King of Thorns Read online

  “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 rubbish 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.

  We stayed five days in Alaric Maladon’s hall. Not in the guest hall but in his great hall. They put a chair for me on the dais, nearly as grand as the Duke’s own, and I sat there wrapped in furs when I shivered and stripped to the waist when I sweated. Makin and the Brothers celebrated with Maladon’s people. Women appeared for the first time in any number, carrying the ale in flagons and horns from the storehouse, knives at their hips, eating at the long tables like the men, drinking and laughing almost as loud. One, near as tall as me, blond as milk and handsome in a raw-boned way, came up to my chair as I huddled in my furs. “My thanks, King Jorg,” she said.

  “I could be making it all up,” I said. Feeling rotten and ugly made me want to sour the day.

  She grinned. “The ground hasn’t shaken since they brought you back. The sky is clear.”

  “What’s that?” I asked. She had a clay pot in one hand, filled with black and glistening paste, a twist of hide next to it.

  “Ekatri gave it to me. A salve for the burns, and a powder to swallow in water to fight the poison in your blood.”

  I managed half a laugh before the pain stopped me. “The old witch who keeps predicting my failures? There’ll be poison in me if I take anything she sends all right. It’s probably how the future turns out the way she says it will.”

  The woman—girl maybe—laughed. “That’s not how völvas
are. Besides, my father would take it in poor humour if you died here. It would reflect badly upon him, and Ekatri depends upon his favour.”

  “Your father?” I asked.

  “Duke Maladon, silly,” she said and walked away leaving the pot and wrap in my lap. I watched her backside as she went. I thought perhaps I wouldn’t die if I could still find time to watch a well-crafted bottom.

  She looked over her shoulder and caught me watching. “I’m Elin.” And she walked on, lost in the crowd and the smoke.

  I took Ekatri’s powder and bit on a leather strap as Makin dabbed the ointment on my burns. He may have a light touch with a sword but as a healer he seemed to have ten thumbs. I nearly chewed through the strap but when he’d finished the pain had died to a dull roar.

  The girl, Elin, said the völva depended upon her father’s favour. I hoped that was so, rather than he on hers. Makin had been digging around, asking my questions in the right corners, doing that thing he does, the one that gets him answers. No one had said it, but if you stacked those answers up and looked at the pile from the right angle, it seemed the ice-witch, Skilfar, had a cold finger in every northern pie. I didn’t doubt that many a jarl and north-lord danced to her tune without ever knowing it. Ekatri though, Makin said she was a smaller fish. I wondered on that one, sitting alone with my pain in the quiet of night. Alaric of Maladon should mind himself I thought—even the smallest fish can choke you.

  I sat for five days, feeding on oat-mush whilst the Brothers gorged on roasted pig, ox heads, fat trout from the lake, sugar apples, and anything else that would be agony for me to chew. Each night more of the Duke’s kith and kin arrived to swell the throng. Neighbours too. Men of the Hagenfast, beards plaited with locks from those who died under their axes, true Vikings tall and fair and cruel, out of Iron Fort and ports north, and a lone fat warrior from the marches of Snjar Songr, sour with seal grease and not parting with any of the furs that bundled him despite the hall’s heat.

  I watched Rike win the wrestling contest after ten drunken heats, finally throwing down a Viking with slab-muscled arms and a permanently florid face. I watched Red Kent come first in the throwing of the hand-axe at a wooden target board, and third in the log-splitting. A tall local with pale eyes beat Grumlow into second in the business of knife-throwing, but Grumlow was ever a stabber and better motivated to hit a target if it breathed. They told me Row acquitted himself well in the archery, but that took place outside and I didn’t let them move me. Makin lost at everything, but then again Makin knows that winners may be admired but they are not liked.

  The Duke and Sindri sat beside me often enough, asking for the tale of Ferrakind’s end, but I shook my head and told it with a single word. “Wet.”

  The ale flowed, but I drank only water and watched the torch-flames more often than I watched the Danes at their feasting and sport. Flames held new colours for me. I thought of Gog, destroyed by fire, and of his little brother who bore the name I gave him, Magog, for only a few hours. I thought of Gorgoth among the silence of the trolls in the black caverns. I held the copper box in my hand and wondered if its contents would distract me from my pain.

  Most of all, though, as boys do when they’re hurt—and at fourteen I discovered I was still a boy if the hurt came fierce enough—I thought of my mother. I remembered how I twisted and moaned on the slopes after Sindri left me, the agony that held me and the thirst I had, nearly as large as the pain. I would have fitted well amongst the dying at Mabberton, amongst the wounded that I had watched with a smile, coiled about their hurts, calling for water. And when pain bites, men bargain. Boys too. We twist and turn, we plead and beg, we offer our tormentor what he wants so that the hurting will stop. And when there is no torturer to placate, no hooded man with hot irons and tongs, just a burn you can’t escape, we bargain with God, or ourselves, depending on the size of our egos. I made mock of the dying at Mabberton and now their ghosts watched me burn. Take the pain, I said, and I will be a good man. Or if not that, a better man. We all become weasels with enough hurt on us. But I think a small part of it was more than that. A small part was that terrible two-edged sword called experience, cutting away at the cruel child I was, carving out whatever man might be yet to come. I promised a better one. Though I have been known to lie.

