Prince of Thorns tbe-1 Read online

  Princess? I didn’t care. Tomorrow, tomorrow I would find out. I let him lead me to my room. One of the guest rooms off the Red Corridor. The chamber could have housed many a tavern I’d slept in, but it was a studied insult nonetheless. A room for a country baron or distant cousin visiting from the protectorates.

  I stopped at the door, reeling with exhaustion. Sageous’s spell bit deeper and my strength left me like blood from sliced veins.

  “I told you it was time to choose, Robart,” I said. I forced the words out one by one. “Get Makin Bortha here. Let him guard my door this night. Time to choose.”

  I didn’t wait for a reply. If I had, he’d have had to carry me to bed. I pushed the door and half-staggered, half-fell, into the chamber. I collapsed back against the door, closing it, and slid to the floor. It felt like I kept on sliding, deeper and deeper, into an endless well.

  18

  I woke up with that sudden convulsion you get when every muscle you own suddenly realizes it’s dropped off on duty. Next came the shock of realizing how deeply I’d been asleep. You don’t sleep like that on the road, not if you want to wake up again. For a moment the darkness would yield nothing to my confusion. I reached for my sword and found only soft sheets. The Tall Castle! It came back to me. I remembered the pagan and his spell.

  I rolled to the right. I always left my gear on my right side. Nothing but more mattress, soft and deep. I might have been blind for all the help my eyes gave. I guessed the shutters were shut tight, for not the slightest whisper of starlight reached me. It was quiet too. I reached out for the edge of the bed, and didn’t find it. A wide bed, I thought, trying to find some humour in the situation.

  I let go the breath I’d been holding, the one I sucked in so fast when I woke. What was it that made me start? What dragged me out of the pagan’s spell in this oh so comfortable bed? I pulled my hand back, drew my knees to my chest. Somebody had put me to bed and taken my clothes. Not Makin, he’d not leave me naked against the night. That somebody and I would be having a discussion soon enough. But it could wait until morning. I just wanted to sleep, to let the day come.

  Only sleep had kicked me out, and it wasn’t about to let me back in. So I lay there, naked in the strange bed, and wondered where my sword was.

  The noise came so quiet at first I could believe I imagined it. I stared blind into the darkness and let my ears suck in the silence. It came again, soft as the whisper of flesh on stone. I could hear the ghost of a sound, a breath being drawn. Or maybe just a night breeze fingering its way through the shutters.

  Ice ran up my spine, tingling on my shoulders. I sat up, biting back the urge to speak, to show bravado to the unseen terrors. I’m not six years old, I told myself. I’ve made the dead run. I threw the sheets back and stood up. If the pagan’s horror was waiting in the darkness, then sheets would be no shield. With my hands held up before me, I walked forward, finding first the elusive edge of the bed, and then the wall. I turned and followed it, fingers trailing the stonework. Something went tumbling and broke with an expensive crash. I barked my shins on an unseen obstacle, nearly groined myself on a sideboard of some kind, then found the shutter slats.

  I fumbled with the shutter catch. It defied me maddeningly, as though my fingers were frost-clumsy. The skin on my back crawled. I heard footsteps drawing closer. I hauled on the shutters with all my strength. Every move I made seemed slow and feeble, as though I moved through molasses, like in those dreams where the witch chases you and you can’t run.

  The shutters gave without warning. They flew back and I found that I was standing high above the execution yard, drenched in moonlight. I spun around. Slow, too slow. And found nothing. Just a room of silver and shadows.

  The window threw the moonlight on the wall to my right. My shadow reached forward in the arch of the window and fell at the feet of a tall portrait. A full length picture of a woman. I went numb: my face felt like a mask. I knew the picture. Mother. Mother in the great hall. Mother in a white dress, tall and icy in her perfection. She said she never liked that picture, that the artist had made her too distant, too much the queen. Only William softened it, she said. If she’d not had William hugging to her skirts, she would have given the picture away, she said. But she couldn’t throw little William away.

  I pulled my eyes from her face, pale in the silver light. She loomed above me, tall in life, taller in the portrait. Her dress fell in cascades of lace-froth: the artist had caught it well. He made it look real.

