King of Thorns be-2 Page 20

  “Miss an opportunity like Katherine and it will haunt you longer and more deeply than any ghost you keep now,” Coddin said.

  Another arrow hit, closer than any before.

  “Run!” I shouted.

  Whatever other wisdom Coddin had been hoarding would have to keep. There’s a time for sentimental chatter and none of it is on a mountain whilst being shot at.

  “Run!” I shouted. But I didn’t raise the purple ribbon on a shortbow, because I had a plan to carry out, and no part of it involved being hit by arrows.

  26

  Wedding day

  I’d buried Brothers before, even friends, but never alive.

  We left Coddin in his tomb, not dead but with his passage booked. We made a messy retreat, fighting across the ground where we’d buried him. I joined the fray and cut a path through the men of Arrow, as if I was planning to make my way right back to the Haunt. There’s something about a fight that makes you forget your troubles. Mainly it’s that all your troubles are suddenly very small in the face of the new problems swinging your way with sharp edges on them.

  Perhaps there’s something wrong with me. Perhaps it’s part of those three steps I took away from the world of reasonable men, of good men. But there’s little that is more satisfying to me than a well-blocked sword blow followed by a swift riposte and the scream of an enemy. God, but the noise and feel of a blade shearing through flesh is as sweet as any flute speaking out its melody. Provided it’s not my flesh of course. It can’t be right. But there it is.

  I fought well but the enemy just kept coming, as if dying were the only thing on their list today. We fell back and left them slipping in blood, tripping on corpses. Most of us managed to find the space to turn and run. Many of us didn’t.

  About two thirds of the Watch made it through the neck of the valley and scrambled up the steeper slopes onto the broad shoulder of the mountain above. The rest, even if it were only a light wound that slowed them, were swallowed by the advancing army.

  Wind is the cruellest cold. Exposed on the mountainside we felt those sharp fingers stealing our warmth. All the running and climbing didn’t matter. The wind put a chill in you even so, taking your strength one pinch at a time.

  We struggled on through the wind, a ragged bunch without ranks or squads, the snow blinding now, small flakes too cold to stick to the rocks. Not far above us the snowline glittered, the whiteness hiding the folds and hollows, making it all of a likeness. Whiteness, stretching up to Blue Moon Pass, snow-choked and useless for escape, stretching beyond to the peak of Mount Botrang, and past that, the sky.

  I caught Makin up, grey-faced and staggering. He looked at me, just a glance as if he were too tired to do anything but hang his head. He hadn’t the breath for words but his look, quick as it was, told me we were going to die on these slopes. Maybe on the next ridge, maybe farther up, on the snow with our blood making pretty crimson patterns against the white.

  “Stick with me,” I said. I had a little go left in me. Not much, but some. “I have a plan.”

  I hoped I had a plan.

  The wind numbed my face. On the right where Gog had left me scarred it felt good. That twisted flesh had never stopped burning, as if shards of him found the bones in my jaw and cheek and lodged there with fire trapped inside. The wind made my face feel solid, like one block that would crack if I spoke again. I enjoyed the relief. I’ve become good at finding crumbs of comfort. Sometimes they’re all you have to eat.

  Screams behind us as the slowest men of the Watch met the fastest men of Arrow.

  I had my head down, concentrating on one foot then the next, hauling in one breath and throwing it out to make room for the one after. Beside me Makin looked to have retreated into that closed and lonely place that we all reach if we keep digging. Dig a little deeper than that and you’re in hell all of a sudden.

  The snow took me by surprise. One moment thump thump thump over rocks and the next a silent wade through deep white powder. It took maybe four strides to go from bare rock to snow past my knees. Another hundred strides and my feet were as numb as my face. I wondered if I was dying piece by piece, a slow introduction rather than the traditional unexpected embrace.

  The snowfield started to get us killed. Pushing a path through snow is hard work. Following in the beaten trail of two hundred men is easier. More men were caught. Natural selection had set the toughest of Arrow’s men at our heels with the weaker troops still struggling through the neck of the valley below the snowline.

