King of Thorns be-2 Page 18

  I couldn’t expect any fire to melt enough ice to drown a fire-mage, least of all for the fire-mage’s own fire to do the melting whilst he stood there patiently awaiting his own deluge. But I had a hope, a faint hope, that his fire and Gog’s together, might at least melt a passage through the ice, a passage where the tunnels led and where heat rises…a passage up.

  In spring and summer Halradra’s crater is a remarkable blue. The blue of a yard of meltwater lying on top of fathoms of ice. A twenty-acre lake, just a yard deep, sitting on all that ice.

  When a hole wide enough to swallow a wagon is melted through that ice you discover that a yard times twenty acres is a lot.

  The icy water hit Ferrakind in a thick column faster than the swiftest of horses, and swept him away without pause.

  With the mage gone and the sparkles dying from Gog’s fragments, darkness returned. I knew only pain and the roar of the waters. The knowledge that I would drown rather than burn held no interest. I only wanted it to be quick.

  Somehow, in the darkness and the deluge, hands found me. Troll-stink mixed with the stench of my roasted flesh and I moved in their grasp. I cursed them, thinking only that the agony would last longer this way. I considered for a moment if they were still wondering whether I tasted good. Perhaps they liked their food part-cooked. I bit one at some point and I can say that trolls taste worse than they smell. I remember no more of it. I think they banged my head on a wall as they scrambled to escape the flood.

  From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron

  December 16th, Year 98 Interregnum

  Ancrath. The Tall Castle. My bedchamber. Maery Coddin sewing in the corner chair. Rain rattling on the shutters.

  “Madam, you send the winter running. We bask in the warmth of your smile.”

  That’s what the Prince of Arrow said when I came down the stairway into the East Hall. “Madam,” not “Princess,” because that’s how they have it in the land of Arrow. Madam. Pompous maybe, but it made me smile, for I’d been serious before, thinking of Sageous and the writing on his face. And even though a dead poet probably wrote Orrin’s lines, it felt as though Orrin meant them and had spoken them just for me.

  “Katherine, you look good.”

  Egan said that, while his brother bowed. Night and day those two. Or maybe morning and twilight. Orrin as blond as a jarl and handsome as the princes painted in those books to delight little princesses before they learn that it isn’t kissing that turns frogs into princes, just the ownership of a castle and some acres. Egan with his hair short and blacker than soot, his skin still holding a stain from the summer sun, and his face that would be brutal, that would fit on a butcher or executioner, but for the fire behind it, the energy that sets the short hairs on your arms and neck on end.

  And what were Jorg Ancrath’s last words to me? “Perhaps, Aunt, you have a better hand?” As he invited me to finish his father’s work. As he stood there, more pale than Orrin, darker than Egan, his hair across his shoulders like a black river. He watched me and my knife, his face sharp and complicated, as if you could see there not the man he will become, but the men he might become.

  And why am I writing of that boy here when there are men to speak of? That boy who hit me. I don’t think he tore my dress. I think he considered it though.

  They both asked for my hand. Orrin with sweet words that I can’t capture. He made me feel perfect. Clean. I know he would keep me safe and would turn his mind toward making me happy. I paint him too…prissy. There’s fire and strength in Orrin of Arrow. At his core he is iron and every part of him is wholly alive.

  Egan asked with short words and long, dark looks. I think his passions would terrify Sareth, despite her dirty mouth. I think a weak woman would die in his bed. And a strong one might find it the only place she’s been alive.

  We walked in the rose garden that Queen Rowan had planted the year before she died, out between the keep and the curtain wall. I strolled first with Orrin, since he’s the elder brother by a year, and then with Egan, with Maery Coddin a yard behind to chaperone us. The garden is overgrown now, not neglected but tended without care, the roses left withered on the stems, thorns and dead flowers all bearded with frost. Orrin walked without speaking to start, with only the crunch of feet in gravel to break the cold silence. His first words plumed before him: “It wouldn’t be easy to be my wife.”

