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Raith just stood there, scratching at a nick out of his ear. ‘Thought we were climbing, not dancing.’
‘So did I.’ Koll grinned. ‘Might be we were misinformed.’
‘My name’s Raith.’ And Raith held out a friendly hand.
The minister’s boy smiled back. ‘Koll.’ And he took it. Just like Raith had known he would, ’cause weak men are always eager for the friendship of strong ones. His smile faded quick enough when he found he couldn’t tug his hand free again. ‘What’re you—’
Queen Laithlin rang the bell.
Raith jerked the lad close and butted him in the face.
He could climb but Raith had no doubts these other two were better at it. If he wanted to win, and he always did, best make the contest about something else. At butting folk in the face he was a master, as Koll now discovered.
Raith punched him in the ribs three times, doubled him up gurgling with blood pattering from his smashed mouth, then caught his shirt and flung him upside down across a table where some of the Gettlanders were sitting.
He heard the chaos behind him, the crowd bellowing curses, but by that time the blood was roaring in his ears and his mind was on the tree. Soryorn was already dragging his great long body into the branches and if he got a good start Raith knew he’d never catch him.
He took a pounding run, sprang onto the lowest branch and swung himself up, jumped to a higher, twigs thrashing from his weight. At the next spring, full stretch, he caught Soryorn by the ankle and dragged him down, a broken stick scratching him all the way up his scar-marked back.
Soryorn kicked out and caught Raith in the mouth, but he’d never been put off by the taste of his own blood. He growled as he hauled himself on, no thought for the scraping branches, no thought for the aching through his left hand, caught Soryorn’s ankle again, then his belt, and finally his garnet studded thrall-collar.
‘What’re you doing?’ snarled the standard-bearer, trying to elbow him away.
‘Winning,’ hissed Raith, hauling himself up level.
‘Gorm wants me to win!’
‘I serve Skara, remember?’
Raith punched Soryorn right between the legs and his eyes bulged. Raith punched him in the mouth and snapped his head back. Raith bit his clutching hand hard and with a wheezing cry Soryorn lost his grip and went tumbling down through the branches, his head bouncing off one, another folding him in half, a third spinning him over and over till he crashed to the ground.
Which was a shame, but someone had to win, and someone had to fall.
Raith shinned up further to where the branches grew sparse. He could see over the walls of the citadel from here. Mother Sea glittering, the forest of masts on the dozens of ships crowded into Thorlby’s harbour, the salt breeze kissing his sweating forehead.
He twitched the armring from the topmost branch. He’d have put it on his wrist but it was sized for Skara’s twig of an arm and there was no way it’d fit. So he stuffed it into the pouch at his belt and started slithering down.
The wind blew up and made the whole tree sway, branches creaking, needles brushing Raith all over as he clung on tight. He caught a flash of white out of the corner of his eye, but all he could see when he peered down was Soryorn, trying and failing to drag himself up into the lowest branches. No sign of the minister’s boy. More’n likely crept off to cry over his broken face. Might be a fine climber but he’d no guts at all, and to climb into Bail’s Point alone, a man would need guts.
Raith swung free and dropped to the ground.
‘You little bastard!’ snarled Soryorn, clinging to a low branch. He must have hurt his leg when he fell, he was holding it up gingerly, toes trailing.
Raith laughed as he passed. Then he sprang in and drove a shoulder into Soryorn’s ribs, ramming him so hard into the tree his breath was all driven out in a flopping wheeze.
‘You big bastard,’ he tossed out as he left Soryorn groaning in the dirt. The standard-bearer had always been a good friend to Raith.
So he really should’ve known better than to leave his side open like that.
‘Princess Skara.’
She gave Raith what she hoped was a disapproving look. ‘I would hardly call that a fair contest.’
He shrugged, looking her straight in the eye. ‘You think Bright Yilling loses much sleep over what’s fair?’
Skara felt herself blush. He had the manners of a stump, treated her with not the slightest deference. Mother Kyre would have been outraged. Maybe that was why Skara found it so hard to be. She was not used to bluntness and there was something refreshing in it. Something appealing in it, even. ‘So I should send a dog to catch a dog?’ she asked.
Raith gave a harsh little chuckle at that. ‘Send a killer to kill a killer, anyway.’ He reached for his pouch, and his smile vanished.
That was when Koll came strolling around the side of the cedar, stopping a moment to help Soryorn up. His lip was split and his nose was swollen and bloody, but he was smiling.
‘Lost something, friend?’ he asked as Raith patted at his clothes. With a flourish of his spindly fingers he produced, apparently from nowhere, the armring Bail the Builder once wore into battle. He bowed in an entirely proper manner. ‘I think this is yours, princess.’
Raith gaped. ‘You thieving—’
Koll showed his bloody teeth as he smiled wider. ‘You think Bright Yilling loses much sleep over thieving?’
Raith made a grab for the armring but Koll was too quick, flipped it glittering into the air. ‘You lost the game.’ He snatched the armring right out of Raith’s clutching fingers, tossed it nimbly from left hand to right and left Raith grabbing at nothing. ‘Don’t lose your sense of humour too!’
