care of Grandmother Wexen seems a good trade for romance.”
“I did have a wife,” said Dosduvoi, lowering himself beside the fire and gingerly seeking out a comfortable position for his bruised buttocks, “but she died.”
“It’s not bad luck if she’s crushed by your bulk,” said Odda.
“That is not funny,” said the giant, though judging from the sniggering many of the crew disagreed.
“No wife for me,” said Odda. “Don’t believe in ’em.”
“I doubt they’re any more convinced by you,” said Safrit. “Though I feel sorry for your hand, forced to be your only lover all this time.”
Odda grinned, filed teeth shining with the firelight. “Don’t be. My hand is a sensitive partner, and always willing.”
“And, unlike the rest of us, not put off by your monstrous breath.” Safrit brushed some loose hairs from Brand’s now close-cropped beard and sat back. “You’re done.”
“Might I borrow the shears?” asked Skifr.
Safrit gave the gray fuzz on her skull a look over. “Doesn’t seem you’ve much to cut.”
“Not for me.” The old woman nodded at Thorn, who’d dragged herself out of the ditch and was limping over, grimacing as she rubbed at her sore head, loose hair torn free and shooting off at all angles. “I think another of our lambs needs shearing. Dosduvoi has proved that mop a weakness.”
“No.” Thorn tossed down her battered wooden weapons and tidied a few strands back behind her ear, a strange gesture from her, who never seemed to care the least for how she looked.
Skifr raised her brows. “I would not have counted vanity among your many shortcomings.”
“I made my mother a promise,” said Thorn, snatching up a flat loaf and stuffing half of it in her mouth with dirty fingers in one go. She might not have outfought three men at once but Brand had no doubt she could have out-eaten them.
“I had no notion you held your mother in such high regard,” said Skifr.
“I don’t. She’s always been a pain in my arse. Always telling me the right way to do things and it’s never the way I want to do them.” Thorn ripped at the loaf with her teeth like a wolf at a carcass, eating and speaking at once, spraying crumbs. “Always fussing over what folk think of me, what they’ll do to me, how I might be hurt, how I might embarrass her. Eat this way, talk this way, smile this way, piss this way.”
All the while she talked Brand was thinking about his sister, left alone with no one to watch over her, and the anger stole up on him. “Gods,” he growled. “Is there a blessing made you couldn’t treat like a curse?”
Thorn frowned, cheeks bulging as she chewed. “What does that mean?”
He barked the words, suddenly disgusted with her. “That you’ve a mother who gives a damn about you, and a home waiting where you’re safe, and you still find a way to complain!”
That caused an uncomfortable silence. Father Yarvi narrowed his eyes, and Koll widened his, and Fror’s brows crept up in surprise. Thorn swallowed slowly, looking as shocked as if she’d been slapped. More shocked. She got slapped all the time.
“I bloody hate people,” she muttered, snatching another loaf from Safrit’s hand.
It was hardly the good thing to say but for once Brand couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Don’t worry.” He dragged his blanket over one shoulder and turned his back on her. “They feel much the same about you.”
DAMN THEM
Thorn’s nose twitched at the smell of cooking. She blinked awake, and knew right off something was odd. She could scarcely remember the last time she had woken without the tender help of Skifr’s boot.
Perhaps the old witch had a heart after all.
She had dreamt a dog was licking at the side of her head, and she tried to shake the memory off a
s she rolled from her blankets. Maybe dreams were messages from the gods, but she was damned if she could sieve the meaning from that one. Koll was hunched at the water’s edge, grumbling as he washed the pots out.
“Morning,” she said, giving an almighty stretch and almost enjoying the long ache through her arms and across her back. The first few days she’d hardly been able to move in the mornings from the rowing and the training together, but she was hardening to the work now, getting tough as rope and timber.
Koll glanced up and his eyes went wide. “Er …”
“I know. Skifr let me sleep.” She grinned across the river. For the first time, Divine seemed an apt name for it. The year was wearing on and Mother Sun was bright and hot already, birds twittering in the forest and insects floating lazy over the water. The trailing branches of the trees about the bank were heavy with white flowers and Thorn took a long, blossom-scented breath in through her nose and let it sigh away. “I’ve a feeling it’ll be a fine day.” And she ruffled Koll’s hair, turned around, and almost walked into Brand.
