In one pace I stood almost nose to nose with him. I couldn’t read what his eyes held, but the old fear had left me, as if it too had trickled from my hands.

‘Give me my birth right.’ I kept all colour from the words, though my jaw ached from the strain of it. ‘Let me lead our armies, and I will take the Empire, and make it whole once more. Set aside the heathen. And his plans.’ I glanced toward the new queen at that.

I should have kept my eyes on him, should have remembered where I got my mean streak.

I felt a sharp pain under my heart. It made me bite off my sentence, nearly my tongue too. I tasted blood, hot and copper. One step back, two, staggering now. I saw the blade, exposed in Father’s hand when I slipped from it.

Is this a dagger I see before me? The quotation bubbled up, and laughter too, breaking out of me, crimson with spittle. I wanted to speak, but for once words escaped me, leaking away with my life’s blood.

The throne-room swam before me, its architecture no longer certain in the face of such betrayal. Every eye watched my retreat toward the great doors. Their stares lanced me, lords and ladies, Princess, Queen, and King. The legs that had borne me league upon league from Gelleth now turned traitor, as if each mile from the ruin of the Castle Red settled upon my shoulders and left me drunk with weariness.

He stabbed me!

There was a time when I loved my father. A time remembered, in dreams, or in rare waking moments, like the shadow of a high cloud crossing my mind. There’s a laughing face from a year I no longer own, from a season when I was too young to see the distance between us. The face is bearded, fierce, but without threat.

Is this a dagger I see before me? My mouth wouldn’t frame the joke. The laugh burst from me, and I fell, as if the knife had cut my strings.

For an eternity I lay before them, my cheek to the cold marble. I heard Makin roar. I heard the clatter as he went down beneath too many guards. The slow thud of a heartbeat filled me.

When I fell I saw the blackness of my father’s hair, darker than night, with the faintest sheen of emerald like a magpie’s wing.

‘Take this away.’ He sounded weary. The slightest hint of human weakness at the last.

‘Will he lie by his mother’s tomb?’ A new voice. The words drew out to fill an age, but somewhere in me they echoed and I saw their owner, Old Lord Nossar who bore us on his shoulders, Will and I, a lifetime ago. Old Nossar, come to carry me one last time. I heard the answer, too faint and deep for distinction. My eyes went blind. I felt the floor scrape between my cheek, and then no more.

I swallowed darkness, and darkness swallowed me.

Without light, without the beat of a heart to count the time, you learn that eternity is nothing to fear. In fact, if they’d just leave you to it, an eternity alone in the dark can be a welcome alternative to the business of living.

Then the angel came.

The first glimmers felt like paper-cuts on my eyes. The illumination built from a distant pin-point, splinters of light lodging in the back of my mind. A dawn came, and in an instant, or an age, darkness fled, leaving no hint of shadow to record its passage.

‘Jorg.’

Her voice flowed through the octaves, an echo of every kind word and every promise fulfilled.

‘Hello.’ My voice sounded like a cracked reed. Hello? But what do you say to heaven when you meet her? Two syllables, weakness and doubt underwriting both.

She opened her arms. ‘Come to me.’

I crouched, naked on a floor too white for any shadow to dare. I could see the dirt on my limbs, like veins, and blood, blood from the wound that killed me, dried and black as sin.

‘Come.’

I tried to look at her. No point in her held constant. As if definition were a thing for mortals, a reduction that her essence would not allow. She wore pale, in shades. She had the eyes of everyone who ever cared. And wings – she had those too, but not in white and feathers, rather in the surety of flight. The potential of sky wrapped her. Sometimes her skin seemed to be clouds, moving one across the other. I looked away.

I crouched there, a knot of flesh and bone, with only dirt and old blood to define me beneath the scrutiny of her brilliance.

‘Come to me.’ Arms open. A mother’s arms, a lover’s, father’s, friend’s.

I looked away, but she drew me still. I felt her breathing. I felt the promise of redemption. I had but to lift my eyes and she would forgive me.

‘No.’

