King of Thorns (52 page)

I understood the blood. “At least Egan offered a quick ending.”

Orrin bowed his head. “Xanthos didn’t linger.”

Sir Talbar glanced at Orrin then looked away and said no more.

I walked with little Jesseth later on, letting her babble as we followed the edge of the glade. Axe blows rang out from somewhere among the trees. Egan had split a mountain of logs and the cooks already had ten times the firewood they needed. Now he was felling trees. He came out from a stand of elm an hour later close by where Jesseth and I were playing board-checks. The blood had gone from his arms and sweat ran down a body as muscled and lithe as Xanthos’s. He barely nodded our way and strode past, axe on his shoulder.

“I don’t like him,” Jesseth whispered.

“Why not?” I asked, bending in with a conspiratorial smile.

“He killed his horse.” Jesseth nodded as if to prove it no lie.

“But that was a kindness.”

“Mother says he cut its head off with his sword because the deer got away.”

July 25th, Year 99 Interregnum

Yotrin Castle. Library.

I’ve found certain scrolls in Orrin’s library that speak of dreams in terms of tides and currents. There’s a woman in the village of Hannam who tells fortunes for
her living, but she has more to say than that, to the right person. In a small room at the top of her house she has spoken to me of sailing on the seas of dream.

August 18th, Year 99 Interregnum

Yotrin Castle. Royal bedchamber.

Orrin has left to command his armies in the west. I will miss him. I will make good use of the rest though. It seems we’ve spent a month in the bedchamber. If it takes more than that to make a baby then I’ll be worn out by winter and an old lady by spring.

F
ROM THE
J
OURNAL OF
K
ATHERINE
A
P
S
CORRON

July 18th, Year 100 Interregnum

Castle Yotrin. Library.

Orrin is a good man, probably a great man. All the oracles say he will be emperor and wear the all-crown. But even great men need to be disobeyed now and again.

When Orrin is here he spends at least half of his days in this library. The knights and captains who hunt him down walk into the reading hall furtively, out of place, eyeing the walls with suspicion as if the knowledge might just leak out of all those books and infect them. They find us, Orrin in one corner, me in another, and he’ll look at them over the top of one of those great and worthy leather-bound tomes of his. “General So-and-so,” he’ll say. He lets the kingdoms he’s taken keep a general each. He says it’s important to let the people have their pride and their heroes. “General So-and-so,” he’ll say. And General So-and-so will shuffle from foot to foot, awkward among so many written words, and not expecting the future emperor to look so scholarly, as if he should be wearing reading lenses.

Orrin reads the great books. The classics from before the Builders’ time, stretching back to the Greeks and Homer. It’s not that he chooses the biggest and most impressive books for show, but that’s what he always ends up with. He likes to read philosophy, military history, the lives of great men, and natural history. He’s always showing me plates of strange animals. At least when he’s here he is. Creatures that you’d think the author just made up on a hot afternoon. But he says the pictures were captured not painted, as if an image were frozen in a mirror, and these things are real. Some of them he’s seen. He shows me a plate of a
whale and puts his fingernail beside its mouth to give the size of a horse next to it. He says he saw the back of one from a ship off the coast of Afrique. Says it rolled through the water, an endless grey sheen of whaleback, broad enough for a carriage and longer than our dining hall.

I read the small forgotten books. The ones found behind the rows on the shelves. In locked chests. In pieces to be assembled. They look old. Some are—a hundred years, three hundred, maybe five, but Orrin’s are more ancient. Mine though, they look older, as if what is written in them takes its toll, even on parchment and leather. Mine were set down after the Burning, after the Builders ignited their many suns.

The ancient books tell a clear story. Euclid gives us shape and form. Mathematics and science progress in an ordered fashion. Reason prevails. The newer stories are confusion. Conflicting ideas and ideologies. New mythologies, new magics offered with serious intent but in a hundred variants, each wrapped in its own superstition and nonsense, but with a core of truth. The world changed. Somewhere along the line of years it changed and what was not possible became possible. Unreason shaded into truth. To assemble it all into some pure architecture, some new science that delivers control in this present chaos, would be a work of lifetimes. But I am making a start. I find it more to my liking than sewing.

Orrin says I should leave it alone. That such knowledge corrupts and if he must make use of it then it will be through others, as Olidan used Sageous, as Renar used Corion. I tell him he mistakes the puppet and the puppeteer. He smiles and says maybe, but if the time comes he will be pulling the strings, not pulled by them. Orrin tells me he is sure I could draw from the same well as Sageous, but such waters would make me bitter and he likes me sweet.

I love Orrin, I know I do. But sometimes it’s easier to love someone who has flaws you can forgive in return for their forgiving yours.