He stared at her, that helpless look of his splattered all over his face. “Thorn, your—”
“Go and die.” Half the night she’d been lying awake thinking of harsh things to say to him, but when the moment came that was the best she could manage. She shouldered past and over to the embers of the fire where the crew were gathered.
“Eat well,” Rulf was saying. “Might be later today we’ll reach the tall hauls. You’ll need all the strength you’ve got and more besides when we carry … the …” He trailed off, staring, as Thorn walked up, grabbing a spare a bowl and peering into the pot.
“No need to stop for me,” she said. They were all staring at her and it was starting to make her nervous.
Then Odda chuckled, spluttering food. “She looks like a brush with half the bristles plucked!”
“A lamb half-sheared,” said Dosduvoi.
“A willow with half the branches lopped,” murmured Fror.
“I like that one,” said Odda. “That has poetry. You should speak more.”
“You should speak less, but things are as they are.”
A breeze floated up from the river, strangely cold against the side of Thorn’s head, and she frowned down, and saw her shoulder was covered in hair. She touched one hand to her scalp, afraid of what she might find. On the right side her hair was muddled into its usual incompetent braid. The left was shaved to patchy stubble, her fingertips trembling as they brushed the unfamiliar knobbles of her skull.
“You sleep on your right.” Skifr leaned past her shoulder, plucking a piece of meat from the pot between long thumb and forefinger. “I did the best I could without waking you. You look so peaceful when you sleep.”
Thorn stared at her. “You said you wouldn’t make me do it!”
“Which is why I did it.” And the old woman smiled as though she’d done Thorn quite the favor.
So much for the witch having a heart, and the fine day too. Thorn hardly knew then whether she wanted to weep, scream, or bite Skifr’s face. In the end all she could do was stalk off toward the river, the crew’s laughter ringing in her ears, clenching her teeth and clutching at her half-tangled, half-bald head.
Her mother’s most treasured possession was a little mirror set in silver. Thorn always teased her that she loved it because she was so vain, but knew really it was because it had been a gift from her father, brought back long ago from the First of Cities. Thorn had always hated to look at herself in it. Her face too long and her cheeks too hollow, her nose too sharp and her eyes too angry. But she would happily have traded that reflection for the lopsided mockery that peered from the still water at the river’s edge now.
She remembered her mother singing softly as she combed Thorn’s hair, her father smiling as he watched them. She remembered the laughter and the warmth of arms about her. Her family. Her home. She gripped the pouch she wore and thought what a pitiful thing it was to carry your father’s fingerbones around your neck. But it was all she had left. She bitterly shook her head as she stared at her ruined reflection and another appeared behind her—tall and lean and colorless.
“Why did you bring me out here?” she asked, slapping both reflections angrily from the water.
“To make allies of our enemies,” said Father Yarvi. “To bring help to Gettland.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, I’ve no touch for making friends.”
“We all have our shortcomings.”
“Why bring me, then? Why pay Skifr to teach me?”
The minister squatted beside her. “Do you trust me, Thorn?”
“Yes. You saved my life.” Though looking into his pale blue eyes she wondered how far one should trust a deep-cunning man. “And I swore an oath. What choice do I have?”
“None. So trust me.” He glanced up at the wreckage of her hair. “It might take a little getting used to, but I think it suits you. Strange and fierce. One of a kind.”
She snorted. “It’s unusual, that I’ll grant you.”
“Some of us are unusual. I always thought you were happy to stand out. You seem to thrive on mockery like a flower on dung.”
“Harder work than it seems,” she muttered. “Always finding a brave face.”
“That I know, believe me.”
They stayed there, beside the water, for a while, in silence.
“Would you help me shave the other side?”
“I say leave it.”
“Like this? Why?”
Yarvi nodded over toward the crew. “Because damn them, that’s why.”
