King of Thorns be-2 Read online

  Taking a rock for a walk turns out to be a genuine national pastime in the Highlands, so deep grained, so known, that nobody seems to feel the need to say more. For generations the men going up to tend their goats have filled any idle moment with the business of carrying loose stones from one part of the slope to another higher part, slowly building up the same piles that their father and grandfather built upon.

  If a Renar man takes the ultimate liberty and decides to graze his goats on another man’s land, chances are that there’ll be a sudden rockslide and the man will have lost his flock. If it weren’t a Renar man then he might lose even more than that.

  It’s hard to tease out a thread when you’re running, especially when that thread is a plan and you’re teasing it from a memory box, and you’re running uphill with thousands of soldiers in pursuit. But even our enemies call the Ancraths cunning, and I call us clever. So I pulled a little more and all of a sudden I saw the slopes we were running up with a whole new perspective. Or rather, an older one that I had forgotten.

  From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron

  October 25th, Year 98 Interregnum

  Ancrath. The Tall Castle. In my rooms again. I’m always in my rooms.

  I had that dream again. The one with Jorg. I have the knife as always, twelve inches and thin as a finger. He’s standing there with his arms open and he’s laughing at me. Laughing. I’m standing there in my torn dress with the knife and him laughing, and I thrust it into him, like he thrust…and I stab it into him. And old Hanna watches and she smiles. But her smile isn’t right and when Jorg falls there are bruises on him too. On his neck. Long dark bruises. And I can almost see the fingers and the thumb print.

  I’m running this torn satin through my fingers and it’s me that feels torn. My memories fight my dreams. Every single day. And I don’t know who is winning and who is losing. I don’t remember.

  November 7th, Year 98 Interregnum

  Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Bell-tower-keep-top.

  I’ve found a place to be alone, the tallest point on the Tall Castle, just me and the crows and the wind. The tower holds only one bell, huge and made of iron. They never ring it. At least now it’s serving a purpose by sheltering me from the wind.

  I find myself wanting to be alone. All the ladies grate on me, even the ones that mean well. There’s no peace in the castle-only the feeling that something is wrong, something I can’t name or touch.

  I found initials up here, H.J. A, you can see them out on the far side of the tower where it leans over the outer wall of the keep. I can see no way to reach the spot. It says something about Honorous Jorg Ancrath that even his name is out of reach.

  Sageous came to my chamber today. Just to the door. The Prince of Arrow has come again. The Prince and his brother, Orrin and Egan. Sareth said they would come back. She said they would come back to sniff around me again. That’s just how she said it. As if they were dogs and I was a bitch in heat.

  I don’t think I am. In heat that is. I can be a bitch. I can be a bitch every day. I made Maery Coddin cry today and I hardly meant to.

  Even so, there’s something about Orrin and something else about Egan. Grandmother would say they both burn too bright. Too bright for regular folks, she’d say. But I’ve never counted myself regular. And if they do burn bright-if they do put heat in me-or me in heat-what of it? I fancy I put some heat in them. Or why would they both be back at the Tall Castle a moon after their first visit? I don’t think it’s for the pleasure of King Olidan’s company. I don’t think Orrin’s charm or Egan’s threat had much impact on that scary old man. I don’t think the devil would make Olidan pause. I don’t think he’d bow his head even if God himself sent an angel to his doors.

  Sareth says both the Arrows are pointed my way. She has a dirty mouth. She says they’ll both ask for my hand. Even though I’m not Scorron’s first daughter and Father promised alliance and land to Olidan already. She says they’ll both ask for my hand but it’s not my hand they’re interested in, or my dowry. She said more, but her mouth is dirtier than my quill, black with ink though it is. And if they did ask, what would I say? It hardly seems that they can be brothers, one as bright and good as my Sir Galen, the other as dark and tempting as Jorg who killed him.

