King of Thorns (54 page)

“We stand about knee-deep, Uncle,” I said.

“It looked more like chest-deep from where we entered those caves.” He sagged slightly, the exertions of the fight catching up with him. Smears of blood crossed the brightness of his breastplate, a deep dent caught the light from odd angles, and the left side of his face had started to darken into a single impressive bruise.

I shrugged. “Either way we’ve got shitty boots and the situation stinks. He has thousands to our hundreds. He can besiege us in this keep from the ruins of my own walls. There is no question that he could wear us down within months, possibly weeks.”

“If the situation is lost. If it were always lost. Why did I spend the lives of two hundred knights out there? Why did we even beat a path through the mountains in the first place?” His brows drew close, furrowing his forehead, a dangerous light in his eyes. I knew the look.

“Because he doesn’t want to wait months, or even weeks,” I said.

Makin stepped up from behind the throne. “The Prince has been attacking as if he intends to crush us in a day.”

“He needs to now,” I said. “He wanted a quick victory before, but now he needs one. He didn’t want to wait the winter out here. He had a huge army to feed, a timetable to keep to, other powers to consider, newly acquired lands to police. Being a prisoner of the Highland winter was never his plan. But now, he needs to win today, tomorrow at the latest. In a day or two his army will start to understand the scale of their losses, his captains will start to mutter, his troops will leak away, and the stories they tell elsewhere will lend Arrow’s enemies courage. If he takes us today, then the stories will run a different course. The talk will be of how he crushed Jorg of Ancrath who levelled Gelleth, who humbled Count Renar. Yes, the losses were high—but he did it in a day! In a day!”

“And how does all this help us?” Uncle Robert asked.

“I don’t think he can take us in a day. And neither does he,” I said.

“Even so, we will still all die, no? It might ruin the Prince’s plans, but that’s cold comfort from where I’m standing.” Uncle Robert glanced
at his captains, tall men burned dark by the southern sun. They said nothing.

“It helps because it will make him accept my offer,” I said.

“Offer? You told Coddin no terms!” Makin stepped off the dais to take a good look at me, as if I might not be Jorg at all.

“No terms!” The echo came from Miana, helped in by young Rodrick. She looked pale but otherwise unhurt.

“I’m not offering terms,” I said. “I’m offering him a duel.”

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

August 27th, Year 101 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Red Room.

Orrin is campaigning again. The bigger his domain grows, the less I see of him. He took Conaught in the spring with just three thousand men. Now he’s marching an army toward Normardy with nine thousand. He even talks of taking the lands of Orlanth into his protection, though there are other realms to consider first.

He never speaks with desire, as if he wants those places for himself, to have them bow and scrape before his throne, or to fill his war-chests. He talks of what he can do for the peoples of those lands, of what they will gain, of how their freedoms will increase, their prosperity, their prospects. It would sound false from any other man. But Orrin believes it, and he can do it. In Conaught they already worship him as one of their old heroes reborn.

To me he speaks with desire. Since the day we were married he has made me feel treasured. Happy. And I know I make him happy too. Though there is always that touch of disappointment, expertly hidden. If I had not spent so very many days delving into the stuff of men’s dreams I wouldn’t see it. But I do see it and I’m cut by the knife I have forged and sharpened. Orrin wants a child. I do too. But it has been two years.

Sareth says in her letters that sometimes it can take two years, sometimes four. She herself has born no child in the years since Degran, but for little Merrith who sickened and died so quickly. I think grief made Sareth barren. Jilli and Keriam also say it can take two years, just as Sareth said. They say we’re young—it will come soon. For the first year they believed it.

March 28th, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. West Gardens.

Egan is back in the palace. I say “back” but he has never been here before. Orrin had the palace built after the Duchy of Belpan surrendered to him, and Egan so rarely returns from campaigns that this is the first time he has laid eyes upon it.

He’s been wounded again. In the side this time, falling off a horse onto something sharp he says. Egan always seems to mend quickly though, as if he just won’t tolerate any kind of restraint, even if it’s his own body that tries to impose it.

I’ve been reading Roland of Thurtan’s
On the Dreamlands and Below.
I like to read it on the balcony that overlooks the herb gardens. The formal gardens are…well, too formal, and too large. I like to look over the herb gardens with their little pools, the sundial and the moondial that I had put there, and to breathe in the scents. Also, it’s not a book for reading indoors or in the dark. It only takes a paragraph or two of Roland of Thurtan before the walls seem to be closing in on you.

Egan practises with his sword in the grand square every day, in front of the statue of his father. There’s a sorcery in the way he moves. It reminds me of the dancers out of the Slav lands, those elfin creatures all grace and air, though he adds force to their grace. It’s not until he brings in men to spar with that you understand how fast he is. He makes them look silly. Even the best among the palace guard.

Something in him scares me though. The passion with which he pursues each victory. Watch him fight and you wonder if there would be anything he might not do in order to have what he wants.

April 15th, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Herb gardens.

Egan is still here. He recovered quickly, although they say it was a dire wound. He seemed eager to heal and be back doing what he loves—cutting a path through anyone who opposes Orrin. But now he idles around the palace. He even came into the library today—a place I’ve never seen him.