  “Honesty is always refreshing,” I told him. “Why should it be so difficult?”

  And he told me there among the roses, without bluster or pride, that he would be emperor some day but the path to Vyene would not be easy. God had not told him to do it, nor had he laid a promise to a dying father; he didn’t paint it as destiny, only duty. Orrin of Arrow is, I think, that rarest of things. A truly good man with all the strengths to do what his goodness demands of him.

  He was right of course. To love such a man might be easy, to marry him much more difficult.

  Where Orrin first thought and then spoke about the future, Egan spoke without hesitation and about the now. All they shared was honesty. Egan told me he wanted me, and I believed him. He told me he would make me happy and how. I’m sure if I’d turned around Maery’s face would have been as red as mine. Egan spoke of his horses, the battles he’d fought in, and the lands he would take me to. Some of it was boasting, sure enough, but in the end he spoke of his passions, killing, riding, travelling, and now me. It may be shallow of me, but to be counted among the simple primal pleasures of a man like Egan of Arrow is a compliment. And yes, he may see me as a prize to be won, but I think I would be equal to his fire and that he could find himself well matched.

  I told them I would have to consider.

  Sareth thinks I’m mad not to choose one and jump at the chance to leave Ancrath.

  Maery Coddin says I should choose Orrin. He has more land, more prospects, and enough fire to melt her but not so much as to scorch her.

  But I chose to wait.

  February 8th, Year 99 Interregnum

  Tall Castle. Library. Cold and empty.

  Sareth has squeezed out her Ancrath brat. She howled about it, loud enough for half the castle to know more than they ever wanted about the business of pushing a big slimy head through a hole where even fingers feel tight. She sent me away after only a few hours. For my sulking she said. Truly, I was glad to go.

  I should be happy for her. I should be thankful they both lived. I do love her, and I suppose I will come to love the boy. It’s not his fault he’s an Ancrath. But I’m scared.

  It wasn’t sulking. It was fear. She howled the rest of the day and into the night before she got it out of her. I knew she had a dirty mouth, but the things she shouted near the end. I wonder how the servants will look on her now. How the table-knights will watch their queen behind their visors.

  I’m scared and this quill puts the fear wavering into each letter. I’m trembling and I have to write slow and firm just to be able to read what I’ve set down.

  I missed my time last month, and again this month. I think before the year is out it will be me screaming and not caring what I say or who hears. And there won’t be flags out and prayers in chapel for my bastard. Not like there were for little Prince Degran at midnight. Not even if my baby has the same black hair slime-plastered to its head and the same dark eyes watching out of a squashed up face.

  I hate him. How could he? How could he spoil everything?

  I dreamed of Jorg last night, coming to me, and my belly all fat, taut and hot and stretched, stretching like the bastard wanted out of me, little hands sliding beneath my skin. I dreamed Jorg brought a knife with him. Or it was my knife. The long narrow one. And he cut me open, like Drane guts fish in the kitchen, and he pulled the baby out scarlet and screaming.

  I should tell somebody. I should go to Friar Glen with the story. How Jorg raped me. And seek forgiveness, though Christ knows why I should be the one to ask. I should go. They would send me to the Holy Sisters at Frau Rock.

  But I hate that man
, that stocky friar with his blank eyes and thick fingers. I don’t know why but I hate him even more than Jorg Ancrath. He makes my skin want to drop off and crawl away.

  Or I could ask someone to help me lose it. They had old mothers in the slum quarter in Scorron who could grind up a bitter paste…and the babies would fall out of the women who went to them, tiny and dead. But that was in Scorron. I don’t know who to ask here. Maery Coddin maybe, but she’s too good, too clean. She would tell Sareth and Sareth would tell King Olidan and who knows what he would do to me for spoiling his plans, for not playing his game of statehood like a good pawn, for falling off the board.

  Better I should marry Prince Orrin or Egan. Quickly before it shows. Egan wouldn’t wait for the wedding. He would be on me in a moment. He would never know it wasn’t his. Orrin would wait.

