King of Thorns
King of Thorns
Mark Lawrence
The second book in the Broken Empire series, Lawrence takes his young anti-hero one step closer to his grand ambition.To reach greatness you must step on bodies, and many brothers lie trodden in my wake. I’ve walked from pawn to player and I’ll win this game of ours, though the cost of it may drown the world in blood…The land burns with the fires of a hundred battles as lords and petty kings fight for the Broken Empire. The long road to avenge the slaughter of his mother and brother has shown Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath the hidden hands behind this endless war. He saw the game and vowed to sweep the board. First though he must gather his own pieces, learn the rules of play, and discover how to break them.A six nation army, twenty thousand strong, marches toward Jorg's gates, led by a champion beloved of the people. Every decent man prays this shining hero will unite the empire and heal its wounds. Every omen says he will. Every good king knows to bend the knee in the face of overwhelming odds, if only to save their people and their lands. But King Jorg is not a good king.Faced by an enemy many times his strength Jorg knows that he cannot win a fair fight. But playing fair was never part of Jorg’s game plan.
KING OF THORNS
Book Two of The Broken Empire
Mark Lawrence
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
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Published by HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2012
Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007439034
Ebook Edition © April 2012 ISBN: 9780007439041
Version: 2017-10-18
Dedicated to my son, Rhodri.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u9e2a99b1-a472-55f4-ae97-2df91de40315)
Copyright (#u56dc8fda-5bb6-5f04-b19b-c5fadc53db9a)
Dedication (#u97fc13c1-0780-5e97-bddf-4bd07622a673)
Map (#ufedd3224-059e-5ffb-b2dd-3466a8f69896)
Prologue (#u474975e3-94c4-5f9c-9019-3ff15dc6607b)
Chapter 1 (#u83d1cba3-7b99-59cb-aae1-9965ff51720e)
Chapter 2 (#u956cfb7d-7151-54a2-9148-c23b2252cf56)
Chapter 3 (#uf8a2e340-7111-5727-abd1-cb4973fd9a98)
Chapter 4 (#u735539f5-4541-52ad-902e-2ccb788b6925)
Chapter 5 (#u716bdada-30d9-5c8e-8a1c-a0aa70de5690)
Chapter 6 (#u66a79cd6-2f65-5fe3-8916-fb5c3afb6d52)
Chapter 7 (#ufb02ef7e-070e-5f92-951e-a9ba258350e4)
Chapter 8 (#u54f029fe-4e74-5d34-8220-993e1d9b4408)
Chapter 9 (#u31d1679a-5935-517d-ba6b-d083e13ff28f)
Chapter 10 (#ua0312902-e2b1-5839-a87f-76515107b9b9)
Chapter 11 (#u947f6888-33a5-530d-8fd5-8bb88276c81f)
Chapter 12 (#u08f6d52a-1170-5c7e-963a-e3784a96b00d)
Chapter 13 (#u286caf3a-7a7b-5012-85b9-a80cbb55c896)
Chapter 14 (#u3a28ff07-fca6-509e-bb3d-6df7e8542074)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Mark Lawrence (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
I found these pages scattered, teased across the rocks by a fitful wind. Some were too charred to show their words, others fell apart in my hands. I chased them though, as if it were my story they told and not hers.
Katherine’s story, Aunt Katherine, sister to my stepmother, Katherine who I have wanted every moment of the past four years, Katherine who picks strange paths through my dreams. A few dozen ragged pages, weighing nothing in my hand, snowflakes skittering across them, too cold to stick.
I sat upon the smoke-wreathed ruins of my castle, careless of the heaped and stinking dead. The mountains, rising on all sides, made us tiny, made toys of the Haunt and the siege engines strewn about it, their purpose spent. And with eyes stinging from the fires, with the wind’s chill in me deep as bones, I read through her memories.
From the journal of Katherine Ap Scorron
October 3rd, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Fountain Room.
The fountain room is as ugly as every other room in this ugly castle. There’s no fountain, just a font that dribbles rather than sprays. My sister’s ladies-in-waiting clutter the place, sewing, always sewing, and tutting at me for writing, as if quill ink is a stain that can’t ever be washed off.
My head aches and wormroot won’t calm it. I found a sliver of pottery in the wound even though Friar Glen said he cleaned it. Dreadful little man. Mother gave me that vase when I came away with Sareth. My thoughts jump and my head aches and this quill keeps trembling.
The ladies sew with their quick clever stitches, line stitch, cross-line, layer-cross. Sharp little needles, dull little minds. I hate them with their tutting and their busy fingers and the lazy Ancrath slurring of their words.
I’ve looked back to see what I wrote yesterday. I don’t remember writing it but it tells how Jorg Ancrath tried to kill me after murdering Hanna, throttling her. I suppose that if he really had wanted to kill me he could have done a better job of it having broken Mother’s vase over my skull. He’s good at killing, if nothing else. Sareth told me that what he said in court, about all those people in Gelleth, burned to dust … it’s all true. Merl Gellethar’s castle is gone. I met him when I was a child. Such a sly red-faced man. Looked as if he’d be happy to eat me up. I’m not sorry about him. But all those people. They can’t all have been bad.
I should have stabbed Jorg when I had the chance. If my hands would do what I told them more often. If they would stop trembling the quill, learn to sew properly, stab murdering nephews when instructed … Friar Glen said the boy tore most of my dress off. Certainly it’s a ruin now. Beyond the rescue of even these empty ladies with their needles and thread.
I’m being too mean. I blame the ache in my head. Sareth tells me be nice. Be nice. Maery Coddin isn’t all sewing and gossip. Though she’s sewing now and tutting with the rest of them. Maery’s worth talking to on her own, I suppose. There. That’s enough nice for one day. Sareth is always nice and look where that got her. Married to an old man, and not a kind one but a cold and scary one, and her belly all fat with a child that will probably run as savage as Jorg Ancrath.
I’m going to have them bury Hanna in the forest graveyard. Maery tells me she’ll lie easy there. All the castle servants are buried there unless their families claim them. Maery says she’ll find me a new maidservant but that seems so cold, to just replace Hanna as if she were torn lace, or a broken vase. We’ll go out by cart tomorrow. There’s a man making her coffin now. My head feels as if he’s hammering the nails into it instead.
I should have left Jorg to die on the throne-room floor. But it didn’t feel right. Damn him.
We’ll bury Hanna tomorrow. She was old and always complaining of her aches but that doesn’t mean she was ready to go. I will miss her. She was a hard woman, cruel maybe, but never to me. I don’t know if I’ll cry when we put her in the ground. I should. But I don’t know if I will.
That’s for tomorrow. Today we have a visitor. The Prince of Arrow is calling, with his brother Prince Egan and his retinue. I think Sareth would like to match me there. Or maybe it’s the old man, King Olidan. Not many of Sareth’s ideas are her own these days. We will see.
I think I’ll try to sleep now. Maybe my headache will be gone in the morning. And the strange dreams too. Maybe Mother’s vase knocked those dreams right out of me.
1
Wedding Day
Open the box, Jorg.
I watched it. A copper box, thorn patterned, no lock or latch.
Open the box, Jorg.
A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.
A goblet, the box, a knife.
I watched the box and the dull reflections from the fire in the hearth. The warmth did not reach me. I let it burn down. The sun fell, and shadows stole the room. The embers held my gaze. Midnight filled the hall and still I didn’t move, as if I were carved from stone, as if motion were a sin. Tension knotted me. It tingled along my cheekbones, clenched in my jaw. I felt the table’s grain beneath my fingertips.
The moon rose and painted ghost-light across the stone-flagged floor. The moonlight found my goblet, wine untouched, and made the silver glow. Clouds swallowed the sky and in the darkness rain fell, soft with old memories. In the small hours, abandoned by fire, moon and stars, I reached for my blade. I laid the keen edge cold against my wrist.
The child still lay in the corner, limbs at corpse angles, too broken for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Sometimes I feel I’ve seen more ghosts than people, but this boy, this child of four, haunts me.
Open the box.
The answer lay in the box. I knew that much. The boy wanted me to open it. More than half of me wanted it open too, wanted to let those memories flood out, however dark, however dangerous. It had a pull on it, like the cliff’s edge, stronger by the moment, promising release.
‘No.’ I turned my chair toward the window and the rain, shading to snow now.
I carried the box out of a desert that could burn you without needing the sun. Four years I’ve kept it. I’ve no recollection of first laying hands upon it, no image of its owner, few facts save only that it holds a hell which nearly broke my mind.
Campfires twinkled distant through the sleet. So many they revealed the shape of the land beneath them, the rise and fall of mountains. The Prince of Arrow’s men took up three valleys. One alone wouldn’t contain his army. Three valleys choked with knights and archers, foot-soldiers, pikemen, men-at-axe and men-at-sword, carts and wagons, engines for siege, ladders, rope, and pitch for burning. And out there, in a blue pavilion, Katherine Ap Scorron, with her four hundred, lost in the throng.
At least she hated me. I’d rather die at the hands of somebody who wanted to kill me, to have it mean something to them.
Within a day they would surround us, sealing the last of the valleys and mountain paths to the east. Then we would see. Four years I had held the Haunt since I took it from my uncle. Four years as King of Renar. I wouldn’t let it go easy. No. This would go hard.
The child stood to my right now, bloodless and silent. There was no light in him but I could always see him through the dark. Even through eyelids. He watched me with eyes that looked like mine.
I took the blade from my wrist and tapped the point to my teeth. ‘Let them come,’ I said. ‘It will be a relief.’
That was true.
I stood and stretched. ‘Stay or go, ghost. I’m going to get some sleep.’
And that was a lie.
The servants came at first light and I let them dress me. It seems a silly thing but it turns out that kings have to do what kings do. Even copper-crown kings with a single ugly castle and lands that spend most of their time going either up or down at an unseemly angle, scattered with more goats than people. It turns out that men are more apt to die for a king who is dressed by pinch-fingered peasants every morning than for a king who knows how to dress himself.
I broke fast with hot bread. I have my page wait at the doors to my chamber with it of a morning. Makin fell in behind me as I strode to the throne-room, his heels clattering on the flagstones. Makin always had a talent for making a din.
‘Good morning, Your Highness,’ he says.
‘Stow that shit.’ Crumbs everywhere. ‘We’ve got problems.’
‘The same twenty thousand problems we had on our doorstep last night?’ Makin asked. ‘Or new ones?’
I glimpsed the child in a doorway as we passed. Ghosts and daylight don’t mix, but this one could show in any patch of shadow.
‘New ones,’ I said. ‘I’m getting married before noon and I haven’t got a thing to wear.’
2
Wedding Day
‘Princess Miana is being attended by Father Gomst and the Sisters of Our Lady,’ Coddin reported. He still looked uncomfortable in chamberlain’s velvets; the Watch-Commander’s uniform had better suited him. ‘There are checks to be carried out.’
‘Let’s just be glad nobody has to check my purity.’ I eased back into the throne. Damn comfortable: swan-down and silk. Kinging it is pain in the arse enough without one of those gothic chairs. ‘What does she look like?’
Coddin shrugged. ‘A messenger brought this yesterday.’ He held up a gold case about the size of a coin.
‘So what does she look like?’
He shrugged again, opened the case with his thumbnail and squinted at the miniature. ‘Small.’
‘Here!’ I caught hold of the locket and took a look for myself. The artists who take weeks to paint these things with a single hair are never going to spend that time making an ugly picture. Miana looked acceptable. She didn’t have the hard look about her that Katherine does, the kind of look that lets you know the person is really alive, devouring every moment. But when it comes down to it, I find most women attractive. How many men are choosy at eighteen?
‘And?’ Makin asked from beside the throne.
‘Small,’ I said and slipped the locket into my robe. ‘Am I too young for wedlock? I wonder …’
Makin pursed his lips. ‘I was married at twelve.’
‘You liar!’ Not once in all these years had Sir Makin of Trent mentioned a wife. He’d surprised me; secrets are hard to keep on the road, among brothers, drinking ale around the campfire after a hard day’s blood-letting.
‘No lie,’ he said. ‘But twelve is too young. Eighteen is a good age for marriage, Jorg. You’ve waited long enough.’
‘What happened to your wife?’
‘Died. There was a child too.’ He pressed his lips together.
It’s good to know that you don’t know everything about a man. Good that there might always be more to come.
‘So, my queen-to-be is nearly ready,’ I said. ‘Shall I go to the altar in this rag?’ I tugged at the heavy samite collar, all scratchy at my neck. I didn’t care of course but a marriage is a show, for high- and low-born alike, a kind of spell, and it pays to do it right.
‘Highness,’ Coddin said, pacing his irritation out before the dais. ‘This … distraction … is ill-timed. We have an army at our gates.’
‘And to be fair, Jorg, nobody knew she was coming until that rider pulled in,’ Makin said.
I spread my hands. ‘I didn’t know she would arrive last night. I’m not magic you know.’ I glimpsed the dead child slumped in a distant corner. ‘I had hoped she would arrive before the summer ended. In any case, that army has a good three miles to march if it wants to be at my gates.’
‘Perhaps a delay is in order?’ Coddin hated being chamberlain with every fibre of his being. Probably that was why he was the only one I’d trust to do it. ‘Until the conditions are less … inclement.’
‘Twenty thousand at our door, Coddin. And a thousand inside our walls. Well, most of them outside because my castle is too damn small to fit them in.’ I found myself smiling. ‘I don’t think conditions are going to improve. So we might as well give the army a queen as well as a king to die for, neh?’
‘And concerning the Prince of Arrow’s army?’ Coddin asked.
‘Is this going to be one of those times when you pretend not to have a plan until the last moment?’ Makin asked. ‘And then turn out to really not have one?’
He looked grim despite his words. I thought perhaps he could still see his own dead child. He had faced death with me before and done it with a smile.
‘You, girl!’ I shouted to one of the serving girls lurking at the far end of the hall. ‘Go tell that woman to bring me a robe fit to get married in. Nothing with lace, mind.’ I stood and set a hand to the pommel of my sword. ‘The night patrols should be back about now. We’ll go down to the east yard and see what they have to say for themselves. I sent Red Kent and Little Rikey along with one of the Watch patrols. Let’s hear what they think about these men of Arrow.’
Makin led the way. Coddin had grown twitchy about assassins. I knew what lurked in the shadows of my castle and it wasn’t assassins that I worried about. Makin turned the corner and Coddin held my shoulder to keep me back.
‘The Prince of Arrow doesn’t want me knifed by some black-cloak, Coddin. He doesn’t want drop-leaf mixed into my morning bread. He wants to roll over us with twenty thousand men and grind us into the dirt. He’s already thinking of the empire throne. Thinks he has a toe past the Gilden Gate. He’s building his legend now and it’s not going to be one of knives in the dark.’
‘Of course, if you had more soldiers you might be worth stabbing.’ Makin turned his head and grinned.
We found the patrol waiting, stamping in the cold. A few castle women fussed around the wounded, planting a stitch or two. I let the commander tell his tale to Coddin while I called Red Kent to my side. Rike loomed behind him uninvited. Four castle years had softened none of Rike’s edges, still close on seven foot of ugly temper with a face to match the blunt, mean, and brutal soul that looked out from it.
‘Little Rikey,’ I said. It had been a while since I’d spoken to the man. Years. ‘And how’s that lovely wife of yours?’ In truth I’d never seen her but she must have been a formidable woman.
‘She broke.’ He shrugged.
I turned away without comment. There’s something about Rike makes me want to go on the attack. Something elemental, red in tooth and claw. Or perhaps it’s just because he’s so damn big. ‘So, Kent,’ I said. ‘Tell me the good news.’
‘There’s too many of them.’ He spat into the mud. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Well now.’ I threw an arm around him. Kent don’t look much but he’s solid, all muscle and bone, quick as you like too. What makes him though, what sets him apart, is a killer’s mind. Chaos, threat, bloody murder, none of that fazes him. Every moment of a crisis he’ll be considering the angles, tracking weapons, looking for the opening, taking it.
‘Well now,’ I pulled him close, hand clapped to the back of his neck. He flinched, but to his credit he didn’t reach for a blade. ‘That’s all well and good.’ I steered him away from the patrol. ‘But suppose that wasn’t going to happen. Just for the sake of argument. Suppose it was only you here and twenty of them out there. That’s not so far from the odds you’d beaten when we found you on that lakeside down in Rutton, neh?’ For a moment he smiled at that. ‘How would you win then, Red Kent?’ I called him Red to remind him of that day when he stood all a tremble with his wolf’s grin white in the scarlet of other men’s blood.
He bit his lip, staring past me into some other place. ‘They’re crowded in, Jorg. In those valleys. Crowded. One man against many, he’s got to be fast, attacking, moving. Each man is your shield from the next.’ He shook his head, seeing me again. ‘But you can’t use an army like one man.’
Red Kent had a point. Coddin had trained the army well, the units of Father’s Forest Watch especially so, but in battle cohesion always slips away. Orders are lost, missed, go unheard or ignored, and sooner or later it’s a bloody maul, each man for himself, and the numbers start to tell.
‘Highness?’ It was the woman from the royal wardrobe, some kind of robe in her hands.
‘Mabel!’ I threw my arms wide and gave her my dangerous smile.
‘Maud, sire.’
I had to admit the old biddy had some stones. ‘Maud it is,’ I said. ‘And I’m to be wed in this am I?’
‘If it pleases you, sire.’ She even curtseyed a bit.
I took it from her. Heavy. ‘Cats?’ I asked. ‘Looks like it took a lot of them.’
‘Sable.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Sable and gold thread. Count—’ She bit the words off.
‘Count Renar married in it, did he?’ I asked. ‘Well if it was good enough for that bastard it’ll do for me. At least it looks warm.’ My uncle Renar owed me for the thorns, for a lost mother, a lost brother. I’d taken his life, his castle, and his crown, and still he owed me. A fur robe would not close our account.
‘Best be quick about it, Highness,’ Coddin said, eyes still roaming for assassins. ‘We’ve got to double-check the defences. Plan out supply for the Kennish archers, and also consider terms.’ To his credit he looked straight at me for that last bit.
I gave Maud back the robe and let her dress me with the patrol watching on. I made no reply to Coddin. He looked pale. I had always liked him, from the moment he tried to arrest me, even past the moment he dared to mention surrender. Brave, sensible, capable, honest. The better man. ‘Let’s get this done,’ I said and started toward the chapel.
‘Is it needed, this marriage?’ Coddin again, doggedly playing the role I set him. Speak to me, I had said. Never think I cannot be wrong. ‘As your wife things may go hard for her.’ Rike sniggered at that. ‘As a guest she would be ransomed back to the Horse Coast.’
Sensible, honest. I don’t even know how to pretend those things. ‘It is needed.’
We came to the chapel by a winding stair, past table-knights in plate armour, Count Renar’s marks still visible beneath mine on the breastplates as if I’d ruled here four months rather than four years. The noble-born too poor or stupid or loyal to have run yet would be lined up within. In the courtyard outside the peasantry waited. I could smell them.
I paused before the doors, lifting a finger to stop the knight with his hands upon the bar. ‘Terms?’
I saw the child again, beneath crossed standards hanging on the wall. He’d grown with me. Years back he had been a baby, watching me with dead eyes. He looked about four now. I tapped my fingers against my forehead in a rapid tempo.
‘Terms?’ I said it again. I’d only said it twice but already the word sounded strange, losing meaning as they do when repeated over and again. I thought of the copper box in my room. It made me sweat. ‘There will be no terms.’
‘Best have Father Gomst say his words swiftly then,’ Coddin said. ‘And look to our defences.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There will be no defence. We’re going to attack.’
I pushed the knight aside and threw the doors wide. Bodies crowded the chapel hall from one side to the other. It seemed my nobles were poorer than I’d thought. And to the left, a splash of blues and violet, ladies-in-waiting and knights in armour, decked in the colours of the House Morrow, the colours of the Horse Coast.
And there at the altar, head bowed beneath a garland of lilies, my bride.
‘Oh hell,’ I said.
Small was right. She looked about twelve.
In peace Brother Kent reverts to type, a peasant plagued by kindness, seeking God in the stone houses where the pious lament. Battle strikes loose such chains.
In war Red Kent approaches the divine.
3
Wedding Day
Marriage was ever the glue that held the Hundred in some semblance of unity, the balm to induce scattered moments of peace, pauses in the crimson progress of the Hundred War. And this one had been hanging over me for close on four years.
I walked along the chapel aisle between the high and mighty of Renar, none of them so high or so mighty, truth be told. I’ve checked the records and half of them have goat-herders for grandparents. It surprised me that they had stayed. If I were them I would have acted on Red Kent’s sentiment and been off across the Matteracks with whatever I could carry on my back.
Miana watched me, as fresh and perky as the lilies on her head. If the ruined left side of my face scared her she didn’t show it. The need to trace the scarred ridges on my cheek itched in my fingertips. For an instant the heat of that fire ran in me, and the memory of pain tightened my jaw.
I joined my bride-to-be at the altar and looked back. And in a moment of clarity I understood. These people expected me to save them. They still thought that with my handful of soldiers I could hold this castle and win the day. I had half a mind to tell them, to just say what any who knew me knew. There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the Prince of Arrow had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.
Four musicians in full livery raised their bladder-pipes and sounded the fanfare.
‘Best use the short version, Father Gomst,’ I said in a low voice. ‘Lots to do today.’
He frowned at that, grey brows rubbing up against each other. ‘Princess Miana, I have the pleasure of introducing His Highness Honorous Jorg Ancrath, King of the Renar Highlands, heir to the lands of Ancrath and the protectorates thereof.’
‘Charmed,’ I said, inclining my head. A child. She didn’t reach much above my ribs.
‘I can see why your miniature was in profile,’ she said, and sketched a curtsey.
That made me grin. It might be destined to be a short marriage but perhaps it wouldn’t be dull. ‘You’re not scared of me then, Miana?’
She reached to take my hand by way of answer. I pulled it back. ‘Best not.’
‘Father?’ I nodded the priest on.
‘Dearly beloved,’ Gomst said. ‘We are gathered together here in the sign of God …’
And so with old words from an old man and lacking anyone ‘here present’ with just reason, or at least with just reason and the balls to say so, little Jorgy Ancrath became a married man.
I led my bride from the chapel with the applause and hoorahs of the nobility ringing behind us, almost but not quite drowning out those awful pipes. The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.
The main doors lead onto a stairway where you can look down into the Haunt’s largest courtyard, the place where I cut down the previous owner. Several hundred packed the space from the curtain wall to the stairs, more thronging out beyond the gateway, swarming beneath the portcullis, a light snow sifting down on all of them.
A cheer went up as we came into the light. I took Miana’s hand then, despite the necromancy lurking in my fingers, and lifted it high to acknowledge the crowd. The loyalty of subject to lord still amazed me. I lived fat and rich off these people year after year while they squeezed a mean life out of the mountainsides. And here they were ready to face pretty much certain death with me. I mean, even that blind faith in my ability to buck the odds had to allow a fairly big chunk of room for doubt.
I got my first proper insight into it a couple of years back. A lesson that life on the road hadn’t taught me or my Brothers. The power of place.
My royal presence was requested for a bit of justice-making in what they call in the Renar Highlands a ‘village’, though pretty much everywhere else people would call it three houses and a few sheds. The place lies way up in the peaks. They call it Gutting. I heard that there’s a Little Gutting slightly higher up the valley, though it can’t be much more than a particularly roomy barrel. Anyhow, the dispute was over where one scabby peasant’s rocks ended and another one’s started. I’d hauled myself and Makin up three thousand foot of mountain to show a bit of willing in the business of kinging it. According to reports, several men of the village had been killed already in the feud, though on closer inspection casualties were limited to a pig and the loss of a woman’s left ear. Not so long ago I would just have killed everyone and come down the mountain with their heads on a spear, but perhaps I just felt tired after the climb. In any event I let the scabby peasants state their cases and they did so with enthusiasm and at great length. It started to get dark and the fleas were biting so I cut it short.
‘Gebbin is it?’ I said to the plaintiff. He nodded. ‘Basically, Gebbin, you just hate the hell out of this fellow here and I really can’t see the reason for it. The thing is that I’m bored, I’ve got my breath back, and unless you tell me the real reason you hate …’
‘Borron,’ Makin supplied.
‘Yes, Borron. Tell me the real reason and make it honest, or it’s a death sentence for everyone except this good woman with the one ear, and we’ll be leaving her in charge of the remaining pig.’
It took him a few moments to realize that I really meant what I said, and then another couple mumbling before he finally came out with it and admitted it was because the fellow was a ‘furner’. Furner turned out to mean foreigner and old Borron was a foreigner because he was born and lived on the east side of the valley.
The men cheering Miana and me, waving their swords, bashing their shields and hollering themselves hoarse, might have told anyone who asked how proud they were to fight for his Highness and his new queen. The truth, however, is that at the bottom of it all they simply didn’t want the men of Arrow marching all over their rocks, eyeing up their goats, and maybe leering at their womenfolk.
‘The Prince of Arrow has a much bigger army than you,’ Miana said. No ‘your highness’, no ‘my lord’.
‘Yes he does.’ I kept waving to the crowd, the big smile on my face.
‘He’s going to win, isn’t he?’ she said. She looked twelve but she didn’t sound twelve.
‘How old are you?’ I asked, a quick glance down at her, still waving.
‘Twelve.’
Damn.
‘They might win. If each of my men doesn’t kill twenty of theirs then there’s a good chance. Especially if he surrounds us.’
‘How far away are they?’ she asked.
‘Their front lines are camped three miles off,’ I said.
‘You should attack now then,’ she said. ‘Before they surround us.’
‘I know.’ I was starting to like the girl. Even an experienced soldier like Coddin, a good soldier, wanted to hunker down behind the Haunt’s walls and let the castle earn its keep, if you’ll pardon the pun. The thing is, though, that no castle stands against odds like the ones we faced. Miana knew what Red Kent knew, Red Kent who cut down a patrol of seventeen men-at-arms on a hot August morning. Killing takes space. You need to move, to advance, to withdraw, and sometimes to just plain run for it.
One more wave and I turned my back on the crowds and strode into the chapel.
‘Makin! Are the Watch ready?’
‘They are.’ He nodded. ‘My king.’
I drew my sword.
The sudden appearance of four foot of razored builder-steel in the house of God resulted in a pleasing gasp.
‘Let’s go.’
From the journal of Katherine Ap Scorron
October 6th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Chapel. Midnight.
The Ancraths’ chapel is small and draughty, as if they hadn’t much time for the place. The candles dance and the shadows are never still. When I leave the friar’s boy will snuff them.
Jorg Ancrath has been gone close on a week. He took Sir Makin with him from the dungeons. I was glad for that, I liked Sir Makin and I cannot truly blame him for what happened to Galen: that was Jorg again. A crossbow! He could never have bested Galen with a blade. There’s no honour in the boy.
Friar Glen says Jorg near tore the dress off me after he hit me. I keep it at the back of the long closet in the bride chest Mother packed for me before we left Scorron Halt. I keep it where the maids don’t look, and my hands lead me back there. I run the tatters through my fingers. Blue satin. I touch it and I try to remember. I see him standing there, arms wide, daring the knife in my hand, weaving as though he were too tired to stand, his skin dead white and the black stain around his chest wound. He looked so young. A child almost. With those scars all across him where the thorns tore him. Sir Reilly says they found him hanging, near bloodless, after a night in the thorns with the storm around him and his mother lying dead.
And then he hit me.
I’m touching the spot now. It’s still sore. Lumpy with scab. I wonder if they can see it through my hair. And then I wonder why I care.
I’m bruised down here too. Bruised black, like that stain. I can almost see the lines of fingers on my thigh, the print of a thumb.
He hit me and then he used me, raped me. It would have been nothing to him, a mercenary from the road, it would have meant nothing to him, just something else to take. It would rank small amongst his crimes. Maybe not the largest even against me, for I miss Hanna and I did cry when we put her in the ground, and I miss Galen for the fierceness of his smile and the heat he put in me whenever he came near.
He hit me, and then he used me? That sick boy, daring the knife, barely able to stand?
October 11th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. My chambers.
I saw Friar Glen in the Blue Hall today. I’ve stopped going to his services but I saw him in the hall. I watched his hands, his thick fingers and his thick thumbs. I watched them and I thought of those fading bruises, yellow now, and I came to the tall closet, and here I am with the torn satin in my hands.
Skin, bones, and mischief comprise Brother Gog. Monster born and monster bred but there’s little to mark him from Adam save the stippled crimson-on-black of his hide, the dark wells of his eyes, ebony talons on hand and foot, and the thorny projections starting to grow along his spine. Watch him play and run and laugh, and he seems too at ease to be a crack in the world through which all the fires of hell might pour.
Watch him burn though, and you will believe it.
4
Four years earlier
I took my uncle’s throne in my fourteenth year and found it to my liking. I had a castle, and staff of serving maids, to explore, a court of nobles to suppress, or at least what counted as nobles in the Highlands, and a treasury to ransack. For the first three months I confined myself to these activities.
I woke soaked with sweat. I normally wake suddenly with a clear head, but I felt as though I were drowning.
‘Too hot …’
I rolled and fell from the bed, landing heavy.
Smoke.
Shouting in the distance.
I uncovered the bed-lamp and turned up the wick. The smoke came from the doors, not seeping under or between but lifting from every inch of the charred wood and rising like a rippled curtain.
‘Shit—’ Burning to death has always been a worry of mine. Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I’m scared of immolation. Also spiders.
‘Gog!’ I bellowed.
He’d been out there in the antechamber when I retired. I moved toward the doors, coming at them from the side. An awful heat came off them. I could leave by the doorway or try to fit myself through the bars on any of three windows before negotiating the ninety-foot drop.
I took an axe from the wall display and stood with my back to the stone, next to the doors. My lungs hurt and I couldn’t see straight. Swinging the axe felt like swinging a full-grown man. The blade bit and the doors exploded. Orange-white fire roared into the room, furnace-hot, in a thick tongue forking time and again. And, almost as suddenly, it died away like a cough ending, leaving nothing but scorched floor and a burning bed.
The antechamber felt hotter than my bedchamber, char-black from floor to ceiling, with a huge glowing coal at its centre. I staggered back toward my bed. The heat took the water from my eyes and for a moment my vision cleared. The coal was Gog, curled like a new-born, pulsing with flame.
Something vast broke from the doorway leading to the guards’ room beyond. Gorgoth! He scooped the boy up in one three-fingered hand and slapped him with the other. Gog woke with a sharp cry and the fire went out of him in an instant, leaving nothing but a limp child, skin stippled red and black, and the stink of burned meat.
Without words I stumbled past them and let my guards help me away.
They practically had to drag me to the throne-room before I found my strength. ‘Water,’ I managed. And when I’d drunk and used my knife to trim away the burned ends of my hair, I coughed out, ‘Bring the monsters.’
Makin clattered into the hall still pulling on a gauntlet. ‘Again?’ he asked. ‘Another fire?’
‘Bad this time. An inferno,’ I said. ‘At least I won’t have to look at my uncle’s furniture any more.’
‘You can’t let him sleep in the castle,’ Makin said.
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Now.’
‘Put a quick end to it, Jorg.’ Makin pulled the gauntlet off. We weren’t under attack after all.
‘You can’t let him go.’ Coddin arrived, dark circles under his eyes. ‘He’s too dangerous. Someone will use him.’
And there it hung. Gog had to die.
Three clashes on the main doors and they swung open. Gorgoth entered the throne-room with Gog, flanked by four of my table-knights, who looked like children beside him. Seen in amongst men the leucrota looked every bit as monstrous as the day I found them under Mount Honas. Gorgoth’s cat-eyes slitted despite the gloom, blood-red hide almost black, as if infected with the night.
‘What are you, Gog, eight years now? And busy trying to burn down my castle.’ I felt Gorgoth’s eyes upon me. The great spars of his ribcage flexed back and forth with each breath.
‘The big one will fight,’ Coddin murmured at my shoulder. ‘He will be hard to put down.’
‘Eight years,’ Gog repeated. He didn’t know but he liked to agree with me. His voice had been high and sweet when we met beneath Mount Honas. Now it came raw and carried the crackle of flame behind it as if he might start breathing the stuff out like a damned dragon.
‘I will take him away,’ Gorgoth said, almost too deep to hear. ‘Far.’
Play your pieces, Jorg. A silence stretched out.
I wouldn’t be sitting in this throne if Gorgoth hadn’t held the gate. Or sitting here if Gog hadn’t burned the Count’s men. The skin on my face still clung tight, my lungs still hurt, and the stink of burnt hair still filled my nostrils.
‘I’m sorry about your bed, Brother Jorg,’ Gog said. Gorgoth flicked his shoulder, one thick finger, enough to stagger him. ‘King Jorg,’ Gog corrected.
I wouldn’t be sitting on the throne but for a lot of people, a stack of chances, some improbable, some stolen, but for the sacrifice of many men, some better, some worse. A man cannot take on new burdens of debt at every turn or he will buckle beneath the weight and be unable to move.
‘You were ready to give this child to the necromancers, Gorgoth,’ I said. ‘Him and his brother both.’ I didn’t ask if he would die to protect Gog. That much was written in him.
‘Things change,’ Gorgoth said.
‘Better they find a quick death, you said.’ I stood. ‘The changes will come too fast in these ones. Too fast to be borne. The changes will turn them inside out, you said.’
‘Let him take his chance,’ Gorgoth said.
‘I nearly died in my bed tonight.’ I stepped down from the dais, Makin at my shoulder now. ‘The royal chambers are in ashes. And dying abed was never my plan. Unless t’were as emperor in my dotage beneath an over-energetic young concubine.’