Her surprise fluttered between us, a palpitation of the light. I felt tension in the muscles of my jaw, and the bitter taste of anger, hot at the back of my throat. Here at last were things familiar to me.

‘Put aside your pain, Jorg. Let the blood of the Lamb wash your sins away.’ Nothing false in her. She stood transparent in her concern. The angel held her gifts in open hands, compassion, love, … pity.

One gift too many. The old smile twisted on my lips. I stood, nice and slow, head bowed still. ‘The Lamb doesn’t have enough blood for my sins. May as well hang a sheep for me as a lamb.’

‘No sin is too great to repent,’ she said. ‘There’s no evil that cannot be put aside.’

She meant it too. No lie could pass those lips. That truth, at least, was self-evident.

I met her eyes then, and the wash of her love, so deep and so without condition, nearly carried me away. I dug deep and fought her. I manufactured my smile once again, cursing myself for a slack-jawed fool.

‘I left few sins untasted.’ I took a step toward her. ‘I cursed … in church. I coveted my neighbour’s ox. I stole it too, roasted it whole, and finished it off with gluttony, a deadly sin, the first of the Seven, learned at my mother’s breast.’

The hurt in her eyes hurt me, but I’d lived a life striking blows that cut two ways.

I moved around the angel, and my feet stained the floor, leaving bruises that faded in my wake.

‘I coveted my neighbour’s wife. And I had her. Murder too. Oh yes, murder and more murder. So few sins untasted … If I’d not died so young I’m sure I’d have met you with a full list.’ Anger closed my jaw. Any tighter and my teeth would have exploded. ‘If I’d lived but five minutes longer you could have put patricide at the head of the tally.’

‘It can be forgiven.’

‘I don’t require your forgiveness.’ Veins of darkness reached across the floor, growing outward from where I stood.

‘Let it go, Child.’ A warmth and a humour ran through her words, so strong it nearly carried me with it. Her eyes stood as windows to a world of things made whole. A place built of tomorrows. It could all be made right. I could taste it, smell it. If she weren’t so sure of her success, she’d have had me, there and then.

I held to my anger, drank from my well of poison. These things are not good things, but at least they’re mine.

‘I could go with you, Lady. I could take what you offer. But who would I be then? Who would I be if I let go the wrongs that have shaped me?’

‘You would be happy,’ she said.

‘Someone else would be happy. A new Jorg, a Jorg without pride. I won’t be anyone’s puppy. Not yours, not even His.’

The night crept back like mist rising from the mire.

‘Pride is a sin too, Jorg. Deadliest of the Seven. You have to let it go.’ At last, a hint of challenge in her words. All I needed to give me strength.

‘Have to?’ Darkness swirled around us.

She held out her hands. The dark grew and her light quailed.

‘Pride?’ I said, my smile dancing now. ‘I am pride! Let the meek have their inheritance – I’d rather have eternity in shadows than divine bliss at the price you ask.’ It wasn’t true, but to speak otherwise, to take her hand rather than to bite it, would leave nothing of me, nothing but pieces.

Glimmers held her now, glimmers against the velvet blackness. ‘Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God’s right hand.’ Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. ‘In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.’

‘Pride is all I have.’

I swallowed the night, and the night swallowed me.

‘He’s not dead yet?’ A woman’s voice, Teuton accent with a creak of age in it.

‘No.’ A younger woman, familiar, also Teuton.

‘It’s not natural to linger so long,’ the older woman said. ‘And so white. He looks dead to me.’

‘There was a lot of blood. I didn’t know men had so much blood in them.’

Katherine! Her face came to me in my darkness. Green eyes, and the sculpted angles of her cheekbones.

‘White and cold,’ she said, her fingers on my wrist. ‘But there’s mist on the mirror when I hold it to his lips.’

‘Put a pillow over his face and be done with it, I say.’ I imagined my hands around the crone’s neck. That brought a hint of warmth.

‘I did want to see him die,’ Katherine said. ‘After what he did to Galen. I would have watched him die on the steps of the throne, with all that blood running down, one step after the next, and been glad.’