  The open shutters let in a chill and I felt a cold beyond any autumn frost. My skin rose in tiny bumps. She couldn’t throw William away. Only William wasn’t there any more . . . I took a step back toward the open window.

  “Sweet Jesus . . .” I blinked away tears.

  Mother’s eyes followed me.

  “Jesus wasn’t there, Jorg,” she said. “Nobody came to save us. You watched us, Jorg. You watched, but you didn’t come to help.”

  “No.” I felt the windowsill cold against the back of my knees. “The thorns . . . the thorns held me.”

  She looked at me, eyes silver with the moon. She smiled and I thought for a moment she would forgive me. Then she screamed. She didn’t scream the screams she’d made when the Count’s men raped her. I could have stood that. Maybe. She screamed the screams she made when they killed William. Ugly, hoarse, animal screams, torn from her perfect painted face.

  I howled back. The words burst from me. “The thorns! I tried, Mother. I tried.”

  He rose up from behind the bed then. William, sweet William with the side of his head caved in. The blood clotted black on his golden hair. The eye that side was gone, but the other held me.

  “You let me die, Jorg,” he said. He spoke it past a bubbling in his throat.

  “Will.” I couldn’t say any more.

  He lifted a hand to me, white with the trickles of blood darkest crimson.

  The window yawned behind me and I made to throw myself back through it, but as I did something jolted me forward. I staggered and righted myself. Will stood there, silent now.

  “Jorg! Jorg!” A shout reached me, distant but somehow familiar.

  I looked back toward the window and the dizzying fall.

  “Jump,” said William.

  “Jump!” Mother said.

  But Mother didn’t sound like Mother any more.

  “Jorg! Prince Jorg!” The shout came louder now, and a more violent jolt threw me to the floor.

  “Get out of the fucking way, boy.” I recognized Makin’s voice. He stood framed in the doorway, lamplight behind. And somehow I lay on the floor at his feet. Not by the window. Not naked, but in my armour still.

  “You were jammed up against the door, Jorg,” Makin said. “This Robart fellow told me to come running, and here you are screaming behind the door.” He glanced around, looking for the danger. “I ran from the South Wing for your blasted nightmare did I?” He shoved the door open wider and added a belated, “Prince.”

  I got to my feet, feeling as if I’d been rolled on by Fat Burlow. There was no painting on the wall, no Mother, no Will behind the bed.

  I drew my sword. I needed to kill Sageous. I wanted it so badly I could taste it, like blood, hot and salt in my mouth.

  “Jorg?” Makin asked. He looked worried, as if he was wondering if I’d gone mad.

  I moved toward the open door. Makin stepped to block me. “You can’t go out there with a drawn sword, Jorg, the guard would have to stop you.”

  He didn’t stand as tall or as wide as Rike, but Makin was a big man, broad in the shoulder and stronger than a man should be. I didn’t think I could take him down without killing him.

  “It’s all about sacrifice, Makin,” I said. I let my sword drop.

  “Prince?” He frowned.

  “I’m going to let that tattooed bastard live,” I said. “I need him.” I glimpsed my mother again, fading. “I need to understand what game is being played out here. Who exactly the pieces are and who the p
layers are.”

  Makin’s frown deepened. “You get some sleep, Jorg. In the bed this time.” He glanced back into the corridor. “Do you want some light in there?”

  I smiled at that. “No,” I said. “I’m not afraid of the dark.”

  19

  I woke early. A grey light through the shutters showed me the room for the first time: big, well-furnished, hunting tapestries on the walls. I uncoiled my fingers from my sword hilt, stretched and yawned. It didn’t feel right, this bed. It was too soft, too clean. When I threw the covers back they knocked the servant-bell from the bedside table. It hit the flagstones with a pretty tinkling then bounced onto a rug and lost its voice. Nobody came. That suited me fine: I’d dressed myself for four years. Hell, I’d rarely undressed! And what rags I had would be put to shame by the meanest of servant smocks. Even so. Nobody came.