‘It cannot be helped.’ Gorgoth’s hands closed into massive fists. ‘It’s in his dena.’
‘His dinner?’ My hand rested on the hilt of my sword. I remembered how Gog had fought to save his little brother. How pure that fury had been. I missed that purity in myself. Only yesterday every choice came easy. Black or white. Stab Gemt in the neck or don’t. And now? Shades of grey. A man can drown in shades of grey.
‘His dena. The story of every man, written at his core, what he is, what he will be, written in a coil in the core of us all,’ Gorgoth said.
I’d never heard the monster say so many words in a row. ‘I’ve opened up a lot of men, Gorgoth, and if anything is written there then it’s written red on red and smells bad.’
‘The centre of a man isn’t found by your geometry, Highness.’ He held me with those cat’s eyes. He’d never called me Highness before either. Probably the closest to begging he would ever come.
I stared at Gog, crouched now, looking from me to Gorgoth and back. I liked the boy. Plain and simple. Both of us with a dead brother that we couldn’t save, both of us with something burning in us, some elemental force of destruction wanting out every moment of every day.
‘Sire,’ Coddin said, knowing my mind for once. ‘These matters need not occupy the king. Take my chambers and we’ll speak again in the morning.’
Leave and we’ll do your dirty work for you. The message was clear enough. And Coddin didn’t want to do it. If he could read me I surely could read him. He didn’t want to slit his horse’s throat when a loose rock lamed it. But he did. And he would now. The game of kings was never a clean game.
Play your pieces.
‘It can’t be helped, Jorg,’ Makin set a hand to my shoulder, voice soft. ‘He’s too dangerous. There’s no knowing what he’ll become.’
Play your pieces. Win the game. Take the hardest line.
‘Gog,’ I said. He stood slowly, eyes on mine. ‘They’re telling me you’re too dangerous. That I can’t keep you. Or let you go. That you are a chance that can’t be taken. A weapon that can’t be wielded.’ I turned, taking in the throne-room, the high vaults, dark windows, and faced Coddin, Makin, the knights of my table. ‘I woke a Builders’ Sun beneath Gelleth, and this child is too much for me?’
‘Those were desperate times, Jorg,’ Makin said, studying the floor.
‘All times are desperate,’ I said. ‘You think we’re safe here, on our mountainside? This castle might look big from the inside. From a mile off you can cover it with your thumb.’
I looked at Gorgoth. ‘Maybe I need a new geometry. Maybe we need to find this dena and see if the story can’t be rewritten.’
‘The child’s power is out of control, Jorg,’ Coddin said, a brave man to interject when I’m in full flow. The kind of man I needed. ‘It will only grow more wild.’
‘I’m taking him to Heimrift,’ I said. Gog is a weapon and I will forge him there.
‘Heimrift?’ Gorgoth relaxed his fists, knuckles cracking with loud retorts.
‘A place of demons and fire,’ Makin muttered.
‘A volcano,’ I said. ‘Four volcanoes actually. And a fire-mage. Or so my tutor told me. So let’s put the benefits of a royal education to the test shall we? At least Gog will like it there. Everything burns.’
5
Four years earlier
‘This is a bad idea, Jorg.’
‘It’s a dangerous idea, Coddin, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s bad.’ I laid my knife on the map to stop it rolling up again.
‘Whatever the chances of success, you’ll leave your kingdom without a king.’ He set a fingertip to the map, resting on the Haunt as if to show me my place. ‘It’s only been three months, Jorg. The people aren’t sure of you yet, the nobles will start to plot the moment you leave, and how many men-at-arms will you take with you? With an empty throne the Renar Highlands might look like an easy prize. Your royal father might even choose to call with the Army of the Gate. If it comes to defending this place I don’t know how many of your uncle’s troops will rally to your cry.’
‘My father didn’t send the Gate when my mother and brother were murdered.’ My fingers closed around the knife hilt of their own accord. ‘He’s unlikely to move against the Haunt now. Especially when his armies are busy acquiring what’s left of Gelleth.’
‘So how many soldiers will you take?’ Coddin asked. ‘The Watch will not be enough.’
‘I’m not going to take any,’ I said. ‘I could take the whole damn army and it would just get me into a war on somebody else’s lands.’ Coddin made to protest. I cut him off. ‘I’ll take my brothers. They’ll appreciate a spell on the road and we managed to traipse to and fro happily enough not so many years ago with nobody giving us much pause.’
Makin returned with several large map scrolls under his arm. ‘In disguise is it?’ he said and grinned. ‘Good. Truth be told, this place has given me itchy feet.’
‘You’re staying, Brother Makin,’ I told him. ‘I’ll take Red Kent, Row, Grumlow, Young Sim … and Maical, why not? He may be a half-wit but he’s hard to kill. And of course Little Rike—’
‘Not him,’ Coddin said, face cold. ‘There’s no loyalty in that one. He’ll leave you dead in a hedgerow.’
‘I need him,’ I said.
Coddin frowned. ‘He might be handy in a fight, but there’s no subtlety in him, no discipline, he’s not clever, he—’
‘The way I’d put it,’ said Makin, ‘is that Rike can’t make an omelette without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.’
‘He’s a survivor,’ I said. ‘And I need survivors.’
‘You need me,’ said Makin.
‘You can’t trust him.’ Coddin rubbed his forehead as he always did when the worry got in him.
‘I need you here, Makin,’ I said. ‘I want to have a kingdom to come back to. And I know I can’t trust Rike, but four years on the road taught me that he’s the right tool for the job.’
I lifted my knife and the map sprung back into its roll. ‘I’ve seen enough.’
Makin raised his eyes and tipped his maps unopened on to the table.
‘Mark me out a decent route will you, Coddin, and have that scribe lad copy it down.’ I stood straight and stretched. I’d need to find something to wear. One of the maids had burned my old rags and velvet’s no good for the road. It’s like a magnet for dust.
Father Gomst met Makin, Kent and me on our way to the stables. He’d hurried from chapel, red in the face, the heaviest bible under one arm and the altar cross in his other hand.
‘Jorg—’ He stopped to catch his breath. ‘King Jorg.’
‘You’re going to join us, Father Gomst?’ The way he paled made me smile.
‘The blessing,’ he said, still short of wind.
‘Ah, well bless away.’
Kent went to his knees in an instant, as pious a killer as I ever knew. Makin followed with unseemly haste for a man who’d sacked a cathedral in his time. Since Gomst walked out of Gelleth by the light of a Builders’ Sun, without so much as a tan to show for it, the Brothers seemed to think him touched by God. The fact we all did the same with far less time at our disposal didn’t register with them.
For my own part, for all the evils of the Roma church, I could no longer bring myself to despise Gomst as I once had. His only true crime was to be a weak and impotent man, unable to deliver the promise of his lord, the love of his saviour, or even to put the yoke of Roma about the necks of his flock with any conviction.
I bowed my head and listened to the prayer. It never hurts to cover your bases.
In the west yard my motley band were assembled, checking over their gear. Rike had the biggest horse I’d ever seen.
‘I could run faster than this monster, Rike.’ I made a show of checking behind it. ‘You didn’t take the plough when you stole it, then?’
‘It’ll do,’ he said. ‘Big enough for loot.’
‘Maical’s not bringing the head-cart?’ I looked around. ‘Where is he anyway?’
‘Gone for the grey,’ Kent said. ‘Idiot won’t ride any other horse. Says he doesn’t know how.’
‘Now that’s loyalty for you.’ I shot Rike a look. ‘So where’s this new wife of yours, Brother Rikey? Not coming to see you off?’
‘Busy ploughing.’ He slapped his horse. ‘Got a job of it now.’
Gorgoth came through the kitchen gate, looming behind Rike. It’s unsettling to see something on two legs that’s taller and wider than Rike. Gog popped out from behind him. He took my hand and I let him lead me. There’s not many that will take my hand since the necromancy took root in me. There’s a touch of death in my fingers, not just the coldness. Flowers wilt and die.
‘Where we going, Brother Jorg?’ Still a child’s voice despite the crackle in it.
‘To find us a fire-mage. Put an end to this bed-burning,’ I told him.
‘Will it hurt?’ He watched me with big eyes, pools of black.
I shrugged. ‘Might do.’
‘Scared,’ he said, clutching my hand tighter. I could feel heat rising from his fingers. Maybe it cancelled the cold from mine. ‘Scared.’
‘Well then,’ I said. ‘We’re headed the right way.’
He frowned.
‘You’ve got to hunt your fears, Gog. Beat them. They’re your only true enemies.’
‘You’re not scared of anything, Brother Jorg,’ he said. ‘King J—’
‘I’m scared of burning,’ I said. ‘Especially in my bed.’ I looked back to the brothers, stowing weapons and supplies. ‘I had a cousin who liked to burn people up, did I not, Brother Row?’
‘Ayuh.’ He nodded.
‘My cousin Marclos,’ I said. ‘Tell Gog what happened to him.’
Row tested the point of an arrow with his thumb. ‘Went up to him all on your ownself, Jorg, and killed him in the middle of a hundred of his soldiers.’
I looked down at Gog. ‘I’m scared of spiders too. It’s the way that they move. And the way that they’re still. It’s that scurry.’ I mimicked it with my hand.
I called back to Row. ‘How am I with spiders, Row?’
‘Weird.’ Row spat and secured his last arrow. ‘You’ll like this tale, Gog, what with being a godless monster and all.’ He spat again. Brother Row liked to spit. ‘Spent a week holed up in some grain barns one time. Hiding. We didn’t go hungry. Grain and rats make for a good stew. Only Jorg here wasn’t having any of that. Place was stuffed full of spiders see. Big hairy fellows.’ He spread his fingers until the knuckles cracked. ‘For a whole week Jorg hunted them. Didn’t eat nothing but spider for a week. And not cooked mind. Not even dead.’
‘And rat stew always tasted good after that week,’ I said.
Gog frowned, then his eyes caught the glitter on my wrist. ‘What’s this?’ He pointed.
I pulled my sleeve back and held it up for all to see. ‘Two things I found in my uncle’s treasury that were worth more than the gold around them. Thought I’d bring them along in case of need.’ I made sure Rike caught sight of the silver on my wrist. ‘No need to be going through my saddle bags at night now, Little Rikey. The treasure’s here and if you think you can take it, try now.’
He sneered and tied off another strap.
‘Wossit?’ Gog stared entranced.
‘The Builders made it,’ I said. ‘It’s a thousand years old.’
Row and Red Kent came over to see.
‘I’m told they call it a watch,’ I said. ‘And you can see why.’
In truth, I’d been watching it a lot myself. It had a face on it behind crystal, with twelve hours marked and sixty minutes, and two black arms that moved, one slow, one slower still, to point out the time. Entranced, I had opened it up at the back with the point of my knife and gazed into the guts of the thing. The hatch popped back on a minute hinge as if the Builders had known I would want to see inside. Wheels within wheels, tiny, toothed, and turning. How they made such things so small and so precise I cannot guess but to me it is a wonder past any man-made sun or glow-light.
‘What else you got, Jorg?’ Rike asked.
‘This.’ I took it from the deep pocket on my hip and set it down on the flagstones. A battered metal clown with traces of paint clinging to his jerkin, hair and nose.
Kent took a step back. ‘It looks evil.’
I knelt and released a catch behind the clown’s head. With a jerk and a whir he started to stamp his metal feet and bring his metal hands together, clashing the cymbals he held. He jittered in a loose circle, stamping and clashing, going nowhere.
Rike started to laugh. Not that ‘hur, hur, hur’ of his that sounds like another kind of anger, but a real laugh, from the belly. ‘It’s like … It’s like …’ He couldn’t get the words out.
The others couldn’t hold back. Sim and Maical cracked first. Grumlow snorting through the drowned-rat moustache he’d been working on. Then Red Kent and at last even Row, laughing like children. Gog looked on, astonished. Even Gorgoth couldn’t help but grin, showing back-teeth like tombstones.
The clown fell over and kept on stamping the air. Rike collapsed with it, thumping the ground with his fist, gasping for breath.
The clown slowed, then stopped. There’s a blue-steel spring inside that you wind tight with a key. And when it’s finished stamping and crashing, the spring is loose again.
‘Burlow … Burlow should have seen this.’ Rike wiped the tears from his eyes. The first time I’d heard him mention any of the fallen.
‘Yes, Brother Rike,’ I said. ‘Yes he should.’ I imagined Brother Burlow laughing with us, his belly shaking.
We made our moment then, one of those waypoints by which a life is remembered, the Brotherhood remade and bound for the road. We made our moment – the last good one. ‘Time to go,’ I said.
Sometimes I wonder if we all don’t have a blue-steel spring inside us, like that dena of Gorgoth’s coiled tight at the core. I wonder if we don’t all go stamping and crashing, crashing and stamping in our own little circles going nowhere. And I wonder who it is that laughs at us.
6
Four years earlier
Three months previously I had entered the Haunt alone, covered in blood that was not my own and swinging a stolen sword. My Brothers followed me in. Now I left the castle in the hands of another. I had wanted my uncle’s blood. His crown I took because other men said I could not have it.
If the Haunt reminds you of a skull, and it does me, then the scraps of town around the gates might be considered the dried vomit of its last heave. A tannery here, abattoir there, all the necessary but stinking evils of modern life, set out beyond the walls where the wind will scour them. We were barely clear of the last hovel before Makin caught us.
‘Missing me already?’
‘The Forest Watch tell me we have company coming,’ Makin said, catching his breath.
‘We really should rename the Watch,’ I said. The best the Highlands could offer by way of forest was the occasional clump of trees huddled miserably in a deep valley, all twisted and hunched against the wind.
‘Fifty knights,’ Makin said. ‘Carrying the banner of Arrow.’
‘Arrow?’ I frowned. ‘They’ve come a ways.’ The province lay on the edge of the map we had so recently rolled up.
‘They look fresh enough by all accounts.’
‘I think I’ll meet them on the road,’ I said. ‘We might get a more interesting story out of them as a band of road brothers.’ The truth was I didn’t want to change back into silks and ermine and go through the formalities. They would be heading for the castle. You don’t send fifty men in plate armour for a stealth mission.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Makin said. He wasn’t going to take ‘no’ this time.
‘You won’t pass as a road brother,’ I said. ‘You look like an actor who’s raided the props chest for all the best knight-gear.’
‘Roll him in some shit,’ Rike said. ‘He’ll pass then.’
We happened to be right by Jerring’s stables and a heap of manure lay close at hand. I pointed to it.
‘Not so different from life in court.’ Makin grimaced and threw his robe into the head-cart. Maical had hitched it to the grey out of habit.
When the captain of my guard looked more like, a hedge-knight at the very bottom of his luck, we moved on. Gog rode with me, clutching tight. Gorgoth jogged along for no horse would take him, and not just because of his weight. Something in him scared them.
‘Ever been to Arrow, Makin?’ I asked, easing my horse up wind.
‘Never have,’ he said. ‘A small enough principality. They breed them tough down there though, by all accounts. Been giving their neighbours a headache for years now.’
We rode on without talk for a while, just the clatter of hooves and the creak of the head-cart to break the mountain silence. The road, or trail if I’m honest, for the Builders never worked their magic in the Highlands, wound its way down, snaking back and forth to tame the gradients. As we dropped I started to realize that in the low valleys it would be spring already. Even here a flash of green showed now and again and set the horses nosing the air.
We saw the knights’ outrider an hour later and the main column a mile further on. Row started to turn off the trail.
‘I’ll say when we turn aside and when we stand our ground, if it’s all the same to you, Brother Row.’ I gave him a look. The Brothers had started to forget the old Jorg – been too long lazing around the Haunt, left too long to their own wickednesses.
‘There’s a lot of them, Brother Jorg,’ said Young Sim, older than me of course but still with little use for a razor if you discounted the cutting of throats.
‘When you’re making for the king’s castle it’s bad manners to cut down travellers on the way,’ I said. ‘Even ones as disreputable as us.’
I rode on. A pause and the others followed.
The next rise showed them closer, two abreast, moving at a slow trot, a pair of narrow banners fluttering in the Renar wind. No rabble these, table-knights from a high court, a harmony to their arms and armour that put my own guard to shame.
‘This is a bad idea,’ Makin said. He stank of horse-shit.
‘If you ever stop saying that I’ll know it’s time to start worrying,’ I said.
The men of Arrow continued their advance. We could hear their hooves on the rock. I had an urge to rest in the middle of the trail and demand a toll. That would have made a tale, but perhaps too short a one. I settled for pulling to the side and watching as they drew closer. I cast an eye over our troop. An ugly lot, but the leucrotas won the prize.
‘See if you can’t hide behind Rike’s beast, Gorgoth,’ I said. ‘I knew that plough horse would come in useful.’
I took the knife from my belt and started to work the dirt from under my fingernails. Gog’s claws dug in beneath my breastplate as the first men reached us.
The knights slowed their horses to a walk as they came near. A few turned their heads but most passed without a glance, faces hidden behind visors. At the middle of the column were two men who caught the eye, or at least their armour did, polished to a brilliance, fluted in the Teuton style, and scintillating with rainbow hues where the oiled metal broke the light. A hound ran between their horses, short-haired, barrel-chested, long in the snout. The leftmost of the pair raised his hand and the column stopped, even the men in front of him, though there seemed no way they could have seen him.
‘Well now,’ he said, both words precise and tightly wrapped.
He took his helm off, which seemed a foolish thing to do when he might be the target of hidden crossbows, and shook his head. Sweat kept his blond hair plastered to his brow.
‘Good day, Sir Knight,’ I said and nodded him a quarter of a bow.
He looked me up and down with calm blue eyes. He reminded me of Katherine’s champion, Sir Galen. ‘How far to Renar’s castle, boy?’ he asked.
Something in me said that this man knew exactly how far it was, as crow flies and cripple crawls. ‘King Jorg’s castle lies a good ten miles yonder.’ I waved my knife along the trail. ‘About a mile of it up.’
‘A king is it?’ He smiled. Handsome like Galen too, in that square-jawed blond manner that will turn a girl’s head. ‘Old Renar didn’t count himself a king.’
I started to hate him. And not just for the pun. ‘Count Renar held only the Highlands. King Jorg is heir to Ancrath and the lands of Gelleth. That’s enough land to make a king, at least in these parts.’
I made show of peering at the fellow’s breastplate. He had dragons there, etched and enamelled in red, each rampant, clutching a vertical arrow taller than itself. Nice work. ‘Arrow is it you’re from, my lord?’ I asked. Not waiting for an answer I turned to Makin. ‘Do you know why that land is named Arrow, Makin?’
He shook his head and studied the pommel of his saddle. The need to say ‘this is a bad idea’ twitched on his lips.
‘They say it’s called Arrow because you can shoot one from the north coast to the south,’ I said. ‘From what I hear they could have called it Sneeze. I wonder what they call the man who rules there.’
‘You know a lot about heraldry, boy.’ Eyes still calm. The man beside him moved his hand to his sword, gauntlet clicking against the hilt. ‘They call the man who rules there the Prince of Arrow.’ He smiled. ‘But you may call me Prince Orrin.’
It seemed rash to be riding into another’s realm with fifty men, even fifty such as these. The very thing I had decided against for my own travels.
‘You’re not worried that King Jorg will take the opportunity to thin the field in this Hundred War of ours?’ I asked.
‘If I were his neighbour, maybe,’ the Prince said. ‘But killing me or even ransoming me to my enemies would just make his own neighbours more secure and better able to harm him. And I hear the king has a good eye for his own chances. Besides, it would not be easy.’
‘I thought you came looking for a count, but now it seems you already know about King Jorg and his good eye,’ I said. He came prepared, this one.
The Prince shrugged. He looked young when he did it. Twenty maybe. Not much more. ‘That’s a handsome sword,’ he said. ‘Show it to me.’
I’d wrapped the hilt about with old leather and smeared that with dirt. The scabbard was older than me and shiny with the years. Whatever my uncle’s sword had been it wasn’t handsome now. Not until I drew it and showed its metal. I considered throwing my dagger. Old blondie might not see so clear with it jutting out of his eye socket. He might even have a brother at home who’d be pleased to be the new Prince of Arrow and owe me a favour hereafter. I could see it in my mind’s eye. The handsome Prince with my dagger in his face, and us racing away across the slopes.
I’m not given to should haves. But I should have.
Instead I stowed the knife and drew my uncle’s sword, an heirloom of his line, Builder-steel, the blade taking the light of the day and giving it back with an edge.
‘Well now,’ Prince Orrin said again. ‘An uncommon sword you have there, boy. From whom did you steal it?’
The mountain wind blew cold, finding every chink in my armour, and I shivered despite the heat pulsing from Gog at my back. ‘Why would the Prince of Arrow come all the way to the Renar Highlands with just fifty knights, I wonder?’ I dismounted. The Prince’s eyes widened at the sight of Gog left in the saddle, half naked and striped like a tiger.
I stood on one of the larger rocks by the roadside, on foot to show I had no running in me.
‘Perhaps such reasons are not for a bandit child by the roadside clutching a stolen sword,’ he said, still maddeningly calm.
I couldn’t argue with the ‘stolen’ so I took offence against the ‘child’. ‘Fourteen is a man’s age in these lands and I wield this sword better than any who held it before me.’
The Prince chuckled, gentle and unforced. If he had studied a book devoted to the art of infuriating me he could have done no better job. Pride has ever been my weakness, and occasionally my strength.
‘My apologies then, young man.’ I could see his champion frown at that, even behind his visor. ‘I travel to see the lands that I will rule as emperor, to know the people and the cities. And to speak with the nobles, the barons, counts … and even kings, who will serve me when I sit upon the empire throne. I would win their service with wisdom, words and favour, rather than with sword and fire.’
A pompous enough speech perhaps, but he had a way with words this one. Oh my brothers, the way he spoke them. A magic of a new kind, this. More subtle than Sageous’s gentle traps – even that heathen witch with his dream-weaving would envy this kind of persuasion. I could see why the Prince had taken off his helm. The enchantment didn’t lie in the words alone but in the look, in the honesty and trust of it all, as if every man who heard them was worthy of his friendship. A talent to be wary of, maybe more potent even than the power Corion used to set me scurrying across empire and to steer my uncle from behind his throne.
The hound sat and licked the slobber from its chops. It looked big enough to swallow a small lamb.
‘And why would they listen to you, Prince of Arrow?’ I asked. I heard a petulance in my voice and hated it.
‘This Hundred War must end,’ he said. ‘It will end. But how many need drown in blood before the peace? Let the throne be claimed. The nobles can keep their castles, rule their lands, collect their gold. Nothing will be lost; nothing will end but the war.’
And there it was again. The magic. I believed him. Even without him saying so I knew that he truly sought peace, that he would rule with a fair and even hand, that he cared about the people. He would let the farmers farm, the merchants trade, the scholars seek their secrets.
‘If you were offered the empire throne,’ he said, looking only at me, ‘would you take it?’
‘Yes.’ Though I would rather take it without it being offered.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want it?’
He shone a light into my dark corners, this storybook prince with his calm eyes. I wanted to win. The throne was just the token to demonstrate that victory. And I wanted to win because other men had said that I may not. I wanted to fight because fighting ran through me. I gave less for the people than for the dung heap we rolled Makin in.
‘It’s mine.’ All the answer I could find.
‘Is it?’ he asked. ‘Is it yours, Steward?’
And in one flourish he showed his hand. And showed my shame. You should know that the men who fight the Hundred War, and they are all men, save for the Queen of Red, fall from two sides of a great tree. The line of the Stewards, as our enemies call us, trace the clearest path to the throne, but it is to the Great Steward, Honorous, who served for fifty years when the seed of empire failed. And Honorous sat before the throne rather than on it. Still a strong claim to be heir to the man who served as emperor in all but name is a better case for taking that throne than a weak claim to be heir to the last emperor. At least that’s how we Stewards see it. In any case I would cut myself a path to the throne even if some bastard-born herder had fathered me on a gutter-whore – genealogy can work for me or I can cut down the family tree and make a battering ram. Either way is good.
Many of the line of Stewards are cast in my mould: lean, tall, dark of hair and eye, quick of mind. Even our foes call us cunning. The line of the emperor is muddied, lost in burning libraries, tainted by madness and excess. And many of the line, or who claim it, are built like Prince Orrin: fair, thick of arm, sometimes giants big as Rike, though pleasing on the eye.
‘Steward is it now?’ I rolled my wrist and my sword danced. His hound stood up, sharp, without a growl.
‘Put it away, Jorg,’ he said. ‘I know you. You have the look of the Ancraths about you. As dark a branch of the Steward tree as ever grew. You’re all still killing each other so I hear?’
‘That’s King Jorg to you,’ I said, knowing I sounded like a spoiled child and unable to help it. Something in Orrin’s calm humour, in the light of him, cast a shadow over me.
‘King? Ah, yes, because of Ancrath, and Gelleth,’ he said. ‘But I’m told your father has named young Prince Degran his heir. So perhaps …’ He spread his hands and smiled.
The smile felt like a slap in the face. So Father had named the new son he’d made with his Scorron whore. And gifted him my birthright. ‘And you’re thinking to give him the Highlands too?’ I asked. Keeping the savage grin on my face however much it wanted to slide away. ‘You should know that there are a hundred of my Watch hidden in the rocks ready to slot arrows through the gaps in that fancy armour, Prince.’ It might even be true. I knew that at least some of the Watch would be tracking the knights.
‘I’d say it was closer to twenty,’ Prince Orrin said. ‘I don’t think they’re mountain men, are they? Did you bring them out of Ancrath, Jorg, when you ran? They’re skilled enough, but proper mountain men would be harder to spot.’
He knew too much, this prince. It was seriously starting to annoy. And as you know, being angry makes me angry.
‘In any case,’ he carried on as if I weren’t about to explode, as if I weren’t about to ram my sword entirely through his body, ‘I won’t kill you for the same reason you won’t kill me. It would replace two weak kingdoms with a stronger one. When the road to the empire throne, to my throne, leads me here, I would rather find you and your colourful friends terrorizing the peasants and getting drunk, than find your father or Baron Kennick keeping order. And I hope that by the time I arrive you will have grown wiser as well as taller, and open your lands to me as emperor.’
I jumped from my rock and the hound stood in my path quicker than quick, still no growl but way too many teeth on display, all gleaming with slobber. I fixed its eyes, which is a good way to get your face bitten off, but I meant to threaten the beast. Holding my sword by hilt and blade, flat side forward, I took another step, a snarl rising in me. I had a hound once, a good one that I loved, before such soft words were taken from me, and I had no wish to kill this one. But I would. ‘Back.’ More growl than word. My eyes on his.
And with ears flat to its head the beast whimpered and skulked back between the horses’ legs. I think it sensed the death in me. A bitter meal, that necromancer’s heart. Another step away from the world. It sometimes seems I stand three steps outside the lives of other men. One for the heart. One for the thorn bush. And perhaps the first for that dog I remember in dreams.
I call him mine but the hound belonged to my brother William and me. A wolf-hound of some kind, huger than the two of us, a charger fit for two young knights. He could take William on his back, Will being just four, but if I leapt on too he would shake us both off and nip my leg. We called him Justice.
‘Impressive,’ said Prince Orrin, looking anything but impressed. ‘If you’re finished with my dog then we’ll be on our way. I plan to cross through to Orlanth via High Pass, or Blue Moon Pass if it’s clear, and pay a call on Earl Samsar.’
‘You’ll be on your way when I say so,’ I told him, still aching for … something. Fear maybe? Perhaps just a measure of respect would do it. ‘And by whatever route I allow.’ I didn’t like the way he seemed to know the lie of my land better than I did.
He raised an eyebrow at that, keeping a smile at bay and irking me more than smiling would have. ‘And what then is your judgment in this matter, King Jorg?’
Every fibre of me ached to hurt him. In any other man his words would sound smug, arrogant, but here on this cold mountain slope they sounded honest and sincere. I hated him for being so openly the better man. I caught his eye and in that instant I knew. He pitied me.
‘Cross swords with me, Brother Orrin,’ I said. ‘You’re right to think of peace. Why should my goat-herders or your pig farmers suffer in a war to see which of our backsides polishes the empire throne? Cross swords with me and if I yield, then on the day you come to claim the empire I won’t stand against you. Come, draw your blade. Or have your champion try his luck if you must.’ I nodded to the man beside him.
‘Ah,’ Orrin said. ‘You wouldn’t want to fight him. That’s my brother Egan. God made him to stand behind a sword. Scares me sometimes! And besides, the two of you are too alike. Egan thinks all this talk is a waste. He would set our farmers on your herders and drown the world in blood, would you not, Egan? I have a dream for the empire. For my empire. A bright dream. But I fear all Egan’s dreams are red.’
Egan grunted as if bored.
The Prince dismounted. ‘Clear the path and let no man interfere.’
‘This is—’
‘I know, Makin.’ I cut across him. ‘It’s a bad idea.’
Makin climbed off his horse and stood beside me as Orrin’s men pulled away. ‘He could be good,’ he said.
‘Good is fine,’ I said. ‘I’m great.’
‘I won’t argue that you’re world class at killing, Jorg,’ Makin hissed. ‘But this is swordplay and only swordplay.’
‘Then I shall have to play the game,’ I said. The Prince hadn’t asked what I would demand of him when I won. That left a bitter taste.
We stepped together then, two of the hundred, the lines of emperor and steward met for battle.
‘We could do this the clever way, Jorg,’ Orrin said. He had enough of my measure not to say the easy way. ‘Support me. The new emperor will need a new steward.’
I spat in the grit.
‘You don’t know what it is you want, or why you want it, Jorg,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen nothing of the empire you want to own. Have you been east, chasing the sun to the wall of Utter itself? Have you seen the shores of dark Afrique? Spoken with the jarls who sail from their northern fastness when the ice allows? If you had been spawned in the Arral wastes then all the miles you covered in those roaming years of yours would have shown you nothing but grassland. By ship, Jorg, by ship. That’s the way to see the empire. Have you even seen the sea?’
The grey let out a long complacent fart, saving me from an answer. I always loved that horse.
We circled. Like much in life, a sword fight, especially a longsword fight, is about choosing your moment. A swing is a commitment, often a lifetime commitment. You wait for the best odds then bet your life on the chance offered. Against a man in plate armour you have to put muscle into it. All your strength. To put enough hurt through that metal so he won’t be taking advantage as you draw back for the next attack. A lunge can be more tentative. It needs to be precise. To find and pierce that chink in the armour before he finds and pierces yours.
I swung, not to hit him but just to let our blades meet. His sword held a smoky look, something darker alloyed to the Builder-steel. The clash rang out harsh across the slopes. Somehow he rolled his blade in the instant they met and almost took mine from my hands. I didn’t like that at all. I pressed him, short swings to keep him busy, to numb his hands and stop them being so tricksy. It felt like hacking at a stone pillar and left my palms aching, pain stabbing up my wrists.
‘You’re better than I expected,’ he said.
He came at me then, lunge, half-swing, lunge. Combinations too fast to think about.
We train so that our muscles learn. So that our eyes talk to our arms and hands, skipping the brain and the need to bother with decision and judgment. It’s like learning the notes for a piece on the harp. First you think it through, A, C, C, D … and in time your fingers know it and you’ve forgotten the notes.
My sword arm made its moves without consulting me.
‘Really not bad at all,’ he said.
But when you try to play the piece faster, and then faster still, and quicker again, at some point your fingers falter. What comes next, they want to know? What’s next?
A heavy metal bar to the side of the head is what’s next, apparently. At least that’s what the flat of his blade felt like. I said something that was half-curse, half-groan, and all blood, then fell over as if he’d cut all my strings.
‘Yield.’ It sounded as if he was calling from the far end of a long tunnel.
‘Fuck that.’ More blood, possibly some bits of tooth.
‘Last chance, Jorg,’ he said. The edge of his sword lay cold against my neck.
‘He yields.’ Makin at the far end of the same tunnel. ‘He yields.’
‘Like hell I do.’ The difference between sky and ground had started to reassert itself. I focused on a dark blob that could well be Orrin.
‘Yield,’ he said again. Warmth down my neck where blood trickled from his shallow cut.
I managed a laugh. ‘You’ve already said you won’t kill me, Prince of Arrow. It’s not in your interest. So why would I yield?’ I spat again. ‘If you ever get to my borders with an army, I’ll decide what to do then.’
He turned away with a look of disgust.
‘The High Pass,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you free passage to the High Pass and you can bother the earl with your moralizing. You earned that much.’ I tried to stand and failed. Makin helped me to my feet.
We watched them ride on. The brother, Prince Egan, gave me an evil stare as he passed. Orrin didn’t even turn his head.
We watched until the last horse vanished over the rise.
‘We’re going to need a bigger army,’ I said.
Sir Makin is almost the handsome knight of legend, dark locks curling, tall, a swordsman’s build, darkest eyes, his armour always polished, blade keen. Only the thickness of his lips and the sharpness of his nose leave him shy of a maiden’s dream. His mouth too expressive, his look too hawkish. In other matters too Sir Makin is ‘almost’. Almost honourable, almost honest.
About his friendship, though, there is no almost.
7
Four years earlier
We’d ridden for two hours since the Prince of Arrow left for the High Pass. Two hours in a very different kind of silence to the one that kept us company for the first part of our journey. I had the sort of headache that makes decapitation seem like a good option. Any idiot could tell that it wouldn’t take much for me to make their neck the practice run.
‘Ouch.’
Well, not every idiot.