In the red ruin of battle Brother Kent oft looks to have stepped from hell. Though in another life he would have tilled his fields and died abed, mourned by grandchildren, in combat Red Kent possesses a clarity that terrifies and lays waste. In all else he is a man confused by his own contradictions—a killer’s instincts married to a farmer’s soul. Not tall, not broad, but packed solid and quick, wide cheekbones, dark eyes flat with murder, bitten lips, scarred hands, thick-fingered, loyalty and the need to be loyal written through him.

“Jorg! The Prince’s men are through the gates!”

Miana didn’t have to shout it at me. I could hear them through the windows, the deep resonances of the scorpions as they fired their spears, the screams, the crash of swords, the strum of bowstrings from the men on my walls, firing down into their own castle now. And the drums! The furious pounding of Uncle Renar’s battle-drums. A beat so loud and fierce that it picks up even the meekest of men and makes them part of the beast. They drum courage into you.

Uncle should have played them that day I came a-calling.

None of it mattered. Sageous’s poison dreams bubbled through me, but all their work only played variations around a nightmare of my own making. I killed my brother. After years defined only by the quest for revenge—years consumed by the need to reach William’s murderer—I took the life of my brother, a baby who could barely fill my hands.

“Jorg!”

I ignored her. I held my hands before my face, remembered the feel of him, remembered the realization that he was dead. Degran. My brother.

Tutor Lundist showed me a drawing once. An old woman’s face. Look again, he said, it’s a young girl. And it was. Just a trick of the mind. Nothing had changed, not one line of the drawing, and yet everything was different. The box gave me Degran back and he had spoken to me across the years. Look again, he had said to me. Look at your life—now look again. And suddenly nothing mattered.

She slapped me, the little bitch slapped me, and for a second that mattered. She’d put her whole body into it. But the anger died quicker than it came.

Then a siege rock hit the window to our right. Fragments of stone flew across the room, smashing on the far wall. Dust rose around us.

“I’m not going to die here,” Miana said.

She had her hand in my hair. She turned my head to the window and its torn bars. Part of the wall below the window had fallen away and we could see the courtyard, where the peasants had gathered to cheer us that morning. A wedge of Arrow’s men, marked by their scarlet cloaks, had driven in through the ruins of the portcullis that Gorgoth had once held open for me. My soldiers, half of them goatherds with the swords I’d given them, hemmed the enemy in. I saw the blue of Lord Jost’s small contingent and the gleam of their plate armour. The odds were against the intruders, but the weight of numbers behind drove them forward as they died. The Prince of Arrow poured his men into the killing field, my archers and troops reducing them but not stopping them. And under it all, pulsing through it, the throb of the battle drums.

“Do something!” Miana shouted.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Everyone dies.” My past, my ghosts, danced around me, the dead, the betrayed. I considered diving through the shattered wall into the foe over the heads of my men. Could I make such a leap? With a run maybe. A short run, and a long drop into eternity.

She slapped me again. “Give me the ruby.”

I fished out the bag and put it in her hand. “You deserved a better husband.”

Miana gave me a look of contempt. “I deserved a stronger one. There’s no victory without sacrifice. My mother taught me that. You have to raise the stakes and raise them again.”

“She was a warrior?” I shook my head hard. Dreams showered from me. The dead held me with cold hands, tearing my insides.

“A card player,” Miana said.

Miana went to the fireplace and picked up one of the two fire screens, an exotic tapestry in an ebony frame. She beat it into splinters against the wall and repeated the process with the second one. Outside the wedge of scarlet developed into a semi-circle around the broken gates. Beyond the walls a blood-red sea would be surging forward.

Miana picked the two heavy stone bases from the wreckage of the fire screens and placed the ruby between them. She tried to tear strips from the tapestries, and finding them too resistant she tore lengths from the hem of her wedding dress.

Despite the emptiness pulsing inside me, a tickle of curiosity scratched at the back of my mind.

A stray arrow struck up through the window on the left and buried itself in the ceiling.

Miana bound both the stone bases together, good and tight, with the ruby between them.

“Is Lord Jost still fighting?” she asked.

I crawled to the broken wall, blinking to clear my sight. “I can see knights from the House Morrow. I think one of them is Jost.”

Miana bit her lip. “Sometimes you can only win if you’re prepared to sacrifice everything,” she said.

I started to wonder if I didn’t get my darkest streak from my mother’s side of the family.

Her eyes grew bright. Tears for the dead.

“Miana, what—”

She ran at the gap, feet falling to the drumbeat, and hurled the stone bases out. I wouldn’t have thought she could throw so hard or so far. The package sailed over the heads of the men, fighting, dying, pressing
in the crush to be at each other. It flew over the Highlanders, over Jost, over Arrow’s red-cloaked foot-soldiers, bounced once in a clear spot to the left of the gates, and smacked against the outer wall.