  I dreamed again last night. I woke up speaking the words of that dream and now I can’t even remember the shape of it. I can remember a knife, a long knife. I know I need to use it. I remember Jorg hurt me. I should go back and read my journal, but somehow my hands don’t want to turn the pages back, only forward. I had a dream about that too.

  Sageous is at the door again. The princes are waiting.

  I don’t like that man’s eyes.

  Gorgoth is like no other. There is no mould for the leucrota. Twisted by the Builders’ poisons they fall broken from the womb and follow strange paths as they grow. The ribs that pierce his flesh and reach from each side are black and thick, his hide more red than blood, and the muscle beneath surges as he moves. And though he is shaped for war and for horror, there are few men in Adam’s image whose approval would mean as much to me-and most of them lie dead.

  14

  Four years earlier

  A day after we left the sands of Thar and started to ride through the Thurtan grasslands I took the box from Makin. I felt the sharp edges of the lost memory through the copper walls and sensed the poison held there. Makin once told me that a man who’s got no fear is missing a friend. With the thorn-patterned copper clutched uneasy in my fist I thought perhaps I had found that friend at last. I turned it one way, then the other. It held nothing good-only me. And a man should be a little scared of himself surely? Of what he might do. To know thyself must be terribly dull. I put the box at the bottom of my saddlebag and left it unopened. I didn’t ask after Katherine. I took a new knife from Grumlow and rode toward our business in Heimrift.

  We rode north across wide acres where the wind whipped the spring grass into a thrashing sea and green ripples raced one after the other. A land made for horse, for galloping, for chasing between the dark borders of one forest and the next. I let Brath have his head and exhausted both of us as if all hell were at our heels. The Brothers kept pace as best they could, all of us wanting to leave Thar many miles behind. Old fires still burned there, unseen. In a thousand years Mount Honas, the place where I lit a Builders’ Sun, might be like Thar, a Promised Land that would return to man in time but for the now loved us not.

  That night as we settled to sleep I saw the baby for the first time, lying dead in the long grass by our camp. I threw off my blanket and walked across to it, watched by Gorgoth, and by Gog who slept beside him now. The spot where the child had lain was empty. I caught a whiff of perfume, white musk maybe. With a shrug I returned to my bed. Some things are best forgotten.

  We travelled the next day and the next along the banks of the River Rhyme that flows between Thurtan and its neighbours to the east. The Rhyme lands were once the Empire’s garden, farmed with exquisite care. Push a nation’s borders back and forth across a garden a dozen times and all that’s left is mud and ruin.

  At one point we rode through a field of old-stones, hundreds upon hundreds in marching lines, single blocks a little taller than a man, a little wider, all set on end, lichen covered, knee-deep grass swaying around them. Ancient before the Builders came, ancient before the Greeks, Lundist told me. An uncomfortable power throbbed between the monoliths and I led the Brothers faster than was prudent to clear the field.

  On the fourth day a soft rain wrapped us and fell without pause from dawn till dusk. I rode for a while beside Maical, rolling gently in the grey’s saddle. He always rode as if he were at sea, did Maical, slumping forward, rolling back, not an ounce of grace in him.

  “Do you like dogs, Maical?” I asked him.

  “Beef’s better,” he said, “or mutton.”

  I set a grin on my face. “Well, that’s a new perspective. I thought you might like them on account of their stupidity.” Why I
was baiting Maical I had no idea. Part of me even liked Maical, almost.

  I remembered a time when I came back to camp having scouted out the town of Mabberton down on the soft edge of the Ken Marshes. I’d come up from the bog path, with Gerrod picking his way through the tufts and cotton grass. At first I thought the shrieking was a village girl foolish enough to get snagged by the Brothers, but it turned out just to be two of the lads bent over a tied dog, poking it with something sharp to get a song out of it.

  I had slipped off Gerrod and grabbed them by the hair, one black handful, one red, and hauled back, throwing my weight into the motion. Both took to shouting and one even reached for me in his anger. I sliced his palm open for him nice and quick.

  “You shouldn’t a-done that, Brother Jorg,” Gemt said, cradling his cut hand with the blood dripping free and fast. “You shouldn’t ah.”

