King of Thorns Page 2

  He looked grim despite his words. I thought perhaps he could still see his own dead child. He had faced death with me before and done it with a smile.

  “You, girl!” I shouted to one of the serving girls lurking at the far end of the hall. “Go tell that woman to bring me a robe fit to get married in. Nothing with lace, mind.” I stood and set a hand to the pommel of my sword. “The night patrols should be back about now. We’ll go down to the east yard and see what they have to say for themselves. I sent Red Kent and Little Rikey along with one of the Watch patrols. Let’s hear what they think about these men of Arrow.”

  Makin led the way. Coddin had grown twitchy about assassins. I knew what lurked in the shadows of my castle and it wasn’t assassins that I worried about. Makin turned the corner and Coddin held my shoulder to keep me back.

  “The Prince of Arrow doesn’t want me knifed by some black-cloak, Coddin. He doesn’t want drop-leaf mixed into my morning bread. He wants to roll over us with twenty thousand men and grind us into the dirt. He’s already thinking of the empire throne. Thinks he has a toe past the Gilden Gate. He’s building his legend now and it’s not going to be one of knives in the dark.”

  “Of course, if you had more soldiers you might be worth stabbing.” Makin turned his head and grinned.

  We found the patrol waiting, stamping in the cold. A few castle women fussed around the wounded, planting a stitch or two. I let the commander tell his tale to Coddin while I called Red Kent to my side. Rike loomed behind him uninvited. Four castle years had softened none of Rike’s edges, still close on seven foot of ugly temper with a face to match the blunt, mean, and brutal soul that looked out from it.

  “Little Rikey,” I said. It had been a while since I’d spoken to the man. Years. “And how’s that lovely wife of yours?” In truth I’d never seen her but she must have been a formidable woman.

  “She broke.” He shrugged.

  I turned away without comment. There’s something about Rike makes me want to go on the attack. Something elemental, red in tooth and claw. Or perhaps it’s just because he’s so damn big. “So, Kent,” I said. “Tell me the good news.”

  “There’s too many of them.” He spat into the mud. “I’m leaving.”

  “Well now.” I threw an arm around him. Kent don’t look much but he’s solid, all muscle and bone, quick as you like too. What makes him though, what sets him apart, is a killer’s mind. Chaos, threat, bloody murder, none of that fazes him. Every moment of a crisis he’ll be considering the angles, tracking weapons, looking for the opening, taking it.

  “Well now.” I pulled him close, hand clapped to the back of his neck. He flinched, but to his credit he didn’t reach for a blade. “That’s all well and good.” I steered him away from the patrol. “But suppose that wasn’t going to happen. Just for the sake of argument. Suppose it was only you here and twenty of them out there. That’s not so far from the odds you’d beaten when we found you on that lakeside down in Rutton, neh?” For a moment he smiled at that. “How would you win then, Red Kent?” I called him Red to remind him of that day when he stood all atremble with his wolf’s grin white in the scarlet of other men’s blood.

  He bit his lip, staring past me into some other place. “They’re crowded in, Jorg. In those valleys. Crowded. One man against many, he’s got to be fast, attacking, moving. Each man is your shield from the next.” He shook his head, seeing me again. “But you can’t use an army like one man.”

  Red Kent had a point. Coddin had trained the army well, the units of Father’s Forest Watch especially so, but in battle cohesion always slips away. Orders are lost, missed, go unheard or ignored, and sooner or later it’s a bloody maul, each man for himself, and the numbers start to tell.

  “Highness?” It was the woman from the royal wardrobe, some kind of robe in her hands.

  “Mabel!” I threw my arms wide and gave her my dangerous smile.

  “Maud, sire.”

  I had to admit the old biddy had some stones. “Maud it is,” I said. “And I’m to be wed in this, am I?”

  “If it pleases you, sire.” She even curtseyed a bit.

  I took it from her. Heavy. “Cats?” I asked. “Looks like it took a lot of them.”