Skara saw Raith clenching his fists as Koll flicked the armring up one more time.
‘Enough!’ She stepped between the two of them before any more harm could be done and plucked the armring from the air. ‘Gettland is the winner!’ she called, as she slipped it back over her wrist and up her arm.
The Gettlanders burst into cheering. The Vanstermen were a good deal quieter as they watched Soryorn hop away, leaning hard on Mother Scaer’s shoulder. As for Skara’s own little entourage, Raith looked as if he had swallowed an axe and Blue Jenner was in tears, but only because he was laughing so hard.
Thorn Bathu cupped her hands to shout over the noise. ‘I guess all that time spent up the mast wasn’t wasted after all!’
‘A man can learn more up a mast than in any minister’s chamber!’ called Koll, basking in the applause and blowing kisses to his friends.
Skara leaned close to him. ‘You realize you’ve won the chance to climb alone into an impregnable fortress full of enemies?’
His smile wilted as she took his wrist and raised his limp hand in triumph.
First Man In (#ulink_1de1ba02-7a27-5256-984f-f114a5e1ef5e)
The walls of Bail’s Point were frozen in another flash of lightning, the battlements black teeth against a brilliant sky. Gods, they looked a long way up.
‘Is it too late to say I don’t like this plan?’ shrieked Koll over the howling of the wind, the hissing of the rain, the hammering of Mother Sea against their little boat.
‘You can say it whenever you like,’ Rulf bellowed back at him, his bald pate running with wet. ‘Long as you climb up there afterward!’
The wind swept up and lashed spray into the faces of the struggling crew. Thunder crackled loud enough to make the world tremble, but Koll could hardly have been trembling more as they jerked and wobbled closer to the rocks.
‘These skies don’t strike me as a fine omen!’ he called.
‘Nor these seas neither!’ shouted Dosduvoi, wrestling with his oar as if it was a horse that needed breaking. ‘Bad luck all round!’
‘We all have luck, good and bad!’ Thorn weighed the grapple in her hand. ‘It’s how you meet it that matters.’
‘She’s right,’ said Fror, his misshapen eye white in his tar-blacked face. ‘He Who Speaks the Thunder is on our side. His rain will keep their heads indoors. His grumbling will muffle the sounds of our coming.’
‘Provided his lightning doesn’t fry you to a cinder.’ Thorn slapped Koll on the back and nearly knocked him out of the boat.
The base of the wall was made from ancient elf-stone but buckled and broken, rusted bars showing in the cracks, coated in limpet, weed and barnacle. Rulf leaned low, teeth bared as he dragged hard on the steering oar, hauling them side on.
‘Easy! Easy!’ Another wave caught them, brought Koll’s stomach into his mouth and carried them hard against stone, wood grating and squealing. He clung to the rail, sure the boat would break her back and Mother Sea come surging in, ever hungry for warm bodies to drag into her cold embrace, but the seasoned timbers held and he muttered thanks to the tree that had given them.
Thorn tossed the grapple and it caught first time among those ancient rods. She braced her legs on the strakes beside Koll, teeth gritted as she hauled the boat close.
Koll saw the two buttresses Princess Skara had spoken of. Man-built from rough-hewn blocks, mortar crumbled from years of Mother Sea’s chewing. Between them was a shadowy cleft, stone shining slick and wet.
‘Just imagine it’s another mast!’ roared Rulf.
‘Masts often have angry seas at the bottom,’ said Thorn, tar-blacked sinews flexing in her shoulders as she wrestled with the rope.
‘But rarely angry enemies at the top,’ muttered Koll, staring up towards the battlements.
‘You sure you don’t want tar?’ asked Fror, offering out the jar. ‘They see you climbing up—’
‘I’m no warrior. They catch me I’ve a better chance talking than fighting.’
‘You ready?’ snapped Rulf.
‘No!’
‘Best go unready, then, the waves’ll smash this boat to kindling soon enough!’
Koll clambered up onto the rail, one hand gripping the prow, the other jerking some slack into the rope he had tied across his chest and coiled up between the sea-chests. Wet it was some weight, and it’d only get heavier the higher he climbed. The boat yawed, grinding against the foot of the buttress. Angry water clapped between rock and wood and fountained up, would’ve soaked Koll through if rain and sea hadn’t soaked him through already.
‘Hold her steady!’ shouted Rulf.
‘I would!’ called Dosduvoi, ‘but Mother Sea objects!’
The wise wait for their moment, as Father Yarvi was always telling him, but never let it pass. Another wave lifted the boat and Koll muttered one more prayer to Father Peace that he might live to see Rin again, then sprang.
He’d been sure he’d plunge scrabbling and wailing straight through the Last Door, but the chimney between the two buttresses was deeper than a man was tall and just the right width. He stuck there so easily it was almost a disappointment.
‘Ha!’ he shouted over his shoulder, delighted at his unexpected survival.
‘Don’t laugh!’ snarled Thorn, still struggling with the grapple. ‘Climb!’
