King of Thorns

  “And the child?” I cursed my empty head. I had only to think a question today and it came spilling out of me.

  “Sick,” she said. “In her stomach. But I think it’s in her blood too. I think it’s the waste.” She pulled the girl to her. “Does it hurt, Janey?”

  “Yes.” A dry whisper.

  “A little or a lot?”

  “A lot.” Still a whisper.

  Why ask such questions if there’s nothing to be done? “He did right,” I said. “Your man. Sometimes you need to hold back. Bide your time.” The thorns had held me back when it mattered, made the decision for me. “He did right.” The words that rang so true before I fell off my horse seemed empty beside the shell of their home. A blow to the skull can knock a deal of sense out of a man.

  I saw horsemen across the meadow. Two men, three horses. Makin and Rike rode up, keeping an easy pace.

  “Good to have you on your feet, Jorg.” Makin gave me his grin. Rike just scowled. “Mistress Sara and Master Marten have been looking after you I see.” And that was Makin for you, always with the making friends, remembering names, jollying along.

  “Sara is it?” I said. I supposed these were my people after all. “And little Janey.” For a moment I saw a different Jane, crushed and broken under rocks, the light dying out of her. That Jane once told me I needed better reasons. Better reasons if I wanted to win, but maybe just better reasons for everything.

  “Take her inside,” I said. “It’s too cold here.” A vague guilt crept over me, for pissing on one of the only four walls they had left.

  Sara stood and carried the girl indoors.

  “So you left me for dead then, Makin?” I asked. “Where are the others?”

  “Camped a mile down the road.” He nodded north. “Watching for any more raiding parties.”

  Odd to think of jolly old Nossar standing behind the raids. It put a sour edge on sweet memories. I remembered him in his feasting hall, with the faded maps stretched out across the table, how he pored over them. Nossar in his oak chair in the fort of Elm, grey beard and warm eyes. We played in that hall, Will and I, when we were no bigger than the child Sara carried past me. Nossar and his lines on the map. Gruff talk of “his boys” giving Renar’s boys a hiding.

  “Are you ready to ride?” Makin asked.

  “Soon.” I went to my horse. “Brath” the stablemaster called him and I’d not seen fit to change the name. Sturdy enough but not a patch on Gerrod who fell under that mountain I pushed over in Gelleth. I fished a few necessaries from my saddlebags and followed Sara.

  The light had blinded me on the way out. The gloom left me blind on the way in. The stall stank. I hadn’t noticed it when I woke but it hit me now. Old vomit, sweat, animal dung. I believed the Prince of Arrow when he said he would protect the people, give them peace. I believed Jane when she said I needed better reasons for the things I made fate give me. I believed it all. Everything except that it meant anything to me.

  I crouched by the woman. Already I had to reach for her name. “The new king didn’t protect you then?”

  “There’s a king?” she said without interest, wanting me gone.

  “Hello, Janey,” I said, turning the charm onto the girl instead. “Did you see I brought the biggest, ugliest man in the world to show you?”

  Half a smile twitched on her lips.

  “So what do you want, little Janey?” I asked. I didn’t know what I was doing here, crouched in the stink with the peasants. Maybe I just wanted to beat the Prince of Arrow at something. Or maybe it was just the echoes of that knock on the head. Perhaps Maical was knocked on the head as a baby and that knock had been echoing through his whole life.

  “I want Davie.” She kept unnaturally still. Only her mouth moved. And her eyes.

  “What do you want to be? To do?” I thought of my childhood. I wanted to be death on wings. I wanted to break the world open until it gave me what was mine.

  “A princess,” Janey said. She paused. “Or a mermaid.”

  “I tell her stories, sir,” the mother said, half-fearful even now, ruined and on the edge of despair. I wondered what she thought I might take from her. “My grandmother read,” she said. “And my family keeps the tales.” She stroked Janey’s hair. “I speak them when she’s hurting. To keep her mind from it. Fill her head with nonsense. She don’t rightly know what a mermaid is even.”