  22

  Wedding day

  “Where’s Coddin, dammit?”

  “Back down there.” Watch-master Hobbs pointed down the valley. The grey rear-guard of the Watch sketched a ragged line ahead of the foremost of Arrow’s troops.

  “Should have left him in the castle, Jorg,” Makin said, heaving a breath between every other word. “He’s too old for running.”

  I spat. “Keppen’s a hundred if he’s a day, and he’d be up and down this mountain before you’d broke fast, Sir Makin.”

  “He might be sixty,” Makin said. “A whack older than Coddin in any case, I’ll grant you.”

  Watch-master Hobbs joined us on the ridge, with Captain Stodd beside him, his short beard white against a red face.

  “Well?” Hobbs said.

  I watched him.

  “Sire,” he added.

  It’s easy to lose faith on the mountain, but also to find it. Somehow being a few thousand feet closer to God makes all the difference.

  Hobbs had good reason for his doubts in any case. Above us the valley narrowed to a steep-sided pass, a choke point that would slow three hundred men to the point where the men of Arrow might finally get to blood their swords after their long chase. Above that, the snowline and the long climb to Blue Moon Pass, blocked at this time of year despite the promise of its name. Below us ten times our number and more filled the valley, a carpet of men in constant motion, the sun glittering off helms, shields, the points of sword and spear.

  “Let’s wait for Coddin,” I said. Even Coddin needed his faith restored.

  “Sire.” Hobbs bowed his head. He took his bow in hand and waited, his breath heavy in his chest. A good man, or if not good, solid. Father picked him from the royal guard for the Forest Watch, not as punishment but to reward the Watch.

  I looked away from the seething mass of men to the peaks, snow-clad, serene. The snowline waited for us not far above the choke point. The wind carried fresh snow, icy crystals in a thin swirl. None of us felt the cold. Ten thousand mountain steps burned in my legs, leaving them to tremble, and warming my blood close to boiling point.

  To the west I could see God’s Finger. The tiredness in me was nothing compared to what I felt the day I hauled myself onto the tip of that finger and lay as dead beneath the bluest sky. I lay there for hours and in the end I stood, leaning into the teeth of the wind, and drew my sword.

  When you climb take nothing that is not essential. I took a sword, strapped across my back. There’s a song behind the swinging of a sword. On God’s Finger it can be heard more clearly. I had climbed chasing the memory of my mother’s music, but the Spire had sung me a different song. Perhaps it’s that heaven is closer, perhaps the wind brings it. Either way I heard the sword-song that day and I made my blade kata, slicing the gale, spinning, turning, striking high then low. I danced to the sword-song in that high place for an hour maybe more, wild play with an endless drop on every side. And then, before the sun fell too low, I left the blade on the rocks, an offering to the elements, and started down.

  Standing on God’s Finger I had first understood why men might fight for a place, for rocks and streams, no matter who calls themselves king there. The power of place. I felt it again at the head of the valley with the hordes of Arrow swarming toward me.

  “What ho, Coddin,” I said as my chancellor staggered to us. “You look half-dead.”

  He hadn’t the breath for a reply.

  “Do you have what I gave you?” I asked. At the time I hadn’t known why I gave it to him, only that I should.

  Still gasping, Coddin shrugged off his pack and dug into it. “Be glad I didn’t drop it just to keep ahead of the enemy,” he said.

  I took the whistle from him, a Highland whistle such as the goatherds use, a foot long with a leather-washered piston.

  “I always trust you to deliver, Coddin,” I said, though I had Makin carry a second and had a third with Keppen. Trust is a fine thing but try not to build plans upon it.

  “We’re none of us local men,” I said to my captains, voice raised for the Watch men starting to gather round. “Well, you are.” I pointed to a fellow in the second rank. “But most of us were born and raised in Ancrath.”

  The last of the Watch were drawing in now, the men of Arrow a couple of hundred yards farther back, toiling over broken rock.

