The door opened a crack to show the well-powdered face of the new Minister for Commerce. “Your Highness?”

“Bring the Closed Council back in. We have work to do.”

Curses and Blessings

In the blackness of the night the Long Eye opened, and she saw it all.

She saw a bald weaver, and the work on his loom was all in ruins, a million threads hanging severed. But he was stitching it back together, patience, patience, and smiling as he worked. He put out his hands, and one fell on the head of a black-haired boy, and the other on the head of a blonde-haired girl.

She saw the girl become a laughing woman, flashing lenses on her eyes, a tall hat perched on her golden curls, and the hat belched smoke, spat ash, blotted out the bleeding sun and cast the world into twilight. She blew a kiss, and the kiss became a coin, a thousand coins, a million golden chains. She offered her hand, and the fingers became iron rails, and the rails reached across the sea and made a cage, the cage that Stour had forged, and the whole North was inside.

She saw the black-haired boy became a black-haired man, and he sat on a hill of bones in a circle of fire with a grey sword across his knees, a grey sword never sheathed, a grey sword marked with one silver letter. His scarred mouth spoke, but his words were drops of blood that made a stream, that became a river, that became a sea that broke upon the beaches of the North. A tide of blood. A flood whose red waters would not recede.

She saw the Crinna boil. She saw Uffrith burn again. She saw the graves open and spew up the dead. She saw Skarling’s Chair split in two and the broken wood bleeding. She saw a plague of worms writhe in the poisoned fields. She saw a plague of crows shower from the bare trees and blot out the moon, sink the world in darkness.

And in the darkness she saw a bald weaver, and in his eye she saw a burning stone, and in the burning stone she saw a circle of runes, and in the circle of runes she saw a black door, and beyond the door a figure rose from the seething sea, a figure made of blinding light, and his feet left smouldering footsteps in the shingle, and he spoke in thunder.

“I am returned.”

Rikke tore free of the furs on her father’s bed and crouched in the darkness, trembling, gasping, the sweat of her vision clinging cold to her and her left eye burning hot as a coal in her tattooed face.

She couldn’t say whether the Long Eye was a blessing for giving her this warning, or a curse that she would wake every day in terror of what she’d seen.

Maybe the truth was it was both. It had always been both.

“You look like you saw the dead,” said Isern-i-Phail, frowning at her as she dropped into Skarling’s Chair.