King of Thorns
King of Thorns
Ace Books by Mark Lawrence
PRINCE OF THORNS
KING OF THORNS
King of Thorns
BOOK TWO OF
THE BROKEN EMPIRE
M A R K L A W R E N C E
ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
Published by the Penguin Group
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Copyright © 2012 by Bobalinga, Ltd.
Map by Andrew Ashton.
Cover design by Annette Fiore DeFex.
Cover illustration by Jason Chan.
Cover hand lettering by Iskra Johnson.
Text design by Laura K. Corless.
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FIRST EDITION: August 2012
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lawrence, Mark, 1966–
King of thorns / Mark Lawrence.—1st ed.
p. cm.—(Broken empire; bk. 2)
ISBN: 978-1-101-58126-1
I. Title.
PS3612.A9484K56 2012
813’.6—dc23
2012011252
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
ALWAYS LEARNING
PEARSON
Dedicated to my son, Rhodri
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I need to thank my reader, Helen Mazarakis, for reading King of Thorns one chunk at a time as I wrote it, and telling me what she thought.
Many thanks go to Ginjer Buchanan at Ace for taking a chance on me, and to both her and Kat Sherbo for all their labour in making The Broken Empire series a success.
My editor at HarperCollins Voyager, Jane Johnson, deserves huge thanks for all her splendid efforts to date. Thanks also to Amy McCulloch and Laura Mell, who have worked various wonders on my behalf.
And finally, my agent Ian Drury must be thanked for getting me the gig in the first place and for continuing to sell my books across the world. Gaia Banks and Virginia Ascione, working with Ian at Sheil Land Associates Ltd., also need thanking for their efforts in getting Jorg’s story into so many translations.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Prologue
1: Wedding day
2: Wedding day
3: Wedding day
4: Four years earlier
5: Four years earlier
6: Four years earlier
7: Four years earlier
8: Four years earlier
9: Four years earlier
10: Four years earlier
11: Wedding day
12: Wedding day
13: Wedding day
14: Four years earlier
15: Four years earlier
16: Four years earlier
17: Four years earlier
18: Four years earlier
19: Four years earlier
20: Four years earlier
21: Four years earlier
22: Wedding day
23: Wedding day
24: Wedding day
25: Wedding day
26: Wedding day
27: Wedding day
28: Four years earlier
29: Four years earlier
30: Four years earlier
31: Four years earlier
32: Four years earlier
33: Four years earlier
34: Four years earlier
35: Wedding day
36: Wedding day
37: Wedding day
38: Wedding day
39: Four years earlier
40: Four years earlier
41: Four years earlier
42: Four years earlier
43: Four years earlier
44: Four years earlier
45: Wedding day
46: Wedding day
47: Wedding day
48: Wedding day
49: Wedding day
PROLOGUE
I found these pages scattered, teased across the rocks by a fitful wind. Some were too charred to show their words, others fell apart in my hands. I chased them though, as if it were my story they told and not hers.
Katherine’s story, Aunt Katherine, sister to my stepmother, Katherine who I have wanted every moment of the past four years, Katherine who picks strange paths through my dreams. A few dozen ragged pages, weighing nothing in my hand, snowflakes skittering across them, too cold to stick.
I sat upon the smoke-wreathed ruins of my castle, careless of the heaped and stinking dead. The mountains, rising on all sides, made us tiny, made toys of the Haunt and the siege engines strewn about it, their purpose spent. And with eyes stinging from the fires, with the wind’s chill in me deep as bones, I read through her memories.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON
October 3rd, Year 98 Interregnum
Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Fountain Room.
The fountain room is as ugly as every other room in this ugly castle. There’s no fountain, just a font that dribbles rather than sprays. My sister’s ladies-in-waiting clutter the place, sewing, always sewing, and tutting at me for writing, as if quill ink is a stain that can’t ever be washed off.
My head aches and wormroot won’t calm it. I found a sliver of pottery in the wound even though Friar Glen said he cleaned it. Dreadful little man. Mother gave me that vase when I came away with Sareth. My thoughts jump and my head aches and this quill keeps trembling.
The ladies sew with their quick clever stitches, line stitch, cross-line, layer-cross. Sharp little needles, dull little minds. I hate them with their tutting and their busy fingers and the lazy Ancrath slurring of their words.