The crumbling mortar offered foot and hand holds in plenty and to begin with he made quick progress, humming away to himself as he went, imagining the song the skalds would sing of Koll the Clever, who swarmed up the impenetrable walls of Bail’s Point as swiftly as a gull in flight. The applause he’d won in the yard of Thorlby’s citadel had only given him a taste for more. To be loved, and admired, and celebrated seemed to him no bad thing. No bad thing at all.
The gods love to laugh at a happy man, however. Like a good mast the buttresses tapered towards their tops. The chimney between them grew shallower, wind and rain lashing into it and giving Koll such an icy buffeting he couldn’t hear himself hum any longer. Worse still it grew wider, so he was reaching further for handholds until there was no choice but to give up one buttress and climb in the angle between the other and the wall itself, the stone ice-cold and moss-slick so he had to keep stopping to scrape the wet hair from his face, wipe his battered hands and blow life back into his numb fingers.
The last few strides of sheer man-built stone took longer than all the rest combined. There was a deadly length of rain-heavy rope dragging at his shoulder now, weightier than a warrior’s armour, whipping and snapping about the chimney as the wind took it. It was as hard a test as he’d faced in his life, muscles twitching, trembling, aching past the point of endurance. Even his teeth were hurting, but to turn back would’ve been more dangerous than to go on.
Koll picked his holds as carefully as a ship-builder his keel, knowing one mistake would see him smashed to fish-food on the rocks below, squinting in the moonlight and the storm-flashes, scraping mossy dirt from between the stones, crumbly here as old cheese. He tried not to think about the yawning drop below, or the angry men who might be waiting above, or the—
A stone burst apart in his numb fingers and he lost his grip, whimpering as he swung away, every stretched-out sinew in his arm on fire, clawing and scrabbling at old ivy until finally he found a firm purchase.
He pressed himself to the wall, watched the gravel tumble away, bouncing down around his rope, down to the jagged elf-boulders and the boat tossed on the angry brine.
He felt his mother’s weights pressing into his breastbone, thought of her frowning up at him on the mast, finger wagging. Get down from there before you break your head.
‘Can’t stay wrapped in a blanket all my life, can I?’ he whispered over the pounding of his heart.
It was with legendary relief he peered over the battlements and saw the rain-lashed walkway, wider than a road, deserted. He groaned as he dragged himself over, hauling the rope after him, rolled on to his back and lay, panting, trying to work the blood back into throbbing fingers.
‘That was an adventure,’ he whispered, slithering up onto hands and knees and staring out over Bail’s Point. ‘Gods …’
From up here it wasn’t hard to believe that it was the strongest fortress in the world, the very key to the Shattered Sea.
There were seven vast towers with vast walls between, six elf-built, the perfect stone gleaming wet, one squat and ugly, built by men to plug a breach left by the Breaking of God. Five towers rose from Father Earth on Koll’s left, but on his right two were thrust out beyond the cliffs into Mother Sea, chains strung between them feathering the waves, enclosing the harbour.
‘Gods,’ he whispered again.
It was crammed with ships, just as Princess Skara had said it would be. Fifty at least, some small, some very great. Bright Yilling’s fleet, safe as babes within the mighty elf-stone arms of the fortress, bare masts scarcely shifting despite Mother Sea’s fury beyond.
A long ramp led from the wharves, up the cliffside to the great yard. Buildings of a dozen different ages and designs were piled up about it, their roofs a mismatched maze of mossy thatch, cracked tile, rain-slick slate, broken gutters spurting water to spatter on the flagstones below. A city, almost, clinging to the inside of the great elf-walls, firelight spilling from around the edges of a hundred windows shuttered against the storm.
Koll squirmed free of his rope, cursing his clumsy cold fingers as he looped it about the battlements, dragged hard at the wet knots to make sure they were fast, and finally allowed himself a weary smile. ‘That’ll do it.’
But the gods love to laugh at a happy man, and his smile vanished the moment he turned.
A warrior was trudging down the walkway towards him, spear in one hand, flickering lantern in the other, rain-heavy cloak flapping about his hunched shoulders.
Koll’s every instinct was to run, but he forced himself to turn his back on the guard, wedged one boot carelessly on the battlements, stared out to sea as though this was the place he felt most at home in all the world, and offered a silent prayer to She Who Spins Lies. One way or another, she got a lot of prayers from Koll.
When he heard boots scraping up he turned with a grin. ‘Hey, hey! Nice evening to be on the walls.’
‘Hardly.’ The man squinted at him as he raised his lantern. ‘Do I know you?’
He sounded like a Yutmarker, so Koll took a guess and trusted to his luck. ‘No, no, I’m one of the Inglings.’
Serve a man one good lie, he might offer you the truth himself. ‘One of Lufta’s boys?’
‘That’s right. Lufta sent me to check the walls.’
‘He did?’
If you can’t fashion a good lie, the truth will have to serve. ‘Aye, there’s these two buttresses, see, and Lufta’s got this worry someone might climb up between them.’
‘On a night like this?’
Koll gave a little chuckle. ‘I know, I know, it’s mad as a hatful of frogs, but you know how Lufta gets …’
‘What’s that?’ asked the man, frowning towards the rope.
