Half the World (Shattered Sea #2)(21)

Brand swallowed. Dangers, no doubt, but opportunities too. Men won glory on the Divine. Men won fortunes beyond it. “You need oarsmen?” he said. “I can pull an oar. You need loads lifted? I can lift a load. You need fighters?” Brand nodded toward Thorn, who’d managed to stand, wincing as she kneaded at her battered ribs. “I can fight. You want men with nothing to lose? Look no further.”

Rulf opened his mouth but Father Yarvi spoke over him. “The way may be hard, but we go to smooth the path for Father Peace. We go to find allies.” The minister gave Brand the slightest nod. “We might need one man aboard who spares some thought for doing good. Give him a marker, Rulf.”

The old warrior scratched at his gray beard. “Yours’ll be the lowest place, boy. The worst work for the thinnest rewards. Back oar.” He jerked his head over at Thorn. “Opposite that article.”

Thorn gave Brand a long, hard frown and spat, but it only made him smile wider. He saw his future once again, and he liked what he saw. Compared to lifting loads on the docks, he liked it a lot.

“Looking forward to it.” He plucked the marker from Rulf’s hand, the minister’s dove carved into the face, and he wrapped his fingers painfully tight about it.

It seemed Mother War had found a crew for him after all. Or Father Peace had.





THE FIRST LESSON


The South Wind rocked on the tide, boasting new oars and a new sail, freshly painted and freshly provisioned, lean and sleek as a racing dog and with minister’s doves gleaming white at high prow and stern. It was, without doubt, a beautiful ship. A ship fit for high deeds and heroes’ songs.

Sadly, her new crew were not quite of that caliber.

“They seem a …” Thorn’s mother always found a pretty way to put things, but even she was stumped. “Varied group.”

“ ‘Fearsome’ is the word I’d have reached for,” grunted Thorn.

She might well have tripped over “desperate,” “disgusting” or “axbitten” 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 center 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.