King of Thorns (56 page)

“Move my sword belt round, Keven,” I said.

The boy frowned and blinked. He looked like a child. I supposed he was, no older than Miana. “Sire?”

I just nodded and still frowning he unbuckled the belt and refastened it with the hilt sitting on the steel above my left hip.

Some men name their swords. I’ve always found that a strange affectation. If I had to call it something I would call it “Sharp,” but I’m no
more inclined to christen it than I would my fork at dinner or the helm upon my head.

I walked from the throne-room, taking slow steps, with all eyes on me.

“Red Jorg,” Kent said in a whisper as I passed.

“Red would be good, Kent. But I fear I am darker than that.”

When I opened that box I got more back than memory.

The flames on the torches by the doorway flared as I passed, infecting me with strange passion. I felt watched by more than my court, by more than Sageous and the players who seek to move the Hundred across their board. Gog watched me. From the fire.

I looked back one time, to see Miana beside the throne.

Lord Robert fell in behind me. Captain Keppen and Rike joined us outside.

“Time to jump the falls, old man,” I told Keppen as he stepped beside me. He grinned at that, as if he knew the hour was upon us and shared my hunger for it.

I led the way through my uncle’s halls. Degran no longer haunted me from the shadows, the fact of my guilt no longer came bound in the promise of madness, but I knew my crime even so. Death waited for me on the slopes, one way or another. Death would be good enough. Death at the Prince’s hands, death on the swords of his thousands, or the death Fexler had saved me from when he anchored into Luntar’s little box those forces of necromancy and fire with their hooks sunk so deep into me and their pulls opposing.

And that reminded me. I took the empty box out one last time to toss it aside. Pandora’s own casket had hope lurking within, the last among all the ills unleashed upon us by her misguided curiosity. She might have let hope fly, but not my way. Even so, I looked into the lidless box once more, hand raised to throw it to the floor. And there, on the polished copper interior, one small stain. One last memory? Reluctant to return? I set a finger to it and the darkness of it soaked through my skin, leaving only bright copper behind.

This memory didn’t seize me, didn’t lift me from the now, but settled in as recollection while I walked the Haunt’s corridors. I remembered that last talk with Fexler, back in Grandfather’s castle. Fexler had been considering the box as I held his view-ring to it.

“Sageous?” he had mused over the buzzing of the ring.

“Sageous? That filthy dream-thief did this to me? Put madness in me?”

“Sageous has done far worse than that, Jorg. He put you in the thorns.” Fexler had paused as if remembering. “What kept you there is another matter.”

Every thorn-scar had burned at his words. “Why?” I had asked. “Why would he do that?”

“The hidden hands that move the pieces of your empire have prophecies they like to share. They like to talk of the Prince of Arrow and his Gilden future. And then they have foretelling they are less eager to spread. The hidden hands believe that two Ancraths joined together will end all their power. Will end the game.”

“Two?” I had laughed at that. “They’re safe enough then!”

“When you survived against all odds it seems some value attached to you,” Fexler had said.

And I had grown cold, knowing at the last how the players had tried to keep two Ancraths from joining on their board. They would have seen Olidan’s sons die together. And when I escaped that end and became as useful to their games as Father dear himself, did they let me live because they knew I would never join my cause to his? Or had the possibility been considered long ago and had the wedge between father and son not been driven there entirely by our own hands?

“I will find the heathen and kill him,” I had promised Fexler.

“Sageous is nothing but a savage, straining truth through superstition to dabble in dreams.” Fexler shook his head.

“Still, he’s hard to catch a hold of,” I had said.

“Oh, how I wish he’d go away,” Fexler had replied, his voice half song.

“What?”

“An old rhyme. An ancient rhyme I suppose. Sageous puts me in mind of it.
As I was going up the stair I met a man who wasn’t there; he wasn’t there again today; oh, how I wish he’d go away.
That’s Sageous for you; the man who wasn’t there. The thing to do of course is to change it around.
Oh, how I wish he’d always stay.
”

“What?” I wondered if ghosts could grow senile.

