King of Thorns Page 20

  “Easy.” Makin moved to support him as he staggered.

  At last I saw the arrow, just the flights showing, black against the dark leather over his guts. “Ah, hell.”

  A gut-shot man doesn’t live. Everyone knows that. Even with silks under the leathers to twist and wrap the arrow so it pulls out easy and clean, you don’t live past a gut shot.

  “Carry him,” I said.

  The others just looked at me. For a moment I saw the Norse witch, felt the intensity of her single eye and the mockery in her withered smile. “Even a gut-shot man has a fool’s hope,” she’d said. Had she been looking past me, at this day?

  “Damn prophecy and damn prediction!” I spat and the wind carried it away.

  “Sorry?” Makin looked at me, even Coddin stared.

  “Get some men here, pick him up, and carry him,” I said.

  “Jorg—” Makin started.

  “I’ll stay here,” Coddin said. “It’s a good view.”

  I liked Coddin from the start. Four years with him at the Haunt just scored the feeling deeper. I liked him for his quick mind, for his curious honesty, and for his courage in the face of hard choices. Mostly though I liked him because he liked me. “It’s a better view from up there.” I gestured up the slope.

  “This will kill me, Jorg.” He looked me in the eyes. I didn’t like that. It put a strange kind of hurt on me.

  Arrows in the guts don’t kill quick, but the wound sours. You bloat and sweat and scream, then die. Two days, maybe four. Had a Brother once that lasted a week and then some. I never once met a man who could show me a scar on his belly and tell how it hurt like a bastard when they pulled the arrow out.

  “You owe me, Coddin,” I said. “Your duty to your king is the least of it. That arrow probably will kill you, but not today. And if you think I’ve a sentimental side that will give you a quick death here and lose several days of useful advice when I need it most, you’re wrong.”

  I’d never met a man who lived after that kind of hurt. But I heard of one. It did happen.

  “We carry him up to the rock fall. We send men ahead to make a hidey-hole in the loose stone. We put him there and cover him up. If he’s lucky we come back for him later. If not, he’s ready buried,” I said.

  Already men of the Watch were crowding around, linking arms to lift Coddin. No complaints. They liked him too.

  25

  Wedding day

  None of the men who carried Coddin up the mountain breathed a word of complaint. They had no breath for it, but if they had still they would have held their peace. Coddin led men by example. Somehow he made you want to do it right.

  “I love you, Jorg, as my king, but also as a father loves his son, or should.”

  There are some things two men can only say to each other when arrows are raining down and one of them lies mortally wounded, walled away in a rough void amid a mass of fallen rock, and thousands of enemy troops are closing in. Even then it’s uncomfortable.

  We carried Coddin, Captain Lore Coddin, formerly of Ancrath, High Chancellor of the Renar Highlands. We carried him ahead of the fresh and surging army of Arrow, fuelled as they were by the desire to avenge the thousands crushed beneath our rockslides. The archers of the Watch held every ridge until the last moment, loosing flight after flight into the oncoming soldiers, making them climb their dead as well as the mountain. And tired as they were, the men of my Watch still opened a lead on the enemy, even bearing Coddin in their arms.

  The troops sent ahead to the loose rubble of the morning’s rockslides found a suitable cavity between two large boulders freed amongst the general fall. They enlarged the void and set aside rocks suitable for sealing and hiding the space.

  By the time we reached the cave, the men carrying Coddin were scarlet with his blood and he groaned at each jolt of their advance. Captains Keppen and Harold massed their commands at separate points across the slope and shot the last of their arrows to hold our enemies’ attention. And to kill them.

  With the narrow neck of the valley ahead of us, and the snowline glistening high above that, and the wind picking up, filching warmth with quick sharp fingers, and the men of Arrow panting and gasping as they closed the last few hundred yards, I lay on the rock and spoke through gaps to the dying man below.

  “You shut your mouth, old man,” I said.

  “You’d need to dig me out to stop me,” he gasped. “Or run away. And I’ve a mind you’re not running, not just yet.” He coughed and tried to hide a groan. “You need to hear such words, Jorg. You need to know that you are loved, not just feared. You need to know it to ease what poisons you.”

  “Don’t.”

  “You need to hear.” Again the cough.

  “I’m coming back for you when this is done, Coddin. So don’t say anything you’ll regret, because I will hold it against you.”

  “I love you for no good reason, Jorg. I’ve no sons, but if I did I wouldn’t want them to be like you. You’re a vicious bastard at the best of times.”

  “Careful, old man. I can still stick a sword through this crack and put you out of my misery.”

  A Watch man screamed and fell to my left, an arrow through his neck. Just like Maical, but louder. Another shaft hit the rock behind me and shattered.

  “I love thee for no good reason,” Coddin said, falling back into some accent from wherever he was born, his voice weak now.

  I could hear the thud of boots. Steel on steel. Shouts.

  “…but I do love thee well.”

  I looked up, blinking. Down the slope Makin cut into the first of the enemy to reach us, an expert sword against exhausted common swords. No contest. At least until the odds mounted.

  “Do something about that girl.” Coddin’s voice with new strength.

  “Miana?” I asked. She should be safe in the castle. For now at least.

  “Katherine of Scorron.” Another cough. “These things seem terribly important when you’re young. Matters of the heart and groin. They fill your world at eighteen. But believe me. When you’re the wrong side of forty-five and the past is a bright haze…they’re more important still. Do something. You’re haunted by many ghosts. I know that, though you hide it well.”

  The men of the Watch massed before our position now, in full melee against the first few dozen of the enemy, with more pressing in moment by moment. They knew the bow like lovers know each other, but they could fight hand to hand too. Fighting on a steep slope of broken rock is not a skill you want to learn for the first time when somebody is trying to kill you, and the Watch had had years to learn the art, so for now they held.

  “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 an
d 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 those 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.