The Rose of the World Read Free

like a dying pig, Katla felt the bile rise in her throat and swallowed it down again. To be sick was unthinkable: she was Katla Aransen, daughter of a line of Eyran rovers, born to a life on the ocean wave. She had the sea in her blood! She had first set foot on a longship at the age of three and a half and been sailing all her life, and never once had she thrown up in the seventeen years that followed, storm or calm: it was a matter of pride.
    Not that there was much pride left to any of them, save old Hesta Rolfsen. It was hard to think about her grandmother, that tough old matriarch, and her terrible, heroic death. For all her sharp tongue, beady eyes and bawdy humour, Katla was more like the old beldame than she would have cared to admit. On their first night aboard this foreign tub, Katla’s mother, Bera Rolfsen, had told them all of the matriarch’s resolute ending in an attempt to put some backbone into those who wailed and prayed for death themselves:
    ‘“Here I sit and here I will stay. Rockfall is my home: I am too old to leave it,” those were her words.’ Bera’s face had been as stern as carved wood as she had looked from one to another amid this telling – from Katla’s shocked face, white in the darkness of the hold except for the black bruise on her chin which had ended her fight with the raiders, to Kitten Soronsen’s tear-reddened eyes and Magla Felinsen’s hunched figure; from Forna Stensen, her straw-yellow hair a wild tangle, to Thin Hildi, staring down at her mismatched stockings all torn to bits. Kit Farsen had made a small sound like an injured rabbit, then mastered herself as Bera’s gaze fell upon her. ‘She took her place in my husband’s great dragon-chair. I tried to cajole her, but she would have none of it, and when I tried to take her from there by force she gripped so fast to the chair’s carved arms that I could not move her. I pleaded with her to come with me, but she said she was too old to see any more of this world of Elda but that much experience still lay before the rest of us, and that if no one survived her, who then would be left to avenge her death?’
    ‘Me.’ Katla’s voice was low. ‘I will avenge her. And not just my brave grandmother, either. I will take vengeance for every one of those who died: Hesta Rolfsen, Marin Edelsen, Tian Jensen, Otter Garsen, Signy and Sigrid Leesen, Finna Jonsen, Audny Filsen and all. Even little Fili Kolson and his old dog, Breda: I will kill the men who did this: I swear it on my grandmother’s bones.’
    That had stopped Kitten’s tears. ‘And how will you do that?’ she jeered.‘With no weapon and your hands shackled? Will you strangle them between your thighs – or screw them to death when they test you for their brothels?’
    ‘Kitten!’ Bera’s voice was sharp as chipped flint.
    Katla gave Kitten Soronsen such a look that she quelled. One day there would be a score to be settled. ‘Do not ask me how; just accept that I will.’
    And she had meant it.
    Now, quite suddenly, three days after making that vow, she was crying for the first time since they had been captured. She had come aboard the vessel unconscious from the man they called Baranguet’s well-placed fist; and when she had come to, hurting and furious, she had been charged with adrenalin and resolve. Slow-burning anger had carried her through the next two days, coupled with utter disbelief. At any moment she expected to awake and find herself chilly from sleeping too long in the wind on top of the Hound’s Tooth. But the discomfort of being chained up in this stinking hold was clearly no dream; and the reality of her grandmother’s stiff-backed demise pressed in on her with ever greater impact. Tears fell, searing and unstoppable. They burned down her cheeks, off her chin and dripped onto her leather tunic. Then her nose began to run. Sur’s nuts! There was nothing she could do about it but sniff furiously: like the others her hands were chained to