I both like and don’t like the way he looks at me. Some animal part of me relishes it. Every reasonable part of me is offended. Although I can find nothing to like in Egan that does not start with what my eyes give me of him, there is still a mystery there. When he watches me it is with an instinctive understanding of women that is denied to the wise. Denied to Orrin.

Orrin and Egan are on campaign again this summer. The days are long and hot and lonely though there must be a thousand souls in this palace of ours, at least fifty of them ladies of quality brought in just to keep me company.

I have learned to travel in dreams, keeping every part of me focused and lucid though I walk through the realms of possibility and of impossibility. Or sometimes fly, or swim, or gallop. The path of the world is a line, a single thread through the vastness of dream, and if I follow that line I can scry what is real rather than wallow in the randomness of strangers’ imaginations. I have sent messengers out to explore the places that I have visited in this manner, and confirmed the truth of my observations.

I dreamed of Jorg of Ancrath last night and in dreaming of him became tangled in the stuff of his own nightmares. The margins of his dreaming are set with briar so thick and sharp I woke expecting my nightclothes to be shredded and soaked with blood. And a storm rages over it all, so fierce it shook the sleep from me. It seemed almost as if he’d set barriers to keep intruders out. Or perhaps it was all my own imagination. I can hardly send out messengers to check.

This morning my head aches, the quill shakes in my hand, and I see the page through slitted eyes. They give fennel powder in Arrow rather than wormwood—it works no better. I would swap the pain behind my eyes for the cuts of that briar, but it seems to be the price I pay for pushing into the dreams of others.

May 22nd, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Grand Library.

Orrin writes me that he has employed Sageous as an advisor of sorts! The heathen had settled in the court of Duke Normardy after fleeing Olidan’s protection.
Orrin writes that Sageous has proved useful in foreseeing the lie of the land ahead of their path and in interpreting certain troubled dreams he has suffered.

I have written back by fastest rider to beg Orrin to dismiss the heathen immediately. I would have written “hang” for “dismiss” but Orrin is too…even handed for that.

June 23rd, Year 102 Interregnum

I tried to visit Orrin’s dreams as I have done every night since I discovered the capacity for it. Tonight I could find no trace of him, just a space in the dreamscape where I sought him, just blankness and the memory of the spice, the coriander seed that the heathen seems to breathe.

In desperation I sought out Egan in his sleep but found no trace of him either. The others in Orrin’s retinue I haven’t enough familiarity with to find among the hundreds of thousands who shape the dream-stuff.

I’ve a new physician, a dirty little man from the Slav steppes, but his infusions calm my head. He’s older than old and what words he has of Empire Tongue are oddly shaped. Even so, Lord Malas makes good report of him and his medicines work.

June 26th, Year 102 Interregnum

I found Orrin dreaming! I couldn’t walk in his dream, a golden thing of many layers, but it seemed to me that he has fought off whatever attempts Sageous has made to control him. Maybe he was right about being the one to hold the strings. It troubles me though that I am kept out. Perhaps it is a barrier fashioned by the heathen, or a defence of Orrin’s own making, whether by conscious will or natural resistance to direction.

Where Jorg kept me out with thorns and lightning, Orrin used a calm and simple refusal. I hope he has sent Sageous scampering back to Olidan Ancrath in the Tall Castle.

July 12th, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Ballroom.

This palace has stood for almost two years and no one has danced in the ballroom. Orrin would host a ball to please me, have his lords and ladies descend upon the palace in their carriages. Hundreds would come in satin and lace. He would dance with the precision and grace that amazed his tutors, be attentive to my needs, compliment the musicians. And all the time I would know that behind his eyes grander thoughts were circulating, plans, philosophies, letters being written, and that when the last revellers had been taken home dead drunk across their carriage seats, Orrin would be found in the library scribbling notes in the margins of some weighty tome.

Egan has written to me from the celebrations after the capture of Orlanth’s last castle. I say it is Egan but I have never seen his hand before. It would surprise me if he has ever written a letter until now. Perhaps a scribe set it down for him, for the characters are formed with practised skill, but the voice is Egan’s. He wrote:

I don’t know what to do. Orrin will hear no wrong of his brother. I have seen it before. Somehow he always finds an angle from which Egan’s deeds can be viewed as excusable.

I’ve never done anything to encourage this passion, this obsession, in Egan. I favoured Orrin from the start. If I had wanted a savage I could have smiled on Jorg of Ancrath, and what a creature I would have been tied to then.

Orrin needs to send Egan away, to give him some castle on a disputed border, some war to occupy him. It can’t be that he needs his brother always at his side. One blade can’t turn a battle, surely, no matter how skilled.

July 18th, Year 102 Interregnum

I have searched for Egan in the dreamscape and he is still hidden from me. The messages I send go unreplied. I don’t even know if the riders are reaching Orrin’s army. Report has it that he is closing on the Renar Highlands. Part of me wonders if Sageous is Jorg Ancrath’s tool. Has he unleashed his father’s pet upon my husband?