‘The King should have slit his throat. Finished the job there and then.’ The old woman again. She had a servant’s tone about her. Voicing her opinion in the security of a private place, opinions held back too long and grown bitter in the silence.

‘It’s a cruel man who will take a knife to his only son, Hanna.’

‘Not his only son. Sareth carries your nephew. The child will be born to his due inheritance now.’

‘Will they keep him here, do you think?’ Katherine said. ‘Will they lay him in his mother’s casket, beside his brother?’

‘Lay the whelps with the bitch and seal the room, I say.’

‘Hanna!’ I heard Katherine move away from me.

They’d taken me to my mother’s tomb, a small chamber in the vaults. The last time I’d visited the dust had lain thick, unmarked by footprints.

‘She was a queen, Hanna,’ Katherine said. I heard her brush at something. ‘You can see the strength in her.’

Mother’s likeness had been carved into her coffer’s marble lid, as if she lay there at rest, her hands together in devotion.

‘Sareth is prettier,’ Hanna said.

Katherine returned to my side. ‘Strength makes a queen.’ I felt her fingers on my forehead.

Four years ago. Four years ago I’d touched that marble cheek, and vowed never to return. That was my last tear. I wondered if Katherine had touched her face, wondered if she’d stroked the same stone.

‘Let me end this, my princess. It would be a kindness to the boy. They’ll lay him with his mother and the little prince.’ Hanna honeyed her voice. She set her hand to my throat, fingers coarse like sharkskin.

‘No.’

‘You said yourself that you wanted to see him die,’ Hanna said. She had strength in that old hand. She’d throttled a chicken or three in her time, had Hanna. Maybe a baby once or twice. The pressure built, slow but sure.

‘On the steps I did, while his blood was hot,’ Katherine said. ‘But I’ve watched him cling to life for so long, with such a slight hold, it’s become a habit. Let him fall when he’s ready. It’s not a wound that can be survived. Let him choose his own time.’

The pressure built a little more.

‘Hanna!’

The hand withdrew.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.

The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

I learned these lessons in my tenth year, although little of them stayed with me. It took Corion only moments to teach me, the heartbeats in which my will guttered like a candle flame in the wind, and then blew out utterly.

I lay with the Nuban, boneless on the stairs. Only my eyes would move, and they followed the old man. He could have looked kindly in a different light. He had something of Tutor Lundist about him, though more gaunt, more hungry. The horror wasn’t in his face, or even his eyes, just in the knowing that these were mere skins, stretched taut across all the emptiness in the world.

The sight of him, just an old man in a dirty robe, put the kind of fear into me that shame erases from our memories. The fear the rabbit has when the eagle strikes. The kind of fright that makes a nothing of you. The kind of fear that’d make you sacrifice mother, brother, everything and anything you’ve ever loved, just for the chance to run.

Corion shuffled closer, and stooped to take my wrist. In one instant the touch silenced the raw terror that had so unmanned me. As completely as if he’d turned the spigot on a wine-barrel, the flow stopped. Without a word he hauled me into his room. I felt the flagstones scrape my cheek.

The chamber held nothing, save for the Nuban’s crossbow, propped against the far wall. I imagined Corion closeted here in his empty chamber, a place to leave his old flesh whilst he stared into eternity.

‘So, Sageous’s hunter finally tracked down something with more bite than him, eh?’

I tried to speak, but my lips didn’t as much as twitch. He knew about the dream-witch and his hunter. He’d called me the Thorn Prince. What else did he know?

‘I know it all, child. The things you know, the secrets you hold. Even the secrets you’ve forgotten.’

He could read my mind!

‘Like an open scroll.’ Corion nodded. He turned my head with his boot, so that I could see the Nuban’s bow once more.

‘You intrigue me, Honorous Jorg Ancrath,’ he said. He moved to stand beside the bow. ‘You’re wondering why a man with such power isn’t emperor over all the lands.’

I was too.

‘It has to be one of the Hundred. Nations won’t follow monsters like me. They’ll follow a lineage, divine right, the spawn of kings. So we who have taken our power from the places where others fear to reach … we play the game of thrones with pieces like Count Renar, pieces like your father. Pieces like you, perhaps.’