  We were bound for Wennith on the Horse Coast that day, when Mabberton burned. Wennith, where my grandfather sits upon his throne in a high castle overlooking the sea. Or so my mother told me, for I had never seen it. Corion came from the Horse Coast. Perhaps he had aimed me there, a weapon to settle some old score for him. In any event, in Duke Maladon’s hall in the quiet hours before dawn when the torches failed and the lamps guttered out, amid snoring Norsemen slumped over their tables, my thoughts turned once more to Wennith. I had friends in the north now, but to win this Hundred War of ours, of mine, I might need some family support.

  Age set its hand on Brother Row and left him forever fifty, not wanting to touch him a second time. Grey, grizzled, lean, gristly, mean. That pale-eyed old man will bend and twist but never break. He’ll hold where the better man would fail beneath his load. The shortest of our number, rank and filthy, seamed with forgotten scars, often overlooked by men who had scant time to reflect on their mistake.

  29

  Four years earlier

  On the long journey south I questioned the motivation for my diversion more than once. More than a hundred times, truth be told. The fact of the matter was that I hadn’t found what I needed yet. I didn’t know what I needed, but I knew it wasn’t in the Haunt. My old tutor, Lundist, once said that if you don’t know where to look for something, just start looking where you are. For a clever man he could be very stupid. I planned to look everywhere.

  We rode out on the sixth day. I sat in Brath’s saddle stiff in every muscle, my face aching and weeping.

  “You’re still sick,” Makin said beside me.

  “I’m sicker of sitting in that chair watching you gorge yourself as if your only ambition were to be spherical,” I said.

  The Duke came to the doors of his hall with a hundred and more of his warriors to see us off. Sindri stood at his right hand, Elin at his left. Alaric led them in a cheer. Three times they roared and shook their axes overhead. They were a scary enough bunch saying farewell to friends. I didn’t fancy the chances of any they deemed to be enemies.

  The Duke left his men to come to my side. “You worked a magic here, Jorg. It will not be forgotten.”

  I nodded. “Leave the Heimrift in peace, Duke,” I said. “Halradra and his sons are sleeping. No need to go poking them.”

  “And you have a friend up there.” He smiled.

  “He’s no friend of mine,” I said. Part of me wished he was though. I liked Gorgoth. Unfortunately he was a good judge of men.

  “Good travels.” Sindri came to stand beside his father, grinning as ever.

  “Come back to us in the winter, King Jorg.” Elin joined them.

  “You wouldn’t want to see this ugly face again.” I watched her pale eyes.

  “A man’s scars tell his story. Yours is a story I like to read,” she said.

  I had to grin at that, though it hurt me. “Ha!” And I wheeled Brath to lead my Brothers south.

  Back on the road, and with regular applications of Ekatri’s black ointment, my face began to heal, the raw flesh congealing to an ugly mass of scar tissue. From the right you got handsome Jorgy Ancrath, from the left, something monstrous: my true nature showing through, some might say. The pain eased, replaced by an unpleasant tightness and a deeper burning around the bones. At last I could bear to eat. Now all the fine servings from the Duke’s table were trailing farther and farther behind us, I discovered that I had an awful hunger about me. And that’s a thing about the road. Out on a horse, trotting the ways of empire day after day with nothing to eat but what you can carry or steal, you discover that everything tastes good when your stomach is empty. If you look at a mouldy piece of cheese and your mouth does
n’t water—you’re just not proper hungry.

  In the Haunt the cooks would honey-glaze venison and garnish it with baked, rosemary-sprinkled dormice just to tempt my palate. After days in the saddle I find that in order for food to tempt me it must be either hot or cold and preferably, though not essentially, if it is animal, that it should not be moving and should once have possessed a backbone.

  Around the fire at camp on that first evening we made a subdued huddle, somehow more reduced by the absence of our smallest companion than by that of our largest. I stared at the flames and imagined a sympathetic tingling in the bones of my jaw, even under the deadening effect of the ointment.

  “I miss the little fellow.” Grumlow surprised me.

  “Aye.” Sim spat.

  Red Kent looked up from the polishing of his axe. “Did he give good account of himself, Jorg?”

  “He saved me and Gorgoth both,” I said. “And he finished the fire-mage before he died.”

  “Sounds about right,” Row said. “He were a godless bastard, that one, but he had a fire in him, God did he.”

  “Makin,” I said.

  He looked up, the flames reflected in his eyes.

  “Since Coddin is at home…” I paused then, realizing that I’d called the Haunt “home” for the first time. “Since Coddin is at home, and the Nuban isn’t with us…”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “I’m saying, if I set on a path that’s…maybe a little too harsh. Just let me know. All right?”

  He pursed those too-fleshy lips of his then sucked air in through his teeth. “I’ll try,” he said. He’d been trying all these years, I knew that, but now I gave him permission.

  For a week we skirted villages, circled towns, and picked our way through the soft edges of the kingdoms we had passed on our journey north. We came to the settlement of Rye, too big to be a village, too recent and too random to be a town. On our trip out we had purchased provisions there and with our saddlebags flapping empty we rode in to resupply. Paying for goods still feels odd to me, but it’s a good habit to get into when you’ve the coin to spare. Of course you should steal every now and then, take something by force just for the wickedness of it, or how else will you keep your hand in the game? But aside from that, paying is recommended, especially if you’re a king with a pocketful of gold.