  I bit my tongue then. Three impossible requests in as many moments. I’d followed them in thinking to be the king. Thinking of my crown and throne, my armies, gold and walls.

  She wants her brother, she wants to be a princess, she wants to be a mermaid. And the waste will take her, screaming from her mother’s arms, to a cold slot in the ground. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t do a thing about it.

  I touched her then, Janey, just a light touch on the forehead. She had enough death in her already and didn’t need me adding to it. But I touched her, with my fingers, just to feel it pulsing under the skin, eating at the marrow of her bones. The sickness in her called out to the necromancy lying in me, making a link. I could feel her heartbeat flutter under mine.

  “Ready to ride, Jorg?”

  “Yes.” I swung up into Brath’s saddle.

  We set off at slow walk.

  “Any of that spice left, Brother Jorg?” Makin asked.

  “I must have swallowed it all for the pain,” I said, patting my belt pouch.

  Makin rolled his eyes. He glanced back at the ruined farmstead. “Christ bleeding. There was enough—”

  The faint sound of cymbals cut him off. The clash of cymbals, the whirr of cogs, stamping, and a child laughing.

  “Leave anything else behind, Jorg?” he asked.

  “Red Kent was right,” I said. “It was cursed. Evil. Better the hurt fall on the peasants, neh?”

  On the plains the winds can make your eyes sting.

  Rike pulled on his reins and started back.

  “Don’t,” I said.

  And he didn’t.

  Sleep came hard that night. Perhaps soft months in the Haunt had left me wanting the comfort of a bed. Sleep came hard and the dreams came harder, dragging me under.

  I lay in a dark room, a dark room sour with the stink of vomit and animals, and saw nothing but the glitter of her eyes, child’s eyes. Heard only the tick tick tick of the watch on my wrist and the rasp rasp rasp of her breath, hot and dry and quick.

  I lay for the longest time with the tick and the rasp and the glitter of her eyes.

  We lay and a warm river carried us, thick with the scent of cloves.

  Tick, breath, tick, breath, tick, breath.

  And then I woke, sudden and with a gasp.

  “What?” someone murmured. Perhaps Kent in his blankets.

  “Nothing,” I said. The dream still tangled me. “I thought my watch stopped.”

  But it wasn’t the watch.

  In the grey dawn Makin rose beside me cracking his face with a yawn, spitting, and rubbing his back. “Jesu but I’m sore.” He cast a bleary glance my way. “Nothing a pinch of clove-spice wouldn’t fix.”

  “The child died last night,” I told him. “Easy rather than hard.”

  Makin pursed those thick lips of his and said no more about it. Perhaps thinking of his own child lost back among the years. He didn’t even ask how I knew.

  The years never seem to weigh on Brother Maical, as if his inability to count their passing protects him from their passage. He watches the world through calm grey eyes, broad-chested, thick-limbed. Brother Grumlow cuts Maical’s hair close, with a tail at the rear, and shaves his beard leaving him clean-cheeked and sharp. And if no one told you that his thoughts rattle in an empty head, you might think Brother Maical as capable a rogue as rides among the Brothers. In battle though his hands grow clever, and you’d think him whole, until the din fades, the dying fall, and Maical wanders the field weeping.

  9

  Four years earlier

  The Highla
nds has lowland, though precious little of it and what there is lies stony and grows yet more stones when farmed. In my three months as king I had stuck to the mountains. Only now, when the road led me north to Heimrift, did I discover the fringes of my kingdom where it brushed against Ancrath and the Ken Marshes.

  We rode from the ruined farm, from the peasants, Marten and Sara, whose names had stayed with me this once, and from their dead girl, Janey, whose breath stopped one night on the edge of spring before we’d gone twenty miles down the trail. We kept to the border lands where road-brothers are wont to travel and opportunity abounds. The farther into a kingdom a bandit-troop can venture without serious resistance is a measure of that kingdom’s softness. Thurtan was always soft around the edges, the Ken Marshes softer still. Ancrath, we would say, was hard. Hard enough to break your teeth on.