  “Sable.” She pursed her lips. “Sable and gold thread. Count—” She bit the words off.

  “Count Renar married in it, did he?” I asked. “Well, if it was good enough for that bastard it’ll do for me. At least it looks warm.” My uncle Renar owed me for the thorns, for a lost mother, a lost brother. I’d taken his life, his castle, and his crown, and still he owed me. A fur robe would not close our account.

  “Best be quick about it, Highness,” Coddin said, eyes still roaming for assassins. “We’ve got to double-check the defences. Plan out supply for the Kennish archers, and also consider terms.” To his credit he looked straight at me for that last bit.

  I gave Maud back the robe and let her dress me with the patrol watching on. I made no reply to Coddin. He looked pale. I had always liked him, from the moment he tried to arrest me, even past the moment he dared to mention surrender. Brave, sensible, capable, honest. The better man. “Let’s get this done,” I said and started toward the chapel.

  “Is it needed, this marriage?” Coddin again, doggedly playing the role I set him. Speak to me, I had said. Never think I cannot be wrong. “As your wife, things may go hard for her.” Rike sniggered at that. “As a guest she would be ransomed back to the Horse Coast.”

  Sensible, honest. I don’t even know how to pretend those things. “It is needed.”

  We came to the chapel by a winding stair, past table-knights in plate armour, Count Renar’s marks still visible beneath mine on the breastplates as if I’d ruled here four months rather than four years. The noble-born too poor or stupid or loyal to have run yet would be lined up within. In the courtyard outside the peasantry waited. I could smell them.

  I paused before the doors, lifting a finger to stop the knight with his hands upon the bar. “Terms?”

  I saw the child again, beneath crossed standards hanging on the wall. He’d grown with me. Years back he had been a baby, watching me with dead eyes. He looked about four now. I tapped my fingers against my forehead in a rapid tempo.

  “Terms?” I said it again. I’d only said it twice but already the word sounded strange, losing meaning as they do when repeated over and again. I thought of the copper box in my room. It made me sweat. “There will be no terms.”

  “Best have Father Gomst say his words swiftly then,” Coddin said. “And look to our defences.”

  “No,” I said. “There will be no defence. We’re going to attack.”

  I pushed the knight aside and threw the doors wide. Bodies crowded the chapel hall from one side to the other. It seemed my nobles were poorer than I’d thought. And to the left, a splash of blues and violet, ladies-in-waiting and knights in armour, decked in the colours of the House Morrow, the colours of the Horse Coast.

  And there at the altar, head bowed beneath a garland of lilies, my bride.

  “Oh hell,” I said.

  Small was right. She looked about twelve.

  In peace Brother Kent reverts to type, a peasant plagued by kindness, seeking God in the stone houses where the pious lament. Battle strikes loose such chains. In war Red Kent approaches the divine.

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  Wedding day

  Marriage was ever the glue that held the Hundred in some semblance of unity, the balm to induce scattered moments of peace, pauses in the crimson progress of the Hundred War. And this one had been hanging over me for close on four years.

  I walked along the chapel aisle between the high and mighty of Renar, none of them so high or so mighty, truth be told. I’ve checked the records and half of them have goat-herders for grandparents. It surprised me that they had stayed. If I were them I would have acted on Red Kent’s sentiment and been off across the Matteracks with whatever I could carry on my back.

  Miana watched me, as fres
h and perky as the lilies on her head. If the ruined left side of my face scared her she didn’t show it. The need to trace the scarred ridges on my cheek itched in my fingertips. For an instant the heat of that fire ran in me, and the memory of pain tightened my jaw.

  I joined my bride-to-be at the altar and looked back. And in a moment of clarity I understood. These people expected me to save them. They still thought that with my handful of soldiers I could hold this castle and win the day. I had half a mind to tell them, to just say what any who knew me knew. There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the Prince of Arrow had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

  Four musicians in full livery raised their bladder-pipes and sounded the fanfare.