I’ve looked back to see what I wrote yesterday. I don’t remember writing it but it tells how Jorg Ancrath tried to kill me after murdering Hanna, throttling her. I suppose that if he really had wanted to kill me he could have done a better job of it having broken Mother’s vase over my skull. He’s good at killing, if nothing else. Sareth told me that what he said in court, about all those people in Gelleth, burned to dust…it’s all true. Merl Gellethar’s castle is gone. I met him when I was a child. Such a sly red-faced man. Looked as if he’d be happy to eat me up. I’m n
ot sorry about him. But all those people. They can’t all have been bad.
I should have stabbed Jorg when I had the chance. If my hands would do what I told them more often. If they would stop trembling the quill, learn to sew properly, stab murdering nephews when instructed…Friar Glen said the boy tore most of my dress off. Certainly it’s a ruin now. Beyond the rescue of even these empty ladies with their needles and thread.
I’m being too mean. I blame the ache in my head. Sareth tells me be nice. Be nice. Maery Coddin isn’t all sewing and gossip. Though she’s sewing now and tutting with the rest of them. Maery’s worth talking to on her own, I suppose. There. That’s enough nice for one day. Sareth is always nice and look where that got her. Married to an old man, and not a kind one but a cold and scary one, and her belly all fat with a child that will probably run as savage as Jorg Ancrath.
I’m going to have them bury Hanna in the forest graveyard. Maery tells me she’ll lie easy there. All the castle servants are buried there unless their families claim them. Maery says she’ll find me a new maidservant but that seems so cold, to just replace Hanna as if she were torn lace, or a broken vase. We’ll go out by cart tomorrow. There’s a man making her coffin now. My head feels as if he’s hammering the nails into it instead.
I should have left Jorg to die on the throne-room floor. But it didn’t feel right. Damn him.
We’ll bury Hanna tomorrow. She was old and always complaining of her aches but that doesn’t mean she was ready to go. I will miss her. She was a hard woman, cruel maybe, but never to me. I don’t know if I’ll cry when we put her in the ground. I should. But I don’t know if I will.
That’s for tomorrow. Today we have a visitor. The Prince of Arrow is calling, with his brother Prince Egan and his retinue. I think Sareth would like to match me there. Or maybe it’s the old man, King Olidan. Not many of Sareth’s ideas are her own these days. We will see.
I think I’ll try to sleep now. Maybe my headache will be gone in the morning. And the strange dreams too. Maybe Mother’s vase knocked those dreams right out of me.
1
Wedding day
Open the box, Jorg.
I watched it. A copper box, thorn patterned, no lock or latch.
Open the box, Jorg.
A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.
A goblet, the box, a knife.
I watched the box and the dull reflections from the fire in the hearth. The warmth did not reach me. I let it burn down. The sun fell, and shadows stole the room. The embers held my gaze. Midnight filled the hall and still I didn’t move, as if I were carved from stone, as if motion were a sin. Tension knotted me. It tingled along my cheekbones, clenched in my jaw. I felt the table’s grain beneath my fingertips.
The moon rose and painted ghost-light across the stone-flagged floor. The moonlight found my goblet, wine untouched, and made the silver glow. Clouds swallowed the sky and in the darkness rain fell, soft with old memories. In the small hours, abandoned by fire, moon, and stars, I reached for my blade. I laid the keen edge cold against my wrist.
The child still lay in the corner, limbs at corpse angles, too broken for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Sometimes I feel I’ve seen more ghosts than people, but this boy, this child of four, haunts me.
Open the box.
The answer lay in the box. I knew that much. The boy wanted me to open it. More than half of me wanted it open too, wanted to let those memories flood out, however dark, however dangerous. It had a pull on it, like the cliff’s edge, stronger by the moment, promising release.
“No.” I turned my chair toward the window and the rain, shading to snow now.
I carried the box out of a desert that could burn you without needing the sun. Four years I’ve kept it. I’ve no recollection of first laying hands upon it, no image of its owner, few facts save only that it holds a hell which nearly broke my mind.
Campfires twinkled distant through the sleet. So many they revealed the shape of the land beneath them, the rise and fall of mountains. The Prince of Arrow’s men took up three valleys. One alone wouldn’t contain his army. Three valleys choked with knights and archers, foot-soldiers, pikemen, men-at-axe and men-at-sword, carts and wagons, engines for siege, ladders, rope, and pitch for burning. And out there, in a blue pavilion, Katherine Ap Scorron, with her four hundred, lost in the throng.
At least she hated me. I’d rather die at the hands of somebody who wanted to kill me, to have it mean something to them.