  “No?” I had asked, as the Brothers started to gather around us. “And where have I been, Brother Gemt, whilst you hone your battle skills on this useless mutt?”

  Jobe stood beside Gemt, rubbing at the spot I’d yanked his hair from. I looked pointedly at the dog and he knelt to cut it free.

  “You been watching on that town,” Gemt said, his face a hot red now.

  “I’ve been scouting that town, Mabberton, yes,” I said. “So we could come at it with what your idiot brother has been known to call the elephant of surprise. And all I told you lot to do was lie low.”

  Gemt had spat and used his left hand to hold closed the cut on his right.

  “Lie low, I said, not wake the whole fecking marsh from tadpole to toad with a howling fecking dog. Besides,” I’d said, making a slow turn to see the whole of my little band, “everyone knows that tormenting a dumb dog is bad luck. You’d all know that if you weren’t too damn stupid to read.”

  Makin had been one of the first to join the show and a big grin he had on him. “I know my letters,” he said, surprising not a few of the Brothers. “So which book is it that says that then, Brother Jorg?”

  “The big book of Go Fuck Yourself,” I told him.

  “So hurting dogs is bad luck now, is it?” Still with that grin on him.

  “It is near me,” I had said.

  Blinking now, I found the rain still rolling down my face on our long trek beside the Rhyme. I shook off the memory. “Do you recall that dog your brother found before we hit Mabberton, Brother Maical?” I asked. He wouldn’t of course. Maical recalled very little about anything.

  He looked at me, lips pursed, spitting out the rain. “Putting the hurt on dogs is bad luck,” he said.

  “It was for your brother,” I said. “Had himself an accident the next day.”

  Maical frowned, confused, and made a slow nod. “Everyone knows not to put the hurt on your food,” he said. “It sours the meat.”

  “Another new perspective, Brother Maical,” I sighed. “I knew I kept you around for a reason.”

  That dog came back the next morning, just before we hit Mabberton, as if I was its friend or something. Wouldn’t leave until I gave it a good kicking, a free lesson in how the world works, if you like.

  Maical just offered a vacant smile and kept on riding.

  Heimrift lies in the dukedom of Maladon, a land where the hungry seas washed up what little of the Danelands they couldn’t swallow. From the Renar Highlands it’s a fair old trek by any standards, and given the tortuous routes we had to take, it would be a journey of weeks. On the road you fall into routine. Mine involved a hard hour at sword with Sir Makin every evening before the light failed. I took to the art with new interest. A fresh challenge is often the way to keep from brooding on the past.

  I had seen the sword as a means of carrying death through a crowd. With the Brothers I often found myself amongst an unskilled foe, one more interested in running than fighting, and I used my blade for slaughter. I had met more skilful opponents of course, soldiers sent to stop us, well-trained mercenaries set to guard merchants’ wagons, and other bandits with their own brothers on the road, wanting what we had.

  When I saw Katherine’s champion fight Sir Makin, and later when I set myself against the Prince of Arrow, I understood the difference between the workman and the artist. Of course there’s time to be an artist when you’re not having to worry about a farmer sneaking up behind you and sticking a pitchfork through your neck whilst you’re showing off your feints and parries.

  So I worked with Makin, day after day, building up the right kind of muscle, learning to feel the subtle differences through the blade even when it’s being pounded so hard all you want to do is let go. And every time I got a bit better, he turned on the skill a little more. I started to hate him, just a piece.

  When you swing a sword enough, put yourself through enough fights, there’s a kind of rhythm you start to detect. Not the rhythm of your opponent, but a kind of necessary beat to the business of cut and thrust, as if your eyes read the very first hints of each action and lay it out as music to dance to. I heard just whispers of the refrain but every time I caught them it made Makin pay sudden attention and start to sweat to hold me back. I heard only murmured phrases of the song, but just knowing it was there at all was enough to keep me striving.