Fexler had come in close then and set his ghost-light hand to the box. “But none of this is any use to you until the puzzle of this box is done, this Gordian knot unravelled. I’ll put it in the box.”

“No!” I shouted it. I wouldn’t let him take this memory from me.

“No what?” Fexler had asked.

“I…forget,” I had said.

“No?” Makin asked at my side, back in the corridors of the Haunt, the Prince of Arrow waiting outside with his sword and thousands more behind.

I shook my head. My hand held the empty box, crushed now in my grip, blood on it from old thorn-scars bleeding once more. The box fell from me, and I kicked it to the wall.

“No,” I said. “Just no.”

Father Gomst waited for us in the courtyard. A path had been cleared through the dead. They lay heaped to either side as if it were the road into hell. And the smell of it, Brothers! It made my stomach rumble. And worse, as I walked that path between the corpses, stacked and charred, they twitched. Hands red in ruin flexed at my passing, burned skin sloughing from fingers. Heads lolled, dead eyes found me. The men with me, focused in their purpose, didn’t see it, but I saw, I felt them all, uneasy in their new slumbers as the Dead King watched me through them.

Never open the box.

Death and fire had their hooks in me. Deeper than deep. And each had started to pull.

“I should be tending the dying,” Father Gomst said, almost shouting to be heard over the screaming from the circle gallery where they had been taken.

“Let the dying tend to themselves,” I said. I knew that Father Gomst would have been no comfort to me when I lay groaning in the Heimrift. I saw Grumlow at the keep doors, hanging back in the shadows. I waved him forward. “Show the dying a little mercy, Grumlow,” I said. He nodded and departed.

I knew I would have appreciated Grumlow’s quick sharp mercy back in the Heimrift rather than a slow exit accompanied by Father Gomst’s moralizing.

We walked along the pathway, cleared of the dead, but not the grease of burned flesh, the pieces of skin, the charred outlines of men. No one spoke; even Rike looked grim. It was appropriate though. My uncle, the Duke of Renar, had been a burner. He had spread his own terror that way. And I had come to take the place from him with Gog at my side, filling the courtyard with cremations. The Prince of Arrow had it right when he called the Ancraths the darkest branch of the Steward tree. I had long wondered if I would stand against Orrin of Arrow when he came a-calling. He was perhaps the brightest fruit from the branches of the emperor’s line. In the four years since I claimed the Highlands I had walked the empire, returning at last to suppress cousin Jarco’s uprising in the west, then battled less tangible foes, sickness in my people and in the economy. In the same span the Prince of Arrow had built his strength and taken five thrones. It was perhaps only the repeated whispering of the wise, telling me I must cede him the empire throne, that made me think of opposing his march to the Gilden Gate. I do not like to be told.

Now though, with the copper box torn open and my memories and sins returned to me, I felt that more had been restored, as if I had been
a shadow of myself, almost me, but with something vital stolen away, something so bonded to my crimes that Luntar had been forced to set it also into his box of memories. I might not live to see the sun set on this day of blood, but if I did, four years would not pass again and find me no closer to my goals.

We walked out through the ruins of the sprawl-town where burning chunks of the Haunt’s outer walls had left only wreckage in their path. No trace of Jerring’s stables where Makin had once rolled in dung to be ready for the road.

Even now I could end this. The Prince would accept a peace: his progress was too important to him not to. And who would say that he would make a worse emperor than I? I could match the very worst of his crimes with my own then trump them with darker deeds.

There had been times aplenty, in the clarity of high places among the peaks, when I had thought to leave Orrin of Arrow a clear path. But things change. A different Jorg approached the duelling ground, a different Prince of Arrow. This wedding day had seen Jorg Ancrath remade in an older mould. I had that old thirst on me once again. Blood would flow.

Music rose around me, faint at first. A piece my mother used to play on the piano. A rare instrument, a complex thing of wires and keys and hammers, ancient, but the notes she scattered from her right hand were clear and high, pure like stars against the black and rolling melody from her left. Sometimes just a single ice-pure note can catch the breath in your lungs, and a second, off tempo, thrown into the void, can command chills across your skin. A small run, a flutter of the hand over the blue notes, can take you any where, any time, make you feel new, or settle the press of years upon you, heavy enough to stop you drawing breath.

