King of Thorns be-2 Read online

She flapped at me again and I withdrew my hand. Her fingers passed swiftly over the rest, counting. She swept them all away and poured them back onto the others still in the bag. “There are arrows ahead of you,” she said.

  “I’m going to be shot?”

  “You will live happy if you don’t break the arrow.” She picked up the flask and stared one eye into the other. She shivered. “Open your gates.” In her other hand the Wunjo rune stone, as if she hadn’t put it into the bag. Joy. She turned it over, blank side up. “Or don’t.”

  “What about Ferrakind?” I asked. I wasn’t interested in arrows.

  “Him!” She spat a dark mess into her furs. “Don’t go there. Even you should know that, Jorg, with your dark heart and empty head. Don’t go anywhere near that man. He burns.”

  “How many stones do you have in that bag, old woman?” I asked. “Twenty? Twenty-five?”

  “Twenty-four,” she said, and laid her claw on the bag, still bleeding.

  “That’s not so many words to tell the story of a man’s life,” I said.

  “Men’s lives are simple things,” she said.

  I felt her hands on me, even though one lay on the bag and the other held the flask. I felt them pinching, poking, reaching in to pick through my memories. “Don’t,” I said. I let the necromancy rise in me, acid at the back of my throat. The dead things above us twisted, a dry paw twitched, the black twist of a man’s entrails crackled as it flexed, snake-like.

  “As you please.” Again that pink tongue flicking over her lips, and she stopped.

  “Why did you come here, Ekatri?” I asked. I surprised myself by finding her name. People’s names escape me. Probably because I don’t care about them.

  Her eye found mine, as if seeing me for the first time. “When I was young, young enough for you to want me, Jorg of Ancrath, oh yes; when I was young the runes were cast for me. Twenty-four words are not enough to tell all of a woman’s story, especially when one of them is wasted on a boy she would have to grow old waiting for. I called you here because I was told to long ago, even before your grandmothers quickened.”

  She spat again, finding the floor-hides this time.

  “I don’t like you, boy,” she said. “You’re too…prickly. You use that charm of yours like a blade, but charming doesn’t work on old witches. We see through to the core, and the core of you is rotten. If there’s anything decent left in there, then it’s buried deeper than I care to look and probably doomed. But I came because the runes were cast for me, and they said I should do the same for you.”

  “Fine words from a hag that smells as though she died ten years back and just hasn’t had the decency to stop wittering,” I said. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, with either eye, and insulting her didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel fourteen. I tried to remember that I called myself a king and stopped my fingers wandering over the dagger at my hip. “So why would your runes send you to annoy me if there’s no chance for me then, old woman? If I’m a lost cause?”

  She shrugged, a shifting of her rags. “There’s hope for everyone. A slim hope. A fool’s hope. Even a gut-shot man has a fool’s hope.”

  I almost spat at that, but royal spit might actually have improved the place. Besides, witches can work all manner of mischief with a glob of your phlegm and a strand of your hair. Instead I stood and offered the smallest of bows. “Breakfast awaits me, if I can find my appetite again.”

  “Play with fire and you’ll get burned,” she said, almost a whisper.

  “You make a living out of platitudes?” I asked.

  “Don’t stand before the arrow,” she said.

  “Capital advice.” I backed toward the exit.

  “The Prince of Arrow will take the throne,” she said through tight-pressed lips, as if it hurt to speak plainly. “The wise have known it since before your father’s father was born. Skilfar told me as much when she cast my runes.”

  “I was never one for fortune-telling.” I reached the flap and pushed it aside.

  “Why don’t you stay?” She patted the hides beside her, tongue flicking over dry lips. “You might enjoy it.” And for a heartbeat Katherine sat there in the sapphire satin of the dress she wore in her chamber that night. When I hit her.

  I ran at that. I pelted through the rain chased by Ekatri’s laughter, my courage sprinting ahead of me. And my appetite did not return for breakfast.