  “Why have we stopped?” Makin wanted to know.

  The road forked. An unmarked junction, a dirt road scored through dreary hills where Ancrath met the Marshes met the Highlands. The wind rippled through the long grass. Any place three nations touch will grow well given half a chance. Blood makes for rich soil.

  “There’s two choices. Take the one that’s not Ancrath,” he said.

  I closed my eyes. “Do you hear that, Makin?”

  “What?”

  “Listen,” I said.

  “To what?” He cocked his head. “Birds?”

  “Harder.”

  “Mosquitoes?” Makin asked, a frown on him now.

  “Gog hears it,” I said. “Don’t you, lad?”

  I felt him move behind me. “A bell?”

  “The bell at Jessop where the marsh-tide brings the dead. It’s got a voice so deep it just crawls over the bogs, mile after mile,” I said.

  That bell had called me back home once before. That bell had let me know I had a new brother lurking in a stranger’s belly, being put together piece by piece by piece beneath dresses fit for a queen. Under silk and lace. And now it reminded me of the Prince of Arrow’s words. Words his sword nearly knocked clean out of my head. That my little brother had come out to play, and the cradle toys my father first gave him were the rights to my inheritance.

  “We’ll go this way,” I said, and turned along the harder path.

  “The Heimrift is that way,” Makin said. He pointed to be clear. “I’m not arguing. I just don’t want anyone saying I didn’t mention it, you know, when we’re all lying on the ground bleeding to death.”

  He was arguing as it happened, but he had a case and I didn’t stop him.

  We rode for an hour or so, leaving the sourness of the boglands behind us. Spring races through Ancrath before it starts to struggle up the slopes into the Highlands. We came to woodlands, with leaves unfurling on every branch, as if one blow of spring’s green hammer had set them exploding from the bud. I took the Brothers from the road and we followed trails into the woods. If you don’t want to meet anyone, take the forest path, especially in Ancrath since I stole Father’s Forest Watch from him.

  Spring warmth, the luminous green of new leaves, the song of thrush and lark, the richness of the forest breathed in and slowly out…Ancrath has charms unknown in the Renar Highlands, but I’d started to appreciate the wildness in my new kingdom, the raw rock, unobtainable peaks, even the endless wind scouring east to west.

  Grumlow leaned over and snagged something from Young Sim’s hair. “Woodtick.” He cracked it between his nails. Even Eden had a snake problem.

  The head-cart started to snag on bushes and dead-fall as the trails grew narrow. Rike’s cursing came more frequent and more dire, prompted by repeated slaps in the face from branch after branch.

  “Shouldn’t ride so high, Little Rikey,” I told him.

  Makin came up, behind him Kent and Row, chuckling over some joke he’d left them with. “We’ll be walking soon then?” He ducked under low-hanging greenery.

  I pulled up at a stream crossed by a small clapper bridge that must have been old when Christ first learned to walk. I remembered the bridge, possibly the farthest I’d ever ventured alone before I left the Tall Castle for good. “We’ll leave the horses here,” I said. “You can watch them, Grumlow, you being the man with the sharp eyes today.”

  And that wasn’t all that was sharp about Grumlow. That moustache might make him look stupid but he had a clever way with daggers, and a clever number of them stashed about his person.

  I thought about leaving Gog and Gorgoth. Especially Gorgoth, for he wasn’t one to be taken places unobserved. When I first brought him into the Haunt, after sitting my arse on the throne for a day or two, he caused quite a stir. Even lame, from the arrows he’d taken for me holding open that gate, he looked like a monster to reckon with. I had Coddin bring him up through the west-yard on a market day. You’d have thought someone dropped a hornets’ nest for all the commotion. One old biddy screamed, clutched her chest, and fell over. That made me laugh. And when they told me she never did get back up…well that seemed funny too at the time. Maybe I’m getting too old, for it doesn’t strike me quite so merrily any more. Let truth be told though, she did fall funny.

  In the end I took them both. Gorgoth is the kind you need in a tough spot, and Gog, well he makes lighting the campfire less of a chore.