  “You’re here with me, men of Ancrath, because you’re my best warriors, because you learned to fight in lands that are hard to defend and that others want to take. These Highlands of ours, however, are easier to protect, and hold bugger all save stones and goats.” That got a laugh or two. Some of the Watch still had go in them.

  “Today,” I said. “We all become Highlanders.”

  I took the whistle, held it high, and drove the piston home, not too hard because that spoils the tone. It’s a steady pressure gives the best results.

  A goat-whistle will carry for miles across the mountains. It’s pitched to let the wind take it and to bounce from rock to rock. One long blast would reach almost back to the Haunt. Certainly far enough to reach each and every Highlander I had hidden on the high slopes overlooking our path up the mountain. And not just any Highlanders these, but the men who had held these particular slopes from generation to generation. The men who like their fathers and grandfathers would take a rock for a walk. They kept their secrets well, the men of Renar, but from the tip of God’s Finger, that day years before, it had all been revealed to me.

  It took the blasts of seven trumpets to bring down the walls of Jericho, but they weren’t stacked to fall. One blast of a herder’s whistle set the mountainsides moving in the Renar Highlands. On both sides of the valley, along the full length, a dozen individual rockslides. The Highlanders know their slopes with an intimacy that puts lovers’ knowing of each other’s curves to shame. Big stones poised to fall, boulders on edge with levers set and ready, toppled with a shove and a grunt, rolling, colliding, cascading one into several into many into too many. We felt the ground tremble beneath our feet. The noise, like a millstone grinding, rattled teeth in loose sockets. In moments the whole valley had been set in motion and Arrow’s thousands vanished as the dust rose and stone churned flesh into bloody paste.

  “Well, thank you, Coddin. Much appreciated.” I handed him back the whistle. “Hobbs,” I said. “When the dust clears enough for a good shot, if you could have the men knock down anyone still standing.”

  “Christ Bleeding,” Makin said, staring into the valley below us. “How…”

  “Topology,” I said. “It’s a kind of magic.”

  “And what now, King Jorg?” Coddin asked, faith restored but still focused on the numbers, knowing our chances against seventeen or sixteen thousand were scarcely better than our chances against twenty thousand.

  “Back down, of course!” I said. “We can’t attack from up here now, can we?”

  23

  Wedding day

  The journey back to the Haunt took us over fresh territory, a new and broken surface, littered with dead men turned into ground meat, and here and there along the way the cries of live ones trapped beneath us. We moved on, the grey of the Watch’s tatter-rob
es renewed with rock dust, the men pale with powdered stone and with horror.

  The Prince’s army encircled the Haunt now, archers on the heights, siege machinery being hauled into place. All my troops at the castle crowded within the walls, space or not. There was no standing against the foe on open ground.

  I could see units of bowmen descending in long files, presumably ordered east to meet our advance in light of the recent massacre. The Prince looked to be a fast learner. He anticipated my renewed attack. It didn’t seem likely that he would consider my three hundred men a mere nuisance this time.

  “He shouldn’t be in a hurry,” Makin said beside me.

  “He’ll reduce the walls and thin the ranks first,” said Coddin.

  “He doesn’t need to get inside until the snows come, the big snows,” said Hobbs. “Inside by the big snows. Winter by the fire. Over the passes when the spring clears them.”

  “He wants in today,” I told them. “Tomorrow by the latest. He’ll go through the front gate.”

  “Why?” Coddin asked. He didn’t argue, but he wanted to understand.

  “Why waste a good castle?” I said. “A big push. A surrender. A dose of mercy and he has a new stronghold, a new garrison, and a small repair to make on the entrance. He doesn’t do half measures any more than I do. Go in hard, fast, get the job done.”

  “A dose of mercy?” Makin asked. “You think that famous Arrow mercy has survived recent events?”

  “Maybe not,” I said, my smile grim, “but I don’t intend to offer any either. Mark me, old friend, nobody gets out alive, not this time.”

  “Red Jorg.” Makin clapped his hand to his chest as he had at Remagen Fort years before.