  While others ate I sat in the shadows by a cold hearth and rocked back upon my chair. Makin came across, his fist full of cold mutton on the bone, grey and greasy. “Find anything interesting?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer but opened my hand. Thurisaz, the thorns. It’s no great feat to steal from a one-eyed woman. The stone ate the shadow and gave back nothing, the single rune slashed black across it. The thorns. My past and future resting on my palm.

  20

  Four years earlier

  Makin works a kind of magic with people. If he spends even half an hour in their company they will like him. He doesn’t need to do anything in particular. There don’t appear to be any tricks involved and he doesn’t seem to try. Whatever he does is different each time but the result is the same. He’s a killer, a hard man, and in bad company he will do bad things, but in half of one hour you will want him to be your friend.

  “Good morning, Duke Maladon,” I said as his axemen showed me into the great hall.

  I squeezed the rain from my hair. Makin sat in a chair a step below the Duke’s dais. He’d just passed a flagon up to Maladon, and sipped small beer from his own as I approached. You could believe they had sat like this every morning for ten years.

  “King Jorg,” the Duke said. To his credit he didn’t hesitate to call me king though I stood dripping in my road-rags.

  The hall lay in shadow, despite the grey morning fingering its way through high windows and the lamps still burning on every other pillar. On his throne Alaric Maladon cut an impressive figure. He could have been drawn from the legends out of dawn-time.

  “I hope Makin hasn’t been boring you with his tales. He is given to some outrageous lies,” I said.

  “So you didn’t push your father’s Watch-master over a waterfall?” the Duke asked.

  “I may-”

  “Or behead a necromancer and eat his heart?”

  Makin wiped foam from his moustache and watched one of the hounds gnaw a bone. All the Brothers seemed to be hard at work on facial hair. I think the Danes made them feel inadequate.

  “Not everything he says is a lie. But watch him,” I said.

  “So did Ekatri have warm words for you?” the Duke asked. No dancing around the issue with these northmen.

  “Isn’t that supposed to be between me and her? Isn’t it bad luck to tell?”

  Alaric shrugged. “How would we know if she was any use if nobody ever told what she said?”

  “I think she passed on a hundred-year-old message telling me to lie down and let the Prince of Arrow have his way with my arse.”

  Makin snorted into his beer at that and some of the northmen grinned, though it’s hard to tell behind a serious beard.

  “I’ve heard something similar,” Alaric said. “A soothsayer from the fjords, ice in his veins and a way with the reading of warm entrails. Told me the old gods and the white Christ all agreed. The time for a new emperor has come and he will spring from the seed of the old. The whisper among the Hundred is that these signs point to Arrow.”

  “The Prince of Arrow can kiss my axe,” Sindri said. I’d not seen him in the shadows behind his father’s guards.

  “You’ve not met him, son,” Alaric said. “I’m told he makes an impression.”

  “So how will your doors stand, Duke of Maladon, if the Prince comes north?” I asked.

  The Duke grinned. “I like you, boy.”

  I let the “boy” slide.

  “I’ve always thought that the blood of empire pooled in the north,” Alaric said. “I always thought that a Dane-man should take the
empire throne, by axe and fire, and that I might be the man to do it.” He took a long draft from his flagon and raised a bushy brow at me. “How would your gates stand if the Prince came calling one fine morning?”

  “That, my friend, would depend on quite how fine a morning it was. But I’ve never liked to be pushed, especially not by soothsayers and witches, not by the words of dead men, not by predictions based on the invisible swing of planets, scratched out on number slates or teased from the spilled guts of an unfortunate sheep,” I said.

  “On the other hand,” Alaric said, “these predictions are very old. The new emperor’s path has been prepared for a hundred years and more. Perhaps this Prince of Arrow is the one they speak of.”

  “Old men make old words holy. I say old words are worn out and should be set aside. Take a new bride to bed, not a hag,” I said, thinking of Ekatri. “A fool may scrawl on a slate and if no one has the wit to wipe it clean for a thousand years, the scrawl becomes the wisdom of ages.”

  Nodding among the warriors, more grins. “Ekatri’s message came from Skilfar in the north.” That wiped the smiles away quick enough.

