‘Varied group.’
‘Fearsome is the word I’d have reached for,’ grunted Thorn.
She might well have tripped over desperate, disgusting or axebitten on the way. All three seemed apt for the gathering of the damned crawling over the South Wind and the wharf beside it, hefting sacks and barrels, hauling at ropes, shoving, bellowing, laughing, threatening, all under Father Yarvi’s watchful eye.
Fighting men, these, but more like bandits than warriors. Men with many scars and few scruples. Men with beards forked and braided and shaved in strange patches and dyed hair chopped into spikes. Men whose clothes were ragged but whose muscled arms and thick necks and calloused fingers glittered with gold and silver ring-money, proclaiming to the world the high value they put on themselves.
Thorn wondered what mountain of corpses this lot might have heaped up between them, but she wasn’t one to be easily intimidated. Especially when she had no choice. She set down her sea-chest, everything she had inside, her father’s old sword wrapped in an oilcloth on top. She put on her bravest face, stepped up to the biggest man she could see and tapped him on the arm.
‘I’m Thorn Bathu.’
‘I am Dosduvoi.’ She found herself staring sharply up at one of the biggest heads she ever saw, tiny features squeezed into the centre of its doughy expanse, looming so high above her that at first she thought its owner must be standing on a box. ‘What bad luck brings you here, girl?’ he asked, with a faintly tragic quiver to his voice.
She wished she had a different answer, but snapped out, ‘I’m sailing with you.’
His face retreated into an even tinier portion of his head as he frowned. ‘Along the Divine River, to Kalyiv and beyond?’
She thrust her chin up at him in the usual manner. ‘If the boat floats with so much meat aboard.’
‘Reckon we’ll have to balance the benches with some little ones.’ This from a man, small and hard as Dosduvoi was huge and soft. He had the spikiest shag of red hair and the maddest eyes, bright blue, shining wet and sunken in dark sockets. ‘My name is Odda, famed about the Shattered Sea.’
‘Famed for what?’
‘All kinds of things.’ He flashed a yellow wolf-smile and she saw his teeth were filed across the front with killer’s grooves. ‘Can’t wait to sail with you.’
‘Likewise,’ Thorn managed to croak, stepping back despite herself and nearly tripping over someone else. He looked up as she turned and, brave face or no, she shrank back the other way. A huge scar started at the corner of one eye, all dragged out of shape to show the pink lid, angled across his stubbled cheek and through both lips. To make matters worse, she realized from his hair, long and braided back around his face, that they would be sailing with a Vansterman.
He met her ill-concealed horror with a mutilated blankness more terrible than any snarl and said mildly, ‘I am Fror.’
It was either bluster or look weak and Thorn reckoned that no choice at all, so she puffed herself up and snapped out, ‘How did you get the scar?’
‘How did you get the scar?’
Thorn frowned. ‘What scar?’
‘That’s the face the gods gave you?’ And with the faintest of smiles the Vansterman went back to coiling rope.
‘Father Peace protect us,’ squeaked Thorn’s mother as she edged past. ‘Fearsome is a fair word for them.’
‘They’ll be the ones scared of me soon enough,’ said Thorn, wishing, and not for the first time, that saying a thing firmly enough makes it so.
‘That’s a good thing?’ Her mother stared at a shaven-headed man with runes stating his crimes tattooed on his face, laughing jaggedly with a bony fellow whose arms were covered in flaking sores. ‘To be feared by men like these?’
‘Better to be feared than afraid.’ Her father’s words and, as always, her mother was ready for them.
‘Are those life’s only two choices?’
‘They’re a warrior’s two choices.’ Whenever Thorn traded more than ten words with her mother she somehow ended up defending an indefensible position. She knew what came next. Why fight so hard to be a warrior if all you can win is fear? But her mother only shut her mouth, and looked pale and scared, and piled guilt on Thorn’s simmering anger. As ever.
‘You can always go back to the house,’ snapped Thorn.
‘I want to see my only child on her way. Can’t you give me that? Father Yarvi says you might be gone a year.’ Her mother’s voice took on an infuriating quiver. ‘If you come back at all—’
‘Fear not, my doves!’ Thorn jumped as someone flung an arm around her shoulders. The strange woman who had watched Thorn fight Brand a few days before thrust her grey-stubbled skull between her and her mother. ‘For the wise Father Yarvi has placed your daughter’s education in my dextrous hands.’
Thorn hadn’t thought her spirits could drop any lower, but the gods had found a way. ‘Education?’
The woman hugged them tighter, her smell a heady mix of sweat, incense, herbs and piss. ‘It’s where I teach and you learn.’
‘And who …’ Thorn’s mother gave the ragged woman a nervous look, ‘or what … are you?’
‘Lately, a thief.’ When that sharpened nervousness into alarm she added brightly, ‘But also an experienced killer! And navigator, wrestler, stargazer, explorer, historian, poet, blackmailer, brewer … I may have forgotten a few. Not to mention an accomplished amateur prophet!’
The old woman scraped a spatter of fresh bird-droppings from a post, tested its texture with her thumb, smelled it closely, seemed on the point of tasting it, then decided against and wiped the mess on her ragged cloak.
‘Inauspicious,’ she grunted, peering up at the wheeling gulls. ‘Add to all that my unchallenged expertise in …’ she gave a suggestive wiggling of the hips, ‘the romantic arts and you can see, my doves, there are few areas of interest to the modern girl in which I am not richly qualified to instruct your daughter.’
Thorn should have enjoyed the rare sight of her mother rendered speechless, but was, for once, speechless herself.
‘Thorn Bathu!’ Rulf shouldered his way through the bustle. ‘You’re late! Get your skinny arse down the wharf and start shifting those sacks. Your friend Brand has already …’ He swallowed. ‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’
Thorn sourly worked her tongue. ‘Mother.’
‘Surely not!’ Rulf combed at his beard with his fingers in a vain attempt to tame the brown-and-grey tangle. ‘If you can suffer a compliment from a plain old fighting man, your beauty lights these docks up like a lamp at twilight.’ He glanced at the silver key on her chest. ‘Your husband must be—’
Thorn’s mother could suffer the compliment. Indeed she clutched it with both hands. ‘Dead,’ she said quickly. ‘Eight years, now, since we howed him up.’
‘Sorry to hear that.’ Though Rulf sounded, in fact, anything but sorry. ‘I’m Rulf, helmsman of the South Wind. The crew may seem rough but I’ve learned never to trust a smooth one. I picked these men and each knows his business. Thorn’ll be rowing right beneath my beard and I’ll treat her with just as soft a heart and firm a hand as I would my own daughter.’
Thorn rolled her eyes, but it was wasted effort. ‘You have children?’ her mother asked.
‘Two sons, but it’s years since I saw them. The gods parted me from my family for too long.’
‘Any chance they could part you from mine?’ grunted Thorn.
‘Shush,’ hissed her mother, without