King of Thorns Read online

  Gog waited where we had left him, still glowing, and Ferrakind stood at the mouth of the tunnel that led to the entrance chamber.

  I had thought to find a man with fire in him. Ferrakind was more of a fire with a touch of man remaining. He stood in the form of a man but as if fashioned from molten iron such as runs from the vats of Barrow and of Gwangyang. Every part of him burned and his whole shape flickered from one posture to another. When his eyes, like hot white stars, glanced my way his gaze seared my skin.

  “To me, Gog!” It hurt to shout, but the steam from the meltwater around my feet helped a little.

  “The child is mine.” Ferrakind spoke in the crackle of his flames.

  Gog scrambled toward us. Ferrakind made a slow advance.

  “And why would you want him?” I called. I couldn’t get any closer without the skin melting off me.

  “The big fire consumes the small. We will join and our strength will multiply,” Ferrakind said.

  It seemed to me as if he spoke from memory, using what parts of the man had yet to burn away.

  “We came to save him from that,” I said. “Can’t you take the fire from him and leave the boy behind?”

  Those hot eyes found me again and stared as if truly seeing me for the first time. “I know you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. My lips felt too dry for the foolish words I might have found in other circumstances.

  “You woke a fire of an old kind that hasn’t burned for a thousand years,” Ferrakind said.

  “Ah, yes,” I said. “That.”

  “You brought the sun to earth,” Ferrakind’s crackle softened as if awed by the memory of the Builders’ weapon. Shadows ran across him.

  Gog reached us, the heat gone from him leaving new markings, bright flames caught in orange across his back, chest, arms.

  “So can you change him? Can you take the fire out of him, or enough so he can live with it?” I asked. It still hurt to breathe and the steam from the meltwater made it hard to see. Somewhere above and behind us the heat from Gog and Ferrakind was meeting the ancient ice at Halradra’s core.

  Ferrakind’s fire guttered and spurted, flowing over the cavern floor. I realized he was laughing.

  “The Builders tried to break the barriers between thought and matter,” he said. “They made it easier to change the world with a desire. They thinned the walls between life and death, between fire and not-fire, whittled away at the difference between this and that, even here and there.”

  It occurred to me that Ferrakind’s sanity had been one of the first things to be consumed in his own personal inferno. “Can you help the boy?” I asked, coughing.

  “It’s written in him. His thoughts touch fire. Fire touches his mind. He is fire-sworn. We can’t change how we’re written.” Ferrakind stepped toward us, flames rising around him like wings readying for flight. “Give me the boy and you may leave.”

  “I’ve come too far for ‘no,’” I said.

  Fire isn’t patient. Fire does not negotiate. I should have known these things.

  Ferrakind reached toward us and a column of white flame erupted from his hands. I had considered myself quick, but Gog moved quicker than I could think and caught the conflagration in his arms, his body shading from orange toward white-heat, but none of it reaching Gorgoth or me.

  “Behind us!” I shouted. “Send it back.”

  And Gog obeyed. The tunnel behind us filled with Ferrakind’s white fire as Gog caught it on one hand and threw it away from the other. I could see nothing of the fire-mage, just the white inferno boiling off him, and nothing of the tunnel, just a fierce tornado of white fire swirling away through it, up. We stood in a cocoon with furnace heat on every side and one small boy keeping our flesh from charring to the bone.

  For an age we saw nothing but blinding heat, heard nothing but the roar of fire. And each moment that I thought it could last no longer, the fury built. Gog blazed, first the bright orange of iron ready for the hammer, then the white of the furnace fire, then a pure white like starshine. I could see the shadows of his bones, clearer by the heartbeat, as if fire were burning though him, taking substance from muscle, skin, and fat. Leaving him brittle and ashen.

  And in an instant the fire and fury fell away revealing Ferrakind, white-hot and molten, with Gog crouched, pale as silvery ash, unmoving.

  A torrent of meltwater rushed around us now, hip deep, white, and roaring, pouring into the main chamber through a tunnel mouth that lay dry and gritty when we first scrambled through it to escape the fire. The waters divided around Gog and again around Ferrakind as if unable to touch the essence of fire. Gorgoth and I kept close to Gog and the water hardly reached us.

  Ferrakind laughed again, new pulses of flame rising from him. “You thought to quench me, Jorg of Ancrath?”

  I shrugged. “It’s the traditional way. Fighting fire with fire doesn’t seem to have worked.” Already the flow around us had started to slacken.

  “It would take an ocean!” Ferrakind said. He gathered fire into his hands and let it blaze white. “The child is done. Time to die, Jorg of Ancrath.”

  If it were time then so be it. I had a faint hope, but it had only ever been that. At least it wouldn’t be a slow fire. I drew my sword. I always thought I would have a blade in hand when the time came.

  I heard a roar, but not the roar of flame, somehow deeper and more distant.

  It would take an ocean.

  “How about a lake?” I asked and sighted along my sword at the burning mage.

  “A lake?” Ferrakind paused.

  The waters hit then, a black wall rushing down on the heels of the trickle around our feet. I dived at Gog, carrying him with me into the cathedral cavern, rolling to the side of the tunnel mouth. He broke as though he were made of glass. He shattered like a toy, into a thousand sharp and brilliant pieces. I felt the sudden flash of heat. Needles of fire pierced my cheek where I hit him, my jaw, my temple. I lay amongst the scintillating shards, Gog’s remains, paralysed by a whole world of pain, curled on the gritty cavern floor with a flood of biblical proportions blasting its way out of the tunnel just yards behind me.

  In Halradra’s crater a thousand times a thousand tons of ice have lain for hundreds of years. But before that, in the distant long ago, waters flowed. How else would these tunnels be smooth, be strewn with grit and ancient mud, be scoured and potholed like the stone where rivers flow? With glacial slowness the ice has crept where underground streams carved hidden cathedrals and long galleries, and Halradra has slept, ice-choked and silent.

  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 h
ead on a wall as they scrambled to escape the flood.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON

  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 c
ase, 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.