He reached out to touch the bow. The air around it shimmered as if the mouth of a furnace had opened.

‘Yes. I rather like that idea. Let Sageous have King Olidan, let him work to bend your father to his will, and I will have the firstborn son.’

The fear had sunk low enough to let my anger rise. I pictured the old man dying on a blade, my hand on the hilt.

‘Let the wilds temper you, and if you weather it, in time the prodigal will return, a viper to his father’s bosom. Pawn takes king.’ He mimed the chess-board gesture. ‘You might become something, Thorn Prince. A piece to win the game.’

Corion took the bow as if it weighed nothing. Raising it to his lips, he whispered a word, too soft for hearing. Five paces took him to the door and he set the bow on the steps by the Nuban’s head. ‘A black knight to guard my pawn.’

‘And you, boy. You will forget the Count of Renar.’

Like hell I will.

‘Turn your vengeance anywhere you choose, share it with the world, spill some blood; but never return to these lands. Set no foot upon these paths. Your mind will not wander here.’

I could only watch him. He came closer. He knelt beside me, took my collar and drew my face to his. I met his blank eyes. I could feel the horror rising, a flood that would carry me away. And worse, I felt his fingers cold inside my skull, erasing memories, turning aside purpose.

‘Forget Renar. Take your vengeance to the world.’

Renar will die. ‘By … my … hand …’ Somehow my lips spoke the words.

But already he’d taken the conviction from me. I could no longer say how I’d reached the tower, or even name him.

The old man smiled. He bent to whisper in my ear. I remember his breath on my neck, and the smell of rot.

Then I heard his words and all reason left me.

Worms writhed behind my eyes. Nothing remained of him in my thoughts, just a hole where I couldn’t look. Renar became a name without weight, and my hatred a gift for anyone and everyone.

I fell, through darkness, deafened by my own howling. Unknown hands locked around my throat, and in the darkness my own hands found a neck to throttle. The grip tightened, and tightened again. The screams died to a hiss, a rattle, and then silence. I squeezed. My hands became iron hooks. If I could have squeezed harder my finger-bones would have snapped like dry twigs.

I fell through darkness, through silence, only the hands on my throat, and the throat in my hands, and the hunger for air, my heart beating sledgehammer blows.

I fell through years. I’ve been falling through my life …

I hit the ground. Hard. My eyes opened. I lay on a stone floor. A purple face stared at me, eyes distended, tongue protruding. Daylight streamed in from a high window. My heart hammered at my breastbone, wanting out. Everything hurt. I saw hands on the neck below that face. My hands. With great effort I unlocked them. The white fingers had little inclination to obey.

Still the pain swelled in me. I needed something, but couldn’t name it. My vision pulsed red, dimming from one moment to the next. I touched a stiff-fingered hand to my neck and found hands there.

I didn’t recognize the face. A woman?

The world grew distant, the pain less.

Renar… The name rose through me, and with it a whisper of strength. The hands that prised the strangler’s fingers from my neck didn’t feel like mine. Renar! My first breath whistled into me, as if sucked through a reed.

Air! I needed air.

I choked, heaved but nothing came, hauled in breaths through a throat grown too narrow for the task.

Renar.

The purple face belonged to a woman with grey hair. I didn’t understand.

Renar. And Corion.

Oh Jesu! I remembered. I remembered the horror, but it burned pale against the cold fury that ate me now.

‘Corion.’ For the first time in the four years since that night in the tower, I spoke his name. I remembered. I recalled what had been taken, and for the first time in forever, I felt whole.

I found the strength to lift myself up on my arms.

I was in a chamber in a castle. Beside a bed … I’d fallen out of bed. Whilst an old woman tried to throttle me.

The door shook. Somebody rattled at the latch. ‘Hanna! Hanna!’ A woman’s voice.

Somehow I stood before the door opened.

‘Katherine.’ My voice escaped a bruised throat as a squeak.

There she was. Beautiful in disarray. Mouth half open, green eyes wide.

‘Katherine.’ I could only get her name out as a whisper, but I wanted to shout, I wanted to scream so many things at once.