‘Yes, Maical,’ I said. ‘Ouch.’ I watched him through slitted eyes, teeth tight against the throb in my skull. Sometimes you couldn’t tell old Maical was broken. Whatever piece was missing from him it didn’t always show. For whole moments at a time he could look ready for anything, tough, dependable, even cunning. And then it came, that weakness about the mouth, the furrowing of the brow, and the empty eyes.
Maical had found his way back to the Brotherhood within weeks of our victory in the Highlands. Lord knows how, but I suppose even pigeons can find their way home with nothing but a drop of brain in their tiny skulls. In the months since I made the Haunt my home he’d served as stable-boy or assistant to the stable-boy, or dung-collector, or some such. I made it clear I wanted him fed and given a place to sleep. I’d killed his brother after all. Gemt hadn’t cared much for him. He beat him and set him to both their tasks on the road. But he made sure Maical ate and he made sure he had a place to sleep. ‘He banged you up, Jorg,’ Maical said. He looked stupid when he spoke, lips always wet and glistening.
I saw Makin wince, Row exchange a bet with Grumlow.
‘Yes, Maical, he surely did.’
I didn’t feel bad for knifing Gemt. Not for a heartbeat. But it hurt me to think of Maical too broken to hate me, caught in whatever hooks snagged his mind, seeing but trapped. I thought of the watch a tick tick ticking on my wrist. All that cleverness, those wheels within wheels, turning, being turned, teeth biting, and yet one tiny piece of grit, one human hair in the wrong place, and it would seize, ruined, worthless. I wondered what had got into Maical way back when. What had it been that stole his wits away?
‘Tell Makin to get himself up here,’ I said.
Maical pulled on his reins and the grey slowed. I saw Row’s scowl. He’d lost his bet.
The mountains pulsed from red to green as the pain washed from front to back, from behind my eyes to the base of my skull.
‘Sometimes I think you keep him around just to keep the grey happy,’ Makin said. I hadn’t noticed him draw level.
‘I want you to teach me how to use a sword,’ I said.
‘You know how—’
‘I thought I did,’ I said. ‘But now I’m going to take it seriously. What just happened …’ I put my hand to my head and my fingers came away bloody. ‘… is not going to happen again.’
‘Well at least it’s a kingly way to pass the time,’ he said. ‘Help to keep your edge too. Have you even swung a sword since we took the Haunt?’
I shrugged and wished I hadn’t. My teeth made a nasty squeaking as they ground over each other.
‘I’m told you’ve been attempting to father a bastard on pretty much every serving girl in the castle.’ He grinned.
It’s good to be the king.
Except when you get hit in the head with a sword.
‘It’s an effort at repopulation,’ I said. ‘Quality and quantity.’ I clapped a hand to my head. ‘Arrrgh, damn and fuck it.’ Some pain you can distance yourself from, but a headache sits right where you live.
Makin kept grinning. I think he quite liked seeing me knocked down.
He reached into his saddlebag, dug deep, pulled out a tight wrap of leather and tossed it over. I almost missed it. Double vision will do that for you.
‘Clove-spice,’ he said.
‘Been hoarding that one, Sir Makin.’ You could trade a good horse and not get enough clove-spice to fill your hand. Wonderful stuff for pain. Too much and you die of course, but it’s like floating to your death, carried by a warm river. I almost opened the wrap. ‘Take it.’ I threw it back. Giving in to things becomes a habit. I made an enemy of the ache in my head and started to fight.
We rode on. I filled my mind with old venom, brought out the hate I kept for the Count of Renar. I’d had little to exercise it on since he passed out of reach. The throb throb throb behind my eyes made the ache from my broken tooth feel like a tingle.
Rike caught up on that monster horse of his and kept pace. He watched me for a while. Makin might have enjoyed seeing me knocked on my arse; but Rike thought all his festival days had come at once.
‘You know why I keep you around, Rike?’ I asked.
‘Why?’
‘You’re like the worst part of me.’ That squeak of enamel on enamel again as I ground my teeth. ‘Damn.’ It slackened off. ‘I don’t have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I got me a devil on both. But you’re like the bad one. Like I’d be if I lost my charm, and my good looks.’ I realized I was babbling and tried to grin.
‘Lose yourself, Rike.’ Makin again. I hadn’t seen him come back.
‘My father was right, Makin,’ I said. ‘Right to take his brother’s money, for William and Mother. He would have lost half his army just getting to the Haunt.’
Makin frowned. He held the clove-spice out again. ‘Take it.’
‘My father knew about sacrifice. Corion too. The path he set me on. The right one. I just didn’t like being pushed.’
I could hardly see Makin, eyes slitted against the pulse in my head.
Makin shook his head. ‘Some crimes demand an answer. Corion tried to take that from you. I crossed three nations to find the men who killed my girl.’ He sounded worried.
‘Idiot.’ Numb lips shaped the word.
‘Jorg.’ Makin kept his voice low. ‘You’re crying. Take the damn spice.’
‘Going to need a bigger army.’ Everything had gone black and I felt as if I was falling. And then I hit the ground.
8
Four years earlier
I woke in a darkened room. A fly buzzed. Someone somewhere was being sick. Light filtered in where the daub cracked from the wattle. More light through the shutters, warped in their frame. A peasant hut. The retching stopped, replaced by muted sobs. A child.
I sat up. A thin blanket slipped from me. Straw prickled. The ache in my head had gone. My tooth hurt like a bastard but it was nothing compared to how my head had been. I felt around for my sword and couldn’t find it.
There’s something magical about a departed headache. It’s a shame the joy fades and you can’t appreciate not having one every moment of your life. That hadn’t been a regular headache of course. Old Jorgy got himself a bruised brain. I’d seen it before. When Brother Gains fell off his horse one time and hit his head he went crazier than Maical for the best part of two days. ‘Did I fall off my horse?’ He must have asked that a thousand times in a row. Crying one moment. Laughing the next. We’re brittle things, us men.
I found my feet, still a little shaky. The door opened and the light came dazzling around the dark shape of a woman. ‘I brought you soup,’ she said.
I took it and sat again. ‘Smells good.’ It did. My stomach growled.
‘Your friend, Makin, he brought a couple of rabbits for the pot,’ she said. ‘We hadn’t had meat since the pigs got took.’
I raised the bowl to my lips: no spoons here. She left as I started slurping, burning my mouth and not caring too much. For a long time I just sipped and watched the dust dance where fingers of light reached in through the shutters. I munched on lumps of rabbit, chewed on the gristle, swallowed the fat. It’s good to eat with an empty mind.
At last I got to my feet again, steadier now. I patted myself down. My old dagger was on my hip and there was a lump in my belt pouch which turned out to be Makin’s clove-spice. One more glance around for my sword and I went to the door. The day seemed a little too bright, the wind chill and sharp with the stink of old burning. I stretched and blinked. Apart from the hut I’d come from, a stall for animals by the look of it, the place lay in ruins. Two houses with tumbled walls and blackened spars, some broken fences, animal pens that looked to have been ridden through with heavy horse. I saw the woman crouched in the shell of the closer house, her back to me.
The sudden need for a piss bit hard. I went against the hut, a long hot acid flow never seeming to end. ‘Jesu! Have I slept for a week?’
A wise man once said, ‘Don’t shit where you eat.’ Aristotle perhaps. On the road that’s a rule to live by. Find your relief where you will. Move on each day and leave the shit, all manner of shit, behind you. In the castle I have a garderobe. Which, let’s face it, is a hole in the wall to crap through. In a castle you shit where you eat and you have to think a bit harder about what kind of shit is worth stirring up. That’s what I’ve learned in three months of being king.
Finished at last. Had to be a week’s worth.
I felt better. Good. A yawn cracked my face. The land lay flat to the north, the Matteracks a jagged line to the south. We’d left the Highlands or near as dammit. I stretched and ambled over to the woman. ‘Did my men do this?’ I frowned and glanced around again. ‘Where in hell are they anyhow?’
She turned, face worn, haunted around the eyes. ‘Soldiers from Ancrath did it.’ A child hung in her arms, limp and grey, a girl, six years maybe seven.
‘Ancrath?’ I arched a brow. My eyes kept returning to the girl. ‘We’re close to the border?’
‘Five miles,’ she said. ‘They told us we couldn’t live here. The land was annexed. They started to fire the buildings.’
Annexed. That rang a small bell at the back of my mind. Some dispute about the border. The oldest maps had it that Lord Nossar’s estate reached out this far.
I could smell the vomit now, sour on the morning air. The girl had a blood-black smear of it in her hair.
‘They killed your man?’ I asked. I surprised myself. I don’t care enough about such things to waste words on them. I blamed the bang on the head.
‘They killed our boy,’ she said, staring past the black timbers, past me, past the sky. ‘Davie came out screaming and choking, blind with the smoke. Got too close to a soldier. Just a quick swing, like he was cutting down bindweed, and my boy was open. His guts …’ She blinked and looked down at the girl. ‘He kept screaming. He wouldn’t stop. Another soldier put an arrow through his neck.’
‘And your man?’ I hadn’t asked about her boy. I hadn’t wanted that story. And the girl kept watching me, without interest, without hope.
‘I don’t know.’ She had a grey voice. The way it goes when emotions have burned out. ‘He didn’t go to Davie, didn’t hold him, too scared the soldiers would cut him down too.’ The girl coughed, a wet sound. ‘Now he cries all the time or stares at the ground.’
‘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 Highlands 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 further 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 furthest 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 cut 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.
I made my way along the margins of the forest toward the Roma Road. They say you can put foot on that road and never leave it till you reach the pope’s front door. I planned to walk the other way.
There’s a cemetery near the Roma Road, mostly eaten by the forest, mostly forgotten. I hunted through it as a child, crumbled mausoleums choked with ivy, smothered with moss, cracked by trees. The cemetery covers acre upon hidden acre, a lost necropolis. Perechaise they call it in dusty books. The legends mean nothing to me, Beloved, 1845. Dearly departed, 1710. My heart lies here, 1908. Barely legible. So long ago even their calendar loses meaning.
The stones are set with a clear resin, harder than glass, which wards them in a skin no thicker than a hair. It took years before I noticed it. The weathering they’d suffered happened in the distant long ago. Now not even a hammer blow will mar them. The Builders held these old markers precious and kept them from the centuries.
I found my way through toppled gravestones close to the road where some of it is kept clear. Much has been robbed out. There’s a peasant’s cottage, a little to the west, entirely built from headstones, weathered granite markers with time-blurred legends remembering the dead for illiterate field-men. A house built of stories, to shelter a man who cannot read.
I found her by the road’s edge, hair pink with fallen blossom. The cycle of seasons has worn the definition from her features. But the beauty remains, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the grace in long limbs, the gentle swell of a child’s breast, a freckling of lichen. She needs no deep-carved runes to spell out her life. Here I buried my child. A message for which reading is not required. She died in the winter of a lost year, the daughter of a wealthy man who would have given all his wealth, and more, to buy her into spring.
I saw her first in autumn, long ago, when the leaves fell so thick they hid the stone dog she chases. Whilst I watched her other travellers hurried past on the road, clenched against the sharp-fingered wind. Some paused to wonder what she chased, hugging themselves, squinting into the rain. They moved on. I stayed. Maybe they wondered what they were chasing.
She’s after her dog. A little terrier, remembered in stone, lost that autumn in a drift of wet ochre. A centuries’-old chase that has seen the death of everyone who cared, the end of every soul that knew the terrier’s name. A chase that saw the stilling of each hand to touch this child, the loss of every life that shared her world.
I came again with the snows on the first day of winter, to see my statue girl. My first love maybe. I watched and the snow fell, tiny crystals, the kind so perfect they almost chime against the ground. The light failed early and a wildness infected the wind, swirling the snow into rivulets of milk across the Roma Road, ice hissing over stone. A frost came and etched silver tracery across her dress, with only me to see.
The seasons turn, and here I am again, and still she waits for spring.
They buried high lords and high ladies here. Poets and bards. Now it’s a place for servant corpses. Close enough to the Tall Castle for sentimental ladies to visit their wet-nurses, far enough away to be seemly. They bury old servants, sometimes even faithful dogs, around my girl who waits for spring. Soft-hearted ladies from court come with their perfumed toys that have ceased to yap. And one time a boy of six, soaked and half frozen, dragging something that might once have been a wolf.
‘Hello, Jorg.’
I turned and between the old graves walked Katherine, the sun making magic of her hair.
10
Four years earlier
Hello, Jorg. Was that all she said to me? Katherine, there in the Rennat Forest, among the gravestones. Hello, Jorg?
I’m trying to wake up from something. Maybe I’ve always been trying. I’m drowning in confusion, somewhere high above me light dances on a surface, and past that the air is waiting. Waiting for me to draw breath.
I hardly know Katherine but I want her, with unreasonable ferocity. Like a sickness, like the need for water. Like Paris for Helen, I am laid low by irresistible longing.
In memory I study the light on her face, beneath the glow-bulbs of the Tall Castle, beneath the cemetery trees. I envy those patches of sunlight, sliding over her hair, moving unopposed the length of her body, across her cheekbones. I remember everything. I recall the pattern of her breath. In the heat of Drane’s kitchen I remember a single bead of sweat and the slow roll of it, down her neck, along the tendon, across her throat. I’ve killed men and forgotten them. Mislaid the act of taking a life. But that drop of sweat is a diamond in my mind’s eye.
‘Hello, Jorg.’ And my clever words desert me. She makes me feel my fourteen summers, more boy than man.
I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I’ve made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh. She’s just a person, just a girl, but she stands at the door to an old world, and although I can’t go back … she can come through, and maybe bring with her a scent of it, a taste of that lost warmth.
These feelings are too fierce to last. They can only burn, making us ash and char.
I see her in dreams. I see her against the mountains. High, snow-cold, snow-pure, unobtainable. I climb, and on the empty peak I speak her name to the wind, but the wind takes my words. It takes me too. Tumbling through void.
‘Hello, Jorg.’
My flesh prickles. I rub at my cheek and my fingers come away bloody, sliced open. Every part of me burns with pins and needles. Real pins, real needles. I scream and like buds on the branch each prickle erupts, a hundred thorns sliding from my skin, growing from the bone. There are animals impaled, stabbed through like exhibits on a gamekeeper’s board. Rat, stoat, ferret, fox, dog … baby. Limp and watching.
I scream again and rotate into darkness. A night with only a whisper to give it form. A whispered chant, growing louder.
Topology, tautology, torsion, torture, taunt, taut, tight, taken, taking … taking … take … what’s he trying to take?
Somebody fumbling at my arm, fingers too stupid for the clever catch on the watch. A quick move and I had his wrist, impossibly thick, strong. I dug my thumb into the necessary pressure point. Lundist showed it to me in a book.
‘Arrg!’ Rike’s voice. ‘Pax!’
I sat up sharp, breaking the surface, drawing that long-awaited breath, and shaking the darkness from my mind. Topology, tautology, torsion … meaningless webs of words falling from me.
‘Rike!’ Crouched over me, blocking the too bright sun.
He sneered and sat back. ‘Pax.’
Pax. Road-speak. Peace, it’s in my nature. An excuse for any crime you’re caught in the middle of. Sometimes I think I should wear the word on my forehead. ‘Where in hell are we?’ I asked. An empty feeling ran through me, welling from my stomach and behind my eyes.
‘Hell’s the word.’ Red Kent walked over.
I lifted my hand. Sand all over. Sand everywhere in fact. ‘A desert?’
Two of the fingernails on my right hand were torn away. Gone. It started to hurt. My other nails were torn and split. I had bruises all over.
Gog came out from behind a lone thorn bush, slow as if he thought I might bite.
‘I—’ I pressed my hand to the side of my head, sand gritty on the skin. ‘I was with Katherine …’
‘And then what?’ Makin’s voice from behind.
‘I …’ Nothing. And then nothing. As if little Jorgy had been too full of the spring’s warmth and possibilities, and then a stone looped out of the shadows and took him off the bough.
I remembered the thorns. The itch and sting of them stayed with me. I lifted my arms. No wounds, but the skin lay red and scabbed. In fact Kent had it too, red as his name suggests. I turned to find Makin, also scabby, leading his horse. The beast looked worse than him, ropes of mucus around its muzzle, blisters on its tongue.
‘This is not a good place to be, I’m thinking.’ I reached for my knife and found it gone. ‘What are we doing here?’
‘We came to see a man named Luntar,’ Makin said. ‘An alchemist from the Utter East. He lives here.’
‘And here is?’
‘Thar.’
I knew the name. On the map scroll the word had sat along the edge of the Thurtan grasslands. There had been a burn mark on the map obscuring whatever the name labelled. But perhaps the scorch mark hadn’t been an accident.
‘Poisoned land,’ Makin said. ‘Some call them promised.’
A Builder’s Sun had burned here, many centuries ago. The promise was that one day the land would be safe again. I thrust my fingers back into the sand. Not the ones missing fingernails. I could touch the death there. I could roll it between fingertip and thumb. Hot. Death and fire together.
‘He lives here?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t he burn?’
Makin shuddered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He does.’ It takes a lot to make Makin shudder.
The empty feeling gnawed at me, eating away at the questions I most wanted to ask.
‘And what,’ I said, ‘did we want from this east-mage?’
Makin held out what he had been holding all along. ‘This.’
A box. A copper box, thorn-patterned, no lock or latch. A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.
‘What’s in the box?’ I didn’t want to know.
Makin shook his head. ‘There was a madness in you, Jorg. When you came back.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘Luntar put the madness in there.’ Makin thrust the box back into his saddlebag. ‘It was killing you.’
‘He put my memory in that box?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘You let him take my memory!’
‘You begged him to do it, Jorg.’ Makin wouldn’t look at me. Rike on the other hand couldn’t stop.
‘Give it to me.’ I would have reached for it but my hand didn’t want to.
‘He told me not to,’ Makin said, unhappy. ‘He told me to make you wait for a day. If you still wanted it after that, you could take it.’ Makin bit his lip. He chewed on it too much. ‘Trust me in this, Jorg, you don’t want to go back to how you were.’
I shrugged. ‘Tomorrow, then.’ Because trust is how a leader binds his men. And because my hands didn’t want that box. They’d rather burn. ‘Now, where’s my fecking dagger?’
Makin would only look at the horizon. ‘Best forgotten.’
We moved on, leading the horses, all of us reunited. We headed east, and when the wind blew, the sand stung like nettles. Only Gog and Gorgoth seemed unaffected.
Gog hung back, as if he didn’t want to be near me. ‘Is it all like this?’ I asked him, just to make him look at me. ‘Even where Luntar lives?’
He shook his head. ‘The sand turns to glass around his hut. Black glass. It cuts your feet.’
We walked on. Rike marched beside me, sparing the occasional glance. Something had changed in the way he looked at me. As if we were equals now.
I kept my head down and tried to remember. I teased at the hole in my mind. ‘Hello, Jorg,’ she had said.
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull. I would have back what was mine. I would open the box.
‘Hello, Jorg,’ she had said. We were by the statue of the girl and her dog, by her grave where sentimental ladies and foolish children bury their animals.
Nothing.
I learned a time ago that if you can’t get what you want by going in the front door, find a back way. I know a back way to that cemetery. Not by a path I wanted to tread, but I would take it even so.
When I was very young, six maybe, a duke called on my father, a man from the north with white-blond hair and a beard down his chest. Alaric of Maladon. The Duke brought a gift for my mother, a wonder of the old world. Something bright and moving, swirling within glass, first lost in the hugeness of the Duke’s hand and then in the folds of Mother’s dress.
I wanted that thing, half-seen and not understood. But such gifts were not for tiny princes. My father took it and set it in the treasury to gather dust. I learned this much from quiet listening.
The treasury in the Tall Castle lies behind an iron door, triple-locked. Not a Builder-made door, but a work of the Turkmen, black iron set with a hundred studs. When you’re six, most locked doors present a problem. This one presented several.
Of all memories, the first I have is of leaning from a high parapet into the teeth of a gale, with the rain lashing and me laughing. The next is of hands pulling me back.
If you’re determined, if you set your mind, there are never enough hands to pull you back. By the time I reached six I knew the outside of the Tall Castle as well as I knew the inside. The Builders left little for a climber to use, but centuries of tinkering by the Ancraths, and the House of Or before us, had provided plenty of footholds, at least plenty of ones deep enough for a child.
There is a single high window in the royal treasury, set in a plain wall a hundred feet above the ground, too narrow for a man and blocked by a forest of bars set so close as to give a snake quite a wriggle of it. On the far side of the castle, close to the throne-room, is a hole that leads to a gargoyle’s head on the outer wall. If the treasury door opens, then the movement of air through the castle makes the gargoyle speak. On a still day he moans and when the wind is up he howls. He will also speak if the wind is hard in the east and a particular window in the kitchen stores is left unshuttered. When that happens there’s a fuss and somebody gets whipped with rope and wire. Without the treasury’s high window the gargoyle would not speak and the king would never know when the door to his treasures stood open.
I left my bed one moonless night. William lay sleeping in his little bed. No one saw me leave, only our great-hound, Justice. He gave a whine of reproach then tried to follow. I cursed him to silence and closed the door on him.
Those bars look strong but like so much we depend upon in life they are rotten to the core. Rust has eaten them. Even those with steel left at the centre will bend given sufficient leverage. One night when my nurse lay sleeping and three guards on wall-duty argued over the ownership of a silver coin found on the steps at change-over, I climbed down a knotted rope and set foot amidst my father’s wealth. I brushed the rust from my tunic, shook great flakes of it from my hair, and set my lantern, now unhooded, upon the floor.
The Ancrath loot, robbed from almost every corner of empire, lay on stone shelves, belched from coffers, stood stacked in careless piles. Armour, swords, gold coin in wooden tubs, mechanisms that looked like parts of insects, gleaming in the lantern light and tainting the air with alien scents, almost citrus, almost metal. I found my prize beside a helmet full of cogs and ash.
The Duke’s gift didn’t disappoint. Beneath a glass dome that wasn’t glass, sealed by an ivory disk that wasn’t ivory, lay a tiny scene, a church in miniature set around with tiny houses, and there a person, and another. And as I held it to the light, and turned its surprising weight this way and that to see the detail, a snowstorm grew, swirling up from the ground until whirling flakes obliterated the view leaving nothing but a blizzard in a half-globe. I set the snow-globe back, worried for a moment that I had somehow broken it. And miracle of miracles, the snow began to settle.
There’s no magic to it now. I know that the right collection of artisans could make something similar in just a few weeks. They would use glass and ivory, and I don’t know what the snow would be, but as ancient wonders go, there’s little wonder in such things if you’re much past six. But at the time it was magic, of the best kind. Stolen magic.
I shook the snow-globe again, and once more the all-encompassing blizzard rose, chaos, followed by calm, by settling snows, and a return to the world before. I shook it again. It seemed wrong. All that storm and fury signifying nothing. The whole world upheaved, and for what? The same man trudged toward the same church, the same woman waited at the same cottage door. I held a world in my hand and however I shook it, however the pieces fell, in whatever new patterns, nothing changed. The man would never reach the church.
Even at six I knew the Hundred War. I marched wooden soldiers across Father’s maps. I saw the troops return through the Tall Gate, bloody and fewer, and the women weeping in the shadows as others threw themselves at their men. I read the tales of battle, of advance and retreat, of victory and defeat, in books I would not have been allowed to open if my father knew me. I understood all this and I knew that I held my whole world in my right hand. Not some play land, some toy church and tiny men crafted by ancients. My whole world. And no amount of shaking would change it. We would swirl against each other, battle, kill, and fall, and settle, and as the haze cleared, the war would still be there, unchanged, waiting, for me, for my brother, for my mother.
When a game cannot be won, change the game. I read that in the book of Kirk. Without thought I brought the snow-globe overhead and smashed it on the ground. From the wet fragments I picked out the man, barely a wheat-grain between my thumb and finger.
‘You’re free now,’ I said, then flicked him into a corner to find his own way home, because I didn’t have all the answers, not then, and not now.
I left the treasury, taking nothing, almost defeated by the rope climb even so. I felt tired but content. What I had done seemed so right that I somehow thought others would see it too and that my crime would not follow me. With aching arms, and covered with rust and scratches, I hauled myself back over the parapet.
‘What’s this now?’ A big hand took me by the neck and lifted me off my feet. It seemed that the wall guards had been less argumentative over my coin than I had hoped.
It didn’t take long before I stood in my father’s throne-room with a sleepy page lighting torches. No whale oil in silver lamps for this night’s business, just pitch-torches crackling, painting more smoke on the black ceiling. Sir Reilly held my shoulder, his gauntlet too heavy and digging in. We waited in the empty room and watched the shadows dance. The page left.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Though I wasn’t.
Sir Reilly looked grim. ‘I’m sorry too, Jorg.’
‘I won’t do it again,’ I said. Though I would.
‘I know,’ Sir Reilly said, almost tender. ‘But now we must wait for your father, and he is not a gentle man.’
It seemed that we waited half the night, and when the doors boomed open, I jumped despite the promises I made myself.
My father, in his purple robe and iron crown, with not a trace of sleep in him, strode alone to the throne. He sat and spread his hands across the arms of his chair.
‘I want Justice,’ he said. Loud enough for a whole court though Reilly and I were his only audience.
Again. ‘I want Justice.’ Eyes on the great doors.
‘I’m sorry.’ And this time I meant it. ‘I can pay—’
‘Justice!’ He didn’t even glance at me.
The doors opened again and on a cart such as they use to bring prisoners up from the dungeon came my great-hound, mine and Will’s, chained at each leg and pushed by mild-faced servant named Inch, a broad-armed man who had once slipped me a sugar-twist on a fete day.
I started forward but Reilly’s hand kept me where I was.
Justice trembled on the cart, eyes wide, shivering so bad he could barely stand, though he had four legs to my two. He looked wet and as Inch pushed him nearer I caught the stink of rock-oil, the kind they burn in servant’s lamps. Inch reached into the cart and lifted an ugly lump hammer, a big one used for breaking coal into smaller pieces for the fire.
‘Go,’ Father said.
The look in Inch’s mild eyes said he would prefer to stay, but he set the hammer on the floor and left without protest.
‘There are lessons to be learned today,’ Father said.
‘Have you ever burned yourself, Jorg?’ Father asked.
I had. I once picked up a poker that had been left with one end in the fire. The pain had taken my breath. I couldn’t scream. Not until the blisters started to rise could I make any sound above hissing, and when I could I howled so loud my mother came running from her tower, arriving as the maids and nurse burst from the next room. My hand had burned for a week, weeping and oozing, sending bursts of horrific pain along my arm at the slightest wiggle of fingers. The skin fell away and the flesh beneath lay raw and wet, hurt by even a breath of air.
‘You took from me, Jorg,’ Father said. ‘You stole what was mine.’
I knew enough not to say that it was Mother’s.
‘I’ve noticed that you love this dog,’ Father said.
I wondered at that, even in my fear. I thought it more likely that he had been told.
‘That’s a weakness, Jorg,’ Father said. ‘Loving anything is a weakness. Loving a hound is stupidity.’
I said nothing.
‘Shall I burn the dog?’ Father reached for the nearest torch.
‘No!’ It burst from me, a horrified scream.
He sat back. ‘See how weak this dog has made you?’ He glanced at Sir Reilly. ‘How will he rule Ancrath if he cannot rule himself?’
‘Don’t burn him.’ My voice trembled, pleading, but somehow it was a threat too, even if none of us recognized it.
‘Perhaps there is another way?’ Father said. ‘A middle ground.’ He looked at the hammer.
I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to.
‘Break the dog’s leg,’ he said. ‘One quick blow and Justice will be served.’
‘No,’ I swallowed, almost choking, ‘I can’t.’
Father shrugged and leaned from his throne, reaching for the torch again.
I remembered the pain that poker had seared into me. Horror reached for me and I knew I could let it take me, down into hysteria, crying, raging, and I could stay there until the deed was done. I could run and hide in tears and leave Justice to burn.
I picked up the hammer before Father’s hand closed on the torch. It took effort just to lift it, heavy in too many ways. Justice just trembled and watched me, whining, his tail hooked between his legs, no understanding in him, only fear.
‘Swing hard,’ Father said. ‘Or you’ll just have to swing again.’
I looked at Justice’s leg, his long quick leg, the fur plastered down with oil over bone and tendon, the iron shackle, some kind of vice from the Question Chamber, biting into his ankle, blood on the metal.
‘I’m sorry, Father, I won’t ever steal again.’ And I meant it.
‘Don’t try my patience, boy.’ I saw the coldness in his eyes and wondered if he had always hated me.
I lifted the hammer, my arms almost too weak, shaking almost as much as the dog. I raised it slowly, waiting, waiting for Father to say it, to say: ‘Enough, you’ve proved yourself.’
The words never came. ‘Break or burn,’ he said. And with a scream I let the hammer swing.
Justice’s leg broke with a loud snap. For a heartbeat there was no other sound. The limb looked wrong, upper and lower parts at sick-making angles, white bone in a slather of red blood and black fur. Then came the howling, the snarling fury, the straining at his bonds as he looked for something to fight, some battle to keep away the pain.
‘One more, Jorg,’ Father said. He spoke softly but I heard him above the howls. For the longest moment his words made no sense to me.
I said ‘No,’ but I didn’t make him reach for the torch. If I made him reach again he wouldn’t draw back. I knew that much.
This time Justice understood the raising of the hammer. He whimpered, whined, begged as only dogs can beg. I swung hard and missed, blinded with tears. The cart rattled and Justice jumped and howled, bleeding from all his shackles now, the broken leg stretching with tendons exposed. I hit him on my second stroke and shattered his other foreleg.
Vomit took me by surprise, hot, sour, spurting from my mouth. I crawled in it, gagging and gasping. Almost not hearing Father’s: ‘One more.’
With his third leg smashed, Justice couldn’t stand. He flopped, broken in the cart, stinking in his own mess. Strangely he didn’t snarl or whine now. Instead as I lay wracked with sobs, heaving in the air in gulps, he nuzzled me as he used to nuzzle William when he cried with a grazed knee or thwarted ambition. That’s how stupid dogs are, my brothers. And that’s how stupid I was at six, letting weakness take hold of me, giving the world a lever with which to bend whatever iron lies in my soul.
‘One more,’ Father said. ‘He has a leg left to stand on, does he not, Sir Reilly?’
And for once Sir Reilly would not answer his king.
‘One more, Jorg.’
I looked at Justice, broken and licking the tears and snot from my hand. ‘No.’
And with that Father took the torch and tossed it into the cart.
I rolled back from the sudden bloom of flame. Whatever my heart told me to do, my body remembered the lesson of the poker and would not let me stay. The howling from the cart made all that had gone before seem as nothing. I call it howling but it was screaming. Man, dog, horse. With enough hurt we all sound the same.
In that moment, rolling clear, even though I was six and my hands were unclever, I took the hammer that had seemed so heavy and threw it without effort, hard and straight. If my father had moved but a little more slowly I might be king of two lands now. Instead it touched his crown just enough to turn it a quarter circle, then hit the wall behind his chair and fell to the ground, leaving a shallow scar on the Builder-stone.
Father was right of course. There were lessons to be learned that night. The dog was a weakness and the Hundred War cannot be won by a man with such weaknesses. Nor can it be won by a man who yields to the lesser evil. Give an inch, give any single man any single inch and the next thing you hear will be, ‘One more, Jorg, one more.’ And in the end what you love will burn. Father’s lesson was a true one, but knowing that can’t make me forgive the means by which he taught it.
For a time there on the road I followed Father’s teaching: strength in all things, no quarter. On the road I had known with the utter conviction of a child that the Empire throne would be mine only if I kept true to the hard lessons of Justice and the thorns. Weakness is a contagion, one breath of it can corrupt a man whole and entire. Now though, even with all the evil in me, I don’t know if I could teach such lessons to a son of mine.
William never needed such teaching. He had iron in him from the start, always the more clever, the more sure, the fiercest of us, despite my two extra years. He said I should have thrown the hammer as soon as I lifted it, and should not have missed. I would be king then, and we would still have our dog.
Two days later I stole away from both nurse and guard and found my way to the rubbish pits behind the table-knights’ stable. A north wind carried the last of winter, laced with rain that was almost ice. I found my dog’s remains, a reeking mess, black, dripping, limp but heavy. I had to drag him, but I had told William I would bury him not leave him to rot on the pile. I dragged him two miles in the freezing rain, along the Roma Road, empty save for a merchant with his wagon lashed closed and his head down. I took Justice to the girl with the dog, and I buried him there beside her, in the mud, my hands numb and the rest of me wishing I were numb.
‘Hello, Jorg,’ Katherine said. And then nothing.
Nothing? If I could remember all that. If I could remember that dark path to the cemetery of Perechaise, and live with it these many years … what in hell lay in that box, and how could I ever want it back?
Many men do not look their part. Wisdom may wait behind a foolish smile, bravery can gaze from eyes that cry fright. Brother Rike however is that rarest of creatures, a man whose face tells the whole story. Blunt features beneath a heavy brow, the ugly puckering of old scar tissue, small black eyes that watch the world with impersonal malice, dark hair, short and thick with dirt, bristling across the thickest of skulls. And had God given him a smaller frame in place of a giant’s packed with unreasonable helpings of muscle, weakness in place of an ox team’s stamina, still Rike would be the meanest dwarf in Christendom.
11
Wedding Day
Mountains are a great leveller. They don’t care who you are or how many.
