CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Perfect Courtesy
The letter came up from the southern farms on the sixth day after the birth.
Liv was sitting up by then, which had taken some arranging. She had been carried to the chair by Hild and installed in it with two cushions and a great deal of disapproval, and from there she could see the yard, the burned ground where the hall had been, and a settlement that had stopped putting out fires and started counting what was left.
Yrsa had gone down the hill two evenings before, on her own feet, with Eira walking beside her.
The room still felt wrong without her in it. Liv had not decided yet whether that was going to get better.
A rider had come to the southern boundary under a green branch, handed the thing over, and gone away again without asking for an answer, which was in itself a message of a kind.
She let it sit on the corner of the table under a river stone for two days.
On the third morning she sent everybody out of the room and opened it.
It was a full page. The hand was clear and unhurried and belonged to a man who had learned to write in a warm room.
Ivar offered his father’s terms.
The king acknowledged that the coast had suffered. The king acknowledged that the queen had governed ably in an absence that had run longer than he intended, as the gods willed. The king was prepared to recognise Liv as queen in her own name and by her own line, to leave the hall to her, and to trouble the fjord no further.
In exchange, three things.
His sister, returned to him.
The hide record, returned to him.
And his children acknowledged.
Liv read that part four times.
The king rejoices, Ivar had written, in the news carried to him within four days of the birth: that the queen was brought to bed of twins on the night of the fire, a boy and a girl, both living, both brown of hair and light of eye as his own children have always been. The king has already told the story at three fires. He intends to have it sung.
There followed a sentence about the mercy of the gods to a man of his years.
And then, in the same clear hand and the same unhurried courtesy:
The king requires that the boy be acknowledged before the whole coast as his trueborn son and heir, and that he be sent to his father’s household in fosterage in his seventh year, as is the custom among great houses, that he may be raised to the things a king’s son must know.
Liv set the letter down on the table and put both hands flat on either side of it and did not move for some time.
* * *
Brown of hair and light of eye.
That was the part she went back to, over and over, through the whole of that grey morning.
It was true. It was the plain truth, and anybody who had stood in that chapel in the three days after the fire would have sworn to it: two brown-haired, blue-grey-eyed infants, their mother’s colouring to the life, as ordinary as bread, one of them slightly louder than the other.
Varka had told them the mask would hold. It had held: through a siege, a fire, a birth and a coronation, against priests and midwives and four hundred frightened people, and it had done exactly what it was there to do.
And it had walked a description that fitted Sigurd’s sons as well as it fitted her the length of the coast and put it into the mouth of the man who wanted heirs.
Liv had spent three days frightened that somebody would see her daughter as she was.
It had not once occurred to her to be frightened of what everybody saw instead.
* * *
“Leif,” said Ingrid, when she was asked.
“You are certain.”
“I am certain enough to say the name to your face and not certain enough to hang him for it, which is the usual condition of knowing anything about Leif.” Ingrid stood with her hands behind her back. “He was in the chapel yard for three days after the fire, helping. Everybody said so. He carried water. He mended a roof. He asked the well women about the birth in that pleasant way he has, four or five times in three days, and he was gone south on the fourth morning with a horse he did not arrive on.”
“He sold the description of my children.”
“He sold what everybody in that yard already knew, my lady. That is his particular skill. He never once has to steal anything.”
Liv thought about a man standing in a burning gateway with a torch and a borrowed shield while half the lower quarter walked out past him, and about how she had chosen to buy him rather than hang him, and had been proud of the choice.
“He will have been paid twice,” she said.
“He will have been paid three times if he could find a third buyer.”
* * *
She put it before the council because hiding it would have been worse.
Four old men in wet wool. The steward. Ingrid at the door with her hands behind her back.
They read it and did what she knew they would do, which was to weigh it honestly, because they were not wicked men and that was the whole difficulty. The terms were good. The terms were better than good. The coast had lost a hall, a quarter of its houses and nineteen people in one night, the ash was still warm, and here was a king offering to go away for the price of one woman, one piece of hide, and a promise about a boy who would not be seven for another seven years.
“Seven years is a long while, my lady,” the steward said. “A great deal happens in seven years. Men die.”
“You are advising me to agree to a thing I do not intend to honour.”
“I am advising you that the coast needs a spring without ships in it.”
“And when the seventh year comes, and I refuse, and he lands with everything he has, and the coast says: she gave her word and broke it, and now our sons are dying for a boy she could have sent away?” Liv looked round the table. “I would have spent seven years teaching four hundred people that my word is a thing with a price on it. Sigurd does not need to beat me if he can teach them that.”
Nobody answered.
“And there is the other half of it,” she said, “which none of you has said out loud, so I will. If I acknowledge that boy as Sigurd’s trueborn son before the whole coast, then I have made my own son into the heir of the man who burned this settlement. Everything I hold, I hold as his mother until he is grown. My line, the record, the crown out of the throne — all of it becomes the boy’s inheritance from his father, and I become the widow keeping a chair warm.”
Old Geir shifted. “It would be the safest thing for him.”
“It would be the safest thing for him this year.”
“And the girl?” said the steward.
Liv did not answer that at all.
* * *
They went away unsatisfied, which was becoming their principal occupation.
Ingrid stayed by the door.
* * *
She read the letter twice more that night, and the second time she stopped hunting for the threat and started reading the man who wrote it.
Ivar had put his father’s claim on the page in his father’s voice: rejoicing, singing, the mercy of the gods to a man of his years. All of that was Sigurd, word for word, and Ivar had taken it down the way a clerk takes down a boast.
But the shape of the letter was not Sigurd’s.
Sigurd would have demanded the boy now. Sigurd had never in his life waited seven years for anything. Sigurd would have written four lines and one threat and had done with it.
Somebody had added the fosterage. Somebody had chosen seven years. Somebody had written a term that a reasonable queen could plausibly agree to, on the assumption that she was in no position to refuse anything, and had then sat back in a warm room a hundred miles south to see what she did with it.
Because there were only two answers she could give.
If she agreed, then the children were Sigurd’s, in law and in every mouth on the coast, and Ivar would know that she had traded them away to buy a quiet spring, and would know exactly how much her word was worth and exactly where to put his next letter.
And if she refused — if she refused an offer this generous, for a boy who was supposedly the king’s own son, with four hundred people watching her do it — then every man on that coast would spend the rest of the winter asking the same question.
Why would a queen refuse to have her son called a king’s heir?
Liv sat in a cold room above a chapel eight days after being opened up by a birth, with a letter in front of her, and understood with absolute clarity that Sigurd’s son had not written to frighten her.
He had written to watch her jump.
