King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

He scratched his head at that. Sindri came back from the stables and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “He’ll look good with a beard. We’ll make a Viking of him yet!”

Rike frowned. “She said to meet her at the end of the lake.”

“Who said?”

He frowned again, shrugged, and went back into the hall.

I looked out across the lake. At the far end, faint through the grey veils of rain, a tent stood, a yurt, yellowed with age, a thin line of smoke escaping through the smoke-hole. The strangeness came from there. That was where she waited.

Sindri looked too. “That’s Ekatri, a völva from the north. She doesn’t come often. Twice when I was young.”

“Völva?” I asked.

“She knows things. She can see the future,” Sindri said. “A witch. Is that what you call them?” He frowned. “Yes, a witch. You’d best go to her. Wouldn’t do to keep her waiting. Maybe she’ll read your future for you.”

“I’ll go now,” I said. Sometimes you wait and watch, sometimes you walk right on in. There’s not much to learn from the outside of a tent.

“I’ll see you inside.” Sindri nodded to the hall, grinned, and wiped the rain from his beard. He’d be waking his father before I got to the end of the lake, telling him about the trolls and Gorgoth. What would the good duke make of all that? I wondered. Perhaps the witch would tell me.

The ground trembled once as I walked along the lake, setting the water dancing. I could smell the smoke from the witch’s tent now. It put an acrid taste in my mouth and reminded me of the volcanoes. The wind picked up, blowing rain into my face.

Old Tutor Lundist once taught me about seers, soothsayers, and the star-watchers who count out our lives by the slow predictions of planets rolling over the heavens. “How many words would be needed to tell the tale of your life?” he had asked. “How many to reach this point, and how many more to reach the end?”

“Lots?” I grinned and glanced away, out the narrow window to the courtyard, the gates, the fields beyond city walls. I had the twitchies in my feet, eager to be off chasing some or other thing while the sun still shone.

“This is our curse.” Lundist stamped and rose from his chair with a groan. “Man is doomed to repeat his mistakes time and again because he learns only from experience.”

He smoothed out an old scroll across the desk, covered in the pictograms of his homeland. It had pictures too, bright and interesting in the eastern style. “The zodiac,” he said.

I put my finger on the dragon, caught in a few bold strokes of red and gold. “This one,” I said.

“Your life is laid out from the moment of your birth, Jorg, and you don’t get to choose. All the words of your story can be replaced by one date and place. Where the planets hung in that instant, how they turned their faces, and which of them looked toward you…that configuration forms a key and that key unlocks all that a man will be,” he said.

I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Lundist was always a man for enquiry, for logic and judging, for patience and subtlety. All that felt rather pointless if we walked a fixed path from the cradle to whatever end was written in stars.

I’d reached the yurt without noticing. I made an abrupt stop and managed not to walk into it. I circled for the entrance and ducked through without announcement. She was supposed to know the future after all.

“Listen,” she said as I pushed through the flap into her tent, a stinking place of hides and hanging dead things.

“Listen,” she said again as I made to open my mouth.

So I sat cross-legged beneath the dangling husks, and listened and didn’t speak.

“Good,” she said. “You’re better than most. Better than those bold, noisy boys wanting so much to be men, wanting only to hear the words from their own mouths.”

I listened to the dry wheeze of her as she spoke, to the flap and creak of the tent, the insistence of the rain, and the complaints of the wind.

“So you listen, but do you hear?” she asked.

I watched her. She wore her years badly and the gloom couldn’t hide it. She watched me back with one eye; the other sat sunken and closed in the grey folds of her flesh. It leaked something like snot onto her cheek.

“You should look better after ninety winters,” she sneered. She needed just the one eye to read my expression. “The first fifty, hard ones in the lands of fire and ice where the true Vikings live.”

I would have guessed two hundred just from looking at her, from the slide of her face, the crags, warts, and wattles. Only her eye seemed young, and that disappointed me for I’d come to seek wisdom.

“I hear,” I said. I held my questions because folk only came to her with questions. If she truly knew the answers then perhaps I didn’t need to ask.

She reached into the layered rags and furs around her waist. The stench increased immediately and I struggled not to choke. When her hand emerged, more a bone claw than supple fingers, it clutched a glass jar, the contents sloshing. “Builder-glass,” she said, wetting her lips with a quick pink tongue, somehow obscene in her withered mouth. She cradled the flask in her hands. “How did we lose the art? There’s not a man you could reach with five weeks of riding that could make this now. And if I dropped it a finger’s width onto stone…gone! A thousand worthless pieces.”

“How old?” I asked. The question escaped me despite my resolution.

“Ten centuries, maybe twelve,” she said. “Palaces have crumbled in that time. The statues of emperors lie ruined and buried. And this…” She held it up. An eye made slow rotations in the greenish swirl. “Still whole.”

“Is it your eye?” I asked.

“The very same.” She watched me with her bright one and set the other on the rug in its Builder flask.

“I sacrificed it for wisdom,” she said. “As Odin did at Mimir’s well.”

“And did you get wisdom?” I asked. An impertinent question perhaps from a boy of fourteen but she had asked to see me, not I her, and the longer I sat there, the smaller and older she looked.

She grinned, displaying a single rotting tooth-stump. “I discovered it would have been wise to leave my eye next to the other one.” The eye came to rest at the bottom of the jar, aimed slightly to my left.

“I see you have a baby with you,” she said.

I glanced to my side. The baby lay dead, brains oozing from his broken skull, not much blood but what there was lay shockingly red on his milk-white scalp. He seldom looked so clear, so real, but Ekatri’s yurt held the kind of shadows that invited ghosts. I said nothing.

“Show me the box.” She held out her hand.

I took it from its place just inside my breastplate. Keeping a tight grip I held it out toward her. She reached for it, quicker than an old woman has a right to be, and snatched her hand back with a gasp. “Powerful,” she said. Blood dripped from her fingers, welling from a dozen small puncture wounds. The fact that there was blood to spill in those bony old fingers surprised me.

I put the box back. “I should warn you that I’m not taken with horoscopes and such,” I told her.

She licked her lips again and said nothing.

“If you must know, I’m a goat,” I said. “That’s right, a fecking goat. There’s a whole nation of people behind the East Wall who say I was born in the year of the goat. I’ve no time for any system that has me as a goat. I don’t care how ancient their civilization is.”