Some have it that the Builders made the Matteracks, drinking the red blood of the earth to steal its power, and that the peaks were thrown up when the rocks themselves revolted and shrugged the Builders off. Gomst tells it that the Lord God set the mountains here, ripples in the wet clay as he formed the world with both hands. Whoever it was that did the work, they have my thanks. It’s the Matteracks that put the ‘high’ into the Renar Highlands. They march on east to west, wrinkling the map through other kingdoms, but it’s in the Highlands that they do their best work. Here it’s the Matteracks that say where you can and can’t go.
It’s been said once or twice that I have a stubborn streak. In any case I have never subscribed to the idea that a king can be told where he can’t go in his own kingdom. And so in the years since arriving as a callow youth, in between learning the sword song, mastering the art of shaving, and dispensing justice with a sharp edge, I took to mountain climbing.
Climbing, it turned out, was as new to the people of the Highlands as it was to me. They knew all about getting up to places they needed to be. High pastures for the wool-goats, the summer passes for trade, the Eiger cliff for hunting opals. But about getting to places they didn’t need to go … well who has time for that when their belly grumbles or there’s money to be made?
‘What in hell are you doing, Jorg?’ Coddin asked me once when I came back bloody, with my wrist grinding bone at every move.
‘You should come out with me,’ I told him, just to see him wince. I climb alone. In truth there’s never room for two on a mountaintop.
‘I’ll rephrase,’ said Coddin. I could see the grey starting in his hair. Threads of it at his temples. ‘Why are you doing it?’
I pursed my lips at that, then grinned at the answer. ‘The mountains told me I couldn’t.’
‘You’re familiar with King Canute?’ he asked. ‘It’s not a path I advise for you – since you pay me for advising these days.’
‘Heh.’ I wondered if Katherine would climb mountains. I thought she would, given half a chance. ‘I’ve seen the sea, Coddin. The sea can eat mountains whole. I might have the occasional difference of opinion with the odd mountain or two, but if you catch me challenging the ocean you have my permission to drop an ox on me.’
I told Coddin that stubbornness led me to climb, and perhaps it did, but there’s more to it. Mountains have no memory, no judgments to offer. There’s a purity in the struggle to reach a peak. You leave your world behind and take only what you need. For a creature like me there is nothing closer to redemption.
‘Attack,’ Miana had said, and surely a man shouldn’t refuse his wife on their wedding day. Of course it helped that I had planned to attack all along. I led the way myself, for the sally ports and the tunnels that lead to them are known to few. Or rather many know of them but, like an honest priest, few would be able to show you one.
We walked four abreast, the tallest men hunched to save scraping their heads on rough-hewn stone. Every tenth man held a pitch torch and at the back of our column they almost choked on the smoke. My own torch showed little more than the ten yards of tunnel ahead, twisting to take advantage of natural voids and fissures. The tramp tramp of many feet, at first hypnotic, faded to background noise, unnoticed until without warning it stopped. I turned and flames showed nothing but my swinging shadow. Not a man of my command, not a whisper of them.
‘What is it that you think you’re doing here, Jorg?’ The dream-witch’s words flowed around me, a river of soft cadence, carrying only hints of his Saracen heritage. ‘I watch you from one moment to the next. Your plans are known before you so much as unfold them.’
‘Then you’ll know what it is I think I’m doing here, Sageous.’ I cast about for a sign of him.
‘You know we joke about you, Jorg?’ Sageous asked. ‘The pawn who thinks he’s playing his own game. Even Ferrakind laughs about it behind the fire, and Kelem, still preserved in his salt mines. Lady Blue has you on her sapphire board, Skilfar sees your future patterned on the ice, at the Mathema they factor you into their equations, a small term approximated to nothing. In the shadows behind thrones you count for little, Jorg, they laugh at how you serve me and know it not. The Silent Sister only smiles when your name is spoken.’
‘I’m pleased to be of some service then.’ To my left the shadows on the wall moved with reluctance, slow to respond to the swing of my torch. I stepped forward and thrust the flames into the darkest spot, scraping embers over the stone.
‘This is your last day, Jorg.’ Sageous hissed as flame ate shadow and darkness peeled from stone like layers of skin. It pleased me no end to hear his pain. ‘I’ll watch you die.’ And he was gone.
Makin nearly walked into me from behind. ‘Problem?’
I shook off the daydream’s tatters and picked up my pace. ‘No problems.’ Sageous liked to pull the strings so gently that a man would never suspect himself steered. To make Sageous angry, to make him hate, only eroded the subtle powers he used. My first victory of the day. And if he felt the need to taunt me then I must have worried him somehow. He must think I had some kind of chance – which made him a hell of a lot more optimistic than I was.
‘No problems. In fact the morning is just starting to look up!’
Another fifty yards and a stair took us onto the slopes via a crawl space beneath a vast rock known as Old Bill.
When you leave the Haunt you are immediately among mountains. They dwarf you in a way that high walls and tall towers cannot. In the midst of the heave and thrust of the Matteracks all of us, the Haunt itself, even the Prince of Arrow’s twenty thousands, were as nothing. Ants fighting on the carcass of an elephant.
Out on those slopes in the coldness of the wind, with the mountains high and silent on all sides, it felt good to be alive, and if it had to be, it was a good day to die.
‘Have Marten take his troops and hold the Runyard for me,’ I said.
‘The Runyard?’ Makin said, wrapping his cloak tight against the wind. ‘You want our best captain to secure a dead end valley?’
‘We need those men, Jorg,’ Coddin said, straightening from his crawl. ‘We can’t spare ten soldiers, let alone a hundred of our best.’ Even as he argued he beckoned a man to carry my orders.
‘You don’t think he can hold it?’ I asked.
And that set Makin running in a new direction. ‘Hold it? He’d hold the gates of heaven for you, that man; or hell. Lord knows why.’
I shrugged. Marten would hold because I’d given him what he called salvation. A second chance to stand, to protect his family. For four years he had studied nothing but war, from arrow to army, the four years since he came to the castle with Sara at his side. In the end he would hold because years ago in the ruins of his farm I had given his little girl a wind-up clown and Makin’s clove-spice. A Builder toy to make her smile and the clove-spice to take her pain, and her life. The drug stole her away rather than the waste, and she died smiling at sweet dreams instead of choking on her own blood.
‘Why the Runyard?’ Coddin wanted to know. Coddin couldn’t be put off the scent so easily.
‘The Prince of Arrow doesn’t have assassins in my castle, Coddin, but he has spies. I tell you what you need to know, what will make a difference to your actions. The rest, the long shots, the hunches, it’s safe to keep locked away.’ I tapped the side of my head. For a moment though the copper box burned against my hip and its thorn pattern filled my vision.
‘I’d be happier on a horse,’ Makin said.
‘I’d be happier on a giant mountain goat,’ I said. ‘One that shat diamonds. Until we find some, we’re walking.’
Three hundred men walked behind us. Armies are wont to march, but marching in the Highlands is a short trip to a broken ankle. Three hundred men of the Watch in mountain grey. Exiting the sally port amid the boulder field west of the Haunt where the tunnel rose through the bedrock. No crimson tabards here, or gold braiding, no rampant lions or displayed dragons or crowned feckin’ frogs, just tatter-robes in rock shades. I hadn’t come out for a uniform competition. I came out to win.
Behind us rockets took flight, lacing the dull morning with trails of sparks, and leaving a loose pall of sulphurous smoke above the castle. Wedding celebrations to amuse the Highlanders, but also a convenient draw for the eyes to the north of us, the uninvited guests.
The Prince’s army had started to move, units massed in their attack formations, Normardy pike-men to the fore, rank upon rank of archers on the far side, men of Belpan with their longbows near tall as them, crossbow units out of Ken, beards braided, brown pennants fluttering above the drummers, each man with a shield boy hurrying before him. The archers stood ready to peel off and find their places on the ridges to our east, the useless Orlanth cavalry at the rear. Their day would come later, after wintering in the ruins of my home, after the high passes cleared and the Prince moved on to increase his tally of fallen kingdoms. The Thurtans next no doubt. And on to Germania and the dozen Teuton realms.
We came down the slopes west of the Haunt in a grey wave, swords, daggers, shortbows. I’d spent most of dear uncle’s gold on those bows. The men of the Forest Watch knew the shortbow, and the Highland recruits learned it fast enough. Three hundred recurved composite shortbows, Scythian made. Ten gold apiece. I could have sat every man on a half-decent nag for that.
The Prince’s scouts saw us. That had never been in doubt. A sharp-eyed observer on their front lines might have seen us across the mile or so that remained. But why would they be looking? They had scouts.
I picked up the pace. There’s nothing like mountains for making you fit to run. At first when you come to the mountains everything is hard. Even the air feels too thin to breathe. Years pass and your muscles become iron. Especially if you climb.
We moved quickly. Speed on the slopes is an art. The Prince of Arrow wasn’t stupid. The commanders he had picked had chosen officers who had selected scouts who knew mountains. They moved fast, but the few men that fell didn’t get up again before we caught them.
It’s always nice to surprise someone. The Prince of Arrow hadn’t expected me to charge his tens of thousands with my three hundred. That’s probably why we were able to arrive only seconds behind the first word of our advance, and long before that word could be acted on.
Three hundred is a magic number. King Leonidas held back a Persian ocean at the Hot Gates with just three hundred. I would have liked to meet the Spartans. That story has outlived empires by the score. King Leonidas held back an ocean, and Canute did not.
I could feel the burn in my legs, the cool breath hauled in and the hot breath out. Sweat inside my armour, a river of it under the breastplate. Hard leathers these, cured and boiled in oil, padded linen underneath, no plate or chain today. Today we needed to move.
When I gave the shout, we stopped on the rock field, scattered on the slope, two hundred yards from their lines, no more, close enough to smell them. On this flank, far from the archers bound for the ridge, men of Arrow formed the largest contingent, units of spearmen in light ringmail, swordsmen in heavier chain, among them the landed knights who had levied the soldiers from farm and village or emptied their castle guard in service of their prince. And all of them, at least the ones we could see before the roll of the mountains hid the vast expanse of their advance, marched without haste, confident, some joking, watching the sparks and smoke above the Haunt. The great siege engines creaked amongst them, drawn by many mules.
I didn’t need to tell the Watch. They started to loose their shafts immediately. The first screams carried the message of our attack far more effectively than scouts still hunting for their breath.
Aiming at the thickest knots of men made it hard not to find flesh.
We managed a second volley before the first of the enemy started to charge. The Prince’s archers, massed on the far side of the army column a quarter mile off and more, could make no reply. Know thyself, Pythagoras said. But he was a man of numbers and you can’t count on those. Sun Tzu tells us: Know thy enemies. I had lost men I could ill afford patrolling these slopes, but I knew my enemy and I knew the disposition of his forces.
The Prince’s archers would have found us hard targets in any case, loose amongst the rocks and the long morning shadows.
Another volley and another. Hundreds killed or wounded with each flight. Wounded is good. Sometimes wounded is better than dead. The wounded cause trouble. If you let them.
The foot-soldiers came at us in ones and twos, then handfuls, and behind that a flood, like a wave breaking and racing across sand.
‘Pick your targets,’ I shouted.
Another volley. A single man amongst the forerunners fell, skewered through his thigh.
‘Dammit! Pick your targets.’
Another volley and none of the runners fell. The dying happened back in the masses still milling in confusion, caught in the press of bodies. One of mine for every twenty of theirs. Stiff odds. If we’d managed ten volleys before they reached us we might have slain three thousand men. We managed six.
12
Wedding Day
‘Be ready to run,’ I shouted.
‘That’s your plan, Jorg?’ Makin’s face could take surprise to a whole new level. Something in the eyebrows did it.
‘Be ready,’ I repeated. In truth if I had a plan I held no more than a thread of it, teasing it out inch by inch. And the thread I held told me, Be ready to run. Sun Tzu instructs: If in all respects your foe exceeds you, be ready to elude him.
‘If that were the fucking plan,’ said Makin, shouldering his bow, ‘we should have started two weeks ago.’
The first of Arrow’s soldiers reached me, purple-faced from the race up the mountain.
Katherine Ap Scorron fills my nights. More than is healthy. And all of those dreams are dark. Chella walks in some of them, stepping direct from the necromancers’ halls beneath Mount Honas, wicked and delicious. Her smile says she knows me to my rotten core, and Katherine’s face will writhe across hers as firm flesh turns to corrupt undulation.
The dead child will wander in and out of many dreams, holding the thorn-patterned box in crimson hands. He takes different names. William most often, though he is not the brother I knew. But he follows Katherine whenever I call her to my bed; fresh killed in some, the blood still running, and in others grey with rot.
The telling of dreams is a dull business, but experiencing a stranger’s dreams at first hand may be another matter. Crafting nightmares as weapons or shackles and setting them loose to hunt your victims could very well be entertaining. It seems to keep a certain dream-witch busy.
My father thought Sageous to be his creature. Perhaps he thinks he sent the witch away after I broke his power in the Tall Castle, and maybe the Prince of Arrow now thinks he owns Sageous’s services. Like Corion, though, and the Silent Sister and others scattered across the empire, Sageous sees himself as a player behind the thrones, pushing kings and counts, earls and princes across the board. I have never liked to be pushed. The Prince of Arrow also struck me as a man who would prove hard for the dream-witch to move, but we will see.
Sageous learned twice over not to send his creatures out to snare me in my sleep. I think each failure takes something vital from him. Certainly he did not persist. The child is not his creation. I would know if it were.
The heathen watches though. He stands on the edge of my dreaming, silent, hoping not to be seen. I have chased him to the edge of waking and fallen from my bed choking the pillow. Once my sleeping hand found a dagger. Feathers everywhere. He seeks to steer me with the most gentle of prods. Even a soft touch, if it is made sufficiently far ahead of the crucial event, can have a great impact. Sageous seeks to steer me, to steer us all, his fingers swift and light as spiders, pulling delicate threads, until the power he wants is delivered into his lap as if by accident.
Tutor Lundist said Sun Tzu should be my guide in war. My father may have executed Lundist a week after I fled the Tall Castle but what the tutor taught will stay with me longer than any lesson Olidan Ancrath inflicted on his son.
All war is deception, Sun Tzu tells me on pages yellow as jaundice, dry as sand. All war is deception but where are my chances to deceive? I have spies in my halls, watchers in my dreams. The grave’s a fine and private place they say, but I suspect even there secrets can be hard to hold in these broken days.
And so I use what I have. A copper box that holds memories. One that stores a memory so terrible I couldn’t keep it in me. I have the box and I use it. Long ago I learned that pressed to the forehead, hard enough to leave its thorn print marked upon the skin, it will steal a memory, a thought, a plan, whatever is foremost in your thinking. The plan is lost but safe from Sageous’ kind, and all that remains is the recollection that you had a good idea, and the memory of where to find it again when needed.
Hold the box tight in your hand and you can feel the dark edges of horror inside, cutting, burning. The pain leaks out, robbed of its context, raw and cold, and with it, if you’re clever, if the fingers of your mind are deft, you can draw the thread of a previously stored stratagem from a place beyond all spies. And if you can surprise your enemy, then surprising yourself is small price to pay.
13
Wedding Day
The first man I killed in my eighteenth year had done most of the job for me. Running two hundred yards up a steep and rocky slope in chain armour is hard work. The soldier looked about ready to keel over, like the old woman in the market who never got up after seeing Gorgoth for the first and last time. I let him run onto my sword and that was the end of it.
The next man went pretty much the same way, only I had to be a little faster and thrust at him rather than just let him impale himself. In battle the thrust is a much cleaner death than the cut. Unless of course it’s the guts where you get it and then you’re going to have a long hard time of it before the rot sets in and carries you off screaming days later.
The third man, tall and bearded, took the two bodies at my feet as a hint and slowed down to face me. He should have waited for his friends behind him on the slope, but instead he came in swinging his broadsword, still huffing and puffing from his run. I stepped back to avoid the sweep of his blade then swung my own and took his throat. He turned, spraying arterial blood over the friends he should have waited for, then tripped and fell amongst the rocks. Until you’ve seen it you won’t believe how far blood will spurt from the right cut. It’s a wonder we don’t feel that pressure inside us all the time, a wonder that we don’t just explode sometimes.
I should have turned and run at that point. It was the plan after all. My plan. And the men of the Watch were already in full retreat behind me. Instead I advanced, moving quickly between the two blood-spattered soldiers who leapt out of Beardy’s way as he fell. I made a figure-eight cut, lashing out from one side to the other, and both of them fell, their mail torn, a shattered collarbone on the right, sliced chest muscle on the left. It shouldn’t have taken them both down, but it did, and I felt that four years’ hard practice with the blade hadn’t been entirely wasted.
Both men were flopping on the ground, calling out about their wounds, as I cut the sixth down, another staggerer, exhausted from his charge. That done, I turned and fled, outpacing the pursuit and working hard to catch the Watch.
The men of Arrow were never going to outrun us, but they could hardly stop the chase and let us come back to practise our archery again, so they kept at it. The captains driving them were making the right choices given what they had to work with. What they should have done, however, was to withdraw to the main force and rely on their commander’s battle sense to deploy his archers as a defence against us. Though perhaps the Prince of Arrow was happy enough sending a few thousand soldiers up the mountain to contain the threat and to keep his army focused on the Haunt.
I caught Makin up a few minutes later, threading my path past Watch men with less go in their legs than I had that day. Watch-master Hobbs ran with him, his captains beside him, Harold, Stodd, and old Keppen who’d made the wise choice and refused to jump for a previous watch-master back at Rulow Falls years ago. I say the Watch-master ran but by that point ‘brisk walk’ would cover it.
‘Set four squads on those ridges,’ I said. ‘Let’s shoot a few more Arrows.’
‘And when the enemy reaches them?’ Hobbs asked.
‘Time to run again,’ I said.
‘At least they’ll get a rest,’ Keppen said, and spat a wad of phlegm on the rock.
‘You’ll get one too, old man.’ I grinned. ‘It’s your squads I’m thinking should stay.’
‘I should have jumped,’ he muttered. He shook his head and raised his shortbow high, its red marker ribbon snapping in the wind. His men started to converge behind him as he jogged off toward the ridges.
‘Running’s all very well,’ Hobbs said, striding on, ‘but we’ll run out of mountain in the end, or be chased out of the Highlands entirely.’
‘Which sounds like—’ Makin heaved in a breath ‘—the best option when all’s said and done.’ Of all of them he looked the worst off. Too many years letting a horse do the running. He clambered up a large boulder and stood on top looking back down the valley. ‘Must be three thousand of the bastards after us. Maybe four.’
‘Likes to keep the odds in his favour does the Prince,’ Hobbs said. He scratched his head where the grey grew thickest and the hair thinned. ‘I hope you’ve got a hell of a plan, King Jorg.’
I hoped so too. If not for Norwood and Gelleth these Watch men would have fled an age ago. How quickly fact turns into fiction, and strangely when fact becomes legend, folk seem more ready to believe it. And maybe they were right to have faith, for I did reduce the Lord of Gelleth, his mighty castle, and his armies all to dust. Maybe they were right and I was wrong, but I found it hard to believe in whatever tricks I might have stowed in a small copper box.
Believer or not, the box was all I had. So I pressed it to my forehead, hard, as if I could push the memory I needed through the bone. The feeling is like that misremembered name appearing without preamble on your tongue, ready to be spoken, after so long dancing beyond reach on its tip. Except that instead of one word, there are many, images with them, and touches and tastes. A piece of your life returned to you.
The memory flooded me, taking me from the cold slopes, back across years. Gone the crowded Watch men, gone the shouting and the screams.
I lunged for the next hold, throwing my body after my arm and hand, loosing the last hold before my fingers had found a grip on the next, before I lost momentum. Climbing is a form of faith, there’s no holding back, no reserve. My fingers jammed into the crack, the sharp edge biting, toes scrabbling on rough rock, the soft leather finding traction as I started to slip.
There’s a spire of stone in the Matteracks that points at the sky as though it were God’s own index finger. How it came to be, who carved it from the fastness of the mountains, I can’t say. One book I own speaks of wind and rivers and ice sculpting the world in the misty long ago, but that sounds like a story for children, and a dull one at that. Better to talk of wind demons, river gods, and ice giants out of Jotenheim. It’s a more interesting tale and just as likely.
Arm aching, leg straining, curved in an awkward pose across the fractured stone, I gasped for air, stealing a cold lungful from the wind. They say don’t look down, but I like to. I like to see the loose pieces fall away and become lost in the distance. My muscles burned, the heat stolen by the wind. It felt as though I were trapped between ice and fire.
The spire stands clear of a vast spur where one of the mountains’ roots divides two deep valleys. From the scree slopes at the spire’s base to the flat top of it where a small cottage might squeeze, there are four hundred feet of shattered rock, vertical in the main, in places leaning out.
A hundred feet below I could see the ledge where had I met the goat. The heights a mountain goat will scale for the possibility of a green mouthful never cease to amaze me. They must use their own kind of magic to climb without the cleverness of fingers or toes. I’d pulled myself up and come eyeball to eyeball with the beast, its long face framed by two curling horns. There’s something alien in a goat’s eye, something not seen in dog or horse or bird. It’s the rectangular pupil. As if they’ve climbed out of hell or fallen from the moon. We sat together in mutual distrust while I caught my breath and waited for life to find its way back into limbs and extremities.
I found the rock pillar in my first year as King of Renar and in all my time on the throne it was perhaps that spare needle of mountain that came closest to killing me. I failed to climb it seven times, and I am not a man who gives up any attempt easily.
Coddin once asked me why I climb and I spun him some pretty lies. The truth – at least for today – is that back when I hadn’t many years on me, my mother would play for William and me on an instrument from the vaults of the tall castle. A piano. A thing of magic and many keys in black and white. We were trouble, Will and I, it has to be said. Fighting, scheming, digging out mischief of any kind that might be had – but when she played we fell silent and just listened. I remember every moment, her long fingers moving on the keys so fast they blurred together, the sway of her body, her hair hanging in a single long plait between her shoulders, the light falling across the wooden body of the instrument. But I can’t hear it. She plays behind glass, walled behind too many years, lost when I walked away from it all, from her, from that damn carriage and the thorns.
I see, but I can’t hear.
When I climb, and only then, on the very edge of everything, I catch stray notes. Like words robbed of meaning on the cusp of hearing … the music almost reaches me. And for that I would dare any height.
I made an eighth assault on the Spire at the start of the summer in which the Prince of Arrow crossed my borders with his armies new laden with loot from conquests in Normardy and Orlanth. Loot and, it must be said, recruits, for the lords of those lands were not well loved and the Prince won the people’s hearts almost before their dead were boxed and buried.
Climbing is about commitment. On the Spire there are places so sheer that one hold must be wholly relinquished before the next can be obtained, and sometimes then only by hurling yourself up an open expanse of rock that offers no purchase. In such moments you are falling, albeit upwards, and if the next hold escapes you then that fall will carry you to the ground. There are no half measures in such ascents: you place everything you are or will be on each decision. Lives can be lived in this manner, but I do not recommend it. In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives – the climber, though he may die young, will have lived.
There comes a point on a long climb when you know you have to surrender or die. There’s no quarter given. I hung to cold stone fifty feet beneath the summit, weak as a child, aching with hunger, blistered hands and feet, arms screaming. The art of survival in the mountains is knowing when to give up. The art of reaching the top is knowing when not to.
‘If I die here,’ I whispered to the stone. ‘If I fall and die, I will count it a life lived, maybe not well, but fully. No book will know my end, but I will have died in battle none the less.’ And summoning my strength I started to climb again.
Like the Scots king and his famous spider, my eighth attempt proved the charm.
Retching, slobbering on the rock, I crawled over the final corner, horizontal at long last. I lay trembling, gasping, half sobbing, as close to the end of my endurance as I had ever come.
When you’re climbing you take nothing with you that you do not absolutely need. That’s a good discipline to acquire, and the mountains teach it to you for free. They say that time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. The mountains are also great teachers and better still, they let the occasional star pupil live.
The mountains teach you to be prepared for change. Amongst the peaks the weather can shift from fair to foul quick as blinking. One moment you might be clambering up a forgiving slope and the next you could be clinging to it as though it were your mother, whilst an east wind tries to carry your frozen corpse off with it.
Climbing God’s Finger I learned a lot about holding on by my fingertips. By the time I finally hauled myself weak and trembling onto the very top of the spire, I had come to realize that I’ve been holding on by my fingertips my entire life.
I flopped to my back. I lay there on the rock with nothing to see between me and a relentless blue sky. I had climbed light, taking nothing unneeded with me, no room on that narrow peak for anyone else, ghosts or otherwise, no Katherine, no William, my mother and father four hundred feet below, too far away to hear. Not even the shadow of a child on the rock or the glimmer of a copper box in memory. It isn’t the danger or the challenge that keeps me climbing, it’s the purity and focus. When you’re a five-second drop from being a smear of guts and pulverized bone, when your whole weight is on eight fingers, then seven, then five, your choices are black and white, made on instinct without baggage.
When you climb hard and reach an impossible peak or ledge, you gain a new perspective, you see the world differently. It’s not just the angle you’re looking from that changes. You change too. They say you can’t go back, and I learned that when I returned to the Tall Castle after four years on the road. I walked the same halls, saw the same people, but I hadn’t gone back, I’d come to a new castle, seen with new eyes. The same is true if you climb high enough, only with climbing you don’t need to stay away for years. Climb a mountain, see the world from its highest point, and a new man will climb down to a world of subtle differences the next day.
Metaphysics aside, there is plenty to be seen from a high point in the mountains. If you sit with your legs dangling over the biggest drop in the world, with the wind streaming your hair behind you, and your shadow falling so far it might never hit the ground … you notice new things.
On the road we have our sayings. ‘Pax,’ we say if we’re caught with our hands in another man’s saddlebags. ‘Visiting the locals,’ we say when a brother is off about dark business after a battle. Where’s Brother Rike? Visiting the locals. In the Renar Highlands there’s a saying that I didn’t hear until I struggled up to the village of Gutting with Sir Makin in tow. ‘’E was taking a rock for a walk, yer worship.’ At the time I paid it no attention, a bit of local colour, a streak of green in the manure. I heard the expression a few more times in the years that followed, generally when somebody was off on mysterious business. Taking a rock for a walk. Once you’ve noticed a phrase or word it starts to crop up everywhere. ‘Lost his flock,’ was another one. I’d hear these things on the parade ground in main, from the local recruits. ‘That John of Bryn had my bowstrings while I was on wall watch.’ ‘What you gonna do about that?’ ‘Don’t you worry none, already happened. Lost his flock he did.’
Up in a high place, especially one hard-reached, you gain a fresh perspective. Looking out over the peaks and cliffs and slopes I’d come to know, I noticed something new. The shadows gave it away, leading the eye here and there to places where the land didn’t lie quite right. It took a time of empty watching, of idle legs dangling, and thought-stuff swirling behind my eyes before, like the snow in the globe, everything settled and I saw clear, the same scene but with new detail.
High on the sides of almost every valley, of all but the highest gorges, the loose rocks gathered too thickly, perched too precariously. At first the eye buys into the deception. It has to be natural. To move that much stone would take a thousand lifetimes, and to what end?
Taking a rock for a walk turns out to be a genuine national pastime in the Highlands, so deep grained, so known, that nobody seems to feel the need to say more. For generations the men going up to tend their goats have filled any idle moment with the business of carrying loose stones from one part of the slope to another higher part, slowly building up the same piles that their father and grandfather built upon.
If a Renar man takes the ultimate liberty and decides to graze his goats on another man’s land, chances are that there’ll be a sudden rockslide and the man will have lost his flock. If it weren’t a Renar man then he might lose even more than that.
It’s hard to tease out a thread when you’re running, especially when that thread is a plan and you’re teasing it from a memory box, and you’re running uphill with thousands of soldiers in pursuit. But even our enemies call the Ancraths cunning, and I call us clever. So I pulled a little more and all of a sudden I saw the slopes we were running up with a whole new perspective. Or rather, an older one that I had forgotten.
From the journal of Katherine Ap Scorron
October 25th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. In my rooms again. I’m always in my rooms.
I had that dream again. The one with Jorg. I have the knife as always, twelve inches and thin as a finger. He’s standing there with his arms open and he’s laughing at me. Laughing. I’m standing there in my torn dress with the knife and him laughing, and I thrust it into him, like he thrust … and I stab it into him. And old Hanna watches and she smiles. But her smile isn’t right and when Jorg falls there are bruises on him too. On his neck. Long dark bruises. And I can almost see the fingers and the thumb print.
I’m running this torn satin through my fingers and it’s me that feels torn. My memories fight my dreams. Every single day. And I don’t know who is winning and who is losing. I don’t remember.
November 7th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Bell-tower – keep-top.
I’ve found a place to be alone, the tallest point on the Tall Castle, just me and the crows and the wind. The tower holds only one bell, huge and made of iron. They never ring it. At least now it’s serving a purpose by sheltering me from the wind.
I find myself wanting to be alone. All the ladies grate on me, even the ones that mean well. There’s no peace in the castle – only the feeling that something is wrong, something I can’t name or touch.
I found initials up here, H.J.A, you can see them out on the far side of the tower where it leans over the outer wall of the keep. I can see no way to reach the spot. It says something about Honorous Jorg Ancrath that even his name is out of reach.
Sageous came to my chamber today. Just to the door. The Prince of Arrow has come again. The Prince and his brother, Orrin and Egan. Sareth said they would come back. She said they would come back to sniff around me again. That’s just how she said it. As if they were dogs and I was a bitch in heat.
I don’t think I am. In heat that is. I can be a bitch. I can be a bitch every day. I made Maery Coddin cry today and I hardly meant to.
Even so, there’s something about Orrin and something else about Egan. Grandmother would say they both burn too bright. Too bright for regular folks, she’d say. But I’ve never counted myself regular. And if they do burn bright – if they do put heat in me – or me in heat – what of it? I fancy I put some heat in them. Or why would they both be back at the Tall Castle a moon after their first visit? I don’t think it’s for the pleasure of King Olidan’s company. I don’t think Orrin’s charm or Egan’s threat had much impact on that scary old man. I don’t think the devil would make Olidan pause. I don’t think he’d bow his head even if God himself sent an angel to his doors.
Sareth says both the Arrows are pointed my way. She has a dirty mouth. She says they’ll both ask for my hand. Even though I’m not Scorron’s first daughter and Father promised alliance and land to Olidan already. She says they’ll both ask for my hand but it’s not my hand they’re interested in, or my dowry. She said more, but her mouth is dirtier than my quill, black with ink though it is. And if they did ask, what would I say? It hardly seems that they can be brothers, one as bright and good as my Sir Galen, the other as dark and tempting as Jorg who killed him.
I dreamed again last night. I woke up speaking the words of that dream and now I can’t even remember the shape of it. I can remember a knife, a long knife. I know I need to use it. I remember Jorg hurt me. I should go back and read my journal, but somehow my hands don’t want to turn the pages back, only forward. I had a dream about that too.
Sageous is at the door again. The princes are waiting.
I don’t like that man’s eyes.
Gorgoth is like no other. There is no mould for the leucrota. Twisted by the Builders’ poisons they fall broken from the womb and follow strange paths as they grow. The ribs that pierce his flesh and reach from each side are black and thick, his hide more red than blood, and the muscle beneath surges as he moves. And though he is shaped for war and for horror, there are few men in Adam’s image whose approval would mean as much to me – and most of them lie dead.
14
Four years earlier
A day after we left the sands of Thar and started to ride through the Thurtan grasslands I took the box from Makin. I felt the sharp edges of the lost memory through the copper walls and sensed the poison held there. Makin once told me that a man who’s got no fear is missing a friend. With the thorn-patterned copper clutched uneasy in my fist I thought perhaps I had found that friend at last. I turned it one way, then the other. It held nothing good – only me. And a man should be a little scared of himself surely? Of what he might do. To know thyself must be terribly dull. I put the box at the bottom of my saddlebag and left it unopened. I didn’t ask after Katherine. I took a new knife from Grumlow and rode toward our business in Heimrift.
We rode north across wide acres where the wind whipped the spring grass into a thrashing sea and green ripples raced one after the other. A land made for horse, for galloping, for chasing between the dark borders of one forest and the next. I let Brath have his head and exhausted both of us as if all hell were at our heels. The Brothers kept pace as best they could, all of us wanting to leave Thar many miles behind. Old fires still burned there, unseen. In a thousand years Mount Honas, the place where I lit a Builders’ Sun, might be like Thar, a Promised Land that would return to man in time but for the now loved us not.
That night as we settled to sleep I saw the baby for the first time, lying dead in the long grass by our camp. I threw off my blanket and walked across to it, watched by Gorgoth, and by Gog who slept beside him now. The spot where the child had lain was empty. I caught a whiff of perfume, white musk maybe. With a shrug I returned to my bed. Some things are best forgotten.
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Mark Lawrence
The second book in the Broken Empire series, Lawrence takes his young anti-hero one step closer to his grand ambition.To reach greatness you must step on bodies, and many brothers lie trodden in my wake. I’ve walked from pawn to player and I’ll win this game of ours, though the cost of it may drown the world in blood…The land burns with the fires of a hundred battles as lords and petty kings fight for the Broken Empire. The long road to avenge the slaughter of his mother and brother has shown Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath the hidden hands behind this endless war. He saw the game and vowed to sweep the board. First though he must gather his own pieces, learn the rules of play, and discover how to break them.A six nation army, twenty thousand strong, marches toward Jorg's gates, led by a champion beloved of the people. Every decent man prays this shining hero will unite the empire and heal its wounds. Every omen says he will. Every good king knows to bend the knee in the face of overwhelming odds, if only to save their people and their lands. But King Jorg is not a good king.Faced by an enemy many times his strength Jorg knows that he cannot win a fair fight. But playing fair was never part of Jorg’s game plan.