I understood. I understood the game. I understood the players. I knew what had to be done.

‘Murderer!’ she said. She took a knife from her sash, a sharp bodkin long enough to run a man through. ‘Your father knew best.’

I tried to tell her, but no words would come now. I tried to raise my arms, but I had no strength.

‘I’ll finish what he started,’ she said.

And all I could do was marvel at the beauty of her.

In a duel, man to man, sword against sword, it can be a lack of skill that gets you killed. Often as not, though, it’ll be a matter of luck, or if it goes on too long then it’ll be the man who tires first that tends to die.

In the end it’s about staying power. They should put that on headstones, ‘Got tired’, maybe not tired of life, but at least too tired to hold on to it.

In a real fight, and most fights are real, not the artifice of a formal duel, it’s fatigue that’s the big killer. A sword is a heavy chunk of iron. You swing that around for a few minutes and your arms start to get ideas of their own about what they can and can’t do. Even when your life depends on it.

I’ve known times when to lift my sword was the equal of any labour of Hercules, but never before I faced Katherine’s knife had I felt so drained.

‘Bastard!’

The fire in her eyes looked fierce enough to burn until the deed was done.

I looked for the will to stop her, and came up empty.

A knife is a scary thing right enough, held to your throat, sharp and cool. The thought echoed back to me from that night when the dead came up out of their bog-pools around the Lichway.

The glitter along that knife edge as she came at me, the thought of it slicing my flesh, piercing an eye maybe, these are all the sort of thing that might give a man pause. Until you realize what they are. They’re just ways to lose the game. You lose the game, and what have you lost? You’ve lost the game. Corion had told me about the game. How many of my thoughts were his? How much of my philosophy was filth from that old man’s fingers?

I’d swum in the darkness too long. The game didn’t seem so important any more.

With the embers of my strength I raised both arms. I stretched them wide, to receive the blow. And I smiled.

Something reached out and held her arm. I saw it in her face, twisting there on that perfect brow, wrestling with the rage.

‘Father didn’t quite reach the heart, it seems.’ I managed a hoarse whisper. ‘Perhaps, Aunt, you have a better hand?’

The knife shook. I wondered if she’d cut live meat before.

‘You … you killed her.’

The fingers of my right hand closed around something, a heavy smooth something, on the shelf beside my bed.

Her eyes dropped to the old woman’s face.

I hit her. Not hard, I didn’t have the strength, but hard enough to break the vase I’d found. She collapsed without a murmur.

She lay in the sapphire pool of her dress, sprawled across the flagstones. Life flowed in my arms once more. It seemed as if my strength began to return the moment she fell. As if a spell were broken.

Kill her and you’ll be free forever. A familiar voice, dry like paper. Mine, or his?

Her hair hid her face, auburn on sapphire.

She’s your weakness. Cut the heart from her.

I knew it to be true.

Choke her.

I saw my hands, pale on a neck shading into crimson.

Have her. The voice of the briar. The hooks slipped beneath my skin, and drew me down to kneel beside her. Have her. Take what might never be given. I knew the creed.

Kill her, and you’ll be free.

I heard the echo of a distant storm.

Katherine’s hair ran like silk between my fingers. ‘She’s my weakness.’ My voice now, my lips. One little step, one more death, and nothing would ever touch me again. One little step and the door on that wild night would close forever. The game would truly be a game. And I would be the player to win it.

Choke her. Have her. The voice of the briar. A crackle in the mind. A hollow sound. An emptiness.

Empty.

Her neck felt warm. Her pulse beat under my fingertips.

‘Kill her, Briar Prince.’

I saw the words on thin lips, spoken in an empty chamber.

‘Kill her.’

I saw the lips move again. I saw the blank eyes, fixed on eternity. ‘Kill her.’

‘Corion!’

For a moment my hands tightened around Katherine’s neck.

‘I’m coming for you, you old bastard.’ I released my grip.

A smile twisted those thin lips, a fierce twist. I saw it as the vision faded, those blank eyes, and that twist of a smile. My smile.

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