  “Up there!” I pointed to a place with nothing to distinguish it from any other acre of white. I could feel the box hot against my hip. I picked up the pace and left Makin plodding. “Up there!” I didn’t know why, but I knew.

  I took the box in my hand and ran on, lungs filling with blood, or that’s how it felt.

  The thing that tripped me wasn’t a rock. The snow had all the rocks covered, deep under our feet. What tripped me was something long and hard and near the surface. Broomstick came to mind as I fell. Then the box went schnick and my mind filled with entirely new things. Old things.

  27

  Wedding day

  Schnick and the box opens. Memory drags me back to Rennat Forest to stand amongst gravestones and wildflowers in the spring sunshine.

  “In any case, I have my heart set on a good man,” Katherine says.

  “Who?” I ask.

  “Prince Orrin,” she says. “The Prince of Arrow.”

  “No,” I say. I don’t want to say anything, but I speak. I don’t want to admit any kind of interest, any form of weakness, but none of this is going as I planned, and plans are what I’m good at.

  “No?” she asks. “You object? You’d like to offer a proposal? Your father is my guardian. You should go and discuss the matter with him.”

  It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. None of the others made me this way. Not Serra leading me astray as a child almost, not Sally bought and paid for, nor Renar’s serving maids, ladies-at-court, bored wives of nobles, comely peasant girls, not the ones on the road that the Brothers took and shared, none of them.

  “I want you,” I say. The words are hard, they have awkward shapes, they leave my mouth clumsy and ill-formed.

  “How romantic,” she says. Her scorn withers me. “You like me because I’m pleasing to your eye.”

  “You please more than my eye, lady,” I say.

  “Would you kill Sareth?” she asks. For a moment I think she’s asking me to do it. Then I remember she’s not like me.

  “Maybe…does she please my father?” I don’t say does he love her; he has never loved. And I don’t lie. If it would hurt my father to lose her, then yes, maybe.

  “No. I don’t think anything pleases Olidan. I can’t even imagine what would. Though he did laugh that day when you killed Galen,” she says.

  “I might kill Sareth in case you’re wrong or trying to protect her,” I say. I don’t know why I can’t lie to her. “But you’re probably telling the truth. My father has found little in this world that doesn’t disappoint him.”

  She steps towards me and although she’s coming closer her eyes get more distant. I can smell her scent, lilacs and white musk.

  “You hit me, Jorg,” she says.

  “You were going to stab me.”

  “You hit me with my mother’s vase.” Her voice is dreamy. “And broke it.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. And the strange truth is that I am.

  “I wasn’t made to be this way.” She’s reaching for something hidden in the folds of her riding dress, under fawn suede. “I wasn’t meant to be the prize princes compete for, or the container to grow their babies in. Damn that. Would you want to be a token? Or made just to grow babies and raise children?”

  “I’m not a woman,” I say. It’s just my lips filling the pause while the questions, or rather the new images they paint of her, bounce around my mind.

  I see her pull the knife from her skirts. A long blade like thos
e for slotting through chinks in armour when you have your foe pinned, only not so sturdy. This one would break if the man twisted and might not reach the heart. I’m not supposed to see it. I’m supposed to be watching her eyes, her mouth, the heave of her breasts, and I am, but often I see more than I’m supposed to.

  “Can’t I want something more?” she asks.

  “Wanting is free.” I can’t stop watching her. My glance touches the knife only now and then. Her eyes don’t see me. I don’t think she knows what her hands are doing, the right gripping a hilt, the left on her belly, clawed like she wants to tear her way in.

  “Do I have to be a monster? Do I have to be a new Queen of Red to-”

  I catch her wrist as she drives the knife at me. She is stronger than I imagined. We both look down at my hand, dark on her white wrist, and the thin blade quivering with its point an inch from my groin.

  “A low blow.” I twist her arm but she drops the knife before I make her.

  “What?” She stares at her hand and mine, mouth open.

  “You’re making a habit of trying to stab me,” I say. The bitterness rises in me. I taste it.