“Damn them,” muttered Thorn, scooping up water with her hand and pushing back the hair she still had. She had to admit she was getting a taste for the idea. Leaving it half-shaved, strange and fierce, a challenge to everyone who looked at her. “Damn them.” And she snorted up a laugh.
“It’s not as though you’ll be the only odd-looking one on this crew. And anyway,” Yarvi brushed some of the clippings gently from her shoulder with his withered hand, “hair grows back.”
THAT WAS A TOUGH DAY’S WORK at the oar, fighting an angry current as the Divine narrowed and its banks steepened, Rulf frowning as he nudged the ship between rocks frothing with white water. That evening, as the sunset flared pink over the forested hills, they reached the tall hauls.
There was a strange village at the shore where no two houses were the same. Some built of timber, some of stone, some from turf like the barrows of dead heroes. It was home to folk of the Shattered Sea who had stopped on the way south, and folk from Kalyiv and the empire who had stopped on the way north, and folk from the forest tribes and the Horse People too who must have stuck on journeys east or west. Seeds blown from half the world away and chosen by some weird luck to put their roots down here.
Whatever their clothes and their customs, though, however sharp they had grown at spinning coins from passing crews, Father Yarvi had the Golden Queen’s blood in his veins and knew the best way to fleece them. He bargained with each in their own tongue, baffled them now with charming smiles and now with stony blankness, until he had them bickering over the chance to offer him the lowest prices. When he finally rented eight great bearded oxen from the village’s headwoman, he left her blinking down bewildered at the few coins in her palm.
“Father Yarvi is no fool,” said Brand as they watched him work his everyday magic.
“He’s the most deep-cunning man I ever met,” answered Rulf.
There was a graveyard of abandoned timber by the river—rollers and runners, broken masts and oars, even a warped old keel with some strakes still on it, the bones of a ship that must have come down off the hills too damaged and been broken up for parts. The crew busied themselves with axes and chisels and by the time Father Moon was showing himself they had the South Wind ashore with good runners mounted alongside her keel and all her cargo packed on two rented wagons.
“Do we train now?” asked Thorn, as she watched the crew settle to their usual evenin
g merry-making about the fire, Koll causing waves of laughter by copying one of Odda’s less-than-likely stories.
Skifr looked at her, one eye gleaming in the fading light. “It is late, and there will be hard work tomorrow. Do you want to train?”
Thorn pushed some wood-shavings around with her toe. “Maybe just a little?”
“We will make a killer of you yet. Fetch the weapons.”
RULF KICKED THEM ALL grumbling from their beds at the first glimmer of dawn, his breath steaming on the damp air.
“Up, you turds! You’ve got the hardest day of your lives ahead of you!”
There had been no easy days since they set off from Thorlby, but their helmsman was right. Carrying a ship over a mountain is exactly as hard as it sounds.
They heaved groaning at ropes, dragged snarling at oars switched about to make handles, set their shoulders to the keel when the runners snagged, gripping at each other in a straining, stinking, swearing tangle. Even with four of the oxen yoked to the prow they were soon all bruised from falls and raw from rope, whipped by twigs and riddled with splinters.
Safrit went ahead to clear the track of fallen branches. Koll darted in and out below the keel with a bucket of pitch and pig fat to keep the runners sliding. Father Yarvi shouted to the drovers in their tongue, who never used the goad but only crooned to the oxen in low voices.
Uphill, always uphill, the track faint and full of stones and roots. Some prowled armed through the trees about the ship, watching for bandits who might wait in the woods for crews to ambush, and rob, and sell as slaves.
“Selling a ship’s crew is much more profitable than selling things to a ship’s crew, that’s sure.” Odda’s sigh implied he spoke from experience.
“Or than dragging a ship through a wood,” grunted Dosduvoi.
“Save your breath for the lifting,” Rulf forced through clenched teeth. “You’ll need it.”
As the morning wore on Mother Sun beat down without mercy and fat flies swarmed about the toiling oxen and the toiling crew. The sweat ran down Thorn’s stubbled scalp in streaks, dripped from her brows and soaked her vest so that it chafed her nipples raw. Many of the crew stripped to their waists and a few much further. Odda struggled along in boots alone, sporting the hairiest arse ever displayed by man or beast.
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