  “Best use the short version, Father Gomst,” I said in a low voice. “Lots to do today.”

  He frowned at that, grey brows rubbing up against each other. “Princess Miana, I have the pleasure of introducing His Highness Honorous Jorg Ancrath, King of the Renar Highlands, heir to the lands of Ancrath and the protectorates thereof.”

  “Charmed,” I said, inclining my head. A child. She didn’t reach much above my ribs.

  “I can see why your miniature was in profile,” she said, and sketched a curtsey.

  That made me grin. It might be destined to be a short marriage but perhaps it wouldn’t be dull. “You’re not scared of me then, Miana?”

  She reached to take my hand by way of answer. I pulled it back. “Best not.”

  “Father?” I nodded the priest on.

  “Dearly beloved,” Gomst said. “We are gathered together here in the sign of God…”

  And so with old words from an old man and lacking anyone “here present” with just reason, or at least with just reason and the balls to say so, little Jorgy Ancrath became a married man.

  I led my bride from the chapel with the applause and hoorahs of the nobility ringing behind us, almost but not quite drowning out those awful pipes. The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.

  The main doors lead onto a stairway where you can look down into the Haunt’s largest courtyard, the place where I cut down the previous owner. Several hundred packed the space from the curtain wall to the stairs, more thronging out beyond the gateway, swarming beneath the portcullis, a light snow sifting down on all of them.

  A cheer went up as we came into the light. I took Miana’s hand then, despite the necromancy lurking in my fingers, and lifted it high to acknowledge the crowd. The loyalty of subject to lord still amazed me. I lived fat and rich off these people year after year while they squeezed a mean life out of the mountainsides. And here they were ready to face pretty much certain death with me. I mean, even that blind faith in my ability to buck the odds had to allow a fairly big chunk of room for doubt.

  I got my first proper insight into it a couple of years back. A lesson that life on the road hadn’t taught me or my Brothers. The power of place.

  My royal presence was requested for a bit of justice-making in what they call in the Renar Highlands a “village,” though pretty much everywhere else people would call it three houses and a few sheds. The place lies way up in the peaks. They call it Gutting. I heard that there’s a Little Gutting slightly higher up the valley, though it can’t be much more than a particularly roomy barrel. Anyhow, the dispute was over where one scabby peasant’s rocks ended and another one’s started. I’d hauled myself and Makin up three thousand foot of mountain to show a bit of willing in the business of kinging it. According to reports, several men of the village had been killed already in the feud, though on closer inspection casualties were limited to a pig and the loss of a woman’s left ear. Not so long ago I would just have killed everyone and come down the mountain with their heads on a spear, but perhaps I just felt tired after the climb. In any event I let the scabby peasants state their cases and they did so with enthusiasm and at great length. It started to get dark and the fleas were biting so I cut it short.

  “Gebbin is it?” I said to the plaintiff. He nodded. “Basically, Gebbin, you just hate the hell out of this fellow here and I really can’t see the reason for it. The thing is that I’m bored, I’ve got my breath back, and unless you tell me the real reason you hate…”

  “Borron,” Makin supplied.

  “Yes, Borron. Tell me the real reason and make it honest, or it’s a death sentence for everyone except this good woman with the one ear, and we’ll be leaving her in charge of the remaining pig.”

  It took him a few moments to realize that I really meant what I said, and then another couple mumbling before he finally came out with it and admitted it was because the fellow was a “furner.” Furner turned out to mean foreigner and old Borron was a foreigner because he was born and lived on the east side of the valley.

  The men cheering Miana and me, waving their swords, bashing their shields and hollering themselves hoarse, might have told anyone who asked how proud they were to fight for His Highness and his new queen. The truth, however, is that at the bottom of it all they simply didn’t want the men of Arrow marching all over their rocks, eyeing up their goats, and maybe leering at their womenfolk.

  “The Prince of Arrow has a much bigger army than you,” Miana said. No “Your Highness,” no “my lord.”