  “I killed our child, Jorg.” Her laugh is too high, too wild. “I killed it. I swallowed a sour pill from Saraem Wic. She lives here.” Katherine whips her head around, unfocused, as if expecting to see the crone among the trees.

  I know of Saraem Wic. I’ve seen her gather her herbs and fungi. I crept to her hut once, almost close enough to look in, but I didn’t want to go closer. It smelled of burned dog. “What are you talking about?” I ask. She looks beautiful. She curses being a woman but here I am forgetting even the knife on the ground, the knife she almost buried in me, forgetting it because of the curve of her neck, the tremble of her lips. Want makes fools of men.

  “You hit me and then you took me. You put your seed in me.” She spits. It misses my face but drips in my hair and wets my ear. “And I drove it out. With a sour pill and a paste that burned.”

  She grins and I can see the hatred now. She sees me clear for once, head down, hair framing her, eyes dark. She shows her teeth. She dares me.

  I remember her lying there in the sapphire pool of her dress. Senseless. The voice from the briar, maybe mine, maybe Corion’s, or something of both, told me to kill her. My father would give that advice. The hardest line. Want makes fools of men. But I didn’t kill her. The voice told me to rape her too. To just take her. But I only touched her hair. What I wanted couldn’t be taken.

  “Nothing to say, Jorg?” She spits again. This time it’s in my face. I blink. Warm spittle cools on my cheek. She wants me angry. She doesn’t care what I might do. “I bled your baby out. Before he was even big enough to see.”

  And I don’t know what to say. What words would serve? I wouldn’t believe me. I have to believe my memory-things have been taken from it in the past, but never added-but who else would give Jorg of Ancrath the benefit of the doubt? Not me.

  I fold Katherine’s arm up behind her and walk her through the graveyard, back the way I came. There are white marks where my fingers touched her skin. Did I grip her that hard? Imagination has put my hands on her many times, but this feels as though I’ve broken something precious and I’m carrying the pieces, knowing they can’t be reassembled.

  “You’re going to do it again?” The anger has leaked from her. She sounds confused.

  “No,” I say.

  We walk on. Brambles catch at her dress. Her riding boots leave heel marks a blind man could follow. “I’ve left my horse tied,” she says. This isn’t the Katherine I left on the floor that day. That Katherine was sharp, clever; this one is dazed, as though just waking.

  “I’m going to marry the Prince of Arrow,” she says, twisting to look at me over her shoulder.

  “I thought you didn’t want to be a prize,” I say.

  She looks away. “We can’t always have what we want.”

  I need her. I wonder if I can have what I need.

  We walk in silence until Red Kent steps out of the undergrowth before us. My sword is strapped over his shoulder. “King Jorg.” He nods. “My lady.”

  “Take her to Sir Makin,” I say. I let her arm go.

  Kent gestures for Katherine to lead the way along the trail he’s been guarding. “No kind of harm is to come to her, Kent. Watch Row and Rike particularly. Tell them you’ve my permission to cut from them any part that touches her. And move camp. We’ve left a trail from there to here.” I walk away.

  “Where are you going?” she asks.

  I stop and turn, wiping her spit from my cheek. “Who found you?”

  “What?”

  “Who found you after I hit you?” I ask. “A man was with you when you recovered your senses.”

  She frowns. Her fingers touch the place where the vase shattered. “Friar Glen.” For the first time she sees me with her old eyes, clear and green and sharp. “Oh.”

  I walk away.

  Schnick and a heartbeat later the box closes again, snapped shut by numb fingers.

  Back on the mountain, knee-deep in snow. My shin hurts. I tripped over a spade.

  There are men to walk to the mountain with and then there are men that are the mountain. Gorgoth, though I may not call him brother, was forged from the qualities I lack.

  28

  Four years earlier

  There are books in my father’s library that say no mountain ever spat lava within a thousand miles of Halradra before the Thousand Suns. They tell it that the Builders drilled into the molten blood of the Earth and drank its power. When the Suns scorched away all that the Builders had wrought, the wounds remained. The Earth bled and Halradra and his sons were born in fire.