  If you keep heading north and east from the Renar Highlands then eventually you have to cross the River Rhyme. Given that the river is at least four hundred yards across at all of the points where one might reach it without an invading army, the exercise of crossing it is one that normally requires a ferryman.

  There is one alternative. A bridge at the free-town of Remagen. How any bridge could span such an expanse of water is a wonder and one that I decided to see for myself rather than dicker with the owner of some rickety barge farther upstream.

  We closed on Remagen through the Kentrow hills, winding through endless narrow valleys-rock-choked gullies in the main of the kind where horses are apt to go lame. The boredom of the trail never bothered me when we used to range mile after mile in search of mischief or loot, or hopefully both. Since Thar though, I found the long silences a trial. My mind wandered along dark paths. I don’t know how many ways there are to put Katherine together with a missing knife and a dead baby but I think I must have considered most of them, and at length. I knew where the answer lay, and kept finding that I didn’t want to know it. At least not badly enough to open that box.

  Brother Maical’s wisdom lies in knowing he is not clever and letting himself be led. The foolishness of mankind is that we do not do the same.

  15

  Four years earlier

  Gog had a bad dream in the dry canyons of the Kentrow hills. So bad a dream that it chased us out of there, tripping over our smouldering blankets as the fire guttered and spat around us. While we hunted the horses in the dark, stumbling over every rock and bush, the far end of the canyon glowed with a fierce red heat.

  “Going to find us a crispy little monster when we go back up there,” Rike said, the fire picking out the raw bones of his face in demonic tones.

  “Never burned hisself before,” Grumlow said, tiny beside Rike.

  Ahead of us, closer than we wanted to get to the heat, closer than we could get to it, Gorgoth waited to return. His silhouette against the glow had a disturbingly arachnid shape to it, the splayed ribs like legs reaching from his sides.

  Young Sim came back leading Brath and his own nag. “Be more use on a winter trip.” He nodded toward the flames, shrugged, and led the horses off. Sim had a way with horses. He’d been a stable lad for some lord once upon a time. Spent time in a brothel too as a child, earning rather than spending.

  We made a new camp and waited to see what was left of our old one.

  When I went back with Gorgoth the sky had started shading into pearl. The rocks creaked as they cooled and I could feel the heat through the soles of my boots. Maical came with us. He seemed to like the leucrota.

  We found Gog sleeping peacefully in a blackened area that resembled a burned-out campfire. I shone the only lan
tern we had left on the boy and he screwed his eyes tighter before rolling over. “Sorry to disturb.” I snorted and sat down, standing up again sharpish with a scorched arse.

  “He’s changing,” Gorgoth said.

  I’d noticed it too. The stippled red-and-black of his skin had taken on fiercer scarlet-on-grey tones and a more flame-like form, as if the fire had somehow frozen into his hide.

  We slept then, us back at the new camp and Gorgoth with Gog in the ruins of the old. In the morning they joined us and Gog ran to the breakfast fire as though it were a new thing he’d not seen before. The flames flushed scarlet as he approached and the water in Row’s pots started to boil even though it was fresh in from the stream.

  “Can’t you see them?” he asked as Gorgoth pulled him back.

  “No,” I said, following them away from the camp. “And best you don’t see ‘them’ either. We’ll be meeting with a man who knows all about these things soon enough. Until then, just keep…cool.”

  I sat with them farther down the canyon. We played throw-stones and cross-sticks. It seems that when you’re eight you can shake anything off, at least for the short term. Gog laughed when he won and smiled when he lost. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t play to win but I didn’t grate on him for his easy ways. When ambition gets its teeth into you it’s hard to know how to just enjoy what’s in front of you.

  “Good boy.” Maical passed Gog the cross-sticks he’d gathered back up, a small bundle in his callused hand. “Bad dreams.”

  I frowned at that. Gorgoth rumbled.

  “We were all slow to wake…” I said. “Could have ended badly.” I remembered feeling the heat, the smell of char, and the slow struggle free of my own nightmares.