King of Thorns (13 page)

“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’s 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.

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 I had 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.