Ten

Willow knew how to be as silent as a shadow.

She and Ivy had climbed this pass before, when they were ten on a visit to their father. Rocky and slippery with gravel. Ivy had been stuck a quarter of the way up, and sat there shouting and crying at her sister to come back. Willow had kept going, scrambling on her hands and knees when she had to. She had always been able to keep going. It was Maava’s blessing to her.

Quietly, up the path. Each foothold sure enough that no gravel was displaced. No hurry. Enduring in complete silence every sharp rock that poked her soles, or sliced her palms. Barely feeling the pain, only feeling the certainty.

That day, when she had climbed to the back of Blicstowe and stood on the ledge, the grass as high as her waist, she had looked down on Ivy and felt a surge of victory. I beat you. Ivy was forthright and pretty and always got her own way, but in this, Willow had triumphed. Then she had felt so guilty, and rather than trudging around to the gatehouse to be let in, she had returned and taken Ivy’s hand and led her down carefully, but deep, deep down she had known she was better than Ivy. She had always known, somehow, that she was better than her whole family.

Time passed. She went carefully, cloaked in grey on a grey night, with mizzling rain. Unseen and unwelcome. She reached the wall of the city and stood on that ledge again, looking down into the dark. Beyond, in fields and woods past the view of the gatehouse guards, her trimartyr army lay waiting for the first glimmer of dawn. Then they would come, and she needed to make sure the entrance was clear.

Willow made for the back gatehouse, the furthest from any of the others, at the narrow point where the city became back alleys. The drunkards with too many children lived in this part of town, the longest distance from the town square and the king’s compound. With her back against the wall, she slid along on silent feet. The ledge narrowed alarmingly, crumbling away to a foot, then half a foot, then a few inches.

Willow closed her eyes. ‘Show me your face, Maava, my saviour, my only love.’

In her mind’s eye, beyond a fog of worldly concern, the faintest glimmer of His brow appeared. It was enough. She kept her eyes closed, her focus on His beloved countenance, and kept sliding along the wall, testing each step with her toe, feeling the breeze curl under her cloak and up her skirts. Sure-footed, towards her goal.

She heard their voices before she saw them. Two guards, sitting on the grass in front of the gate, smoking pipes. As she drew closer, the thick pungent scent of tobacco reached her, and it put her in mind of Uncle Robert, and the single pipe a day he allowed himself, while Aunt Myrtle complained and waved her apron around to clear the air.

Willow paused to assess. In the watchtowers were another two men. Four of them. All had to be dead before one of the two tower guards rang their bell. She had hoped for only two. Blicstowe was on higher alert than she’d expected.

Her eyes went to the path leading to the gate, little more than a narrow track in the grass. Soon to be swarming with raiders. She only had to clear the way.

Willow was not afraid of drawing blood but suddenly she doubted herself. She and Hakon had made six different plans, and now they all seemed improbable. She ran through them in her head, decided, and marched forward.

‘Where did you come from?’ one of the smoking guards exclaimed, climbing to his feet.

She ignored him and stood at the bottom of the closest tower. ‘Wilfred, you come down from there.’

The smoking guards looked confused but not worried. The guard in the tower leaned over and said, ‘What? My name isn’t Wilfred.’

‘I know what you’ve been up to with that lass at the alehouse and I won’t take it. You come down from there and face your wife.’

‘He’s not married,’ one of the smoking guards said, laughing lightly. ‘You’ve got the wrong man.’

‘I know it’s him,’ she said.

‘Is there a Wilfred round on the east tower?’ the other tower guard said.

‘Now I’m getting angry!’ she shouted, walking right up to them and stamping her foot. ‘You are all in on it. Do you think it’s funny when a man plumbs a lass that isn’t his wife?’

‘Hey, calm down, calm down.’ The guard put his pipe aside, resting it on a jutting stone in the wall. ‘We can’t have you making a scene.’

‘Little wildcat down there, Wilfred,’ the other tower guard said, laughing.

‘Well, if you’re not my husband, come down here and show me your face. Don’t hide up there in the shadows.’

The two guards on the ground were laughing now, encouraging the tower guard to come and quiet down his unruly ‘wife’, before whispering to each other that she was crazy. Willow let their banter wash over her, maintaining her focus with a searing edge, aware of every rock on the ground, every weapon under her cloak, the distance between the second tower guard and his bell rope, the first leaching of darkness from the horizon.

‘Wilfred’ threw a rope ladder over the stone tower and made his way down. His feet touched the ground and he walked forward, arms spread, did a little twirl in front of her then turned back to the tower.

Heat moved through Willow’s body, making her fast and deadly. She scooped up a rock and pitched it precisely at the head of the guard who had remained in the tower. Then another when the first didn’t take him down. She ran after the second tower guard as he realised what was happening and tried to return faster up the ladder. Grabbing him on the third rung, knife in her hands, slashing his tendons so he fell backwards, knocking her to the ground. Then the other two, both scrambling away from her, both succumbing to her sword through their backs in one, two, three, four heartbeats. Back to the injured guard. Sword directly through the heart. Then climbing the tower.

Across from her, the bleeding, confused guard was struggling to stand. She needed to stop him reaching the bell rope, so she raced down the tower stairs on the inside of the wall then back up the other side to cut his throat. He gargled blood and she watched him die.