  Alaric spat into the rushes. “An ice witch in the north, a fire-mage on our doorstep. Vikings were born in the land of ice and fire, and found their strength opposing both. Write your own story, Jorg.”

  I liked the man. Let the hidden players reach to move the Duke of Maladon across the board and they might find themselves short of several fingers.

  The floor shook, a vibration that put a buzz in my teeth and held us all silent until it had passed. The lamps didn’t swing but jittered on their hooks and the shadows blurred.

  “And how did you find the Heimrift?” Alaric asked.

  “I liked it well enough,” I said. “Mountains have always pleased me.”

  In the wide hearth beside us the heaped ash of last night’s fire smoked gently. It reminded me of Mount Vallas with the fumes rising from its flanks.

  “And are you ready to seek out Ferrakind?” Alaric asked.

  “I am,” I said. I had the feeling that Ferrakind would be seeking me out soon enough if I didn’t go to him.

  “Tell me about the trolls,” Alaric said. He surprised me this duke, with his dawn-time ways, his old gods, his axes and furs, so that you’d think him a blunt instrument built for war and little else, and yet his thoughts ran so quick that his mouth had to leap from one subject to the next just to keep up. “The trolls and your strange companions,” he said. And as if on cue the great doors opened at the far end of the hall to admit Gorgoth, his bulk black against the rain.

  The Duke’s warriors took tighter hold of their axes as Gorgoth advanced toward us, the hall silent but for the heavy fall of his feet. Gog hurried on behind him, the rain steaming off him and each lamp burning brighter as he passed.

  The ground shook. This time it jolted as if a giant’s hammer had fallen close by. Outside something groaned and fell with a crash. And beside me a lamp slipped its hook and smashed on the flagstones, splashing burning oil in a wide bright circle. Several splatters caught my leggings and flamed there though the cloth lay too wet to catch. Gog moved fast. He threw one clawed hand toward me and the other at the hearth. He made a brief, high cry and the lamp oil guttered out. In the hearth a new fire burned with merry flames as if it were dry wood heaped there instead of grey ash.

  Oaths from the men around us. Because of the fierceness of the tremor, or the business with the fallen lamp, or just to release the tension built as Gorgoth advanced through the shadowed hall, I didn’t know.

  “Now that was a clever trick.” I crouched to be on a level with Gog and waved him to me. “How did you do that?” My fingers tested where the fire had burned, leggings and floor, and came away cold and oily.

  “Do what?” Gog asked, his voice high, his eyes on the Duke and the glitter of the axes held around him.

  “Put the fire out,” I said. I glanced at the hearth. “Move the fire.” I corrected myself.

  Gog didn’t look away from the Alaric in his high chair. “There’s only one fire, silly,” he said, forgetting any business of kings and dukes. “I just squeezed it.”

  I frowned. I had the edge of understanding him, but it kept slipping my grasp. I hate that. “Tell me.” I steered him by the shoulders until our eyes met.

  “There’s only one fire,” he said. His eyes were dark, their usual all-black, but his gaze held something hot, something uncomfortable, as if it might light you up like a tallow wick.

  “One fire,” I said. “And all these…” I waved a hand at the lamps. “Windows onto it?”

  “Yes.” Gog sighed, exasperated, and struggled to turn away for some new game.

  I had the image of a rug in my head. A rug with a wrinkle in it. I remembered it from softer days. From days when I slept in a world that never shook or burned, in a room where my mother would always come to say good night. A rug with a wrinkle in it and a maid trying to smooth it down with her foot. And every time she squashed it flat a new wrinkle would spring up close by. But never two. Because there was only one fold in the rug.

  “You can take fire from one place and put it in another,” I said.

  Gog nodded.

  “Because there is only one fire, and we see pieces of it,” I said. “You squeeze one corner down and pull up another.”

  Gog nodded and struggled to be off.

  “And that’s all you ever do,” I said.

  Gog didn’t answer, as if it were too obvious for comment. I let him go and he ran beneath the nearest table to play with a red-furred hound.