  I wore my armour over the grey tatters of my shirt. A looking-glass lay on the sideboard. I let it lie there face down. A quick run of fingers through hair in search of any louse fat enough to be found, and I was ready to break my fast.

  First I threw the shutters open. No fumbling with the catch this time. I looked out over the execution yard, a square bounded by the blank walls of the Tall Castle. Kitchen-boys and maids hastened across the bleak courtyard, going about their various quests, blind to the pale wash of the sky so high above them.

  I turned from the window and set off on my own little quest. Every prince knows the kitchens better than any other quarter of his castle. Where else can so much adventure be found? Where else is the truth spoken so plain? William and I learned a hundred times more in the kitchens of the Tall Castle than from our books on Latin and strategy. We’d steal ink-handed from Lundist’s study and sprint through long corridors, leaping down the stairs too many at a time, to reach the refuge of the kitchens.

  I walked those same corridors now, ill at ease in the confined space. I’d spent too long under wide skies, living bloody. We learned about death in the kitchens too. We watched the cook turn live chickens to dead meat with a twist of his hands. We watched Ethel the Bread pluck the fat hens, leaving them naked in death, ready for gutting. You soon learn there’s no elegance or dignity in death if you spend time in the castle kitchens. You learn how ugly it is, and how good it tastes.

  I turned the corner at the end of the Red Corridor, too full of memories to pay attention. All I saw was a figure bearing down on me. Instincts learned on the road took over. Before I had time to register the long hair and silks, I had her against the wall, a hand across her mouth and my knife to her throat. We were face by face and my captive held my stare, eyes an unreal green like stained glass. I let my snarl relax into a smile and unclenched my teeth. I stepped back, letting her off the wall.

  “Your pardon, my lady,” I said, and sketched her a shallow bow. She was tall, nearly my height, and surely not many years my senior.

  She gave me a fierce grin and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It came away bloody, from a bitten tongue. Gods but she was good to look at. She had a strong face, sharp in the nose and cheekbones but rich in the lips, all framed by the darkest red hair.

  “Lord, how you stink, boy,” she said. She stepped around me, as if she was checking a horse at market. “You’re lucky Sir Galen isn’t with me, or a skivvy would be picking your head off the ground about now.”

  “Sir Galen?” I asked. “I’ll be sure to watch out for him.” She had diamonds around her neck on a complex web of gold. Spanard work: none on the Horse Coast could make a thing like that. “It wouldn’t do for the King’s guests to go about killing one another.” I took her for the daughter of a merchant come a-toadying to the King. A very rich merchant, or maybe the daughter of some count or earl from the east: there was an eastern burr to her voice.

  “You’re a guest?” She raised a brow at that, and very pretty it looked too. “I think not. You look to have stolen in. By the privy chute to judge by the smell. I don’t think you could have climbed the walls, not in that clunky old armour.”

  I clicked my heels together, like the table knights, and offered her an arm. “I was on my way to break fast in the kitchens. They know me there. Perhaps you’d like to accompany me and check my credentials, lady?”

  She nodded, ignoring my arm. “I can send a kitchen-boy for the guards and have you arrested, if we don’t meet any on the way.”

  So we walked side by side through the corridors and down one flight of stairs after another.

  “My brothers call me Jorg,” I said. “How are you called, lady?” I found the court-speak awkward on the tongue, especially with my mouth so unaccountably dry. She smelled like flowers.

  “You can call me ‘my lady,’” she said, and wrinkled her nose again. We passed two of the house guards in their fire-bronze plate and plumes. Both of them studied me as if I was a turd escaped from the privy, but she said nothing and they let us pass.

  We passed the storerooms where the salt beef and pickled pork lay in barrels, stacked to the ceiling. “My lady” seemed to know the way. She shot me a glance with those emerald eyes of hers.

  “So did you come here to steal, or for murder with that dagger of yours?” she asked.

  “Perhaps a bit of both.” I smiled.

