Half the World (Shattered Sea #2)(22)
“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 gray-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-gray 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 taking her eyes from Rulf, and the thick-linked golden chain he wore in particular. “It will be a great comfort to know that a man of your quality looks to my daughter’s welfare. Prickly though she may be, Hild is all I have.”
A lot of strong wind and no doubt not a little strong ale had rendered Rulf ruddy about the cheeks already, but Thorn thought she saw him blush even so. “As for being a man of quality you’ll find many to disagree, but as to looking to your daughter’s welfare I promise to do my best.”
Thorn’s mother flashed a simpering smile. “What else can any of us promise?”
“Gods,” hissed Thorn, turning away. The one thing she hated worse than being fussed over was being ignored.
Brinyolf the Prayer-Weaver had wrought murder on some unwitting animal and was daubing its blood on the South Wind’s prow-beast, red to the wrists as he wailed out a blessing to Mother Sea and She Who Finds the Course and He Who Steers the Arrow and a dozen other small gods whose names Thorn had never even heard before. She’d never been much for prayers and had her doubts the weather was that interested in them either.
“How does a girl end up on a fighting crew?”
She turned to see a young lad had stolen up on her. Thorn judged him maybe fourteen years, slight, with a bright eye and a twitchy quickness to him, a mop of sandy hair and the first hints of beard on his sharp jaw.