  Gorgoth carried me to where Sindri waited. The sun still shone outside though I felt it should be dark. I came to my senses halfway down the mountain, bouncing on Gorgoth’s broad back. They came one by one, my senses, first the pain and only the pain, then after an age, the smell of my own burned flesh, the taste of vomit, the sound of my moaning, and finally a blurred vision of Halradra’s black slopes.

  “God, just kill me,” I whimpered. The tears dripped off my nose and lips, hanging as I was like a sack over Gorgoth’s shoulder.

  It wasn’t Gog I was sorry for, it was me.

  In my defence, having a hand-sized part of your face burned crisp is ridiculously painful. It hurt worse hanging there, bumping with the monster’s strides, than when it happened, and I had wanted to die back there in the cave.

  “Kill me,” I moaned.

  Gorgoth stopped. “Yes?”

  I thought about it. “Christ Jesu.” I needed someone to hate, something to take my mind off the fire still eating into me. Gorgoth waited. He would take me at my word. I thought of my father with his young wife and new son, snug in the Tall Castle.

  “Maybe later,” I said.

  I remember only snippets until Gorgoth laid me down in the bracken and Sindri leaned over me.

  “Uskit’r!” He fell back into the old tongue of the north. “That’s bad.”

  “At least I’m still half-pretty.” I retched and turned my face to spit sour liquid into the ferns.

  “Let’s get him back,” Sindri said. He looked around for a moment, opened his mouth then closed it.

  “Gog’s gone,” I said.

  Sindri shook his head and looked down. He drew a breath. “Come, we need to get you back. Gorgoth?”

  The monster made no move.

  “Gorgoth’s not coming,” I said.

  Gorgoth bowed his head.

  “You can’t stay here,” Sindri said, alarmed. “Ferrakind-”

  “Ferrakind is gone too,” I said. Each word hurt, almost enough to make them into one scream.

  “No?” Sindri’s mouth stayed open.

  “We are not friends, Jorg of Ancrath,” Gorgoth said, deeper than he’d ever spoken. “But we both loved the boy. You loved him first. You named him. That means something.”

  I would have told him what rubb
ish he was speaking but my face hurt too much for more words.

  “I will stay in the Heimrift, in the caves.”

  I would have said, I hope the troll-stink chokes you, but the price for opening my mouth was too high. I just raised my hand. And Gorgoth raised his. And we parted.

  Sindri closed his mouth, then opened it again. “Ferrakind’s gone?”

  I nodded.

  “Can you walk?” he asked.

  I shrugged and lay back in the bracken. Maybe I could. Maybe I couldn’t. I wasn’t going to, and that was the main thing.

  “I’ll get help. Horses,” he said. “Wait there.” He held out both hands as if to stop me standing, then turned on a heel and sprinted away. I thought the news drove him more than any of my needs. He wanted to be the one to tell it. Which was fair enough.

  I watched the blue sky and prayed for rain. Flies buzzed about me, drawn by the raw pink, the skinless muscle and fat on offer. They wanted to lay their eggs. After a while I stopped trying to wave them away. I lay a-moaning, twisting one way and another as if there might be a way that helped. From time to time I fainted and in the afternoon a light rain did come and I prayed it would stop. Each drop burned like acid.

  In the evening clouds of mosquitoes rose from wherever it is that mosquitoes hide. The Dane-lands were thick with the things. Probably why the folk are so pale. The blood’s been sucked from them. I lay there, letting them eat me, and eventually I heard voices.

  Makin came and I wanted to beg for death, but my face hurt too much. It would crack apart if I opened my mouth, all the wounds oozing. Then Rike stepped up, black against the deep blue of the sky and a little strength flowed into me. It doesn’t pay to be weak in front of Rike, and there’s something about Rike that makes me forget all about dying and want to do a bit of killing instead. “I knew I brought you along for a reason, Rike.” Each word an agony, edged with murder.