We walked through broken stone, charred timbers. The melody pulsed under the crackle of flame, her left hand running through the deepest notes. Rike towered above me on one side, my uncle walked on the other. I felt the high refrain. I saw my mother’s hand finding
the high notes, the black keys, the ones that made me ache inside my chest, like the cries of gulls above wild seas. After so many years of watching her hands play in silent memory, I heard her at last, I heard her music.

Down the mountainside, down toward the serried expanse of the Prince’s army. Still the music, the deep slow melody, the high and broken counterpoint, as if the mountains themselves had become the score, as if the glories of hidden caves and secret peaks had been wrapped around the ageless majesty of the ocean and turned into the music of all men’s lives, played out by a woman’s fingers, without pause or mercy, reaching in, twisting, laying us bare.

To the level ground before the grey bulk of Rigden Rock. The music slowing now, the notes scattered, just the counterpoint played out in the highest octave, sad notes, faltering, faint. I glanced at Makin, remembering that first day when he handed me a wooden sword. All those earnest boys of his ready to learn his game. I’d shown them that it wasn’t play, that it’s always about winning, but I don’t think they understood it even then, even with the best of them lying choking on the floor.

A great trebuchet lay burning by the rock. It must have ignited closer to the walls and been dragged this far before they realized it was a lost cause. I wondered if it were the one that threw the rock at my bedchamber. The flames watched me. They leaned toward me.

The Prince of Arrow stood waiting, the dragons still clutching his namesakes on the rainbow sheen of his Teuton armour. His five knights stood at the agreed distance and I left my seconds at the same remove. They made a funny line, Rike towering at the centre looking like six kinds of bad news. Makin and Robert to either side. Old Gomst on the right wearing every holy thing he owned in the hope that nobody would stick an arrow in him, and old Keppen on the left, a sour face on him as if he had no time for this foolishness.

I walked over to meet the Prince.

“Open your keep to me and we can end this.” The Prince’s voice muffled within his helm, dark eyes watching.

“You don’t really want me to,” I said. “Better this way.” I turned my blade to catch the light. “Stop trying to be your brother. Him I would have opened the gates for. Maybe.”

The Prince lifted his visor. He offered a fierce and joyless smile then pulled the helm clear, running a hand back across hair bristling, thick and short and black.

“Hello, Egan,” I said.

“I liked you better as road-filth,” he said. “It suited you.”

Smoke from the burning siege engine drifted across us. I heard Rike cough.

“I like your armour. I may take it for myself when they pry it from your corpse,” I said.

He frowned, black brows meeting. “You’re right-handed. What game is this?”

I set my left hand to my sword hilt. “I often fight right-handed. I hope you haven’t based your assessment of my skills on spies who saw that…I’m much better with my left.”

Egan shifted his weight onto his back heel. “You fought Orrin with your right…”

“True,” I said. “I was sorry to hear that you killed Orrin. He was a better man than both of us. Perhaps the best man of our generation.”

“He was a fool,” Egan said, fixing his helm in place again.

“Too easy with his trust maybe. I heard that you stabbed him in the back and watched him bleed to death?”

Egan shrugged. “He would never have fought me. He would have talked. And talked. And talked.” He spoke as if it were nothing, but it haunted him. I could see it in his eyes.

“And how did Katherine take news of Orrin’s death?” I asked.

I saw him pale. Just half a shade. “Prepare to defend yourself,” Egan said. He drew his sword. I paid it no heed.

“I told Orrin that I would decide about him on the day he came to the Highlands again,” I said. “I think that I would have followed him and called him emperor. I hope that I would have. You should have left
it for two weeks—then you could have murdered him after moving through the Highlands. It would have worked out better for you.”

Egan spat. “We are two fratricides met for battle. Are you ready?”

“You know why I’ve practised with the sword every day since we last met?” I asked.

“So it would take me a few moments longer to kill you?” Egan asked.

“Nope.”

“Why then?”

“So you would believe that I’d stand against you in a fair fight,” I said.