Within a day they would surround us, sealing the last of the valleys and mountain paths to the east. Then we would see. Four years I had held the Haunt since I took it from my uncle. Four years as King of Renar. I wouldn’t let it go easy. No. This would go hard.
The child stood to my right now, bloodless and silent. There was no light in him but I could always see him through the dark. Even through eyelids. He watched me with eyes that looked like mine.
I took the blade from my wrist and tapped the point to my teeth. “Let them come,” I said. “It will be a relief.”
That was true.
I stood and stretched. “Stay or go, ghost. I’m going to get some sleep.”
And that was a lie.
The servants came at first light and I let them dress me. It seems a silly thing but it turns out that kings have to do what kings do. Even copper-crown kings with a single ugly castle and lands that spend most of their time going either up or down at an unseemly angle, scattered with more goats than people. It turns out that men are more apt to die for a king who is dressed by pinch-fingered peasants every morning than for a king who knows how to dress himself.
I broke fast with hot bread. I have my page wait at the doors to my chamber with it of a morning. Makin fell in behind me as I strode to the throne-room, his heels clattering on the flagstones. Makin always had a talent for making a din.
“Good morning, Your Highness,” he says.
“Stow that shit.” Crumbs everywhere. “We’ve got problems.”
“The same twenty thousand problems we had on our doorstep last night?” Makin asked. “Or new ones?”
I glimpsed the child in a doorway as we passed. Ghosts and daylight don’t mix, but this one could show in any patch of shadow.
“New ones,” I said. “I’m getting married before noon and I haven’t got a thing to wear.”
2
Wedding day
“Princess Miana is being attended by Father Gomst and the Sisters of Our Lady,” Coddin reported. He still looked uncomfortable in chamberlain’s velvets; the Watch-Commander’s uniform had better suited him. “There are checks to be carried out.”
“Let’s just be glad nobody has to check my purity.” I eased back into the throne. Damn comfortable: swan-down and silk. Kinging it is pain in the arse enough without one of those gothic chairs. “What does she look like?”
Coddin shrugged. “A messenger brought this yesterday.” He held up a gold case about the size of a coin.
“So what does she look like?”
He shrugged again, opened the case with his thumbnail and squinted at the miniature. “Small.”
“Here!” I caught hold of the locket and took a look for myself. The artists who take weeks to paint these things with a single hair are never going to spend that time making an ugly picture. Miana looked acceptable. She didn’t have the hard look about her that Katherine does, the kind of look that lets you know the person is really alive, devouring every moment. But when it comes down to it, I find most women attractive. How many men are choosy at eighteen?
“And?” Makin asked from beside the throne.
“Small,” I said and slipped the locket into my robe. “Am I too young for wedlock? I wonder…”
Makin pursed his lips. “I was married at twelve.”
“You liar!” Not once in all these years had Sir Makin of Trent mentioned a wife. He’d surprised me; secrets are hard to keep on the road, among brothers, drinking
ale around the campfire after a hard day’s blood-letting.
“No lie,” he said. “But twelve is too young. Eighteen is a good age for marriage, Jorg. You’ve waited long enough.”
“What happened to your wife?”
“Died. There was a child too.” He pressed his lips together.
It’s good to know that you don’t know everything about a man. Good that there might always be more to come.
“So, my queen-to-be is nearly ready,” I said. “Shall I go to the altar in this rag?” I tugged at the heavy samite collar, all scratchy at my neck. I didn’t care of course but a marriage is a show, for high- and low-born alike, a kind of spell, and it pays to do it right.
“Highness,” Coddin said, pacing his irritation out before the dais. “This…distraction…is ill-timed. We have an army at our gates.”
“And to be fair, Jorg, nobody knew she was coming until that rider pulled in,” Makin said.
I spread my hands. “I didn’t know she would arrive last night. I’m not magic you know.” I glimpsed the dead child slumped in a distant corner. “I had hoped she would arrive before the summer ended. In any case, that army has a good three miles to march if it wants to be at my gates.”
“Perhaps a delay is in order?” Coddin hated being chamberlain with every fibre of his being. Probably that was why he was the only one I’d trust to do it. “Until the conditions are less…inclement.”
“Twenty thousand at our door, Coddin. And a thousand inside our walls. Well, most of them outside because my castle is too damn small to fit them in.” I found myself smiling. “I don’t think conditions are going to improve. So we might as well give the army a queen as well as a king to die for, neh?”
“And concerning the Prince of Arrow’s army?” Coddin asked.
“Is this going to be one of those times when you pretend not to have a plan until the last moment?” Makin asked. “And then turn out to really not have one?”