KING OF THORNS
Book Two of The Broken Empire
Mark Lawrence
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
Published by HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2012
Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2012
Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication
Source ISBN: 9780007439034
Ebook Edition © April 2012 ISBN: 9780007439041
Version: 2017-10-18
Dedicated to my son, Rhodri.
Table of Contents
Title Page (#u9e2a99b1-a472-55f4-ae97-2df91de40315)
Copyright (#u56dc8fda-5bb6-5f04-b19b-c5fadc53db9a)
Dedication (#u97fc13c1-0780-5e97-bddf-4bd07622a673)
Map (#ufedd3224-059e-5ffb-b2dd-3466a8f69896)
Prologue (#u474975e3-94c4-5f9c-9019-3ff15dc6607b)
Chapter 1 (#u83d1cba3-7b99-59cb-aae1-9965ff51720e)
Chapter 2 (#u956cfb7d-7151-54a2-9148-c23b2252cf56)
Chapter 3 (#uf8a2e340-7111-5727-abd1-cb4973fd9a98)
Chapter 4 (#u735539f5-4541-52ad-902e-2ccb788b6925)
Chapter 5 (#u716bdada-30d9-5c8e-8a1c-a0aa70de5690)
Chapter 6 (#u66a79cd6-2f65-5fe3-8916-fb5c3afb6d52)
Chapter 7 (#ufb02ef7e-070e-5f92-951e-a9ba258350e4)
Chapter 8 (#u54f029fe-4e74-5d34-8220-993e1d9b4408)
Chapter 9 (#u31d1679a-5935-517d-ba6b-d083e13ff28f)
Chapter 10 (#ua0312902-e2b1-5839-a87f-76515107b9b9)
Chapter 11 (#u947f6888-33a5-530d-8fd5-8bb88276c81f)
Chapter 12 (#u08f6d52a-1170-5c7e-963a-e3784a96b00d)
Chapter 13 (#u286caf3a-7a7b-5012-85b9-a80cbb55c896)
Chapter 14 (#u3a28ff07-fca6-509e-bb3d-6df7e8542074)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 36 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 37 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 38 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 39 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 40 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 41 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 42 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 43 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 44 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 45 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 46 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 47 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 48 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 49 (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Mark Lawrence (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue
I found these pages scattered, teased across the rocks by a fitful wind. Some were too charred to show their words, others fell apart in my hands. I chased them though, as if it were my story they told and not hers.
Katherine’s story, Aunt Katherine, sister to my stepmother, Katherine who I have wanted every moment of the past four years, Katherine who picks strange paths through my dreams. A few dozen ragged pages, weighing nothing in my hand, snowflakes skittering across them, too cold to stick.
I sat upon the smoke-wreathed ruins of my castle, careless of the heaped and stinking dead. The mountains, rising on all sides, made us tiny, made toys of the Haunt and the siege engines strewn about it, their purpose spent. And with eyes stinging from the fires, with the wind’s chill in me deep as bones, I read through her memories.
From the journal of Katherine Ap Scorron
October 3rd, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Fountain Room.
The fountain room is as ugly as every other room in this ugly castle. There’s no fountain, just a font that dribbles rather than sprays. My sister’s ladies-in-waiting clutter the place, sewing, always sewing, and tutting at me for writing, as if quill ink is a stain that can’t ever be washed off.
My head aches and wormroot won’t calm it. I found a sliver of pottery in the wound even though Friar Glen said he cleaned it. Dreadful little man. Mother gave me that vase when I came away with Sareth. My thoughts jump and my head aches and this quill keeps trembling.
The ladies sew with their quick clever stitches, line stitch, cross-line, layer-cross. Sharp little needles, dull little minds. I hate them with their tutting and their busy fingers and the lazy Ancrath slurring of their words.
I’ve looked back to see what I wrote yesterday. I don’t remember writing it but it tells how Jorg Ancrath tried to kill me after murdering Hanna, throttling her. I suppose that if he really had wanted to kill me he could have done a better job of it having broken Mother’s vase over my skull. He’s good at killing, if nothing else. Sareth told me that what he said in court, about all those people in Gelleth, burned to dust … it’s all true. Merl Gellethar’s castle is gone. I met him when I was a child. Such a sly red-faced man. Looked as if he’d be happy to eat me up. I’m not sorry about him. But all those people. They can’t all have been bad.
I should have stabbed Jorg when I had the chance. If my hands would do what I told them more often. If they would stop trembling the quill, learn to sew properly, stab murdering nephews when instructed … Friar Glen said the boy tore most of my dress off. Certainly it’s a ruin now. Beyond the rescue of even these empty ladies with their needles and thread.
I’m being too mean. I blame the ache in my head. Sareth tells me be nice. Be nice. Maery Coddin isn’t all sewing and gossip. Though she’s sewing now and tutting with the rest of them. Maery’s worth talking to on her own, I suppose. There. That’s enough nice for one day. Sareth is always nice and look where that got her. Married to an old man, and not a kind one but a cold and scary one, and her belly all fat with a child that will probably run as savage as Jorg Ancrath.
I’m going to have them bury Hanna in the forest graveyard. Maery tells me she’ll lie easy there. All the castle servants are buried there unless their families claim them. Maery says she’ll find me a new maidservant but that seems so cold, to just replace Hanna as if she were torn lace, or a broken vase. We’ll go out by cart tomorrow. There’s a man making her coffin now. My head feels as if he’s hammering the nails into it instead.
I should have left Jorg to die on the throne-room floor. But it didn’t feel right. Damn him.
We’ll bury Hanna tomorrow. She was old and always complaining of her aches but that doesn’t mean she was ready to go. I will miss her. She was a hard woman, cruel maybe, but never to me. I don’t know if I’ll cry when we put her in the ground. I should. But I don’t know if I will.
That’s for tomorrow. Today we have a visitor. The Prince of Arrow is calling, with his brother Prince Egan and his retinue. I think Sareth would like to match me there. Or maybe it’s the old man, King Olidan. Not many of Sareth’s ideas are her own these days. We will see.
I think I’ll try to sleep now. Maybe my headache will be gone in the morning. And the strange dreams too. Maybe Mother’s vase knocked those dreams right out of me.
1
Wedding Day
Open the box, Jorg.
I watched it. A copper box, thorn patterned, no lock or latch.
Open the box, Jorg.
A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.
A goblet, the box, a knife.
I watched the box and the dull reflections from the fire in the hearth. The warmth did not reach me. I let it burn down. The sun fell, and shadows stole the room. The embers held my gaze. Midnight filled the hall and still I didn’t move, as if I were carved from stone, as if motion were a sin. Tension knotted me. It tingled along my cheekbones, clenched in my jaw. I felt the table’s grain beneath my fingertips.
The moon rose and painted ghost-light across the stone-flagged floor. The moonlight found my goblet, wine untouched, and made the silver glow. Clouds swallowed the sky and in the darkness rain fell, soft with old memories. In the small hours, abandoned by fire, moon and stars, I reached for my blade. I laid the keen edge cold against my wrist.
The child still lay in the corner, limbs at corpse angles, too broken for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Sometimes I feel I’ve seen more ghosts than people, but this boy, this child of four, haunts me.
Open the box.
The answer lay in the box. I knew that much. The boy wanted me to open it. More than half of me wanted it open too, wanted to let those memories flood out, however dark, however dangerous. It had a pull on it, like the cliff’s edge, stronger by the moment, promising release.
‘No.’ I turned my chair toward the window and the rain, shading to snow now.
I carried the box out of a desert that could burn you without needing the sun. Four years I’ve kept it. I’ve no recollection of first laying hands upon it, no image of its owner, few facts save only that it holds a hell which nearly broke my mind.
Campfires twinkled distant through the sleet. So many they revealed the shape of the land beneath them, the rise and fall of mountains. The Prince of Arrow’s men took up three valleys. One alone wouldn’t contain his army. Three valleys choked with knights and archers, foot-soldiers, pikemen, men-at-axe and men-at-sword, carts and wagons, engines for siege, ladders, rope, and pitch for burning. And out there, in a blue pavilion, Katherine Ap Scorron, with her four hundred, lost in the throng.
At least she hated me. I’d rather die at the hands of somebody who wanted to kill me, to have it mean something to them.
Within a day they would surround us, sealing the last of the valleys and mountain paths to the east. Then we would see. Four years I had held the Haunt since I took it from my uncle. Four years as King of Renar. I wouldn’t let it go easy. No. This would go hard.
The child stood to my right now, bloodless and silent. There was no light in him but I could always see him through the dark. Even through eyelids. He watched me with eyes that looked like mine.
I took the blade from my wrist and tapped the point to my teeth. ‘Let them come,’ I said. ‘It will be a relief.’
That was true.
I stood and stretched. ‘Stay or go, ghost. I’m going to get some sleep.’
And that was a lie.
The servants came at first light and I let them dress me. It seems a silly thing but it turns out that kings have to do what kings do. Even copper-crown kings with a single ugly castle and lands that spend most of their time going either up or down at an unseemly angle, scattered with more goats than people. It turns out that men are more apt to die for a king who is dressed by pinch-fingered peasants every morning than for a king who knows how to dress himself.
I broke fast with hot bread. I have my page wait at the doors to my chamber with it of a morning. Makin fell in behind me as I strode to the throne-room, his heels clattering on the flagstones. Makin always had a talent for making a din.
‘Good morning, Your Highness,’ he says.
‘Stow that shit.’ Crumbs everywhere. ‘We’ve got problems.’
‘The same twenty thousand problems we had on our doorstep last night?’ Makin asked. ‘Or new ones?’
I glimpsed the child in a doorway as we passed. Ghosts and daylight don’t mix, but this one could show in any patch of shadow.
‘New ones,’ I said. ‘I’m getting married before noon and I haven’t got a thing to wear.’
2
Wedding Day
‘Princess Miana is being attended by Father Gomst and the Sisters of Our Lady,’ Coddin reported. He still looked uncomfortable in chamberlain’s velvets; the Watch-Commander’s uniform had better suited him. ‘There are checks to be carried out.’
‘Let’s just be glad nobody has to check my purity.’ I eased back into the throne. Damn comfortable: swan-down and silk. Kinging it is pain in the arse enough without one of those gothic chairs. ‘What does she look like?’
Coddin shrugged. ‘A messenger brought this yesterday.’ He held up a gold case about the size of a coin.
‘So what does she look like?’
He shrugged again, opened the case with his thumbnail and squinted at the miniature. ‘Small.’
‘Here!’ I caught hold of the locket and took a look for myself. The artists who take weeks to paint these things with a single hair are never going to spend that time making an ugly picture. Miana looked acceptable. She didn’t have the hard look about her that Katherine does, the kind of look that lets you know the person is really alive, devouring every moment. But when it comes down to it, I find most women attractive. How many men are choosy at eighteen?
‘And?’ Makin asked from beside the throne.
‘Small,’ I said and slipped the locket into my robe. ‘Am I too young for wedlock? I wonder …’
Makin pursed his lips. ‘I was married at twelve.’
‘You liar!’ Not once in all these years had Sir Makin of Trent mentioned a wife. He’d surprised me; secrets are hard to keep on the road, among brothers, drinking ale around the campfire after a hard day’s blood-letting.
‘No lie,’ he said. ‘But twelve is too young. Eighteen is a good age for marriage, Jorg. You’ve waited long enough.’
‘What happened to your wife?’
‘Died. There was a child too.’ He pressed his lips together.
It’s good to know that you don’t know everything about a man. Good that there might always be more to come.
‘So, my queen-to-be is nearly ready,’ I said. ‘Shall I go to the altar in this rag?’ I tugged at the heavy samite collar, all scratchy at my neck. I didn’t care of course but a marriage is a show, for high- and low-born alike, a kind of spell, and it pays to do it right.
‘Highness,’ Coddin said, pacing his irritation out before the dais. ‘This … distraction … is ill-timed. We have an army at our gates.’
‘And to be fair, Jorg, nobody knew she was coming until that rider pulled in,’ Makin said.
I spread my hands. ‘I didn’t know she would arrive last night. I’m not magic you know.’ I glimpsed the dead child slumped in a distant corner. ‘I had hoped she would arrive before the summer ended. In any case, that army has a good three miles to march if it wants to be at my gates.’
‘Perhaps a delay is in order?’ Coddin hated being chamberlain with every fibre of his being. Probably that was why he was the only one I’d trust to do it. ‘Until the conditions are less … inclement.’
‘Twenty thousand at our door, Coddin. And a thousand inside our walls. Well, most of them outside because my castle is too damn small to fit them in.’ I found myself smiling. ‘I don’t think conditions are going to improve. So we might as well give the army a queen as well as a king to die for, neh?’
‘And concerning the Prince of Arrow’s army?’ Coddin asked.
‘Is this going to be one of those times when you pretend not to have a plan until the last moment?’ Makin asked. ‘And then turn out to really not have one?’
He looked grim despite his words. I thought perhaps he could still see his own dead child. He had faced death with me before and done it with a smile.
‘You, girl!’ I shouted to one of the serving girls lurking at the far end of the hall. ‘Go tell that woman to bring me a robe fit to get married in. Nothing with lace, mind.’ I stood and set a hand to the pommel of my sword. ‘The night patrols should be back about now. We’ll go down to the east yard and see what they have to say for themselves. I sent Red Kent and Little Rikey along with one of the Watch patrols. Let’s hear what they think about these men of Arrow.’
Makin led the way. Coddin had grown twitchy about assassins. I knew what lurked in the shadows of my castle and it wasn’t assassins that I worried about. Makin turned the corner and Coddin held my shoulder to keep me back.
‘The Prince of Arrow doesn’t want me knifed by some black-cloak, Coddin. He doesn’t want drop-leaf mixed into my morning bread. He wants to roll over us with twenty thousand men and grind us into the dirt. He’s already thinking of the empire throne. Thinks he has a toe past the Gilden Gate. He’s building his legend now and it’s not going to be one of knives in the dark.’
‘Of course, if you had more soldiers you might be worth stabbing.’ Makin turned his head and grinned.
We found the patrol waiting, stamping in the cold. A few castle women fussed around the wounded, planting a stitch or two. I let the commander tell his tale to Coddin while I called Red Kent to my side. Rike loomed behind him uninvited. Four castle years had softened none of Rike’s edges, still close on seven foot of ugly temper with a face to match the blunt, mean, and brutal soul that looked out from it.
‘Little Rikey,’ I said. It had been a while since I’d spoken to the man. Years. ‘And how’s that lovely wife of yours?’ In truth I’d never seen her but she must have been a formidable woman.
‘She broke.’ He shrugged.
I turned away without comment. There’s something about Rike makes me want to go on the attack. Something elemental, red in tooth and claw. Or perhaps it’s just because he’s so damn big. ‘So, Kent,’ I said. ‘Tell me the good news.’
‘There’s too many of them.’ He spat into the mud. ‘I’m leaving.’
‘Well now.’ I threw an arm around him. Kent don’t look much but he’s solid, all muscle and bone, quick as you like too. What makes him though, what sets him apart, is a killer’s mind. Chaos, threat, bloody murder, none of that fazes him. Every moment of a crisis he’ll be considering the angles, tracking weapons, looking for the opening, taking it.
‘Well now,’ I pulled him close, hand clapped to the back of his neck. He flinched, but to his credit he didn’t reach for a blade. ‘That’s all well and good.’ I steered him away from the patrol. ‘But suppose that wasn’t going to happen. Just for the sake of argument. Suppose it was only you here and twenty of them out there. That’s not so far from the odds you’d beaten when we found you on that lakeside down in Rutton, neh?’ For a moment he smiled at that. ‘How would you win then, Red Kent?’ I called him Red to remind him of that day when he stood all a tremble with his wolf’s grin white in the scarlet of other men’s blood.
He bit his lip, staring past me into some other place. ‘They’re crowded in, Jorg. In those valleys. Crowded. One man against many, he’s got to be fast, attacking, moving. Each man is your shield from the next.’ He shook his head, seeing me again. ‘But you can’t use an army like one man.’
Red Kent had a point. Coddin had trained the army well, the units of Father’s Forest Watch especially so, but in battle cohesion always slips away. Orders are lost, missed, go unheard or ignored, and sooner or later it’s a bloody maul, each man for himself, and the numbers start to tell.
‘Highness?’ It was the woman from the royal wardrobe, some kind of robe in her hands.
‘Mabel!’ I threw my arms wide and gave her my dangerous smile.
‘Maud, sire.’
I had to admit the old biddy had some stones. ‘Maud it is,’ I said. ‘And I’m to be wed in this am I?’
‘If it pleases you, sire.’ She even curtseyed a bit.
I took it from her. Heavy. ‘Cats?’ I asked. ‘Looks like it took a lot of them.’
‘Sable.’ She pursed her lips. ‘Sable and gold thread. Count—’ She bit the words off.
‘Count Renar married in it, did he?’ I asked. ‘Well if it was good enough for that bastard it’ll do for me. At least it looks warm.’ My uncle Renar owed me for the thorns, for a lost mother, a lost brother. I’d taken his life, his castle, and his crown, and still he owed me. A fur robe would not close our account.
‘Best be quick about it, Highness,’ Coddin said, eyes still roaming for assassins. ‘We’ve got to double-check the defences. Plan out supply for the Kennish archers, and also consider terms.’ To his credit he looked straight at me for that last bit.
I gave Maud back the robe and let her dress me with the patrol watching on. I made no reply to Coddin. He looked pale. I had always liked him, from the moment he tried to arrest me, even past the moment he dared to mention surrender. Brave, sensible, capable, honest. The better man. ‘Let’s get this done,’ I said and started toward the chapel.
‘Is it needed, this marriage?’ Coddin again, doggedly playing the role I set him. Speak to me, I had said. Never think I cannot be wrong. ‘As your wife things may go hard for her.’ Rike sniggered at that. ‘As a guest she would be ransomed back to the Horse Coast.’
Sensible, honest. I don’t even know how to pretend those things. ‘It is needed.’
We came to the chapel by a winding stair, past table-knights in plate armour, Count Renar’s marks still visible beneath mine on the breastplates as if I’d ruled here four months rather than four years. The noble-born too poor or stupid or loyal to have run yet would be lined up within. In the courtyard outside the peasantry waited. I could smell them.
I paused before the doors, lifting a finger to stop the knight with his hands upon the bar. ‘Terms?’
I saw the child again, beneath crossed standards hanging on the wall. He’d grown with me. Years back he had been a baby, watching me with dead eyes. He looked about four now. I tapped my fingers against my forehead in a rapid tempo.
‘Terms?’ I said it again. I’d only said it twice but already the word sounded strange, losing meaning as they do when repeated over and again. I thought of the copper box in my room. It made me sweat. ‘There will be no terms.’
‘Best have Father Gomst say his words swiftly then,’ Coddin said. ‘And look to our defences.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There will be no defence. We’re going to attack.’
I pushed the knight aside and threw the doors wide. Bodies crowded the chapel hall from one side to the other. It seemed my nobles were poorer than I’d thought. And to the left, a splash of blues and violet, ladies-in-waiting and knights in armour, decked in the colours of the House Morrow, the colours of the Horse Coast.
And there at the altar, head bowed beneath a garland of lilies, my bride.
‘Oh hell,’ I said.
Small was right. She looked about twelve.
In peace Brother Kent reverts to type, a peasant plagued by kindness, seeking God in the stone houses where the pious lament. Battle strikes loose such chains.
In war Red Kent approaches the divine.
3
Wedding Day
Marriage was ever the glue that held the Hundred in some semblance of unity, the balm to induce scattered moments of peace, pauses in the crimson progress of the Hundred War. And this one had been hanging over me for close on four years.
I walked along the chapel aisle between the high and mighty of Renar, none of them so high or so mighty, truth be told. I’ve checked the records and half of them have goat-herders for grandparents. It surprised me that they had stayed. If I were them I would have acted on Red Kent’s sentiment and been off across the Matteracks with whatever I could carry on my back.
Miana watched me, as fresh and perky as the lilies on her head. If the ruined left side of my face scared her she didn’t show it. The need to trace the scarred ridges on my cheek itched in my fingertips. For an instant the heat of that fire ran in me, and the memory of pain tightened my jaw.
I joined my bride-to-be at the altar and looked back. And in a moment of clarity I understood. These people expected me to save them. They still thought that with my handful of soldiers I could hold this castle and win the day. I had half a mind to tell them, to just say what any who knew me knew. There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the Prince of Arrow had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.
Four musicians in full livery raised their bladder-pipes and sounded the fanfare.
‘Best use the short version, Father Gomst,’ I said in a low voice. ‘Lots to do today.’
He frowned at that, grey brows rubbing up against each other. ‘Princess Miana, I have the pleasure of introducing His Highness Honorous Jorg Ancrath, King of the Renar Highlands, heir to the lands of Ancrath and the protectorates thereof.’
‘Charmed,’ I said, inclining my head. A child. She didn’t reach much above my ribs.
‘I can see why your miniature was in profile,’ she said, and sketched a curtsey.
That made me grin. It might be destined to be a short marriage but perhaps it wouldn’t be dull. ‘You’re not scared of me then, Miana?’
She reached to take my hand by way of answer. I pulled it back. ‘Best not.’
‘Father?’ I nodded the priest on.
‘Dearly beloved,’ Gomst said. ‘We are gathered together here in the sign of God …’
And so with old words from an old man and lacking anyone ‘here present’ with just reason, or at least with just reason and the balls to say so, little Jorgy Ancrath became a married man.
I led my bride from the chapel with the applause and hoorahs of the nobility ringing behind us, almost but not quite drowning out those awful pipes. The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.
The main doors lead onto a stairway where you can look down into the Haunt’s largest courtyard, the place where I cut down the previous owner. Several hundred packed the space from the curtain wall to the stairs, more thronging out beyond the gateway, swarming beneath the portcullis, a light snow sifting down on all of them.
A cheer went up as we came into the light. I took Miana’s hand then, despite the necromancy lurking in my fingers, and lifted it high to acknowledge the crowd. The loyalty of subject to lord still amazed me. I lived fat and rich off these people year after year while they squeezed a mean life out of the mountainsides. And here they were ready to face pretty much certain death with me. I mean, even that blind faith in my ability to buck the odds had to allow a fairly big chunk of room for doubt.
I got my first proper insight into it a couple of years back. A lesson that life on the road hadn’t taught me or my Brothers. The power of place.
My royal presence was requested for a bit of justice-making in what they call in the Renar Highlands a ‘village’, though pretty much everywhere else people would call it three houses and a few sheds. The place lies way up in the peaks. They call it Gutting. I heard that there’s a Little Gutting slightly higher up the valley, though it can’t be much more than a particularly roomy barrel. Anyhow, the dispute was over where one scabby peasant’s rocks ended and another one’s started. I’d hauled myself and Makin up three thousand foot of mountain to show a bit of willing in the business of kinging it. According to reports, several men of the village had been killed already in the feud, though on closer inspection casualties were limited to a pig and the loss of a woman’s left ear. Not so long ago I would just have killed everyone and come down the mountain with their heads on a spear, but perhaps I just felt tired after the climb. In any event I let the scabby peasants state their cases and they did so with enthusiasm and at great length. It started to get dark and the fleas were biting so I cut it short.
‘Gebbin is it?’ I said to the plaintiff. He nodded. ‘Basically, Gebbin, you just hate the hell out of this fellow here and I really can’t see the reason for it. The thing is that I’m bored, I’ve got my breath back, and unless you tell me the real reason you hate …’
‘Borron,’ Makin supplied.
‘Yes, Borron. Tell me the real reason and make it honest, or it’s a death sentence for everyone except this good woman with the one ear, and we’ll be leaving her in charge of the remaining pig.’
It took him a few moments to realize that I really meant what I said, and then another couple mumbling before he finally came out with it and admitted it was because the fellow was a ‘furner’. Furner turned out to mean foreigner and old Borron was a foreigner because he was born and lived on the east side of the valley.
The men cheering Miana and me, waving their swords, bashing their shields and hollering themselves hoarse, might have told anyone who asked how proud they were to fight for his Highness and his new queen. The truth, however, is that at the bottom of it all they simply didn’t want the men of Arrow marching all over their rocks, eyeing up their goats, and maybe leering at their womenfolk.
‘The Prince of Arrow has a much bigger army than you,’ Miana said. No ‘your highness’, no ‘my lord’.
‘Yes he does.’ I kept waving to the crowd, the big smile on my face.
‘He’s going to win, isn’t he?’ she said. She looked twelve but she didn’t sound twelve.
‘How old are you?’ I asked, a quick glance down at her, still waving.
‘Twelve.’
Damn.
‘They might win. If each of my men doesn’t kill twenty of theirs then there’s a good chance. Especially if he surrounds us.’
‘How far away are they?’ she asked.
‘Their front lines are camped three miles off,’ I said.
‘You should attack now then,’ she said. ‘Before they surround us.’
‘I know.’ I was starting to like the girl. Even an experienced soldier like Coddin, a good soldier, wanted to hunker down behind the Haunt’s walls and let the castle earn its keep, if you’ll pardon the pun. The thing is, though, that no castle stands against odds like the ones we faced. Miana knew what Red Kent knew, Red Kent who cut down a patrol of seventeen men-at-arms on a hot August morning. Killing takes space. You need to move, to advance, to withdraw, and sometimes to just plain run for it.
One more wave and I turned my back on the crowds and strode into the chapel.
‘Makin! Are the Watch ready?’
‘They are.’ He nodded. ‘My king.’
I drew my sword.
The sudden appearance of four foot of razored builder-steel in the house of God resulted in a pleasing gasp.
‘Let’s go.’
From the journal of Katherine Ap Scorron
October 6th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Chapel. Midnight.
The Ancraths’ chapel is small and draughty, as if they hadn’t much time for the place. The candles dance and the shadows are never still. When I leave the friar’s boy will snuff them.
Jorg Ancrath has been gone close on a week. He took Sir Makin with him from the dungeons. I was glad for that, I liked Sir Makin and I cannot truly blame him for what happened to Galen: that was Jorg again. A crossbow! He could never have bested Galen with a blade. There’s no honour in the boy.
Friar Glen says Jorg near tore the dress off me after he hit me. I keep it at the back of the long closet in the bride chest Mother packed for me before we left Scorron Halt. I keep it where the maids don’t look, and my hands lead me back there. I run the tatters through my fingers. Blue satin. I touch it and I try to remember. I see him standing there, arms wide, daring the knife in my hand, weaving as though he were too tired to stand, his skin dead white and the black stain around his chest wound. He looked so young. A child almost. With those scars all across him where the thorns tore him. Sir Reilly says they found him hanging, near bloodless, after a night in the thorns with the storm around him and his mother lying dead.
And then he hit me.
I’m touching the spot now. It’s still sore. Lumpy with scab. I wonder if they can see it through my hair. And then I wonder why I care.
I’m bruised down here too. Bruised black, like that stain. I can almost see the lines of fingers on my thigh, the print of a thumb.
He hit me and then he used me, raped me. It would have been nothing to him, a mercenary from the road, it would have meant nothing to him, just something else to take. It would rank small amongst his crimes. Maybe not the largest even against me, for I miss Hanna and I did cry when we put her in the ground, and I miss Galen for the fierceness of his smile and the heat he put in me whenever he came near.
He hit me, and then he used me? That sick boy, daring the knife, barely able to stand?
October 11th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. My chambers.
I saw Friar Glen in the Blue Hall today. I’ve stopped going to his services but I saw him in the hall. I watched his hands, his thick fingers and his thick thumbs. I watched them and I thought of those fading bruises, yellow now, and I came to the tall closet, and here I am with the torn satin in my hands.
Skin, bones, and mischief comprise Brother Gog. Monster born and monster bred but there’s little to mark him from Adam save the stippled crimson-on-black of his hide, the dark wells of his eyes, ebony talons on hand and foot, and the thorny projections starting to grow along his spine. Watch him play and run and laugh, and he seems too at ease to be a crack in the world through which all the fires of hell might pour.
Watch him burn though, and you will believe it.
4
Four years earlier
I took my uncle’s throne in my fourteenth year and found it to my liking. I had a castle, and staff of serving maids, to explore, a court of nobles to suppress, or at least what counted as nobles in the Highlands, and a treasury to ransack. For the first three months I confined myself to these activities.
I woke soaked with sweat. I normally wake suddenly with a clear head, but I felt as though I were drowning.
‘Too hot …’
I rolled and fell from the bed, landing heavy.
Smoke.
Shouting in the distance.
I uncovered the bed-lamp and turned up the wick. The smoke came from the doors, not seeping under or between but lifting from every inch of the charred wood and rising like a rippled curtain.
‘Shit—’ Burning to death has always been a worry of mine. Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I’m scared of immolation. Also spiders.
‘Gog!’ I bellowed.
He’d been out there in the antechamber when I retired. I moved toward the doors, coming at them from the side. An awful heat came off them. I could leave by the doorway or try to fit myself through the bars on any of three windows before negotiating the ninety-foot drop.
I took an axe from the wall display and stood with my back to the stone, next to the doors. My lungs hurt and I couldn’t see straight. Swinging the axe felt like swinging a full-grown man. The blade bit and the doors exploded. Orange-white fire roared into the room, furnace-hot, in a thick tongue forking time and again. And, almost as suddenly, it died away like a cough ending, leaving nothing but scorched floor and a burning bed.
The antechamber felt hotter than my bedchamber, char-black from floor to ceiling, with a huge glowing coal at its centre. I staggered back toward my bed. The heat took the water from my eyes and for a moment my vision cleared. The coal was Gog, curled like a new-born, pulsing with flame.
Something vast broke from the doorway leading to the guards’ room beyond. Gorgoth! He scooped the boy up in one three-fingered hand and slapped him with the other. Gog woke with a sharp cry and the fire went out of him in an instant, leaving nothing but a limp child, skin stippled red and black, and the stink of burned meat.
Without words I stumbled past them and let my guards help me away.
They practically had to drag me to the throne-room before I found my strength. ‘Water,’ I managed. And when I’d drunk and used my knife to trim away the burned ends of my hair, I coughed out, ‘Bring the monsters.’
Makin clattered into the hall still pulling on a gauntlet. ‘Again?’ he asked. ‘Another fire?’
‘Bad this time. An inferno,’ I said. ‘At least I won’t have to look at my uncle’s furniture any more.’
‘You can’t let him sleep in the castle,’ Makin said.
‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Now.’
‘Put a quick end to it, Jorg.’ Makin pulled the gauntlet off. We weren’t under attack after all.
‘You can’t let him go.’ Coddin arrived, dark circles under his eyes. ‘He’s too dangerous. Someone will use him.’
And there it hung. Gog had to die.
Three clashes on the main doors and they swung open. Gorgoth entered the throne-room with Gog, flanked by four of my table-knights, who looked like children beside him. Seen in amongst men the leucrota looked every bit as monstrous as the day I found them under Mount Honas. Gorgoth’s cat-eyes slitted despite the gloom, blood-red hide almost black, as if infected with the night.
‘What are you, Gog, eight years now? And busy trying to burn down my castle.’ I felt Gorgoth’s eyes upon me. The great spars of his ribcage flexed back and forth with each breath.
‘The big one will fight,’ Coddin murmured at my shoulder. ‘He will be hard to put down.’
‘Eight years,’ Gog repeated. He didn’t know but he liked to agree with me. His voice had been high and sweet when we met beneath Mount Honas. Now it came raw and carried the crackle of flame behind it as if he might start breathing the stuff out like a damned dragon.
‘I will take him away,’ Gorgoth said, almost too deep to hear. ‘Far.’
Play your pieces, Jorg. A silence stretched out.
I wouldn’t be sitting in this throne if Gorgoth hadn’t held the gate. Or sitting here if Gog hadn’t burned the Count’s men. The skin on my face still clung tight, my lungs still hurt, and the stink of burnt hair still filled my nostrils.
‘I’m sorry about your bed, Brother Jorg,’ Gog said. Gorgoth flicked his shoulder, one thick finger, enough to stagger him. ‘King Jorg,’ Gog corrected.
I wouldn’t be sitting on the throne but for a lot of people, a stack of chances, some improbable, some stolen, but for the sacrifice of many men, some better, some worse. A man cannot take on new burdens of debt at every turn or he will buckle beneath the weight and be unable to move.
‘You were ready to give this child to the necromancers, Gorgoth,’ I said. ‘Him and his brother both.’ I didn’t ask if he would die to protect Gog. That much was written in him.
‘Things change,’ Gorgoth said.
‘Better they find a quick death, you said.’ I stood. ‘The changes will come too fast in these ones. Too fast to be borne. The changes will turn them inside out, you said.’
‘Let him take his chance,’ Gorgoth said.
‘I nearly died in my bed tonight.’ I stepped down from the dais, Makin at my shoulder now. ‘The royal chambers are in ashes. And dying abed was never my plan. Unless t’were as emperor in my dotage beneath an over-energetic young concubine.’
‘It cannot be helped.’ Gorgoth’s hands closed into massive fists. ‘It’s in his dena.’
‘His dinner?’ My hand rested on the hilt of my sword. I remembered how Gog had fought to save his little brother. How pure that fury had been. I missed that purity in myself. Only yesterday every choice came easy. Black or white. Stab Gemt in the neck or don’t. And now? Shades of grey. A man can drown in shades of grey.
‘His dena. The story of every man, written at his core, what he is, what he will be, written in a coil in the core of us all,’ Gorgoth said.
