She gave the flask a gentle swirl. “It sees into other worlds,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.
“That’s good then?” I said.
She tapped her living eye. “This one sees into other worlds too,” she said. “And it has a clearer view.” She took a leather bag from within her rags and set it by the jar. “Rune stones,” she said. “Maybe if you go east and climb over the great wall you will be a goat. Here in the north the runes will tell your story.”
I kept my lips tight shut, remembering my pledge at last. She would tell me about the future or she wouldn’t. What she told me without questions to answer might be true.
She took a handful from the bag, grey stones clacking soft against each other. “Honorous Jorg Ancrath.” She breathed my name into the stones, then let them fall. It seemed that they took a lifetime to reach the rug, each making its slow turns, end to end, side to side, the runes scored across them appearing and reappearing. They hit like anvils. I can feel the shake of it even now. It echoes in these bones of mine.
“The Perth rune, initiation,” she said. “Thurisaz. Uruz, strength.” She poked them aside as if they were unimportant. She turned a stone over. “Wunjo, joy, face down. And here, Kano, the rune of opening.”
I set a finger to Thurisaz and the völva sucked a sharp breath over grey gums. She scowled and batted at my hand to move it, the stone cold to touch, the witch’s hand colder, thin skin like paper. She hadn’t spoken the rune’s name in the empire tongue but I knew the old speech of the north from Lundist’s books.
“The thorns,” I said.
She flapped at me again and I withdrew my hand. Her fingers passed swiftly over the rest, counting. She swept them all away and poured them back onto the others still in the bag. “There are arrows ahead of you,” she said.
“I’m going to be shot?”
“You will live happy if you don’t break the arrow.” She picked up the flask and stared one eye into the other. She shivered. “Open your gates.” In her other hand the Wunjo rune stone, as if she hadn’t put it into the bag. Joy. She turned it over, blank side up. “Or don’t.”
“What about Ferrakind?” I asked. I wasn’t interested in arrows.
“Him!” She spat a dark mess into her furs. “Don’t go there. Even you should know that, Jorg, with your dark heart and empty head. Don’t go anywhere near that man. He burns.”
“How many stones do you have in that bag, old woman?” I asked. “Twenty? Twenty-five?”
“Twenty-four,” she said, and laid her claw on the bag, still bleeding.
“That’s not so many words to tell the story of a man’s life,” I said.
“Men’s lives are simple things,” she said.
I felt her hands on me, even though one lay on the bag and the other held the flask. I felt them pinching, poking, reaching in to pick through my memories. “Don’t,” I said. I let the necromancy rise in me, acid at the back of my throat. The dead things above us twisted, a dry paw twitched, the black twist of a man’s entrails crackled as it flexed, snake-like.
“As you please.” Again that pink tongue flicking over her lips, and she stopped.
“Why did you come here, Ekatri?” I asked. I surprised myself by finding her name. People’s names escape me. Probably because I don’t care about them.
Her eye found mine, as if seeing me for the first time. “When I was young, young enough for you to want me, Jorg of Ancrath, oh yes; when I was young the runes were cast for me. Twenty-four words are not enough to tell all of a woman’s story, especially when one of them is wasted on a boy she would have to grow old waiting for. I called you here because I was told to long ago, even before your grandmothers quickened.”
She spat again, finding the floor-hides this time.
“I don’t like you, boy,” she said. “You’re too…prickly. You use that charm of yours like a blade, but charming doesn’t work on old witches. We see through to the core, and the core of you is rotten. If there’s anything decent left in there, then it’s buried deeper than I care to look and probably doomed. But I came because the runes were cast for me, and they said I should do the same for you.”
“Fine words from a hag that smells as though she died ten years back and just hasn’t had the decency to stop wittering,” I said. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, with either eye, and insulting her didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel fourteen. I tried to remember that I called myself a king and stopped my fingers wandering over the dagger at my hip. “So why would your runes send you to annoy me if there’s no chance for me then, old woman? If I’m a lost cause?”
She shrugged, a shifting of her rags. “There’s hope for everyone. A slim hope. A fool’s hope. Even a gut-shot man has a fool’s hope.”
I almost spat at that, but royal spit might actually have improved the place. Besides, witches can work all manner of mischief with a glob of your phlegm and a strand of your hair. Instead I stood and offered the smallest of bows. “Breakfast awaits me, if I can find my appetite again.”
“Play with fire and you’ll get burned,” she said, almost a whisper.
“You make a living out of platitudes?” I asked.
“Don’t stand before the arrow,” she said.
“Capital advice.” I backed toward the exit.
“The Prince of Arrow will take the throne,” she said through tight-pressed lips, as if it hurt to speak plainly. “The wise have known it since before your father’s father was born. Skilfar told me as much when she cast my runes.”
“I was never one for fortune-telling.” I reached the flap and pushed it aside.
“Why don’t you stay?” She patted the hides beside her, tongue flicking over dry lips. “You might enjoy it.” And for a heartbeat Katherine sat there in the sapphire satin of the dress she wore in her chamber that night. When I hit her.
I ran at that. I pelted through the rain chased by Ekatri’s laughter, my courage sprinting ahead of me. And my appetite did not return for breakfast.
While others ate I sat in the shadows by a cold hearth and rocked back upon my chair. Makin came across, his fist full of cold mutton on the bone, grey and greasy. “Find anything interesting?” he asked.
I didn’t answer but opened my hand. Thurisaz, the thorns. It’s no great feat to steal from a one-eyed woman. The stone ate the shadow and gave back nothing, the single rune slashed black across it. The thorns. My past and future resting on my palm.
20
Four years earlier
Makin works a kind of magic with people. If he spends even half an hour in their company they will like him. He doesn’t need to do anything in particular. There don’t appear to be any tricks involved and he doesn’t seem to try. Whatever he does is different each time but the result is the same. He’s a killer, a hard man, and in bad company he will do bad things, but in half of one hour you will want him to be your friend.
“Good morning, Duke Maladon,” I said as his axemen showed me into the great hall.