“What did I do? To make you turn on me?” He stepped closer, lips curling back from his teeth. “Have you even got a heart?”
She did, and it was pounding now. She felt as if her battered skull was going to split. He gripped the arms of her chair with white knuckles and she shrank back, turning her face away as he leaned down over her, snarling, spitting, stabbing at his chest with a finger.
“I loved you. I still fucking love you! How pathetic is that? After what you’ve done!”
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, “I’m so sorry—”
“I don’t want your sorry, I want to know why!” He snarled the word over and over. “Why? Why? Why—”
“Because I’m your sister!” she screamed in his face. She was revolted. She was ashamed. She was terrified.
She was relieved.
She only realised then how the secret had eaten at her. She met his eye and gave a helpless shrug. “I’m your sister.”
Never had she seen a man’s face so contorted with different extremes of emotion within a few moments. From fury, to bafflement, to disgust, to disbelief. “What do you mean?” He flinched back. Jerked his hand from the arm of her chair and held it up as if to ward off a blow. “What do you mean?”
“I meant to say yes to you!” Her confession welled up, sickening as shit flooding from a broken sewer. “After Valbeck. That’s the truth. I wanted to. That’s all I wanted. You were the one good thing… the only good thing… I went to my mother…” She closed her eyes, felt tears burning at the lids. A little sadness. A lot of fear. “She told me… I couldn’t marry you. She told me… she, and your father…” She squeezed her eyes tighter shut, had to force out the words. “They were lovers! Before he became king. And I was the result. I’m your sister! Half-sister. That’s the truth. I didn’t—”
“That’s a lie.” Orso’s face crushed up in disbelief. “That can’t be true.”
“You know it is. I know it is. My father—” she gave a kind of cough, “Arch Lector Glokta, that is, he offered to marry my mother. So she would be safe. He raised me as his own. I didn’t know. Not until she told me. That’s the truth. And then… I didn’t know what I could do! I couldn’t marry you. I couldn’t tell you why. Then seeing how you hated me for it… it was torture!” She found she was leaning towards him, reaching out for him. “It still is torture.”
He stumbled back, clattering into a chair and sending it over backwards.
“I lost my way after that!” She struggled up somehow, took a wobbling step towards him. “I lost all my judgement. I was just… pretending… to be me. I was still trapped in Valbeck, somehow! I couldn’t see… past my own ambitions… I didn’t have anything else!” Pathetic excuses, mangled in her dry mouth. “Leo… he’s a good man. He could be… but he’s so easily led. Isher and the rest brought him to this.” She closed her eyes, tears welling down her face. “I brought him to this. Blame me. I wanted… I don’t even know what I wanted any more!”
She could hardly stand. She sank down on her knees. “I’m begging you for mercy. For my husband. For myself. For our child.” Hands clasped, face wet with tears, nose clicking with snot. What a fucking cliché. “I know I don’t deserve it, but it’s all I can do now. Please, Orso.”
He stared down at her, that hand still up as though to push her away. To push away what she was saying.
“Gorst!” he shrieked.
“No. Orso, please.” She almost clutched at his ankles. “I didn’t know. It’s the truth—”
The door burst open and Bremer dan Gorst strode in. Huge. Merciless.
“Get her out of here!”
Gorst took her under one arm. Oddly gentle. But utterly irresistible.
“Please!” she blubbed as he half-marched her, half-carried her out. “Orso!” She clutched at a table in desperation and dragged it over, a pile of books scattering. “Please!”
The door slammed shut.
Those Names
“There’s the beacon fire!” squeaked Greenway, pointing off through the mist. “It’s Ollensand!”
“Finally!” Stour stalked to the prow, shouldering Greenway aside for a better look. There was no missing the wriggling pinprick of light now, and there were smiles all around at the thought of land, and food, and warmth, Clover’s big as anyone’s. It had been quite the wearying voyage.
They’d scratched together a crew half his men, half Stour’s young bastards who’d lived through the battle. One had a wound in his back and died after a night of groaning on the water. They’d rolled him over the side, the only ceremony Clover’s observation that not everyone goes back to the mud after all. Some get the big drink instead. Greenway had looked green the whole way, and especially green at that, Rikke’s prediction that he’d die on water no doubt weighing on his mind.
“Home again.” Clover shook some of the salt dew from the old blanket around his shoulders. He glanced at Sholla, sitting beside him with her arm over the tiller. “Quite a feat o’ navigation.”
“Nothing to comment on,” she said modestly, though he knew she’d spent most of the nights awake, frowning at the stars and fretting over the course. Last thing they wanted was to land in the wrong place, after all, and one bit of sea looks much like another.
All the way, Stour snapped and whined like a wounded wolf indeed. Anyone hoping a glimpse of the North would sweeten his mood was sorely disappointed. All it did was remind him that he’d left with big ambitions and a few thousand men, and was coming back with neither.
“Get the oars out and row us in, you bastards!” he snarled, that fine wolfskin cloak of his snapping as he stalked between the benches. He leaned against the mast to rub at the wound on his leg. “Fucking thing! It’s right on top o’ the one the Young Lion gave me!”
“Seems a bonus,” Sholla murmured through tight lips. “You end up with one wound not two.”
“In my experience o’ the Great Wolf,” mused Clover, “and I have about as much these days as any man alive, he’s not prone to look on the sunny side. I’d best try and calm the bastard, eh?” He heaved out a sigh as he stood. “Doubt anyone else will.” And he pulled the damp blanket off and tossed it over Sholla’s head.
Men scurried about the ship as that distant light grew brighter and was joined to either side by the grey rumour of the coast. Wood clonked, rope hissed and salt spray flew as they brought in the sailcloth and leaned to the oars.
“Ready for the shore?” Clover asked Downside as he passed, and the big man gave him a wink with that bloodshot eye, red from a blow to the head in the battle. Stour was still raging, o’ course, as he walked up. What else would he be doing?
“Not a moment too fucking soon! Fucking Union. Fucking disaster.” As though failure had fallen out of the sky, rather than his having any hand in it.
Clover folded his arms and looked off towards the coast. “If no one lost, my king, where’d be the pleasure in winning?”