I’d never heard the monster say so many words in a row. ‘I’ve opened up a lot of men, Gorgoth, and if anything is written there then it’s written red on red and smells bad.’
‘The centre of a man isn’t found by your geometry, Highness.’ He held me with those cat’s eyes. He’d never called me Highness before either. Probably the closest to begging he would ever come.
I stared at Gog, crouched now, looking from me to Gorgoth and back. I liked the boy. Plain and simple. Both of us with a dead brother that we couldn’t save, both of us with something burning in us, some elemental force of destruction wanting out every moment of every day.
‘Sire,’ Coddin said, knowing my mind for once. ‘These matters need not occupy the king. Take my chambers and we’ll speak again in the morning.’
Leave and we’ll do your dirty work for you. The message was clear enough. And Coddin didn’t want to do it. If he could read me I surely could read him. He didn’t want to slit his horse’s throat when a loose rock lamed it. But he did. And he would now. The game of kings was never a clean game.
Play your pieces.
‘It can’t be helped, Jorg,’ Makin set a hand to my shoulder, voice soft. ‘He’s too dangerous. There’s no knowing what he’ll become.’
Play your pieces. Win the game. Take the hardest line.
‘Gog,’ I said. He stood slowly, eyes on mine. ‘They’re telling me you’re too dangerous. That I can’t keep you. Or let you go. That you are a chance that can’t be taken. A weapon that can’t be wielded.’ I turned, taking in the throne-room, the high vaults, dark windows, and faced Coddin, Makin, the knights of my table. ‘I woke a Builders’ Sun beneath Gelleth, and this child is too much for me?’
‘Those were desperate times, Jorg,’ Makin said, studying the floor.
‘All times are desperate,’ I said. ‘You think we’re safe here, on our mountainside? This castle might look big from the inside. From a mile off you can cover it with your thumb.’
I looked at Gorgoth. ‘Maybe I need a new geometry. Maybe we need to find this dena and see if the story can’t be rewritten.’
‘The child’s power is out of control, Jorg,’ Coddin said, a brave man to interject when I’m in full flow. The kind of man I needed. ‘It will only grow more wild.’
‘I’m taking him to Heimrift,’ I said. Gog is a weapon and I will forge him there.
‘Heimrift?’ Gorgoth relaxed his fists, knuckles cracking with loud retorts.
‘A place of demons and fire,’ Makin muttered.
‘A volcano,’ I said. ‘Four volcanoes actually. And a fire-mage. Or so my tutor told me. So let’s put the benefits of a royal education to the test shall we? At least Gog will like it there. Everything burns.’
5
Four years earlier
‘This is a bad idea, Jorg.’
‘It’s a dangerous idea, Coddin, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s bad.’ I laid my knife on the map to stop it rolling up again.
‘Whatever the chances of success, you’ll leave your kingdom without a king.’ He set a fingertip to the map, resting on the Haunt as if to show me my place. ‘It’s only been three months, Jorg. The people aren’t sure of you yet, the nobles will start to plot the moment you leave, and how many men-at-arms will you take with you? With an empty throne the Renar Highlands might look like an easy prize. Your royal father might even choose to call with the Army of the Gate. If it comes to defending this place I don’t know how many of your uncle’s troops will rally to your cry.’
‘My father didn’t send the Gate when my mother and brother were murdered.’ My fingers closed around the knife hilt of their own accord. ‘He’s unlikely to move against the Haunt now. Especially when his armies are busy acquiring what’s left of Gelleth.’
‘So how many soldiers will you take?’ Coddin asked. ‘The Watch will not be enough.’
‘I’m not going to take any,’ I said. ‘I could take the whole damn army and it would just get me into a war on somebody else’s lands.’ Coddin made to protest. I cut him off. ‘I’ll take my brothers. They’ll appreciate a spell on the road and we managed to traipse to and fro happily enough not so many years ago with nobody giving us much pause.’
Makin returned with several large map scrolls under his arm. ‘In disguise is it?’ he said and grinned. ‘Good. Truth be told, this place has given me itchy feet.’
‘You’re staying, Brother Makin,’ I told him. ‘I’ll take Red Kent, Row, Grumlow, Young Sim … and Maical, why not? He may be a half-wit but he’s hard to kill. And of course Little Rike—’
‘Not him,’ Coddin said, face cold. ‘There’s no loyalty in that one. He’ll leave you dead in a hedgerow.’
‘I need him,’ I said.
Coddin frowned. ‘He might be handy in a fight, but there’s no subtlety in him, no discipline, he’s not clever, he—’
‘The way I’d put it,’ said Makin, ‘is that Rike can’t make an omelette without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.’
‘He’s a survivor,’ I said. ‘And I need survivors.’
‘You need me,’ said Makin.
‘You can’t trust him.’ Coddin rubbed his forehead as he always did when the worry got in him.
‘I need you here, Makin,’ I said. ‘I want to have a kingdom to come back to. And I know I can’t trust Rike, but four years on the road taught me that he’s the right tool for the job.’
I lifted my knife and the map sprung back into its roll. ‘I’ve seen enough.’
Makin raised his eyes and tipped his maps unopened on to the table.
‘Mark me out a decent route will you, Coddin, and have that scribe lad copy it down.’ I stood straight and stretched. I’d need to find something to wear. One of the maids had burned my old rags and velvet’s no good for the road. It’s like a magnet for dust.
Father Gomst met Makin, Kent and me on our way to the stables. He’d hurried from chapel, red in the face, the heaviest bible under one arm and the altar cross in his other hand.
‘Jorg—’ He stopped to catch his breath. ‘King Jorg.’
‘You’re going to join us, Father Gomst?’ The way he paled made me smile.
‘The blessing,’ he said, still short of wind.
‘Ah, well bless away.’
Kent went to his knees in an instant, as pious a killer as I ever knew. Makin followed with unseemly haste for a man who’d sacked a cathedral in his time. Since Gomst walked out of Gelleth by the light of a Builders’ Sun, without so much as a tan to show for it, the Brothers seemed to think him touched by God. The fact we all did the same with far less time at our disposal didn’t register with them.
For my own part, for all the evils of the Roma church, I could no longer bring myself to despise Gomst as I once had. His only true crime was to be a weak and impotent man, unable to deliver the promise of his lord, the love of his saviour, or even to put the yoke of Roma about the necks of his flock with any conviction.
I bowed my head and listened to the prayer. It never hurts to cover your bases.
In the west yard my motley band were assembled, checking over their gear. Rike had the biggest horse I’d ever seen.
‘I could run faster than this monster, Rike.’ I made a show of checking behind it. ‘You didn’t take the plough when you stole it, then?’
‘It’ll do,’ he said. ‘Big enough for loot.’
‘Maical’s not bringing the head-cart?’ I looked around. ‘Where is he anyway?’
‘Gone for the grey,’ Kent said. ‘Idiot won’t ride any other horse. Says he doesn’t know how.’
‘Now that’s loyalty for you.’ I shot Rike a look. ‘So where’s this new wife of yours, Brother Rikey? Not coming to see you off?’
‘Busy ploughing.’ He slapped his horse. ‘Got a job of it now.’
Gorgoth came through the kitchen gate, looming behind Rike. It’s unsettling to see something on two legs that’s taller and wider than Rike. Gog popped out from behind him. He took my hand and I let him lead me. There’s not many that will take my hand since the necromancy took root in me. There’s a touch of death in my fingers, not just the coldness. Flowers wilt and die.
‘Where we going, Brother Jorg?’ Still a child’s voice despite the crackle in it.
‘To find us a fire-mage. Put an end to this bed-burning,’ I told him.
‘Will it hurt?’ He watched me with big eyes, pools of black.
I shrugged. ‘Might do.’
‘Scared,’ he said, clutching my hand tighter. I could feel heat rising from his fingers. Maybe it cancelled the cold from mine. ‘Scared.’
‘Well then,’ I said. ‘We’re headed the right way.’
He frowned.
‘You’ve got to hunt your fears, Gog. Beat them. They’re your only true enemies.’
‘You’re not scared of anything, Brother Jorg,’ he said. ‘King J—’
‘I’m scared of burning,’ I said. ‘Especially in my bed.’ I looked back to the brothers, stowing weapons and supplies. ‘I had a cousin who liked to burn people up, did I not, Brother Row?’
‘Ayuh.’ He nodded.
‘My cousin Marclos,’ I said. ‘Tell Gog what happened to him.’
Row tested the point of an arrow with his thumb. ‘Went up to him all on your ownself, Jorg, and killed him in the middle of a hundred of his soldiers.’
I looked down at Gog. ‘I’m scared of spiders too. It’s the way that they move. And the way that they’re still. It’s that scurry.’ I mimicked it with my hand.
I called back to Row. ‘How am I with spiders, Row?’
‘Weird.’ Row spat and secured his last arrow. ‘You’ll like this tale, Gog, what with being a godless monster and all.’ He spat again. Brother Row liked to spit. ‘Spent a week holed up in some grain barns one time. Hiding. We didn’t go hungry. Grain and rats make for a good stew. Only Jorg here wasn’t having any of that. Place was stuffed full of spiders see. Big hairy fellows.’ He spread his fingers until the knuckles cracked. ‘For a whole week Jorg hunted them. Didn’t eat nothing but spider for a week. And not cooked mind. Not even dead.’
‘And rat stew always tasted good after that week,’ I said.
Gog frowned, then his eyes caught the glitter on my wrist. ‘What’s this?’ He pointed.
I pulled my sleeve back and held it up for all to see. ‘Two things I found in my uncle’s treasury that were worth more than the gold around them. Thought I’d bring them along in case of need.’ I made sure Rike caught sight of the silver on my wrist. ‘No need to be going through my saddle bags at night now, Little Rikey. The treasure’s here and if you think you can take it, try now.’
He sneered and tied off another strap.
‘Wossit?’ Gog stared entranced.
‘The Builders made it,’ I said. ‘It’s a thousand years old.’
Row and Red Kent came over to see.
‘I’m told they call it a watch,’ I said. ‘And you can see why.’
In truth, I’d been watching it a lot myself. It had a face on it behind crystal, with twelve hours marked and sixty minutes, and two black arms that moved, one slow, one slower still, to point out the time. Entranced, I had opened it up at the back with the point of my knife and gazed into the guts of the thing. The hatch popped back on a minute hinge as if the Builders had known I would want to see inside. Wheels within wheels, tiny, toothed, and turning. How they made such things so small and so precise I cannot guess but to me it is a wonder past any man-made sun or glow-light.
‘What else you got, Jorg?’ Rike asked.
‘This.’ I took it from the deep pocket on my hip and set it down on the flagstones. A battered metal clown with traces of paint clinging to his jerkin, hair and nose.
Kent took a step back. ‘It looks evil.’
I knelt and released a catch behind the clown’s head. With a jerk and a whir he started to stamp his metal feet and bring his metal hands together, clashing the cymbals he held. He jittered in a loose circle, stamping and clashing, going nowhere.
Rike started to laugh. Not that ‘hur, hur, hur’ of his that sounds like another kind of anger, but a real laugh, from the belly. ‘It’s like … It’s like …’ He couldn’t get the words out.
The others couldn’t hold back. Sim and Maical cracked first. Grumlow snorting through the drowned-rat moustache he’d been working on. Then Red Kent and at last even Row, laughing like children. Gog looked on, astonished. Even Gorgoth couldn’t help but grin, showing back-teeth like tombstones.
The clown fell over and kept on stamping the air. Rike collapsed with it, thumping the ground with his fist, gasping for breath.
The clown slowed, then stopped. There’s a blue-steel spring inside that you wind tight with a key. And when it’s finished stamping and crashing, the spring is loose again.
‘Burlow … Burlow should have seen this.’ Rike wiped the tears from his eyes. The first time I’d heard him mention any of the fallen.
‘Yes, Brother Rike,’ I said. ‘Yes he should.’ I imagined Brother Burlow laughing with us, his belly shaking.
We made our moment then, one of those waypoints by which a life is remembered, the Brotherhood remade and bound for the road. We made our moment – the last good one. ‘Time to go,’ I said.
Sometimes I wonder if we all don’t have a blue-steel spring inside us, like that dena of Gorgoth’s coiled tight at the core. I wonder if we don’t all go stamping and crashing, crashing and stamping in our own little circles going nowhere. And I wonder who it is that laughs at us.
6
Four years earlier
Three months previously I had entered the Haunt alone, covered in blood that was not my own and swinging a stolen sword. My Brothers followed me in. Now I left the castle in the hands of another. I had wanted my uncle’s blood. His crown I took because other men said I could not have it.
If the Haunt reminds you of a skull, and it does me, then the scraps of town around the gates might be considered the dried vomit of its last heave. A tannery here, abattoir there, all the necessary but stinking evils of modern life, set out beyond the walls where the wind will scour them. We were barely clear of the last hovel before Makin caught us.
‘Missing me already?’
‘The Forest Watch tell me we have company coming,’ Makin said, catching his breath.
‘We really should rename the Watch,’ I said. The best the Highlands could offer by way of forest was the occasional clump of trees huddled miserably in a deep valley, all twisted and hunched against the wind.
‘Fifty knights,’ Makin said. ‘Carrying the banner of Arrow.’
‘Arrow?’ I frowned. ‘They’ve come a ways.’ The province lay on the edge of the map we had so recently rolled up.
‘They look fresh enough by all accounts.’
‘I think I’ll meet them on the road,’ I said. ‘We might get a more interesting story out of them as a band of road brothers.’ The truth was I didn’t want to change back into silks and ermine and go through the formalities. They would be heading for the castle. You don’t send fifty men in plate armour for a stealth mission.
‘I’ll come with you,’ Makin said. He wasn’t going to take ‘no’ this time.
‘You won’t pass as a road brother,’ I said. ‘You look like an actor who’s raided the props chest for all the best knight-gear.’
‘Roll him in some shit,’ Rike said. ‘He’ll pass then.’
We happened to be right by Jerring’s stables and a heap of manure lay close at hand. I pointed to it.
‘Not so different from life in court.’ Makin grimaced and threw his robe into the head-cart. Maical had hitched it to the grey out of habit.
When the captain of my guard looked more like, a hedge-knight at the very bottom of his luck, we moved on. Gog rode with me, clutching tight. Gorgoth jogged along for no horse would take him, and not just because of his weight. Something in him scared them.
‘Ever been to Arrow, Makin?’ I asked, easing my horse up wind.
‘Never have,’ he said. ‘A small enough principality. They breed them tough down there though, by all accounts. Been giving their neighbours a headache for years now.’
We rode on without talk for a while, just the clatter of hooves and the creak of the head-cart to break the mountain silence. The road, or trail if I’m honest, for the Builders never worked their magic in the Highlands, wound its way down, snaking back and forth to tame the gradients. As we dropped I started to realize that in the low valleys it would be spring already. Even here a flash of green showed now and again and set the horses nosing the air.
We saw the knights’ outrider an hour later and the main column a mile further on. Row started to turn off the trail.
‘I’ll say when we turn aside and when we stand our ground, if it’s all the same to you, Brother Row.’ I gave him a look. The Brothers had started to forget the old Jorg – been too long lazing around the Haunt, left too long to their own wickednesses.
‘There’s a lot of them, Brother Jorg,’ said Young Sim, older than me of course but still with little use for a razor if you discounted the cutting of throats.
‘When you’re making for the king’s castle it’s bad manners to cut down travellers on the way,’ I said. ‘Even ones as disreputable as us.’
I rode on. A pause and the others followed.
The next rise showed them closer, two abreast, moving at a slow trot, a pair of narrow banners fluttering in the Renar wind. No rabble these, table-knights from a high court, a harmony to their arms and armour that put my own guard to shame.
‘This is a bad idea,’ Makin said. He stank of horse-shit.
‘If you ever stop saying that I’ll know it’s time to start worrying,’ I said.
The men of Arrow continued their advance. We could hear their hooves on the rock. I had an urge to rest in the middle of the trail and demand a toll. That would have made a tale, but perhaps too short a one. I settled for pulling to the side and watching as they drew closer. I cast an eye over our troop. An ugly lot, but the leucrotas won the prize.
‘See if you can’t hide behind Rike’s beast, Gorgoth,’ I said. ‘I knew that plough horse would come in useful.’
I took the knife from my belt and started to work the dirt from under my fingernails. Gog’s claws dug in beneath my breastplate as the first men reached us.
The knights slowed their horses to a walk as they came near. A few turned their heads but most passed without a glance, faces hidden behind visors. At the middle of the column were two men who caught the eye, or at least their armour did, polished to a brilliance, fluted in the Teuton style, and scintillating with rainbow hues where the oiled metal broke the light. A hound ran between their horses, short-haired, barrel-chested, long in the snout. The leftmost of the pair raised his hand and the column stopped, even the men in front of him, though there seemed no way they could have seen him.
‘Well now,’ he said, both words precise and tightly wrapped.
He took his helm off, which seemed a foolish thing to do when he might be the target of hidden crossbows, and shook his head. Sweat kept his blond hair plastered to his brow.
‘Good day, Sir Knight,’ I said and nodded him a quarter of a bow.
He looked me up and down with calm blue eyes. He reminded me of Katherine’s champion, Sir Galen. ‘How far to Renar’s castle, boy?’ he asked.
Something in me said that this man knew exactly how far it was, as crow flies and cripple crawls. ‘King Jorg’s castle lies a good ten miles yonder.’ I waved my knife along the trail. ‘About a mile of it up.’
‘A king is it?’ He smiled. Handsome like Galen too, in that square-jawed blond manner that will turn a girl’s head. ‘Old Renar didn’t count himself a king.’
I started to hate him. And not just for the pun. ‘Count Renar held only the Highlands. King Jorg is heir to Ancrath and the lands of Gelleth. That’s enough land to make a king, at least in these parts.’
I made show of peering at the fellow’s breastplate. He had dragons there, etched and enamelled in red, each rampant, clutching a vertical arrow taller than itself. Nice work. ‘Arrow is it you’re from, my lord?’ I asked. Not waiting for an answer I turned to Makin. ‘Do you know why that land is named Arrow, Makin?’
He shook his head and studied the pommel of his saddle. The need to say ‘this is a bad idea’ twitched on his lips.
‘They say it’s called Arrow because you can shoot one from the north coast to the south,’ I said. ‘From what I hear they could have called it Sneeze. I wonder what they call the man who rules there.’
‘You know a lot about heraldry, boy.’ Eyes still calm. The man beside him moved his hand to his sword, gauntlet clicking against the hilt. ‘They call the man who rules there the Prince of Arrow.’ He smiled. ‘But you may call me Prince Orrin.’
It seemed rash to be riding into another’s realm with fifty men, even fifty such as these. The very thing I had decided against for my own travels.
‘You’re not worried that King Jorg will take the opportunity to thin the field in this Hundred War of ours?’ I asked.
‘If I were his neighbour, maybe,’ the Prince said. ‘But killing me or even ransoming me to my enemies would just make his own neighbours more secure and better able to harm him. And I hear the king has a good eye for his own chances. Besides, it would not be easy.’
‘I thought you came looking for a count, but now it seems you already know about King Jorg and his good eye,’ I said. He came prepared, this one.
The Prince shrugged. He looked young when he did it. Twenty maybe. Not much more. ‘That’s a handsome sword,’ he said. ‘Show it to me.’
I’d wrapped the hilt about with old leather and smeared that with dirt. The scabbard was older than me and shiny with the years. Whatever my uncle’s sword had been it wasn’t handsome now. Not until I drew it and showed its metal. I considered throwing my dagger. Old blondie might not see so clear with it jutting out of his eye socket. He might even have a brother at home who’d be pleased to be the new Prince of Arrow and owe me a favour hereafter. I could see it in my mind’s eye. The handsome Prince with my dagger in his face, and us racing away across the slopes.
I’m not given to should haves. But I should have.
Instead I stowed the knife and drew my uncle’s sword, an heirloom of his line, Builder-steel, the blade taking the light of the day and giving it back with an edge.
‘Well now,’ Prince Orrin said again. ‘An uncommon sword you have there, boy. From whom did you steal it?’
The mountain wind blew cold, finding every chink in my armour, and I shivered despite the heat pulsing from Gog at my back. ‘Why would the Prince of Arrow come all the way to the Renar Highlands with just fifty knights, I wonder?’ I dismounted. The Prince’s eyes widened at the sight of Gog left in the saddle, half naked and striped like a tiger.
I stood on one of the larger rocks by the roadside, on foot to show I had no running in me.
‘Perhaps such reasons are not for a bandit child by the roadside clutching a stolen sword,’ he said, still maddeningly calm.
I couldn’t argue with the ‘stolen’ so I took offence against the ‘child’. ‘Fourteen is a man’s age in these lands and I wield this sword better than any who held it before me.’
The Prince chuckled, gentle and unforced. If he had studied a book devoted to the art of infuriating me he could have done no better job. Pride has ever been my weakness, and occasionally my strength.
‘My apologies then, young man.’ I could see his champion frown at that, even behind his visor. ‘I travel to see the lands that I will rule as emperor, to know the people and the cities. And to speak with the nobles, the barons, counts … and even kings, who will serve me when I sit upon the empire throne. I would win their service with wisdom, words and favour, rather than with sword and fire.’
A pompous enough speech perhaps, but he had a way with words this one. Oh my brothers, the way he spoke them. A magic of a new kind, this. More subtle than Sageous’s gentle traps – even that heathen witch with his dream-weaving would envy this kind of persuasion. I could see why the Prince had taken off his helm. The enchantment didn’t lie in the words alone but in the look, in the honesty and trust of it all, as if every man who heard them was worthy of his friendship. A talent to be wary of, maybe more potent even than the power Corion used to set me scurrying across empire and to steer my uncle from behind his throne.
The hound sat and licked the slobber from its chops. It looked big enough to swallow a small lamb.
‘And why would they listen to you, Prince of Arrow?’ I asked. I heard a petulance in my voice and hated it.
‘This Hundred War must end,’ he said. ‘It will end. But how many need drown in blood before the peace? Let the throne be claimed. The nobles can keep their castles, rule their lands, collect their gold. Nothing will be lost; nothing will end but the war.’
And there it was again. The magic. I believed him. Even without him saying so I knew that he truly sought peace, that he would rule with a fair and even hand, that he cared about the people. He would let the farmers farm, the merchants trade, the scholars seek their secrets.
‘If you were offered the empire throne,’ he said, looking only at me, ‘would you take it?’
‘Yes.’ Though I would rather take it without it being offered.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Why do you want it?’
He shone a light into my dark corners, this storybook prince with his calm eyes. I wanted to win. The throne was just the token to demonstrate that victory. And I wanted to win because other men had said that I may not. I wanted to fight because fighting ran through me. I gave less for the people than for the dung heap we rolled Makin in.
‘It’s mine.’ All the answer I could find.
‘Is it?’ he asked. ‘Is it yours, Steward?’
And in one flourish he showed his hand. And showed my shame. You should know that the men who fight the Hundred War, and they are all men, save for the Queen of Red, fall from two sides of a great tree. The line of the Stewards, as our enemies call us, trace the clearest path to the throne, but it is to the Great Steward, Honorous, who served for fifty years when the seed of empire failed. And Honorous sat before the throne rather than on it. Still a strong claim to be heir to the man who served as emperor in all but name is a better case for taking that throne than a weak claim to be heir to the last emperor. At least that’s how we Stewards see it. In any case I would cut myself a path to the throne even if some bastard-born herder had fathered me on a gutter-whore – genealogy can work for me or I can cut down the family tree and make a battering ram. Either way is good.
Many of the line of Stewards are cast in my mould: lean, tall, dark of hair and eye, quick of mind. Even our foes call us cunning. The line of the emperor is muddied, lost in burning libraries, tainted by madness and excess. And many of the line, or who claim it, are built like Prince Orrin: fair, thick of arm, sometimes giants big as Rike, though pleasing on the eye.
‘Steward is it now?’ I rolled my wrist and my sword danced. His hound stood up, sharp, without a growl.
‘Put it away, Jorg,’ he said. ‘I know you. You have the look of the Ancraths about you. As dark a branch of the Steward tree as ever grew. You’re all still killing each other so I hear?’
‘That’s King Jorg to you,’ I said, knowing I sounded like a spoiled child and unable to help it. Something in Orrin’s calm humour, in the light of him, cast a shadow over me.
‘King? Ah, yes, because of Ancrath, and Gelleth,’ he said. ‘But I’m told your father has named young Prince Degran his heir. So perhaps …’ He spread his hands and smiled.
The smile felt like a slap in the face. So Father had named the new son he’d made with his Scorron whore. And gifted him my birthright. ‘And you’re thinking to give him the Highlands too?’ I asked. Keeping the savage grin on my face however much it wanted to slide away. ‘You should know that there are a hundred of my Watch hidden in the rocks ready to slot arrows through the gaps in that fancy armour, Prince.’ It might even be true. I knew that at least some of the Watch would be tracking the knights.
‘I’d say it was closer to twenty,’ Prince Orrin said. ‘I don’t think they’re mountain men, are they? Did you bring them out of Ancrath, Jorg, when you ran? They’re skilled enough, but proper mountain men would be harder to spot.’
He knew too much, this prince. It was seriously starting to annoy. And as you know, being angry makes me angry.
‘In any case,’ he carried on as if I weren’t about to explode, as if I weren’t about to ram my sword entirely through his body, ‘I won’t kill you for the same reason you won’t kill me. It would replace two weak kingdoms with a stronger one. When the road to the empire throne, to my throne, leads me here, I would rather find you and your colourful friends terrorizing the peasants and getting drunk, than find your father or Baron Kennick keeping order. And I hope that by the time I arrive you will have grown wiser as well as taller, and open your lands to me as emperor.’
I jumped from my rock and the hound stood in my path quicker than quick, still no growl but way too many teeth on display, all gleaming with slobber. I fixed its eyes, which is a good way to get your face bitten off, but I meant to threaten the beast. Holding my sword by hilt and blade, flat side forward, I took another step, a snarl rising in me. I had a hound once, a good one that I loved, before such soft words were taken from me, and I had no wish to kill this one. But I would. ‘Back.’ More growl than word. My eyes on his.
And with ears flat to its head the beast whimpered and skulked back between the horses’ legs. I think it sensed the death in me. A bitter meal, that necromancer’s heart. Another step away from the world. It sometimes seems I stand three steps outside the lives of other men. One for the heart. One for the thorn bush. And perhaps the first for that dog I remember in dreams.
I call him mine but the hound belonged to my brother William and me. A wolf-hound of some kind, huger than the two of us, a charger fit for two young knights. He could take William on his back, Will being just four, but if I leapt on too he would shake us both off and nip my leg. We called him Justice.
‘Impressive,’ said Prince Orrin, looking anything but impressed. ‘If you’re finished with my dog then we’ll be on our way. I plan to cross through to Orlanth via High Pass, or Blue Moon Pass if it’s clear, and pay a call on Earl Samsar.’
‘You’ll be on your way when I say so,’ I told him, still aching for … something. Fear maybe? Perhaps just a measure of respect would do it. ‘And by whatever route I allow.’ I didn’t like the way he seemed to know the lie of my land better than I did.
He raised an eyebrow at that, keeping a smile at bay and irking me more than smiling would have. ‘And what then is your judgment in this matter, King Jorg?’
Every fibre of me ached to hurt him. In any other man his words would sound smug, arrogant, but here on this cold mountain slope they sounded honest and sincere. I hated him for being so openly the better man. I caught his eye and in that instant I knew. He pitied me.
‘Cross swords with me, Brother Orrin,’ I said. ‘You’re right to think of peace. Why should my goat-herders or your pig farmers suffer in a war to see which of our backsides polishes the empire throne? Cross swords with me and if I yield, then on the day you come to claim the empire I won’t stand against you. Come, draw your blade. Or have your champion try his luck if you must.’ I nodded to the man beside him.
‘Ah,’ Orrin said. ‘You wouldn’t want to fight him. That’s my brother Egan. God made him to stand behind a sword. Scares me sometimes! And besides, the two of you are too alike. Egan thinks all this talk is a waste. He would set our farmers on your herders and drown the world in blood, would you not, Egan? I have a dream for the empire. For my empire. A bright dream. But I fear all Egan’s dreams are red.’
Egan grunted as if bored.
The Prince dismounted. ‘Clear the path and let no man interfere.’
‘This is—’
‘I know, Makin.’ I cut across him. ‘It’s a bad idea.’
Makin climbed off his horse and stood beside me as Orrin’s men pulled away. ‘He could be good,’ he said.
‘Good is fine,’ I said. ‘I’m great.’
‘I won’t argue that you’re world class at killing, Jorg,’ Makin hissed. ‘But this is swordplay and only swordplay.’
‘Then I shall have to play the game,’ I said. The Prince hadn’t asked what I would demand of him when I won. That left a bitter taste.
We stepped together then, two of the hundred, the lines of emperor and steward met for battle.
‘We could do this the clever way, Jorg,’ Orrin said. He had enough of my measure not to say the easy way. ‘Support me. The new emperor will need a new steward.’
I spat in the grit.
‘You don’t know what it is you want, or why you want it, Jorg,’ he said. ‘You’ve seen nothing of the empire you want to own. Have you been east, chasing the sun to the wall of Utter itself? Have you seen the shores of dark Afrique? Spoken with the jarls who sail from their northern fastness when the ice allows? If you had been spawned in the Arral wastes then all the miles you covered in those roaming years of yours would have shown you nothing but grassland. By ship, Jorg, by ship. That’s the way to see the empire. Have you even seen the sea?’
The grey let out a long complacent fart, saving me from an answer. I always loved that horse.
We circled. Like much in life, a sword fight, especially a longsword fight, is about choosing your moment. A swing is a commitment, often a lifetime commitment. You wait for the best odds then bet your life on the chance offered. Against a man in plate armour you have to put muscle into it. All your strength. To put enough hurt through that metal so he won’t be taking advantage as you draw back for the next attack. A lunge can be more tentative. It needs to be precise. To find and pierce that chink in the armour before he finds and pierces yours.
I swung, not to hit him but just to let our blades meet. His sword held a smoky look, something darker alloyed to the Builder-steel. The clash rang out harsh across the slopes. Somehow he rolled his blade in the instant they met and almost took mine from my hands. I didn’t like that at all. I pressed him, short swings to keep him busy, to numb his hands and stop them being so tricksy. It felt like hacking at a stone pillar and left my palms aching, pain stabbing up my wrists.
‘You’re better than I expected,’ he said.
He came at me then, lunge, half-swing, lunge. Combinations too fast to think about.
We train so that our muscles learn. So that our eyes talk to our arms and hands, skipping the brain and the need to bother with decision and judgment. It’s like learning the notes for a piece on the harp. First you think it through, A, C, C, D … and in time your fingers know it and you’ve forgotten the notes.
My sword arm made its moves without consulting me.
‘Really not bad at all,’ he said.
But when you try to play the piece faster, and then faster still, and quicker again, at some point your fingers falter. What comes next, they want to know? What’s next?
A heavy metal bar to the side of the head is what’s next, apparently. At least that’s what the flat of his blade felt like. I said something that was half-curse, half-groan, and all blood, then fell over as if he’d cut all my strings.
‘Yield.’ It sounded as if he was calling from the far end of a long tunnel.
‘Fuck that.’ More blood, possibly some bits of tooth.
‘Last chance, Jorg,’ he said. The edge of his sword lay cold against my neck.
‘He yields.’ Makin at the far end of the same tunnel. ‘He yields.’
‘Like hell I do.’ The difference between sky and ground had started to reassert itself. I focused on a dark blob that could well be Orrin.
‘Yield,’ he said again. Warmth down my neck where blood trickled from his shallow cut.
I managed a laugh. ‘You’ve already said you won’t kill me, Prince of Arrow. It’s not in your interest. So why would I yield?’ I spat again. ‘If you ever get to my borders with an army, I’ll decide what to do then.’
He turned away with a look of disgust.
‘The High Pass,’ I said. ‘I’ll give you free passage to the High Pass and you can bother the earl with your moralizing. You earned that much.’ I tried to stand and failed. Makin helped me to my feet.
We watched them ride on. The brother, Prince Egan, gave me an evil stare as he passed. Orrin didn’t even turn his head.
We watched until the last horse vanished over the rise.
‘We’re going to need a bigger army,’ I said.
Sir Makin is almost the handsome knight of legend, dark locks curling, tall, a swordsman’s build, darkest eyes, his armour always polished, blade keen. Only the thickness of his lips and the sharpness of his nose leave him shy of a maiden’s dream. His mouth too expressive, his look too hawkish. In other matters too Sir Makin is ‘almost’. Almost honourable, almost honest.
About his friendship, though, there is no almost.
7
Four years earlier
We’d ridden for two hours since the Prince of Arrow left for the High Pass. Two hours in a very different kind of silence to the one that kept us company for the first part of our journey. I had the sort of headache that makes decapitation seem like a good option. Any idiot could tell that it wouldn’t take much for me to make their neck the practice run.
‘Ouch.’
Well, not every idiot.
‘Yes, Maical,’ I said. ‘Ouch.’ I watched him through slitted eyes, teeth tight against the throb in my skull. Sometimes you couldn’t tell old Maical was broken. Whatever piece was missing from him it didn’t always show. For whole moments at a time he could look ready for anything, tough, dependable, even cunning. And then it came, that weakness about the mouth, the furrowing of the brow, and the empty eyes.