  Making your way through the greenwood without people seeing you isn’t too hard if you know your way and don’t count charcoal burners as people. They’re a lonely breed and not wont to gossip. So Rike didn’t have to kill them.

  And so we sliced into Ancrath easily enough, tramping along the deer paths. Even hard kingdoms have their fault lines.

  “It shouldn’t be this easy,” Makin said. “It wasn’t in my day. Damned if Coddin and his fellows would have let bandits wander so carelessly.” He shook his head, though it seemed an odd thing to complain about.

  “Your father’s army has grown weak?” Gorgoth asked, demolishing the undergrowth as he walked.

  I shrugged. “Half his forces are out in the marsh or barracked in the bog towns. Dead things keep hauling themselves out of the muck these days. There’s others having similar problems. I had a merchant at court telling me the Drowned Isles have fallen to the Dead King. All of them. Given over to corpse men, marsh ghouls, necromancers, lich-kin.”

  Makin just crossed his chest and picked up the pace.

  We travelled light, locating good shelter in the woods, and good eating. Young Sim had a way with the finding of rabbits, and I could knock the odd squirrel or wood-pigeon off its branch with a handy stone. Animals in spring are easy, too full of the new warmth, too taken with new possibilities, and not enough of watching for rocks winging their way out of the shadows.

  Ancrath casts a spell on you, and nowhere more so than in the greenwood where the day trickles like honey and the sun falls golden amid pools of shade. We walked in single file with the song of the thrush and sparrow, and the scent of may and wild onions. The day set me dreaming as I walked and my nose led me back through the years to memories of William. There was a night when my brother lay sick, when my mother wept, and the table-knights would not turn their stern faces to me. I remembered the prayers I had whispered in the dark chapel when all the holy men were in their beds, the promises I made. No threats back then. I barely even bargained with the Almighty in those days. And when I crept back to our chambers I climbed in beside William and held his head. The friar had given him bitter potions and cut his leg to release the bad blood. My mother had set an ointment of honey and onion on his chest. That at least seemed to ease his breathing a little. We lay with the night sounds, William’s dry wheeze, our hound Justice snoring by the doors, the click of the maid’s needles in the hall, and the cry of bats, almost too high for hearing as they swung around the Tall Castle in the moonless dark.

  “A penny for them,” Makin said.

  I snapped my head up with a start, almost tripping. “My thoughts are worth less than that today.” I had been a foolish child.

  Sometimes I wished I could cu
t away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.

  We made our way without problem until we ran out of forest. The land around the Tall Castle is clear of trees and set to farming, to feed the king, and so that he may see his enemies advance.

  I leaned against the trunk of a massive copper beech, one of the last great trees before the woods gave over to a two-acre field of ploughed earth peeping with green that might have been anything from carrots to kale for all I knew. More fields to the left and right, more beyond. A lone scarecrow watched us.

  “I’ll go on alone,” I said. I started to unbuckle my breastplate.

  “Go where?” Makin asked. “You can’t get in there, Jorg. Nobody could. And what for? What are you possibly going to achieve?”

  “A man’s got a right to call in on his family now and again, Brother Makin,” I said.

  I stripped the vambraces from my forearms, my breastplate, and finally the gorget. I like to have iron around my neck, kept it from a slitting once or twice, but armour wouldn’t save me where I was aimed.

  I took the scabbard off my belt. “Kent, look after this for me.” His eyes widened, almost as if he didn’t know that’s how a leader binds his men, with trust.

  “A sword like this…Sir Makin—”

  “I gave it to you.” I cut him off.

  “You need a sword, Jorg,” Maical said, confusion in his eyes. Behind him Sim watched me without comment, unwrapping his harp. He at least knew enough to settle down for a wait.

  I magicked my old knife into my hand, a trick I learned off Grumlow. “This will do for what I have in mind, Brother Maical.”

  “Give me two days,” I said. “If I’m not back by then, send Rike to take the castle by storm.”

  And with a bow I left them to watch the carrots grow. Or the kale.