  “The trolls?” Alaric said, with the air of a man forcing patience.

  “We met some. Gorgoth can talk to them. They seem to like him,” I said.

  Alaric waited. It’s a good enough trick. Say nothing and men feel compelled to fill the silence, even if it’s with things they would rather have kept secret. It’s a good enough trick, but I know it and I said nothing.

  “The Duke of Maladon knows about the trolls,” Gorgoth said. The Danes flinched when he spoke, as if they thought him incapable of it and expected him to growl and snarl. “The trolls serve Ferrakind. The duke wishes to know why the ones we discovered were not in the fire-mage’s service.”

  Alaric shrugged. “It’s true.”

  “The trolls serve Ferrakind out of fear,” Gorgoth said. “Their flesh burns as easily as man-flesh. A few hide from him.”

  “Why don’t they just leave the Heimrift if they want to live free?” I asked.

  “Men,” he said.

  For a moment I didn’t understand. It’s hard to think of such creatures as victims. I remembered their black-clawed hands, hands that could snatch the head off a man.

  “They were once many,” Gorgoth said.

  “You told me they were made for war, soldiers, so why hide?” I asked.

  Gorgoth nodded. “Made for war. Made to serve. Not made to be hunted. Not to be scattered and hunted alone across strange lands.”

  I pulled myself to my full height, topping six foot of late. “I think-”

  “What do you think, Makin?” The Duke cut across me.

  Makin caught my eye and offered the tiniest of grins. “I think all these things are the glimpses of the same fire,” he said. “Everything here comes back to Ferrakind. The dead trees, the lung-flake in your cattle, your lost harvests, the knocking down of your halls one brick, one gable, one rafter at a time, the trolls, the chances of either of you ever making a play for the empire throne, all of it, with Ferrakind burning at the centre.”

  It’s always a different thing that makes the magic happen. Today it was his cleverness. But at the end of it all, you wanted Makin to be your friend.

  21

  Four years earlier

  The Danes are settled Vikings in the main. The blood of reavers mixed with that of the farmers they conquered. Every Dane counts his ancestry back to the north, to some bloody-handed warrior jumping from his longship, but in truth the wild men o
f the fjords scorn the Danes and call them fit-firar — a mistake that has seen a lot of Vikings on the wrong end of an axe.

  “You’re more use to me here, Makin.”

  “You’re mad to go in the first place,” Makin said.

  “It’s why we came,” I said.

  “Every new thing I hear about this Ferrakind is a new good reason not to go anywhere near him,” Makin said.

  “We’re here because he’s gone soft on the little monster,” Row said from the doorway. He hadn’t been invited to the conversation. None of them had. But on the road any raised voice is an invitation for an audience. Although strictly we weren’t on the road. We were in chambers set aside for guests in a smaller hall paralleling the Duke of Maladon’s great hall.

  “Or hard on him.” Rike leaned in under the door lintel, a nasty leer on him. Since I took the copper box he seemed to feel he had license to speak his mind.

  I turned to the doorway. “Two things you should remember, my brothers.”

  Grumlow, Sim, and Kent appeared as faces poking out behind Rike.

  “First, if you answer me back on this I swear by every priest in hell that you will not leave this building alive. Second, you may recall a time when you and our late lamented brothers were busy dying outside the Haunt. And whilst the Count of Renar’s foot-soldiers were killing you. Killing Elban, and Liar, and Fat Burlow…Gog had the whole of the count’s personal guard, more than seventy picked men, either as burning pools of human fat, or too damn scared to move. And he was seven. So right now the kind of man he grows into, and whether he grows up at all, is a question of far greater interest to me than whether you sorry lot live to see tomorrow. In fact there are a lot of questions more important to me than whether you get a day older or not, Rike, but that one is top of the list.”

  “You still need me there,” Makin said. Too many years guarding me had turned a duty into a habit, an imperative.

  “If things go well I won’t need you,” I said. “And if they go badly, I don’t think an extra sword or two will help. He has a small army of trolls at his beck and call, and he can set men on fire by thinking about it. I don’t believe a sword will help.”