Maical had found his way back to the Brotherhood within weeks of our victory in the Highlands. Lord knows how, but I suppose even pigeons can find their way home with nothing but a drop of brain in their tiny skulls. In the months since I made the Haunt my home he’d served as stable-boy or assistant to the stable-boy, or dung-collector, or some such. I made it clear I wanted him fed and given a place to sleep. I’d killed his brother after all. Gemt hadn’t cared much for him. He beat him and set him to both their tasks on the road. But he made sure Maical ate and he made sure he had a place to sleep. ‘He banged you up, Jorg,’ Maical said. He looked stupid when he spoke, lips always wet and glistening.
I saw Makin wince, Row exchange a bet with Grumlow.
‘Yes, Maical, he surely did.’
I didn’t feel bad for knifing Gemt. Not for a heartbeat. But it hurt me to think of Maical too broken to hate me, caught in whatever hooks snagged his mind, seeing but trapped. I thought of the watch a tick tick ticking on my wrist. All that cleverness, those wheels within wheels, turning, being turned, teeth biting, and yet one tiny piece of grit, one human hair in the wrong place, and it would seize, ruined, worthless. I wondered what had got into Maical way back when. What had it been that stole his wits away?
‘Tell Makin to get himself up here,’ I said.
Maical pulled on his reins and the grey slowed. I saw Row’s scowl. He’d lost his bet.
The mountains pulsed from red to green as the pain washed from front to back, from behind my eyes to the base of my skull.
‘Sometimes I think you keep him around just to keep the grey happy,’ Makin said. I hadn’t noticed him draw level.
‘I want you to teach me how to use a sword,’ I said.
‘You know how—’
‘I thought I did,’ I said. ‘But now I’m going to take it seriously. What just happened …’ I put my hand to my head and my fingers came away bloody. ‘… is not going to happen again.’
‘Well at least it’s a kingly way to pass the time,’ he said. ‘Help to keep your edge too. Have you even swung a sword since we took the Haunt?’
I shrugged and wished I hadn’t. My teeth made a nasty squeaking as they ground over each other.
‘I’m told you’ve been attempting to father a bastard on pretty much every serving girl in the castle.’ He grinned.
It’s good to be the king.
Except when you get hit in the head with a sword.
‘It’s an effort at repopulation,’ I said. ‘Quality and quantity.’ I clapped a hand to my head. ‘Arrrgh, damn and fuck it.’ Some pain you can distance yourself from, but a headache sits right where you live.
Makin kept grinning. I think he quite liked seeing me knocked down.
He reached into his saddlebag, dug deep, pulled out a tight wrap of leather and tossed it over. I almost missed it. Double vision will do that for you.
‘Clove-spice,’ he said.
‘Been hoarding that one, Sir Makin.’ You could trade a good horse and not get enough clove-spice to fill your hand. Wonderful stuff for pain. Too much and you die of course, but it’s like floating to your death, carried by a warm river. I almost opened the wrap. ‘Take it.’ I threw it back. Giving in to things becomes a habit. I made an enemy of the ache in my head and started to fight.
We rode on. I filled my mind with old venom, brought out the hate I kept for the Count of Renar. I’d had little to exercise it on since he passed out of reach. The throb throb throb behind my eyes made the ache from my broken tooth feel like a tingle.
Rike caught up on that monster horse of his and kept pace. He watched me for a while. Makin might have enjoyed seeing me knocked on my arse; but Rike thought all his festival days had come at once.
‘You know why I keep you around, Rike?’ I asked.
‘Why?’
‘You’re like the worst part of me.’ That squeak of enamel on enamel again as I ground my teeth. ‘Damn.’ It slackened off. ‘I don’t have an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I got me a devil on both. But you’re like the bad one. Like I’d be if I lost my charm, and my good looks.’ I realized I was babbling and tried to grin.
‘Lose yourself, Rike.’ Makin again. I hadn’t seen him come back.
‘My father was right, Makin,’ I said. ‘Right to take his brother’s money, for William and Mother. He would have lost half his army just getting to the Haunt.’
Makin frowned. He held the clove-spice out again. ‘Take it.’
‘My father knew about sacrifice. Corion too. The path he set me on. The right one. I just didn’t like being pushed.’
I could hardly see Makin, eyes slitted against the pulse in my head.
Makin shook his head. ‘Some crimes demand an answer. Corion tried to take that from you. I crossed three nations to find the men who killed my girl.’ He sounded worried.
‘Idiot.’ Numb lips shaped the word.
‘Jorg.’ Makin kept his voice low. ‘You’re crying. Take the damn spice.’
‘Going to need a bigger army.’ Everything had gone black and I felt as if I was falling. And then I hit the ground.
8
Four years earlier
I woke in a darkened room. A fly buzzed. Someone somewhere was being sick. Light filtered in where the daub cracked from the wattle. More light through the shutters, warped in their frame. A peasant hut. The retching stopped, replaced by muted sobs. A child.
I sat up. A thin blanket slipped from me. Straw prickled. The ache in my head had gone. My tooth hurt like a bastard but it was nothing compared to how my head had been. I felt around for my sword and couldn’t find it.
There’s something magical about a departed headache. It’s a shame the joy fades and you can’t appreciate not having one every moment of your life. That hadn’t been a regular headache of course. Old Jorgy got himself a bruised brain. I’d seen it before. When Brother Gains fell off his horse one time and hit his head he went crazier than Maical for the best part of two days. ‘Did I fall off my horse?’ He must have asked that a thousand times in a row. Crying one moment. Laughing the next. We’re brittle things, us men.
I found my feet, still a little shaky. The door opened and the light came dazzling around the dark shape of a woman. ‘I brought you soup,’ she said.
I took it and sat again. ‘Smells good.’ It did. My stomach growled.
‘Your friend, Makin, he brought a couple of rabbits for the pot,’ she said. ‘We hadn’t had meat since the pigs got took.’
I raised the bowl to my lips: no spoons here. She left as I started slurping, burning my mouth and not caring too much. For a long time I just sipped and watched the dust dance where fingers of light reached in through the shutters. I munched on lumps of rabbit, chewed on the gristle, swallowed the fat. It’s good to eat with an empty mind.
At last I got to my feet again, steadier now. I patted myself down. My old dagger was on my hip and there was a lump in my belt pouch which turned out to be Makin’s clove-spice. One more glance around for my sword and I went to the door. The day seemed a little too bright, the wind chill and sharp with the stink of old burning. I stretched and blinked. Apart from the hut I’d come from, a stall for animals by the look of it, the place lay in ruins. Two houses with tumbled walls and blackened spars, some broken fences, animal pens that looked to have been ridden through with heavy horse. I saw the woman crouched in the shell of the closer house, her back to me.
The sudden need for a piss bit hard. I went against the hut, a long hot acid flow never seeming to end. ‘Jesu! Have I slept for a week?’
A wise man once said, ‘Don’t shit where you eat.’ Aristotle perhaps. On the road that’s a rule to live by. Find your relief where you will. Move on each day and leave the shit, all manner of shit, behind you. In the castle I have a garderobe. Which, let’s face it, is a hole in the wall to crap through. In a castle you shit where you eat and you have to think a bit harder about what kind of shit is worth stirring up. That’s what I’ve learned in three months of being king.
Finished at last. Had to be a week’s worth.
I felt better. Good. A yawn cracked my face. The land lay flat to the north, the Matteracks a jagged line to the south. We’d left the Highlands or near as dammit. I stretched and ambled over to the woman. ‘Did my men do this?’ I frowned and glanced around again. ‘Where in hell are they anyhow?’
She turned, face worn, haunted around the eyes. ‘Soldiers from Ancrath did it.’ A child hung in her arms, limp and grey, a girl, six years maybe seven.
‘Ancrath?’ I arched a brow. My eyes kept returning to the girl. ‘We’re close to the border?’
‘Five miles,’ she said. ‘They told us we couldn’t live here. The land was annexed. They started to fire the buildings.’
Annexed. That rang a small bell at the back of my mind. Some dispute about the border. The oldest maps had it that Lord Nossar’s estate reached out this far.
I could smell the vomit now, sour on the morning air. The girl had a blood-black smear of it in her hair.
‘They killed your man?’ I asked. I surprised myself. I don’t care enough about such things to waste words on them. I blamed the bang on the head.
‘They killed our boy,’ she said, staring past the black timbers, past me, past the sky. ‘Davie came out screaming and choking, blind with the smoke. Got too close to a soldier. Just a quick swing, like he was cutting down bindweed, and my boy was open. His guts …’ She blinked and looked down at the girl. ‘He kept screaming. He wouldn’t stop. Another soldier put an arrow through his neck.’
‘And your man?’ I hadn’t asked about her boy. I hadn’t wanted that story. And the girl kept watching me, without interest, without hope.
‘I don’t know.’ She had a grey voice. The way it goes when emotions have burned out. ‘He didn’t go to Davie, didn’t hold him, too scared the soldiers would cut him down too.’ The girl coughed, a wet sound. ‘Now he cries all the time or stares at the ground.’
‘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 Highlands 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 further 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 furthest 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 cut 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.
I made my way along the margins of the forest toward the Roma Road. They say you can put foot on that road and never leave it till you reach the pope’s front door. I planned to walk the other way.
There’s a cemetery near the Roma Road, mostly eaten by the forest, mostly forgotten. I hunted through it as a child, crumbled mausoleums choked with ivy, smothered with moss, cracked by trees. The cemetery covers acre upon hidden acre, a lost necropolis. Perechaise they call it in dusty books. The legends mean nothing to me, Beloved, 1845. Dearly departed, 1710. My heart lies here, 1908. Barely legible. So long ago even their calendar loses meaning.
The stones are set with a clear resin, harder than glass, which wards them in a skin no thicker than a hair. It took years before I noticed it. The weathering they’d suffered happened in the distant long ago. Now not even a hammer blow will mar them. The Builders held these old markers precious and kept them from the centuries.
I found my way through toppled gravestones close to the road where some of it is kept clear. Much has been robbed out. There’s a peasant’s cottage, a little to the west, entirely built from headstones, weathered granite markers with time-blurred legends remembering the dead for illiterate field-men. A house built of stories, to shelter a man who cannot read.
I found her by the road’s edge, hair pink with fallen blossom. The cycle of seasons has worn the definition from her features. But the beauty remains, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the grace in long limbs, the gentle swell of a child’s breast, a freckling of lichen. She needs no deep-carved runes to spell out her life. Here I buried my child. A message for which reading is not required. She died in the winter of a lost year, the daughter of a wealthy man who would have given all his wealth, and more, to buy her into spring.
I saw her first in autumn, long ago, when the leaves fell so thick they hid the stone dog she chases. Whilst I watched her other travellers hurried past on the road, clenched against the sharp-fingered wind. Some paused to wonder what she chased, hugging themselves, squinting into the rain. They moved on. I stayed. Maybe they wondered what they were chasing.
She’s after her dog. A little terrier, remembered in stone, lost that autumn in a drift of wet ochre. A centuries’-old chase that has seen the death of everyone who cared, the end of every soul that knew the terrier’s name. A chase that saw the stilling of each hand to touch this child, the loss of every life that shared her world.
I came again with the snows on the first day of winter, to see my statue girl. My first love maybe. I watched and the snow fell, tiny crystals, the kind so perfect they almost chime against the ground. The light failed early and a wildness infected the wind, swirling the snow into rivulets of milk across the Roma Road, ice hissing over stone. A frost came and etched silver tracery across her dress, with only me to see.
The seasons turn, and here I am again, and still she waits for spring.
They buried high lords and high ladies here. Poets and bards. Now it’s a place for servant corpses. Close enough to the Tall Castle for sentimental ladies to visit their wet-nurses, far enough away to be seemly. They bury old servants, sometimes even faithful dogs, around my girl who waits for spring. Soft-hearted ladies from court come with their perfumed toys that have ceased to yap. And one time a boy of six, soaked and half frozen, dragging something that might once have been a wolf.
‘Hello, Jorg.’
I turned and between the old graves walked Katherine, the sun making magic of her hair.
10
Four years earlier
Hello, Jorg. Was that all she said to me? Katherine, there in the Rennat Forest, among the gravestones. Hello, Jorg?
I’m trying to wake up from something. Maybe I’ve always been trying. I’m drowning in confusion, somewhere high above me light dances on a surface, and past that the air is waiting. Waiting for me to draw breath.
I hardly know Katherine but I want her, with unreasonable ferocity. Like a sickness, like the need for water. Like Paris for Helen, I am laid low by irresistible longing.
In memory I study the light on her face, beneath the glow-bulbs of the Tall Castle, beneath the cemetery trees. I envy those patches of sunlight, sliding over her hair, moving unopposed the length of her body, across her cheekbones. I remember everything. I recall the pattern of her breath. In the heat of Drane’s kitchen I remember a single bead of sweat and the slow roll of it, down her neck, along the tendon, across her throat. I’ve killed men and forgotten them. Mislaid the act of taking a life. But that drop of sweat is a diamond in my mind’s eye.
‘Hello, Jorg.’ And my clever words desert me. She makes me feel my fourteen summers, more boy than man.
I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I’ve made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh. She’s just a person, just a girl, but she stands at the door to an old world, and although I can’t go back … she can come through, and maybe bring with her a scent of it, a taste of that lost warmth.
These feelings are too fierce to last. They can only burn, making us ash and char.
I see her in dreams. I see her against the mountains. High, snow-cold, snow-pure, unobtainable. I climb, and on the empty peak I speak her name to the wind, but the wind takes my words. It takes me too. Tumbling through void.
‘Hello, Jorg.’
My flesh prickles. I rub at my cheek and my fingers come away bloody, sliced open. Every part of me burns with pins and needles. Real pins, real needles. I scream and like buds on the branch each prickle erupts, a hundred thorns sliding from my skin, growing from the bone. There are animals impaled, stabbed through like exhibits on a gamekeeper’s board. Rat, stoat, ferret, fox, dog … baby. Limp and watching.
I scream again and rotate into darkness. A night with only a whisper to give it form. A whispered chant, growing louder.
Topology, tautology, torsion, torture, taunt, taut, tight, taken, taking … taking … take … what’s he trying to take?
Somebody fumbling at my arm, fingers too stupid for the clever catch on the watch. A quick move and I had his wrist, impossibly thick, strong. I dug my thumb into the necessary pressure point. Lundist showed it to me in a book.
‘Arrg!’ Rike’s voice. ‘Pax!’
I sat up sharp, breaking the surface, drawing that long-awaited breath, and shaking the darkness from my mind. Topology, tautology, torsion … meaningless webs of words falling from me.
‘Rike!’ Crouched over me, blocking the too bright sun.
He sneered and sat back. ‘Pax.’
Pax. Road-speak. Peace, it’s in my nature. An excuse for any crime you’re caught in the middle of. Sometimes I think I should wear the word on my forehead. ‘Where in hell are we?’ I asked. An empty feeling ran through me, welling from my stomach and behind my eyes.
‘Hell’s the word.’ Red Kent walked over.
I lifted my hand. Sand all over. Sand everywhere in fact. ‘A desert?’
Two of the fingernails on my right hand were torn away. Gone. It started to hurt. My other nails were torn and split. I had bruises all over.
Gog came out from behind a lone thorn bush, slow as if he thought I might bite.
‘I—’ I pressed my hand to the side of my head, sand gritty on the skin. ‘I was with Katherine …’
‘And then what?’ Makin’s voice from behind.
‘I …’ Nothing. And then nothing. As if little Jorgy had been too full of the spring’s warmth and possibilities, and then a stone looped out of the shadows and took him off the bough.
I remembered the thorns. The itch and sting of them stayed with me. I lifted my arms. No wounds, but the skin lay red and scabbed. In fact Kent had it too, red as his name suggests. I turned to find Makin, also scabby, leading his horse. The beast looked worse than him, ropes of mucus around its muzzle, blisters on its tongue.
‘This is not a good place to be, I’m thinking.’ I reached for my knife and found it gone. ‘What are we doing here?’
‘We came to see a man named Luntar,’ Makin said. ‘An alchemist from the Utter East. He lives here.’
‘And here is?’
‘Thar.’
I knew the name. On the map scroll the word had sat along the edge of the Thurtan grasslands. There had been a burn mark on the map obscuring whatever the name labelled. But perhaps the scorch mark hadn’t been an accident.
‘Poisoned land,’ Makin said. ‘Some call them promised.’
A Builder’s Sun had burned here, many centuries ago. The promise was that one day the land would be safe again. I thrust my fingers back into the sand. Not the ones missing fingernails. I could touch the death there. I could roll it between fingertip and thumb. Hot. Death and fire together.
‘He lives here?’ I asked. ‘Doesn’t he burn?’
Makin shuddered. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘He does.’ It takes a lot to make Makin shudder.
The empty feeling gnawed at me, eating away at the questions I most wanted to ask.
‘And what,’ I said, ‘did we want from this east-mage?’
Makin held out what he had been holding all along. ‘This.’
A box. A copper box, thorn-patterned, no lock or latch. A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.
‘What’s in the box?’ I didn’t want to know.
Makin shook his head. ‘There was a madness in you, Jorg. When you came back.’
‘What’s in it?’
‘Luntar put the madness in there.’ Makin thrust the box back into his saddlebag. ‘It was killing you.’
‘He put my memory in that box?’ I asked, incredulous. ‘You let him take my memory!’
‘You begged him to do it, Jorg.’ Makin wouldn’t look at me. Rike on the other hand couldn’t stop.
‘Give it to me.’ I would have reached for it but my hand didn’t want to.
‘He told me not to,’ Makin said, unhappy. ‘He told me to make you wait for a day. If you still wanted it after that, you could take it.’ Makin bit his lip. He chewed on it too much. ‘Trust me in this, Jorg, you don’t want to go back to how you were.’
I shrugged. ‘Tomorrow, then.’ Because trust is how a leader binds his men. And because my hands didn’t want that box. They’d rather burn. ‘Now, where’s my fecking dagger?’
Makin would only look at the horizon. ‘Best forgotten.’
We moved on, leading the horses, all of us reunited. We headed east, and when the wind blew, the sand stung like nettles. Only Gog and Gorgoth seemed unaffected.
Gog hung back, as if he didn’t want to be near me. ‘Is it all like this?’ I asked him, just to make him look at me. ‘Even where Luntar lives?’
He shook his head. ‘The sand turns to glass around his hut. Black glass. It cuts your feet.’
We walked on. Rike marched beside me, sparing the occasional glance. Something had changed in the way he looked at me. As if we were equals now.
I kept my head down and tried to remember. I teased at the hole in my mind. ‘Hello, Jorg,’ she had said.
Memory is all we are. Moments and feelings, captured in amber, strung on filaments of reason. Take a man’s memories and you take all of him. Chip away a memory at a time and you destroy him as surely as if you hammered nail after nail through his skull. I would have back what was mine. I would open the box.
‘Hello, Jorg,’ she had said. We were by the statue of the girl and her dog, by her grave where sentimental ladies and foolish children bury their animals.
Nothing.
I learned a time ago that if you can’t get what you want by going in the front door, find a back way. I know a back way to that cemetery. Not by a path I wanted to tread, but I would take it even so.
When I was very young, six maybe, a duke called on my father, a man from the north with white-blond hair and a beard down his chest. Alaric of Maladon. The Duke brought a gift for my mother, a wonder of the old world. Something bright and moving, swirling within glass, first lost in the hugeness of the Duke’s hand and then in the folds of Mother’s dress.
I wanted that thing, half-seen and not understood. But such gifts were not for tiny princes. My father took it and set it in the treasury to gather dust. I learned this much from quiet listening.
The treasury in the Tall Castle lies behind an iron door, triple-locked. Not a Builder-made door, but a work of the Turkmen, black iron set with a hundred studs. When you’re six, most locked doors present a problem. This one presented several.
Of all memories, the first I have is of leaning from a high parapet into the teeth of a gale, with the rain lashing and me laughing. The next is of hands pulling me back.
If you’re determined, if you set your mind, there are never enough hands to pull you back. By the time I reached six I knew the outside of the Tall Castle as well as I knew the inside. The Builders left little for a climber to use, but centuries of tinkering by the Ancraths, and the House of Or before us, had provided plenty of footholds, at least plenty of ones deep enough for a child.
There is a single high window in the royal treasury, set in a plain wall a hundred feet above the ground, too narrow for a man and blocked by a forest of bars set so close as to give a snake quite a wriggle of it. On the far side of the castle, close to the throne-room, is a hole that leads to a gargoyle’s head on the outer wall. If the treasury door opens, then the movement of air through the castle makes the gargoyle speak. On a still day he moans and when the wind is up he howls. He will also speak if the wind is hard in the east and a particular window in the kitchen stores is left unshuttered. When that happens there’s a fuss and somebody gets whipped with rope and wire. Without the treasury’s high window the gargoyle would not speak and the king would never know when the door to his treasures stood open.
I left my bed one moonless night. William lay sleeping in his little bed. No one saw me leave, only our great-hound, Justice. He gave a whine of reproach then tried to follow. I cursed him to silence and closed the door on him.
Those bars look strong but like so much we depend upon in life they are rotten to the core. Rust has eaten them. Even those with steel left at the centre will bend given sufficient leverage. One night when my nurse lay sleeping and three guards on wall-duty argued over the ownership of a silver coin found on the steps at change-over, I climbed down a knotted rope and set foot amidst my father’s wealth. I brushed the rust from my tunic, shook great flakes of it from my hair, and set my lantern, now unhooded, upon the floor.
The Ancrath loot, robbed from almost every corner of empire, lay on stone shelves, belched from coffers, stood stacked in careless piles. Armour, swords, gold coin in wooden tubs, mechanisms that looked like parts of insects, gleaming in the lantern light and tainting the air with alien scents, almost citrus, almost metal. I found my prize beside a helmet full of cogs and ash.
The Duke’s gift didn’t disappoint. Beneath a glass dome that wasn’t glass, sealed by an ivory disk that wasn’t ivory, lay a tiny scene, a church in miniature set around with tiny houses, and there a person, and another. And as I held it to the light, and turned its surprising weight this way and that to see the detail, a snowstorm grew, swirling up from the ground until whirling flakes obliterated the view leaving nothing but a blizzard in a half-globe. I set the snow-globe back, worried for a moment that I had somehow broken it. And miracle of miracles, the snow began to settle.
There’s no magic to it now. I know that the right collection of artisans could make something similar in just a few weeks. They would use glass and ivory, and I don’t know what the snow would be, but as ancient wonders go, there’s little wonder in such things if you’re much past six. But at the time it was magic, of the best kind. Stolen magic.
I shook the snow-globe again, and once more the all-encompassing blizzard rose, chaos, followed by calm, by settling snows, and a return to the world before. I shook it again. It seemed wrong. All that storm and fury signifying nothing. The whole world upheaved, and for what? The same man trudged toward the same church, the same woman waited at the same cottage door. I held a world in my hand and however I shook it, however the pieces fell, in whatever new patterns, nothing changed. The man would never reach the church.
Even at six I knew the Hundred War. I marched wooden soldiers across Father’s maps. I saw the troops return through the Tall Gate, bloody and fewer, and the women weeping in the shadows as others threw themselves at their men. I read the tales of battle, of advance and retreat, of victory and defeat, in books I would not have been allowed to open if my father knew me. I understood all this and I knew that I held my whole world in my right hand. Not some play land, some toy church and tiny men crafted by ancients. My whole world. And no amount of shaking would change it. We would swirl against each other, battle, kill, and fall, and settle, and as the haze cleared, the war would still be there, unchanged, waiting, for me, for my brother, for my mother.
When a game cannot be won, change the game. I read that in the book of Kirk. Without thought I brought the snow-globe overhead and smashed it on the ground. From the wet fragments I picked out the man, barely a wheat-grain between my thumb and finger.
‘You’re free now,’ I said, then flicked him into a corner to find his own way home, because I didn’t have all the answers, not then, and not now.
I left the treasury, taking nothing, almost defeated by the rope climb even so. I felt tired but content. What I had done seemed so right that I somehow thought others would see it too and that my crime would not follow me. With aching arms, and covered with rust and scratches, I hauled myself back over the parapet.
‘What’s this now?’ A big hand took me by the neck and lifted me off my feet. It seemed that the wall guards had been less argumentative over my coin than I had hoped.
It didn’t take long before I stood in my father’s throne-room with a sleepy page lighting torches. No whale oil in silver lamps for this night’s business, just pitch-torches crackling, painting more smoke on the black ceiling. Sir Reilly held my shoulder, his gauntlet too heavy and digging in. We waited in the empty room and watched the shadows dance. The page left.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. Though I wasn’t.
Sir Reilly looked grim. ‘I’m sorry too, Jorg.’
‘I won’t do it again,’ I said. Though I would.
‘I know,’ Sir Reilly said, almost tender. ‘But now we must wait for your father, and he is not a gentle man.’
It seemed that we waited half the night, and when the doors boomed open, I jumped despite the promises I made myself.
My father, in his purple robe and iron crown, with not a trace of sleep in him, strode alone to the throne. He sat and spread his hands across the arms of his chair.
‘I want Justice,’ he said. Loud enough for a whole court though Reilly and I were his only audience.
Again. ‘I want Justice.’ Eyes on the great doors.
‘I’m sorry.’ And this time I meant it. ‘I can pay—’
‘Justice!’ He didn’t even glance at me.
The doors opened again and on a cart such as they use to bring prisoners up from the dungeon came my great-hound, mine and Will’s, chained at each leg and pushed by mild-faced servant named Inch, a broad-armed man who had once slipped me a sugar-twist on a fete day.
I started forward but Reilly’s hand kept me where I was.
Justice trembled on the cart, eyes wide, shivering so bad he could barely stand, though he had four legs to my two. He looked wet and as Inch pushed him nearer I caught the stink of rock-oil, the kind they burn in servant’s lamps. Inch reached into the cart and lifted an ugly lump hammer, a big one used for breaking coal into smaller pieces for the fire.
‘Go,’ Father said.
The look in Inch’s mild eyes said he would prefer to stay, but he set the hammer on the floor and left without protest.
‘There are lessons to be learned today,’ Father said.
‘Have you ever burned yourself, Jorg?’ Father asked.
I had. I once picked up a poker that had been left with one end in the fire. The pain had taken my breath. I couldn’t scream. Not until the blisters started to rise could I make any sound above hissing, and when I could I howled so loud my mother came running from her tower, arriving as the maids and nurse burst from the next room. My hand had burned for a week, weeping and oozing, sending bursts of horrific pain along my arm at the slightest wiggle of fingers. The skin fell away and the flesh beneath lay raw and wet, hurt by even a breath of air.
‘You took from me, Jorg,’ Father said. ‘You stole what was mine.’
I knew enough not to say that it was Mother’s.
‘I’ve noticed that you love this dog,’ Father said.
I wondered at that, even in my fear. I thought it more likely that he had been told.
‘That’s a weakness, Jorg,’ Father said. ‘Loving anything is a weakness. Loving a hound is stupidity.’
I said nothing.
‘Shall I burn the dog?’ Father reached for the nearest torch.
‘No!’ It burst from me, a horrified scream.
He sat back. ‘See how weak this dog has made you?’ He glanced at Sir Reilly. ‘How will he rule Ancrath if he cannot rule himself?’
‘Don’t burn him.’ My voice trembled, pleading, but somehow it was a threat too, even if none of us recognized it.
‘Perhaps there is another way?’ Father said. ‘A middle ground.’ He looked at the hammer.
I didn’t understand. I didn’t want to.
‘Break the dog’s leg,’ he said. ‘One quick blow and Justice will be served.’
‘No,’ I swallowed, almost choking, ‘I can’t.’
Father shrugged and leaned from his throne, reaching for the torch again.
I remembered the pain that poker had seared into me. Horror reached for me and I knew I could let it take me, down into hysteria, crying, raging, and I could stay there until the deed was done. I could run and hide in tears and leave Justice to burn.
I picked up the hammer before Father’s hand closed on the torch. It took effort just to lift it, heavy in too many ways. Justice just trembled and watched me, whining, his tail hooked between his legs, no understanding in him, only fear.
‘Swing hard,’ Father said. ‘Or you’ll just have to swing again.’
I looked at Justice’s leg, his long quick leg, the fur plastered down with oil over bone and tendon, the iron shackle, some kind of vice from the Question Chamber, biting into his ankle, blood on the metal.
‘I’m sorry, Father, I won’t ever steal again.’ And I meant it.
‘Don’t try my patience, boy.’ I saw the coldness in his eyes and wondered if he had always hated me.
I lifted the hammer, my arms almost too weak, shaking almost as much as the dog. I raised it slowly, waiting, waiting for Father to say it, to say: ‘Enough, you’ve proved yourself.’
The words never came. ‘Break or burn,’ he said. And with a scream I let the hammer swing.
Justice’s leg broke with a loud snap. For a heartbeat there was no other sound. The limb looked wrong, upper and lower parts at sick-making angles, white bone in a slather of red blood and black fur. Then came the howling, the snarling fury, the straining at his bonds as he looked for something to fight, some battle to keep away the pain.
‘One more, Jorg,’ Father said. He spoke softly but I heard him above the howls. For the longest moment his words made no sense to me.
I said ‘No,’ but I didn’t make him reach for the torch. If I made him reach again he wouldn’t draw back. I knew that much.
This time Justice understood the raising of the hammer. He whimpered, whined, begged as only dogs can beg. I swung hard and missed, blinded with tears. The cart rattled and Justice jumped and howled, bleeding from all his shackles now, the broken leg stretching with tendons exposed. I hit him on my second stroke and shattered his other foreleg.
Vomit took me by surprise, hot, sour, spurting from my mouth. I crawled in it, gagging and gasping. Almost not hearing Father’s: ‘One more.’
With his third leg smashed, Justice couldn’t stand. He flopped, broken in the cart, stinking in his own mess. Strangely he didn’t snarl or whine now. Instead as I lay wracked with sobs, heaving in the air in gulps, he nuzzled me as he used to nuzzle William when he cried with a grazed knee or thwarted ambition. That’s how stupid dogs are, my brothers. And that’s how stupid I was at six, letting weakness take hold of me, giving the world a lever with which to bend whatever iron lies in my soul.
‘One more,’ Father said. ‘He has a leg left to stand on, does he not, Sir Reilly?’
And for once Sir Reilly would not answer his king.
‘One more, Jorg.’
I looked at Justice, broken and licking the tears and snot from my hand. ‘No.’
And with that Father took the torch and tossed it into the cart.
I rolled back from the sudden bloom of flame. Whatever my heart told me to do, my body remembered the lesson of the poker and would not let me stay. The howling from the cart made all that had gone before seem as nothing. I call it howling but it was screaming. Man, dog, horse. With enough hurt we all sound the same.
In that moment, rolling clear, even though I was six and my hands were unclever, I took the hammer that had seemed so heavy and threw it without effort, hard and straight. If my father had moved but a little more slowly I might be king of two lands now. Instead it touched his crown just enough to turn it a quarter circle, then hit the wall behind his chair and fell to the ground, leaving a shallow scar on the Builder-stone.
Father was right of course. There were lessons to be learned that night. The dog was a weakness and the Hundred War cannot be won by a man with such weaknesses. Nor can it be won by a man who yields to the lesser evil. Give an inch, give any single man any single inch and the next thing you hear will be, ‘One more, Jorg, one more.’ And in the end what you love will burn. Father’s lesson was a true one, but knowing that can’t make me forgive the means by which he taught it.
For a time there on the road I followed Father’s teaching: strength in all things, no quarter. On the road I had known with the utter conviction of a child that the Empire throne would be mine only if I kept true to the hard lessons of Justice and the thorns. Weakness is a contagion, one breath of it can corrupt a man whole and entire. Now though, even with all the evil in me, I don’t know if I could teach such lessons to a son of mine.
William never needed such teaching. He had iron in him from the start, always the more clever, the more sure, the fiercest of us, despite my two extra years. He said I should have thrown the hammer as soon as I lifted it, and should not have missed. I would be king then, and we would still have our dog.
Two days later I stole away from both nurse and guard and found my way to the rubbish pits behind the table-knights’ stable. A north wind carried the last of winter, laced with rain that was almost ice. I found my dog’s remains, a reeking mess, black, dripping, limp but heavy. I had to drag him, but I had told William I would bury him not leave him to rot on the pile. I dragged him two miles in the freezing rain, along the Roma Road, empty save for a merchant with his wagon lashed closed and his head down. I took Justice to the girl with the dog, and I buried him there beside her, in the mud, my hands numb and the rest of me wishing I were numb.
‘Hello, Jorg,’ Katherine said. And then nothing.
Nothing? If I could remember all that. If I could remember that dark path to the cemetery of Perechaise, and live with it these many years … what in hell lay in that box, and how could I ever want it back?
Many men do not look their part. Wisdom may wait behind a foolish smile, bravery can gaze from eyes that cry fright. Brother Rike however is that rarest of creatures, a man whose face tells the whole story. Blunt features beneath a heavy brow, the ugly puckering of old scar tissue, small black eyes that watch the world with impersonal malice, dark hair, short and thick with dirt, bristling across the thickest of skulls. And had God given him a smaller frame in place of a giant’s packed with unreasonable helpings of muscle, weakness in place of an ox team’s stamina, still Rike would be the meanest dwarf in Christendom.
11
Wedding Day
Mountains are a great leveller. They don’t care who you are or how many.
Some have it that the Builders made the Matteracks, drinking the red blood of the earth to steal its power, and that the peaks were thrown up when the rocks themselves revolted and shrugged the Builders off. Gomst tells it that the Lord God set the mountains here, ripples in the wet clay as he formed the world with both hands. Whoever it was that did the work, they have my thanks. It’s the Matteracks that put the ‘high’ into the Renar Highlands. They march on east to west, wrinkling the map through other kingdoms, but it’s in the Highlands that they do their best work. Here it’s the Matteracks that say where you can and can’t go.