  “Yes, he does.” I kept waving to the crowd, the big smile on my face.

  “He’s going to win, isn’t he?” she said. She looked twelve but she didn’t sound twelve.

  “How old are you?” I asked, a quick glance down at her, still waving.

  “Twelve.”

  Damn.

  “They might win. If each of my men doesn’t kill twenty of theirs then there’s a good chance. Especially if he surrounds us.”

  “How far away are they?” she asked.

  “Their front lines are camped three miles off,” I said.

  “You should attack now then,” she said. “Before they surround us.”

  “I know.” I was starting to like the girl. Even an experienced soldier like Coddin, a good soldier, wanted to hunker down behind the Haunt’s walls and let the castle earn its keep, if you’ll pardon the pun. The thing is, though, that no castle stands against odds like the ones we faced. Miana knew what Red Kent knew, Red Kent who cut down a patrol of seventeen men-at-arms on a hot August morning. Killing takes space. You need to move, to advance, to withdraw, and sometimes to just plain run for it.

  One more wave and I turned my back on the crowds and strode into the chapel.

  “Makin! Are the Watch ready?”

  “They are.” He nodded. “My king.”

  I drew my sword.

  The sudden appearance of four foot of razored Builder-steel in the house of God resulted in a pleasing gasp.

  “Let’s go.”

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON

  October 6th, Year 98 Interregnum

  Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Chapel. Midnight.

  The Ancraths’ chapel is small and draughty, as if they hadn’t much time for the place. The candles dance and the shadows are never still. When I leave, the friar’s boy will snuff them.

  Jorg Ancrath has been gone close on a week. He took Sir Makin with him from the dungeons. I was glad for that, I liked Sir Makin and I cannot truly blame him for what happened to Galen: that was Jorg again. A crossbow! He could never have bested Galen with a blade. There’s no honour in the boy.

  Friar Glen says Jorg near tore the dress off me after he hit me. I keep it at the back of the long closet in the bride chest Mother packed for me before we left Scorron Halt. I keep it where the maids don’t look, and my hands lead me back there. I run the tatters through my fingers. Blue satin. I touch it and I try to remember. I see him standing there, arms wide, daring the knife in my hand, weaving as though he were too tired to stand, his skin dead white, and the black stain around his chest wound. He looked so young. A child almost. With those scars all
across him where the thorns tore him. Sir Reilly says they found him hanging, near bloodless, after a night in the thorns with the storm around him and his mother lying dead.

  And then he hit me.

  I’m touching the spot now. It’s still sore. Lumpy with scab. I wonder if they can see it through my hair. And then I wonder why I care.

  I’m bruised down here too. Bruised black, like that stain. I can almost see the lines of fingers on my thigh, the print of a thumb.

  He hit me and then he used me, raped me. It would have been nothing to him, a mercenary from the road, it would have meant nothing to him, just something else to take. It would rank small amongst his crimes. Maybe not the largest even against me, for I miss Hanna and I did cry when we put her in the ground, and I miss Galen for the fierceness of his smile and the heat he put in me whenever he came near.

  He hit me, and then he used me? That sick boy, daring the knife, barely able to stand?

  October 11th, Year 98 Interregnum

  Ancrath. The Tall Castle. My chambers.

  I saw Friar Glen in the Blue Hall today. I’ve stopped going to his services but I saw him in the hall. I watched his hands, his thick fingers and his thick thumbs. I watched them and I thought of those fading bruises, yellow now, and I came to the tall closet, and here I am with the torn satin in my hands.

  Skin, bones, and mischief comprise Brother Gog. Monster born and monster bred but there’s little to mark him from Adam save the stippled crimson-on-black of his hide, the dark wells of his eyes, ebony talons on hand and foot, and the thorny projections starting to grow along his spine. Watch him play and run and laugh, and he seems too at ease to be a crack in the world through which all the fires of hell might pour. Watch him burn though, and you will believe it.

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