  A good question though. I couldn’t say why I’d come, other than I felt somebody didn’t want me to. Ever since that moment when I found Father Gomst in his cage, ever since that ghost ran its course through me and my thoughts turned to the Tall Castle, it felt as though someone were steering me away. And I don’t take direction.

  We passed Short Bridge, little more than three mahogany planks over the great iron valves that could seal the lower levels from the castle main. The doors, steel and three feet thick, would slide up from the gaping slot in the corridor floor, so Tutor Lundist told me. Lifted on old magic. I’d never seen them close. Torches burned here, no silver lamps for the servant levels. The stink of tar-smoke made me more at home than anything yet.

  “Perhaps I’ll stay,” I said.

  The kitchen arch lay just ahead of us. I could see Drane, the assistant cook, wrestling half a hog through the doors.

  “Wouldn’t your brothers miss you?” she asked, playful now. She touched her fingers to the corner of her mouth, where the red pattern of my fingers had started to rise. Something in her gesture made me rise too.

  I shrugged, then paused as I worked the straps of the vambrace over my left forearm. “There are plenty of brothers on the road,” I said. “Let me show you the kind of brothers I meant . . .”

  “Here,” she said, impatient.

  The torchlight burned in the red of her hair. She undid the clasps with deft fingers. The girl knew armour. Perhaps Sir Galen was for more than just beheading ill-mannered louts?

  “What then?” she asked. “I’ve seen arms before, though maybe not one so dirty.”

  I grinned at that and turned my arm over so she could see the Brotherhood brand across my wrist. Three ugly bands of burn-scar. A look of distaste furrowed her brow. “You’re a sell-sword? You take your pride in that?”

  “More pride in that than in what true family I have left.” I felt a bite of anger. I felt like sending this distracting merchant’s daughter on her way, making her run.

  “What are these?” She reached out to run her fingers from the brand up to the small of my elbow where the armour stopped her. “Jesu! There’s more scar than boy under this dirt!”

  At her touch a thrill ran through me, and I pulled away. “I fell in a thorn bush when . . . when I was a child,” I said, my voice too sharp.

  “Some thorn bush!” she said.

  I shrugged. “A hook-briar.”

  She twisted her mouth into an “ouch.” “You’ve got to lie still in one of those,” she said, her eyes still on my arm. “Everyone knows that. Looks as if it tore you to the bone.”

  “I know that. Now.” I set off for the kitchen doors, walking fast.

  She ran to catch me, silks swirling. “W
hy did you struggle? Why didn’t you stop?”

  “I was stupid,” I said. “I wouldn’t struggle now.” I wanted the silly bitch to leave. I didn’t even feel hungry any more.

  My arm burned with the memory of her fingers. She was right, the thorns had cut me deep. Every few weeks for more than a year the poison would flare in the wounds and run through my blood. When the poison ran in me I’d done things that scared even the brothers.

  Drane lumbered out through the doors just as I reached them. He pulled up short, and wiped his hands on the soiled white apron stretched over his belly. “Wh—” He looked past me and his eyes widened. “Princess!” He seemed suddenly terrified, quivering like a blob of jelly. “Princess! Wh-what are you doing in the kitchens? It’s no place for a lady in silks and all.”

  “Princess?” I turned to stare at her. I’d left my mouth open, so I closed it.

  She gave me a smile that left me wondering if I wanted to slap it off her, or kiss it. Before I could decide, a heavy hand landed on my shoulder, and Drane turned me round. “And what’s a ruffian like you doing leading her highness astray . . .” The question died in his throat. His fat face crinkled up and he tried to speak again, but the words wouldn’t come. He let me go and found his voice. “Jorg? Little Jorg?” Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  Will and I had watched the man throttle a few chickens and bake a few pies: there was no call for him to start blubbing over me. I let him off the embarrassment though, he’d given me the chance to see her royal highness look surprised. I grinned at her and gave a court bow.

  “Princess, eh? So I guess that means the road-trash you wanted to have the palace guards arrest is in fact your step-brother.”

  She recovered her composure quickly. I’ll give her that.

  “Actually, that would make you my nephew,” she said. “Your father married my older sister two months ago. I’m your aunt Katherine.”

  20