It’s been said once or twice that I have a stubborn streak. In any case I have never subscribed to the idea that a king can be told where he can’t go in his own kingdom. And so in the years since arriving as a callow youth, in between learning the sword song, mastering the art of shaving, and dispensing justice with a sharp edge, I took to mountain climbing.
Climbing, it turned out, was as new to the people of the Highlands as it was to me. They knew all about getting up to places they needed to be. High pastures for the wool-goats, the summer passes for trade, the Eiger cliff for hunting opals. But about getting to places they didn’t need to go … well who has time for that when their belly grumbles or there’s money to be made?
‘What in hell are you doing, Jorg?’ Coddin asked me once when I came back bloody, with my wrist grinding bone at every move.
‘You should come out with me,’ I told him, just to see him wince. I climb alone. In truth there’s never room for two on a mountaintop.
‘I’ll rephrase,’ said Coddin. I could see the grey starting in his hair. Threads of it at his temples. ‘Why are you doing it?’
I pursed my lips at that, then grinned at the answer. ‘The mountains told me I couldn’t.’
‘You’re familiar with King Canute?’ he asked. ‘It’s not a path I advise for you – since you pay me for advising these days.’
‘Heh.’ I wondered if Katherine would climb mountains. I thought she would, given half a chance. ‘I’ve seen the sea, Coddin. The sea can eat mountains whole. I might have the occasional difference of opinion with the odd mountain or two, but if you catch me challenging the ocean you have my permission to drop an ox on me.’
I told Coddin that stubbornness led me to climb, and perhaps it did, but there’s more to it. Mountains have no memory, no judgments to offer. There’s a purity in the struggle to reach a peak. You leave your world behind and take only what you need. For a creature like me there is nothing closer to redemption.
‘Attack,’ Miana had said, and surely a man shouldn’t refuse his wife on their wedding day. Of course it helped that I had planned to attack all along. I led the way myself, for the sally ports and the tunnels that lead to them are known to few. Or rather many know of them but, like an honest priest, few would be able to show you one.
We walked four abreast, the tallest men hunched to save scraping their heads on rough-hewn stone. Every tenth man held a pitch torch and at the back of our column they almost choked on the smoke. My own torch showed little more than the ten yards of tunnel ahead, twisting to take advantage of natural voids and fissures. The tramp tramp of many feet, at first hypnotic, faded to background noise, unnoticed until without warning it stopped. I turned and flames showed nothing but my swinging shadow. Not a man of my command, not a whisper of them.
‘What is it that you think you’re doing here, Jorg?’ The dream-witch’s words flowed around me, a river of soft cadence, carrying only hints of his Saracen heritage. ‘I watch you from one moment to the next. Your plans are known before you so much as unfold them.’
‘Then you’ll know what it is I think I’m doing here, Sageous.’ I cast about for a sign of him.
‘You know we joke about you, Jorg?’ Sageous asked. ‘The pawn who thinks he’s playing his own game. Even Ferrakind laughs about it behind the fire, and Kelem, still preserved in his salt mines. Lady Blue has you on her sapphire board, Skilfar sees your future patterned on the ice, at the Mathema they factor you into their equations, a small term approximated to nothing. In the shadows behind thrones you count for little, Jorg, they laugh at how you serve me and know it not. The Silent Sister only smiles when your name is spoken.’
‘I’m pleased to be of some service then.’ To my left the shadows on the wall moved with reluctance, slow to respond to the swing of my torch. I stepped forward and thrust the flames into the darkest spot, scraping embers over the stone.
‘This is your last day, Jorg.’ Sageous hissed as flame ate shadow and darkness peeled from stone like layers of skin. It pleased me no end to hear his pain. ‘I’ll watch you die.’ And he was gone.
Makin nearly walked into me from behind. ‘Problem?’
I shook off the daydream’s tatters and picked up my pace. ‘No problems.’ Sageous liked to pull the strings so gently that a man would never suspect himself steered. To make Sageous angry, to make him hate, only eroded the subtle powers he used. My first victory of the day. And if he felt the need to taunt me then I must have worried him somehow. He must think I had some kind of chance – which made him a hell of a lot more optimistic than I was.
‘No problems. In fact the morning is just starting to look up!’
Another fifty yards and a stair took us onto the slopes via a crawl space beneath a vast rock known as Old Bill.
When you leave the Haunt you are immediately among mountains. They dwarf you in a way that high walls and tall towers cannot. In the midst of the heave and thrust of the Matteracks all of us, the Haunt itself, even the Prince of Arrow’s twenty thousands, were as nothing. Ants fighting on the carcass of an elephant.
Out on those slopes in the coldness of the wind, with the mountains high and silent on all sides, it felt good to be alive, and if it had to be, it was a good day to die.
‘Have Marten take his troops and hold the Runyard for me,’ I said.
‘The Runyard?’ Makin said, wrapping his cloak tight against the wind. ‘You want our best captain to secure a dead end valley?’
‘We need those men, Jorg,’ Coddin said, straightening from his crawl. ‘We can’t spare ten soldiers, let alone a hundred of our best.’ Even as he argued he beckoned a man to carry my orders.
‘You don’t think he can hold it?’ I asked.
And that set Makin running in a new direction. ‘Hold it? He’d hold the gates of heaven for you, that man; or hell. Lord knows why.’
I shrugged. Marten would hold because I’d given him what he called salvation. A second chance to stand, to protect his family. For four years he had studied nothing but war, from arrow to army, the four years since he came to the castle with Sara at his side. In the end he would hold because years ago in the ruins of his farm I had given his little girl a wind-up clown and Makin’s clove-spice. A Builder toy to make her smile and the clove-spice to take her pain, and her life. The drug stole her away rather than the waste, and she died smiling at sweet dreams instead of choking on her own blood.
‘Why the Runyard?’ Coddin wanted to know. Coddin couldn’t be put off the scent so easily.
‘The Prince of Arrow doesn’t have assassins in my castle, Coddin, but he has spies. I tell you what you need to know, what will make a difference to your actions. The rest, the long shots, the hunches, it’s safe to keep locked away.’ I tapped the side of my head. For a moment though the copper box burned against my hip and its thorn pattern filled my vision.
‘I’d be happier on a horse,’ Makin said.
‘I’d be happier on a giant mountain goat,’ I said. ‘One that shat diamonds. Until we find some, we’re walking.’
Three hundred men walked behind us. Armies are wont to march, but marching in the Highlands is a short trip to a broken ankle. Three hundred men of the Watch in mountain grey. Exiting the sally port amid the boulder field west of the Haunt where the tunnel rose through the bedrock. No crimson tabards here, or gold braiding, no rampant lions or displayed dragons or crowned feckin’ frogs, just tatter-robes in rock shades. I hadn’t come out for a uniform competition. I came out to win.
Behind us rockets took flight, lacing the dull morning with trails of sparks, and leaving a loose pall of sulphurous smoke above the castle. Wedding celebrations to amuse the Highlanders, but also a convenient draw for the eyes to the north of us, the uninvited guests.
The Prince’s army had started to move, units massed in their attack formations, Normardy pike-men to the fore, rank upon rank of archers on the far side, men of Belpan with their longbows near tall as them, crossbow units out of Ken, beards braided, brown pennants fluttering above the drummers, each man with a shield boy hurrying before him. The archers stood ready to peel off and find their places on the ridges to our east, the useless Orlanth cavalry at the rear. Their day would come later, after wintering in the ruins of my home, after the high passes cleared and the Prince moved on to increase his tally of fallen kingdoms. The Thurtans next no doubt. And on to Germania and the dozen Teuton realms.
We came down the slopes west of the Haunt in a grey wave, swords, daggers, shortbows. I’d spent most of dear uncle’s gold on those bows. The men of the Forest Watch knew the shortbow, and the Highland recruits learned it fast enough. Three hundred recurved composite shortbows, Scythian made. Ten gold apiece. I could have sat every man on a half-decent nag for that.
The Prince’s scouts saw us. That had never been in doubt. A sharp-eyed observer on their front lines might have seen us across the mile or so that remained. But why would they be looking? They had scouts.
I picked up the pace. There’s nothing like mountains for making you fit to run. At first when you come to the mountains everything is hard. Even the air feels too thin to breathe. Years pass and your muscles become iron. Especially if you climb.
We moved quickly. Speed on the slopes is an art. The Prince of Arrow wasn’t stupid. The commanders he had picked had chosen officers who had selected scouts who knew mountains. They moved fast, but the few men that fell didn’t get up again before we caught them.
It’s always nice to surprise someone. The Prince of Arrow hadn’t expected me to charge his tens of thousands with my three hundred. That’s probably why we were able to arrive only seconds behind the first word of our advance, and long before that word could be acted on.
Three hundred is a magic number. King Leonidas held back a Persian ocean at the Hot Gates with just three hundred. I would have liked to meet the Spartans. That story has outlived empires by the score. King Leonidas held back an ocean, and Canute did not.
I could feel the burn in my legs, the cool breath hauled in and the hot breath out. Sweat inside my armour, a river of it under the breastplate. Hard leathers these, cured and boiled in oil, padded linen underneath, no plate or chain today. Today we needed to move.
When I gave the shout, we stopped on the rock field, scattered on the slope, two hundred yards from their lines, no more, close enough to smell them. On this flank, far from the archers bound for the ridge, men of Arrow formed the largest contingent, units of spearmen in light ringmail, swordsmen in heavier chain, among them the landed knights who had levied the soldiers from farm and village or emptied their castle guard in service of their prince. And all of them, at least the ones we could see before the roll of the mountains hid the vast expanse of their advance, marched without haste, confident, some joking, watching the sparks and smoke above the Haunt. The great siege engines creaked amongst them, drawn by many mules.
I didn’t need to tell the Watch. They started to loose their shafts immediately. The first screams carried the message of our attack far more effectively than scouts still hunting for their breath.
Aiming at the thickest knots of men made it hard not to find flesh.
We managed a second volley before the first of the enemy started to charge. The Prince’s archers, massed on the far side of the army column a quarter mile off and more, could make no reply. Know thyself, Pythagoras said. But he was a man of numbers and you can’t count on those. Sun Tzu tells us: Know thy enemies. I had lost men I could ill afford patrolling these slopes, but I knew my enemy and I knew the disposition of his forces.
The Prince’s archers would have found us hard targets in any case, loose amongst the rocks and the long morning shadows.
Another volley and another. Hundreds killed or wounded with each flight. Wounded is good. Sometimes wounded is better than dead. The wounded cause trouble. If you let them.
The foot-soldiers came at us in ones and twos, then handfuls, and behind that a flood, like a wave breaking and racing across sand.
‘Pick your targets,’ I shouted.
Another volley. A single man amongst the forerunners fell, skewered through his thigh.
‘Dammit! Pick your targets.’
Another volley and none of the runners fell. The dying happened back in the masses still milling in confusion, caught in the press of bodies. One of mine for every twenty of theirs. Stiff odds. If we’d managed ten volleys before they reached us we might have slain three thousand men. We managed six.
12
Wedding Day
‘Be ready to run,’ I shouted.
‘That’s your plan, Jorg?’ Makin’s face could take surprise to a whole new level. Something in the eyebrows did it.
‘Be ready,’ I repeated. In truth if I had a plan I held no more than a thread of it, teasing it out inch by inch. And the thread I held told me, Be ready to run. Sun Tzu instructs: If in all respects your foe exceeds you, be ready to elude him.
‘If that were the fucking plan,’ said Makin, shouldering his bow, ‘we should have started two weeks ago.’
The first of Arrow’s soldiers reached me, purple-faced from the race up the mountain.
Katherine Ap Scorron fills my nights. More than is healthy. And all of those dreams are dark. Chella walks in some of them, stepping direct from the necromancers’ halls beneath Mount Honas, wicked and delicious. Her smile says she knows me to my rotten core, and Katherine’s face will writhe across hers as firm flesh turns to corrupt undulation.
The dead child will wander in and out of many dreams, holding the thorn-patterned box in crimson hands. He takes different names. William most often, though he is not the brother I knew. But he follows Katherine whenever I call her to my bed; fresh killed in some, the blood still running, and in others grey with rot.
The telling of dreams is a dull business, but experiencing a stranger’s dreams at first hand may be another matter. Crafting nightmares as weapons or shackles and setting them loose to hunt your victims could very well be entertaining. It seems to keep a certain dream-witch busy.
My father thought Sageous to be his creature. Perhaps he thinks he sent the witch away after I broke his power in the Tall Castle, and maybe the Prince of Arrow now thinks he owns Sageous’s services. Like Corion, though, and the Silent Sister and others scattered across the empire, Sageous sees himself as a player behind the thrones, pushing kings and counts, earls and princes across the board. I have never liked to be pushed. The Prince of Arrow also struck me as a man who would prove hard for the dream-witch to move, but we will see.
Sageous learned twice over not to send his creatures out to snare me in my sleep. I think each failure takes something vital from him. Certainly he did not persist. The child is not his creation. I would know if it were.
The heathen watches though. He stands on the edge of my dreaming, silent, hoping not to be seen. I have chased him to the edge of waking and fallen from my bed choking the pillow. Once my sleeping hand found a dagger. Feathers everywhere. He seeks to steer me with the most gentle of prods. Even a soft touch, if it is made sufficiently far ahead of the crucial event, can have a great impact. Sageous seeks to steer me, to steer us all, his fingers swift and light as spiders, pulling delicate threads, until the power he wants is delivered into his lap as if by accident.
Tutor Lundist said Sun Tzu should be my guide in war. My father may have executed Lundist a week after I fled the Tall Castle but what the tutor taught will stay with me longer than any lesson Olidan Ancrath inflicted on his son.
All war is deception, Sun Tzu tells me on pages yellow as jaundice, dry as sand. All war is deception but where are my chances to deceive? I have spies in my halls, watchers in my dreams. The grave’s a fine and private place they say, but I suspect even there secrets can be hard to hold in these broken days.
And so I use what I have. A copper box that holds memories. One that stores a memory so terrible I couldn’t keep it in me. I have the box and I use it. Long ago I learned that pressed to the forehead, hard enough to leave its thorn print marked upon the skin, it will steal a memory, a thought, a plan, whatever is foremost in your thinking. The plan is lost but safe from Sageous’ kind, and all that remains is the recollection that you had a good idea, and the memory of where to find it again when needed.
Hold the box tight in your hand and you can feel the dark edges of horror inside, cutting, burning. The pain leaks out, robbed of its context, raw and cold, and with it, if you’re clever, if the fingers of your mind are deft, you can draw the thread of a previously stored stratagem from a place beyond all spies. And if you can surprise your enemy, then surprising yourself is small price to pay.
13
Wedding Day
The first man I killed in my eighteenth year had done most of the job for me. Running two hundred yards up a steep and rocky slope in chain armour is hard work. The soldier looked about ready to keel over, like the old woman in the market who never got up after seeing Gorgoth for the first and last time. I let him run onto my sword and that was the end of it.
The next man went pretty much the same way, only I had to be a little faster and thrust at him rather than just let him impale himself. In battle the thrust is a much cleaner death than the cut. Unless of course it’s the guts where you get it and then you’re going to have a long hard time of it before the rot sets in and carries you off screaming days later.
The third man, tall and bearded, took the two bodies at my feet as a hint and slowed down to face me. He should have waited for his friends behind him on the slope, but instead he came in swinging his broadsword, still huffing and puffing from his run. I stepped back to avoid the sweep of his blade then swung my own and took his throat. He turned, spraying arterial blood over the friends he should have waited for, then tripped and fell amongst the rocks. Until you’ve seen it you won’t believe how far blood will spurt from the right cut. It’s a wonder we don’t feel that pressure inside us all the time, a wonder that we don’t just explode sometimes.
I should have turned and run at that point. It was the plan after all. My plan. And the men of the Watch were already in full retreat behind me. Instead I advanced, moving quickly between the two blood-spattered soldiers who leapt out of Beardy’s way as he fell. I made a figure-eight cut, lashing out from one side to the other, and both of them fell, their mail torn, a shattered collarbone on the right, sliced chest muscle on the left. It shouldn’t have taken them both down, but it did, and I felt that four years’ hard practice with the blade hadn’t been entirely wasted.
Both men were flopping on the ground, calling out about their wounds, as I cut the sixth down, another staggerer, exhausted from his charge. That done, I turned and fled, outpacing the pursuit and working hard to catch the Watch.
The men of Arrow were never going to outrun us, but they could hardly stop the chase and let us come back to practise our archery again, so they kept at it. The captains driving them were making the right choices given what they had to work with. What they should have done, however, was to withdraw to the main force and rely on their commander’s battle sense to deploy his archers as a defence against us. Though perhaps the Prince of Arrow was happy enough sending a few thousand soldiers up the mountain to contain the threat and to keep his army focused on the Haunt.
I caught Makin up a few minutes later, threading my path past Watch men with less go in their legs than I had that day. Watch-master Hobbs ran with him, his captains beside him, Harold, Stodd, and old Keppen who’d made the wise choice and refused to jump for a previous watch-master back at Rulow Falls years ago. I say the Watch-master ran but by that point ‘brisk walk’ would cover it.
‘Set four squads on those ridges,’ I said. ‘Let’s shoot a few more Arrows.’
‘And when the enemy reaches them?’ Hobbs asked.
‘Time to run again,’ I said.
‘At least they’ll get a rest,’ Keppen said, and spat a wad of phlegm on the rock.
‘You’ll get one too, old man.’ I grinned. ‘It’s your squads I’m thinking should stay.’
‘I should have jumped,’ he muttered. He shook his head and raised his shortbow high, its red marker ribbon snapping in the wind. His men started to converge behind him as he jogged off toward the ridges.
‘Running’s all very well,’ Hobbs said, striding on, ‘but we’ll run out of mountain in the end, or be chased out of the Highlands entirely.’
‘Which sounds like—’ Makin heaved in a breath ‘—the best option when all’s said and done.’ Of all of them he looked the worst off. Too many years letting a horse do the running. He clambered up a large boulder and stood on top looking back down the valley. ‘Must be three thousand of the bastards after us. Maybe four.’
‘Likes to keep the odds in his favour does the Prince,’ Hobbs said. He scratched his head where the grey grew thickest and the hair thinned. ‘I hope you’ve got a hell of a plan, King Jorg.’
I hoped so too. If not for Norwood and Gelleth these Watch men would have fled an age ago. How quickly fact turns into fiction, and strangely when fact becomes legend, folk seem more ready to believe it. And maybe they were right to have faith, for I did reduce the Lord of Gelleth, his mighty castle, and his armies all to dust. Maybe they were right and I was wrong, but I found it hard to believe in whatever tricks I might have stowed in a small copper box.
Believer or not, the box was all I had. So I pressed it to my forehead, hard, as if I could push the memory I needed through the bone. The feeling is like that misremembered name appearing without preamble on your tongue, ready to be spoken, after so long dancing beyond reach on its tip. Except that instead of one word, there are many, images with them, and touches and tastes. A piece of your life returned to you.
The memory flooded me, taking me from the cold slopes, back across years. Gone the crowded Watch men, gone the shouting and the screams.
I lunged for the next hold, throwing my body after my arm and hand, loosing the last hold before my fingers had found a grip on the next, before I lost momentum. Climbing is a form of faith, there’s no holding back, no reserve. My fingers jammed into the crack, the sharp edge biting, toes scrabbling on rough rock, the soft leather finding traction as I started to slip.
There’s a spire of stone in the Matteracks that points at the sky as though it were God’s own index finger. How it came to be, who carved it from the fastness of the mountains, I can’t say. One book I own speaks of wind and rivers and ice sculpting the world in the misty long ago, but that sounds like a story for children, and a dull one at that. Better to talk of wind demons, river gods, and ice giants out of Jotenheim. It’s a more interesting tale and just as likely.
Arm aching, leg straining, curved in an awkward pose across the fractured stone, I gasped for air, stealing a cold lungful from the wind. They say don’t look down, but I like to. I like to see the loose pieces fall away and become lost in the distance. My muscles burned, the heat stolen by the wind. It felt as though I were trapped between ice and fire.
The spire stands clear of a vast spur where one of the mountains’ roots divides two deep valleys. From the scree slopes at the spire’s base to the flat top of it where a small cottage might squeeze, there are four hundred feet of shattered rock, vertical in the main, in places leaning out.
A hundred feet below I could see the ledge where had I met the goat. The heights a mountain goat will scale for the possibility of a green mouthful never cease to amaze me. They must use their own kind of magic to climb without the cleverness of fingers or toes. I’d pulled myself up and come eyeball to eyeball with the beast, its long face framed by two curling horns. There’s something alien in a goat’s eye, something not seen in dog or horse or bird. It’s the rectangular pupil. As if they’ve climbed out of hell or fallen from the moon. We sat together in mutual distrust while I caught my breath and waited for life to find its way back into limbs and extremities.
I found the rock pillar in my first year as King of Renar and in all my time on the throne it was perhaps that spare needle of mountain that came closest to killing me. I failed to climb it seven times, and I am not a man who gives up any attempt easily.
Coddin once asked me why I climb and I spun him some pretty lies. The truth – at least for today – is that back when I hadn’t many years on me, my mother would play for William and me on an instrument from the vaults of the tall castle. A piano. A thing of magic and many keys in black and white. We were trouble, Will and I, it has to be said. Fighting, scheming, digging out mischief of any kind that might be had – but when she played we fell silent and just listened. I remember every moment, her long fingers moving on the keys so fast they blurred together, the sway of her body, her hair hanging in a single long plait between her shoulders, the light falling across the wooden body of the instrument. But I can’t hear it. She plays behind glass, walled behind too many years, lost when I walked away from it all, from her, from that damn carriage and the thorns.
I see, but I can’t hear.
When I climb, and only then, on the very edge of everything, I catch stray notes. Like words robbed of meaning on the cusp of hearing … the music almost reaches me. And for that I would dare any height.
I made an eighth assault on the Spire at the start of the summer in which the Prince of Arrow crossed my borders with his armies new laden with loot from conquests in Normardy and Orlanth. Loot and, it must be said, recruits, for the lords of those lands were not well loved and the Prince won the people’s hearts almost before their dead were boxed and buried.
Climbing is about commitment. On the Spire there are places so sheer that one hold must be wholly relinquished before the next can be obtained, and sometimes then only by hurling yourself up an open expanse of rock that offers no purchase. In such moments you are falling, albeit upwards, and if the next hold escapes you then that fall will carry you to the ground. There are no half measures in such ascents: you place everything you are or will be on each decision. Lives can be lived in this manner, but I do not recommend it. In the end though, everybody dies, but not everybody lives – the climber, though he may die young, will have lived.
There comes a point on a long climb when you know you have to surrender or die. There’s no quarter given. I hung to cold stone fifty feet beneath the summit, weak as a child, aching with hunger, blistered hands and feet, arms screaming. The art of survival in the mountains is knowing when to give up. The art of reaching the top is knowing when not to.
‘If I die here,’ I whispered to the stone. ‘If I fall and die, I will count it a life lived, maybe not well, but fully. No book will know my end, but I will have died in battle none the less.’ And summoning my strength I started to climb again.
Like the Scots king and his famous spider, my eighth attempt proved the charm.
Retching, slobbering on the rock, I crawled over the final corner, horizontal at long last. I lay trembling, gasping, half sobbing, as close to the end of my endurance as I had ever come.
When you’re climbing you take nothing with you that you do not absolutely need. That’s a good discipline to acquire, and the mountains teach it to you for free. They say that time is a great teacher but unfortunately it kills all its pupils. The mountains are also great teachers and better still, they let the occasional star pupil live.
The mountains teach you to be prepared for change. Amongst the peaks the weather can shift from fair to foul quick as blinking. One moment you might be clambering up a forgiving slope and the next you could be clinging to it as though it were your mother, whilst an east wind tries to carry your frozen corpse off with it.
Climbing God’s Finger I learned a lot about holding on by my fingertips. By the time I finally hauled myself weak and trembling onto the very top of the spire, I had come to realize that I’ve been holding on by my fingertips my entire life.
I flopped to my back. I lay there on the rock with nothing to see between me and a relentless blue sky. I had climbed light, taking nothing unneeded with me, no room on that narrow peak for anyone else, ghosts or otherwise, no Katherine, no William, my mother and father four hundred feet below, too far away to hear. Not even the shadow of a child on the rock or the glimmer of a copper box in memory. It isn’t the danger or the challenge that keeps me climbing, it’s the purity and focus. When you’re a five-second drop from being a smear of guts and pulverized bone, when your whole weight is on eight fingers, then seven, then five, your choices are black and white, made on instinct without baggage.
When you climb hard and reach an impossible peak or ledge, you gain a new perspective, you see the world differently. It’s not just the angle you’re looking from that changes. You change too. They say you can’t go back, and I learned that when I returned to the Tall Castle after four years on the road. I walked the same halls, saw the same people, but I hadn’t gone back, I’d come to a new castle, seen with new eyes. The same is true if you climb high enough, only with climbing you don’t need to stay away for years. Climb a mountain, see the world from its highest point, and a new man will climb down to a world of subtle differences the next day.
Metaphysics aside, there is plenty to be seen from a high point in the mountains. If you sit with your legs dangling over the biggest drop in the world, with the wind streaming your hair behind you, and your shadow falling so far it might never hit the ground … you notice new things.
On the road we have our sayings. ‘Pax,’ we say if we’re caught with our hands in another man’s saddlebags. ‘Visiting the locals,’ we say when a brother is off about dark business after a battle. Where’s Brother Rike? Visiting the locals. In the Renar Highlands there’s a saying that I didn’t hear until I struggled up to the village of Gutting with Sir Makin in tow. ‘’E was taking a rock for a walk, yer worship.’ At the time I paid it no attention, a bit of local colour, a streak of green in the manure. I heard the expression a few more times in the years that followed, generally when somebody was off on mysterious business. Taking a rock for a walk. Once you’ve noticed a phrase or word it starts to crop up everywhere. ‘Lost his flock,’ was another one. I’d hear these things on the parade ground in main, from the local recruits. ‘That John of Bryn had my bowstrings while I was on wall watch.’ ‘What you gonna do about that?’ ‘Don’t you worry none, already happened. Lost his flock he did.’
Up in a high place, especially one hard-reached, you gain a fresh perspective. Looking out over the peaks and cliffs and slopes I’d come to know, I noticed something new. The shadows gave it away, leading the eye here and there to places where the land didn’t lie quite right. It took a time of empty watching, of idle legs dangling, and thought-stuff swirling behind my eyes before, like the snow in the globe, everything settled and I saw clear, the same scene but with new detail.
High on the sides of almost every valley, of all but the highest gorges, the loose rocks gathered too thickly, perched too precariously. At first the eye buys into the deception. It has to be natural. To move that much stone would take a thousand lifetimes, and to what end?
Taking a rock for a walk turns out to be a genuine national pastime in the Highlands, so deep grained, so known, that nobody seems to feel the need to say more. For generations the men going up to tend their goats have filled any idle moment with the business of carrying loose stones from one part of the slope to another higher part, slowly building up the same piles that their father and grandfather built upon.
If a Renar man takes the ultimate liberty and decides to graze his goats on another man’s land, chances are that there’ll be a sudden rockslide and the man will have lost his flock. If it weren’t a Renar man then he might lose even more than that.
It’s hard to tease out a thread when you’re running, especially when that thread is a plan and you’re teasing it from a memory box, and you’re running uphill with thousands of soldiers in pursuit. But even our enemies call the Ancraths cunning, and I call us clever. So I pulled a little more and all of a sudden I saw the slopes we were running up with a whole new perspective. Or rather, an older one that I had forgotten.
From the journal of Katherine Ap Scorron
October 25th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. In my rooms again. I’m always in my rooms.
I had that dream again. The one with Jorg. I have the knife as always, twelve inches and thin as a finger. He’s standing there with his arms open and he’s laughing at me. Laughing. I’m standing there in my torn dress with the knife and him laughing, and I thrust it into him, like he thrust … and I stab it into him. And old Hanna watches and she smiles. But her smile isn’t right and when Jorg falls there are bruises on him too. On his neck. Long dark bruises. And I can almost see the fingers and the thumb print.
I’m running this torn satin through my fingers and it’s me that feels torn. My memories fight my dreams. Every single day. And I don’t know who is winning and who is losing. I don’t remember.
November 7th, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Bell-tower – keep-top.
I’ve found a place to be alone, the tallest point on the Tall Castle, just me and the crows and the wind. The tower holds only one bell, huge and made of iron. They never ring it. At least now it’s serving a purpose by sheltering me from the wind.
I find myself wanting to be alone. All the ladies grate on me, even the ones that mean well. There’s no peace in the castle – only the feeling that something is wrong, something I can’t name or touch.
I found initials up here, H.J.A, you can see them out on the far side of the tower where it leans over the outer wall of the keep. I can see no way to reach the spot. It says something about Honorous Jorg Ancrath that even his name is out of reach.
Sageous came to my chamber today. Just to the door. The Prince of Arrow has come again. The Prince and his brother, Orrin and Egan. Sareth said they would come back. She said they would come back to sniff around me again. That’s just how she said it. As if they were dogs and I was a bitch in heat.
I don’t think I am. In heat that is. I can be a bitch. I can be a bitch every day. I made Maery Coddin cry today and I hardly meant to.
Even so, there’s something about Orrin and something else about Egan. Grandmother would say they both burn too bright. Too bright for regular folks, she’d say. But I’ve never counted myself regular. And if they do burn bright – if they do put heat in me – or me in heat – what of it? I fancy I put some heat in them. Or why would they both be back at the Tall Castle a moon after their first visit? I don’t think it’s for the pleasure of King Olidan’s company. I don’t think Orrin’s charm or Egan’s threat had much impact on that scary old man. I don’t think the devil would make Olidan pause. I don’t think he’d bow his head even if God himself sent an angel to his doors.
Sareth says both the Arrows are pointed my way. She has a dirty mouth. She says they’ll both ask for my hand. Even though I’m not Scorron’s first daughter and Father promised alliance and land to Olidan already. She says they’ll both ask for my hand but it’s not my hand they’re interested in, or my dowry. She said more, but her mouth is dirtier than my quill, black with ink though it is. And if they did ask, what would I say? It hardly seems that they can be brothers, one as bright and good as my Sir Galen, the other as dark and tempting as Jorg who killed him.
I dreamed again last night. I woke up speaking the words of that dream and now I can’t even remember the shape of it. I can remember a knife, a long knife. I know I need to use it. I remember Jorg hurt me. I should go back and read my journal, but somehow my hands don’t want to turn the pages back, only forward. I had a dream about that too.
Sageous is at the door again. The princes are waiting.
I don’t like that man’s eyes.
Gorgoth is like no other. There is no mould for the leucrota. Twisted by the Builders’ poisons they fall broken from the womb and follow strange paths as they grow. The ribs that pierce his flesh and reach from each side are black and thick, his hide more red than blood, and the muscle beneath surges as he moves. And though he is shaped for war and for horror, there are few men in Adam’s image whose approval would mean as much to me – and most of them lie dead.
14
Four years earlier
A day after we left the sands of Thar and started to ride through the Thurtan grasslands I took the box from Makin. I felt the sharp edges of the lost memory through the copper walls and sensed the poison held there. Makin once told me that a man who’s got no fear is missing a friend. With the thorn-patterned copper clutched uneasy in my fist I thought perhaps I had found that friend at last. I turned it one way, then the other. It held nothing good – only me. And a man should be a little scared of himself surely? Of what he might do. To know thyself must be terribly dull. I put the box at the bottom of my saddlebag and left it unopened. I didn’t ask after Katherine. I took a new knife from Grumlow and rode toward our business in Heimrift.
We rode north across wide acres where the wind whipped the spring grass into a thrashing sea and green ripples raced one after the other. A land made for horse, for galloping, for chasing between the dark borders of one forest and the next. I let Brath have his head and exhausted both of us as if all hell were at our heels. The Brothers kept pace as best they could, all of us wanting to leave Thar many miles behind. Old fires still burned there, unseen. In a thousand years Mount Honas, the place where I lit a Builders’ Sun, might be like Thar, a Promised Land that would return to man in time but for the now loved us not.
That night as we settled to sleep I saw the baby for the first time, lying dead in the long grass by our camp. I threw off my blanket and walked across to it, watched by Gorgoth, and by Gog who slept beside him now. The spot where the child had lain was empty. I caught a whiff of perfume, white musk maybe. With a shrug I returned to my bed. Some things are best forgotten.
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Mark Lawrence
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The second book in the Broken Empire series, Lawrence takes his young anti-hero one step closer to his grand ambition.To reach greatness you must step on bodies, and many brothers lie trodden in my wake. I’ve walked from pawn to player and I’ll win this game of ours, though the cost of it may drown the world in blood…The land burns with the fires of a hundred battles as lords and petty kings fight for the Broken Empire. The long road to avenge the slaughter of his mother and brother has shown Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath the hidden hands behind this endless war. He saw the game and vowed to sweep the board. First though he must gather his own pieces, learn the rules of play, and discover how to break them.A six nation army, twenty thousand strong, marches toward Jorg′s gates, led by a champion beloved of the people. Every decent man prays this shining hero will unite the empire and heal its wounds. Every omen says he will. Every good king knows to bend the knee in the face of overwhelming odds, if only to save their people and their lands. But King Jorg is not a good king.Faced by an enemy many times his strength Jorg knows that he cannot win a fair fight. But playing fair was never part of Jorg’s game plan.