King of Thorns

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.