King of Thorns Read online

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking. Lundist was always a man for enquiry, for logic and judging, for patience and subtlety. All that felt rather pointless if we walked a fixed path from the cradle to whatever end was written in stars.

  I’d reached the yurt without noticing. I made an abrupt stop and managed not to walk into it. I circled for the entrance and ducked through without announcement. She was supposed to know the future after all.

  “Listen,” she said as I pushed through the flap into her tent, a stinking place of hides and hanging dead things.

  “Listen,” she said again as I made to open my mouth.

  So I sat cross-legged beneath the dangling husks, and listened and didn’t speak.

  “Good,” she said. “You’re better than most. Better than those bold, noisy boys wanting so much to be men, wanting only to hear the words from their own mouths.”

  I listened to the dry wheeze of her as she spoke, to the flap and creak of the tent, the insistence of the rain, and the complaints of the wind.

  “So you listen, but do you hear?” she asked.

  I watched her. She wore her years badly and the gloom couldn’t hide it. She watched me back with one eye; the other sat sunken and closed in the grey folds of her flesh. It leaked something like snot onto her cheek.

  “You should look better after ninety winters,” she sneered. She needed just the one eye to read my expression. “The first fifty, hard ones in the lands of fire and ice where the true Vikings live.”

  I would have guessed two hundred just from looking at her, from the slide of her face, the crags, warts, and wattles. Only her eye seemed young, and that disappointed me for I’d come to seek wisdom.

  “I hear,” I said. I held my questions because folk only came to her with questions. If she truly knew the answers then perhaps I didn’t need to ask.

  She reached into the layered rags and furs around her waist. The stench increased immediately and I struggled not to choke. When her hand emerged, more a bone claw than supple fingers, it clutched a glass jar, the contents sloshing. “Builder-glass,” she said, wetting her lips with a quick pink tongue, somehow obscene in her withered mouth. She cradled the flask in her hands. “How did we lose the art? There’s not a man you could reach with five weeks of riding that could make this now. And if I dropped it a finger’s width onto stone…gone! A thousand worthless pieces.”

  “How old?” I asked. The question escaped me despite my resolution.

  “Ten centuries, maybe twelve,” she said. “Palaces have crumbled in that time. The statues of emperors lie ruined and buried. And this…” She held it up. An eye made slow rotations in the greenish swirl. “Still whole.”

  “Is it your eye?” I asked.

  “The very same.” She watched me with her bright one and set the other on the rug in its Builder flask.

  “I sacrificed it for wisdom,” she said. “As Odin did at Mimir’s well.”

  “And did you get wisdom?” I asked. An impertinent question perhaps from a boy of fourteen but she had asked to see me, not I her, and the longer I sat there, the smaller and older she looked.

  She grinned, displaying a single rotting tooth-stump. “I discovered it would have been wise to leave my eye next to the other one.” The eye came to rest at the bottom of the jar, aimed slightly to my left.

  “I see you have a baby with you,” she said.

  I glanced to my side. The baby lay dead, brains oozing from his broken skull, not much blood but what there was lay shockingly red on his milk-white scalp. He seldom looked so clear, so real, but Ekatri’s yurt held the kind of shadows that invited ghosts. I said nothing.

  “Show me the box.” She held out her hand.

  I took it from its place just inside my breastplate. Keeping a tight grip I held it out toward her. She reached for it, quicker than an old woman has a right to be, and snatched her hand back with a gasp. “Powerful,” she said. Blood dripped from her fingers, welling from a dozen small puncture wounds. The fact that there was blood to spill in those bony old fingers surprised me.

  I put the box back. “I should warn you that I’m not taken with horoscopes and such,” I told her.

  She licked her lips again and said nothing.

  “If you must know, I’m a goat,” I said. “That’s right, a fecking goat. There’s a whole nation of people behind the East Wall who say I was born in the year of the goat. I’ve no time for any system that has me as a goat. I don’t care how ancient their civilization is.”

  She gave the flask a gentle swirl. “It sees into other worlds,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

  “That’s good then?” I said.

  She tapped her living eye. “This one sees into other worlds too,” she said. “And it has a clearer view.” She took a leather bag from within her rags and set it by the jar. “Rune stones,” she said. “Maybe if you go east and climb over the great wall you will be a goat. Here in the north the runes will tell your story.”

  I kept my lips tight shut, remembering my pledge at last. She would tell me about the future or she wouldn’t. What she told me without questions to answer might be true.

  She took a handful from the bag, grey stones clacking soft against each other. “Honorous Jorg Ancrath.” She breathed my name into the stones, then let them fall. It seemed that they took a lifetime to reach the rug, each making its slow turns, end to end, side to side, the runes scored across them appearing and reappearing. They hit like anvils. I can feel the shake of it even now. It echoes in these bones of mine.

  “The Perth rune, initiation,” she said. “Thurisaz. Uruz, strength.” She poked them aside as if they were unimportant. She turned a stone over. “Wunjo, joy, face down. And here, Kano, the rune of opening.”

  I set a finger to Thurisaz and the völva sucked a sharp breath over grey gums. She scowled and batted at my hand to move it, the stone cold to touch, the witch’s hand colder, thin skin like paper. She hadn’t spoken the rune’s name in the empire tongue but I knew the old speech of the north from Lundist’s books.

  “The thorns,” I said.

  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. Tw
enty-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.