Perhaps four minutes had passed. Time resumed its usual rhythm, all was silent as it had been. On her quiet feet, she descended the tower stairs and dropped down into the city, heaved open the latch and left the gates ajar. She could still smell tobacco, mixed with blood. She sat on the grass, watching and waiting. If another guard came around, she would use one of her other plans. But none did. With dawn, from the north-west, the raiders would come. Running up to Blicstowe, in the blind spot created by the deaths of the tower guards. Eventually they would be seen. Eventually all the bells would ring, and some might think there was time to assemble an army against them, that nobody could breach the walls.

But they had already been breached by Willow, with Maava at her side.

Skalmir didn’t sleep, apart from a grainy hour or so in the coldest part of the night. Gytha had not returned, nor sent word. He played out a hundred scenarios in his mind, but decided that the only course of action was to rise before dawn and take a horse north. He would stop in at Æcstede and if Bluebell was there and cross with him, then so be it. But if she had not emerged from the woods, then he would know to ride all the way to Druimach and find Rowan. He would not wait here with his heart in his mouth.

Skalmir took his quiver and bow on his back in case he needed to eat along the way. Thrymm lay on the bed and he stroked her head gently. She licked his hand.

‘You stay here where it’s warm. I’ll be back before you know it.’ Thrymm knew her way around the family compound, and which doors to beg at if she got hungry or lonely. Skalmir headed out into the dewy morning and set course for the stables.

The smell of hay and leather greeted him. It was too early for the stablehand to help him, so he chose a lean, fast horse and went about finding a bridle and saddle.

Then the ringing started. All the tower bells, one after the other. His veins bloomed with heat.

The Ærfolc were attacking, and by the ringing of the bells the army – what was left of it – was being called to fight. That meant they were inside the walls.

Inside.

A little whimper drew his attention. He turned around. It was Thrymm. Alarmed by the bells, she had followed him.

‘They will come for us first,’ he said, grabbing her scruff and dragging her out of the stableyard. ‘Go.’ He opened the gate that led from the king’s compound into the grassy gardens around it.

She looked at him.

‘Go!’ he said again, and slammed the gate shut.

Skalmir stood there a few moments, gathering his thoughts. He could flee, but he did not know which gate the Ærfolc were attacking from. Besides, perhaps he could do good. He wasn’t a soldier but he was a sharp shot with the bow and arrow.

Bluebell wouldn’t want him anywhere near conflict.

Then he thought of the thatchers who had come to finish off the repaired gatehouses, camped in the west of the city. They did not know the streets and alleyways they could hide in. That decided for him what he would do.

He dashed across the stableyard and back past the bowerhouses. Kitchen staff and off-duty guards and counsellors and hall-hands were emerging into the cold and frightening dawn. He kept running, out through the gate to the city. Soldiers everywhere.

Skalmir shot off down a laneway, away from the main thoroughfare. In a gap between houses he saw them, the enemies.

They were not Ærfolc. They were tall, fair, with plaited beards and bearskins and mail and helms and sharp spears.

Raiders.

Heart in his mouth, he kept running down the laneway, navigating his way through the back ways of the city, pumping his limbs so the horror and disbelief didn’t take him to his knees. At one corner he saw an old man lying slain at his doorstep, his wife dead beside him, her arm still around his back. The air was filled with the sounds of crying and fear.

Skalmir skidded to a stop, turned around. Turned a circle. The horror had hold of him. Suddenly life made no sense. Raiders surged through the city, its hundred well-trained but not battle-hardened soldiers trying to defend it. No time to call up the remaining army from the surrounds. He would die. For certain he would die.

His heart thundering, he climbed up onto the sill of the nearest house. Hand over hand, he muscled himself up onto the roof. He was too distant from the action, so he picked his way over the thatching to the edge, then jumped a yard to the next roof, nearly losing his footing. Crouched, one hand on the thatching. He crested the roof and sat astride it, looking over the next roof to the parade of raiders, of which he could only see the northern-most edge.

Loaded an arrow into his bow.

Thwack.

He had never killed a man before. It was horribly easy.

Skalmir loaded another arrow. When he had taken four down, they noticed and shouted at him and each other and he knew they’d come to find him. He shot another, then shouldered his bow and headed back the way he had come.

This time, his foot hit a patch of mouldy thatching and slid. He thought for a moment that he would not fall: it couldn’t be possible that in this most portentous of moments, a fall should finish him off.

But the air did not catch him, and he heard his own shout of fear before everything went dark.

Willow walked slowly among the noise and blood and chaos, as though she walked in a cloud of her own that enveloped her, protected her, lifted her out of this time and place. History would tell of this moment, the trimartyr queen on her procession through the city, stepping sure-footed over the injured and the dead as her army, led by her fearless husband Hakon, flowed into the city like poison into veins. Citizens ran through the open gate behind them, but the army were under orders to move only forward, to the king’s compound, and put every living thing to death. Somewhere in there were the people and the creatures Bluebell loved. Not one of them would be suffered to breathe beyond this night.

Untouched by blade or brutish hand, she walked on until she arrived at her father’s hall. Bluebell’s hall.

Willow’s hall now.

She threw open the doors and her men streamed in behind her, hacking at cowering folk and brave old soldiers. She barely heard, barely saw. Her eyes were fixed on one goal only.

Up the stairs to the riser.

Willow smiled, and sat on her sister’s throne.