King of Thorns Read online

  “I need you in Renar,” I said. “I needed you there from the start. If you recall I did my damnedest not to have you come in the first place. Coddin’s a good man but how long can he hold a kingdom together for? Go back, crack any heads that need cracking, and let my people know I’ll be returning.”

  “Oi!” Grumlow’s cry. A man running away through the crowd. I saw Grumlow’s arm flick back and throw. The man fell without a sound twenty yards off, shoving his way through the crowd.

  I walked with Grumlow to where he lay. People got out of our way, except for the children who ran everywhere as if we were part of a show. Grumlow pulled his saddlebag from the man’s limp hands.

  “Cut the bloody strap! That’ll cost!” he said.

  “I told you to secure it better,” I said. The few bits and pieces Grumlow had managed to bring through the bogs were tied randomly around Brath’s tack.

  Grumlow grunted and bent to retrieve his knife. It had hit the man hilt-first in the back of the head. A pool of blood glistened beneath the man’s face, but it must have come from his nose or mouth hitting the cobbles. We didn’t bother turning him over to find out.

  “I love this city,” I said, and we went back to the others.

  We stabled the horses and sat at a tavern by the docks. I call it a tavern but we sat outside, around tables in the sun if you please, with wine in bottles shaped like tear drops with baskets woven around them. Makin with his bare feet, traces of dried mud still visible. Rike complained of course, about the sun, about the wine, even about the chairs which seemed unable to support his weight, but I paid more attention to the seagulls’ chatter. I sat and watched the ships moored at the quayside, bigger than I had thought they would be, and more complex, with rigging and spars and deck ropes and a multitude of sails. I felt better than I had in an age. Even my burns hurt less fiercely, as if the hot sun soothed their anger. For the first time in a long time we relaxed, smiled, and spoke of the dead. Of Brother Row, who I would remember, and Brother Sim, who I would miss for his harping and for his promise. We raised our bottles to them both and drank deep.

  Only Kent put up any resistance to the idea of returning without me. I let him protest a while until he ran out of things to say and in the end convinced himself that my plan was the best one. Red Kent’s like that. Give him a little space to turn and he’ll come around.

  I stood, rolled my neck, and stretched in the sunshine. “Catch you on the road, Brothers.”

  “You’re going now?” Makin asked, putting down his bottle-in-a-basket.

  “Well, unless you want to drink till we’re all sunburnt and maudlin and then declare undying love for each other and part with drunken hugs?” I said.

  Rike spat. He seemed to have inherited the role of spitter from Row.

  “In that case, your path lies that way.” I pointed north. “I should note that the first quarter mile of that path is on a street that boasts several fine-looking whorehouses. So take your time. As for me—I’m going to find out about ships.”

  I set off at an amble, following my shadow across the bright flagstones.

  “Look after Brath for me,” I called back.

  They picked up their bottles and drank to me. “Catch you on the road,” they replied. Even Rike.

  And if Makin hadn’t been there I think I really could have ditched them that easily.

  40

  Four years earlier

  In a great port like Barlona there are hundreds of ships at harbour. Most belong to merchants, or collectives of merchants, and hug the coastline loaded with things that are cheap where the ships set out and that command a higher price where they are bound. It’s a simple equation and the devil lies in the details. There are warships too, owned in name by the Prince of Barlona and in the service of his people. In reality it is the wealthiest of the merchants who put new princes on the throne, and the warships serve to protect their trade routes. And among the merchant cogs and the Prince’s warships, a scattering of ocean-going ships, triple-masted and more, deep-hulled, from the strangest and most distant shores. Even one great vessel of sickwood, twice the size of her largest rival, her grey planks grown one into the next, half-living despite the lumberman’s saw. Her hull, crusted with barnacles large as dinner plates even above the wave-line, bore many scars, and on her decks men with copper skin worked at repairs.

  I spent a few hours watching the great ships with their foreign crews, yellow men from Utter, black crews from the many Kingdoms of Afrique, turbaned sailors with curling beards, sun-stained, strutting the decks of pungent spice-boats. The Prince of Arrow’s words returned to me. His observations on the smallness of my world and the largeness of my ignorance. Even so, every man amongst these travellers knew of the empire, even though it stood in pieces. And so we had us some common ground.

  I saw Makin and the others trailing me almost from the start. He’d had the sense to leave Rike behind, most likely in one of the whorehouses I’d suggested. Rike’s not one to be missed, even on a crowded street. Makin would have done better to leave himself and Red Kent in the whorehouse too. Grumlow I might not have spotted. Grumlow has quiet ways about him.

  The smaller and more shabby of the merchant cogs stood at anchor on the margins of the great harbour. They moored along sway-backed quays that abutted semi-derelict warehouses separated by dangerous alleys where the stink of rotted fish made my eyes water. I followed two bare-chested men carrying a barrel up the gangplank onto the Sea-goat.

  “You! Get off my ship.” The man shouting at me was smaller and dirtier than the other men on deck but loud enough to be the captain.

  “A ship now is it?” I looked around. “Well, I suppose if you set a sail in a rowboat you can call it a ship. But you were unwise to throw away the oars.”

  “I was going to let you choose which side you left by. But that offer is now void,” the little man said. The mass of black curls framing his ugly face looked to be a wig, but why anyone would want to set ten pounds of stolen sweaty hair on their head in this heat I couldn’t fathom.

  I magicked a silver coin into my hand, an Ancrath royal stamped with my father’s head. “Customer,” I said.

  The fat man advancing on me stopped. He looked relieved.

  “I want to get to the Horse Coast,” I said. “Somewhere around the ear would do.”

  The Horse Coast isn’t named for the stallions that make it famous these days. Apparently the peninsula coastline resembles a horse’s head. I’ve studied the map scrolls in my father’s library and I can say with surety that it looks like a horse’s head in the same way that troll-stones look like trolls, or that the constellation of Orion looks like a belted giant holding a club. They could have called it the Happy Pig Coast or the Crooked Thumb Coast just as well. To give the ancients the benefit of the doubt I will note that the sea has risen twice the height of the Tall Castle since the time of Building and the old maps had to be rewritten many times. Even so, I’d stake a bag of stolen gold on the fact that there was never a time that “horse” was the first thing to spring to mind when contemplating the run of the Horse Coast.

  I had plenty of time to think while the little captain favoured me with a sour stare and chewed his lip. I could have picked a ship at random. Any small vessel actively loading would be departing for ports up the coast from Barlona or down the coast. I’d bought a couple of ales for a sailor earlier in the day. He’d gone through his share from his previous trip and was delaying a new signing until the last possible moment. In return for my keeping him from sobriety for a few more hours he’d run off a list of the best bets for a trip south. The Sea-goat’s name had taken my fancy. Who wants to sail on the Maria, or the God’s Grace, when there’s a Sea-goat to be ridden?

  “Two silver and you haul rope when told,” he said.

  “One silver and I get fed with the crew,” I said and started walking toward the gangplank. I could ride the Maria just as well. In fact it sounded better each time I said it.

  “Do
ne,” he said.

  And so I sailed on the Sea-goat with Captain Nellis.

  Before the Sea-goat hoisted sail I took a last walk around the seafront and stopped in at the Port Commander’s office long enough to place a bribe of sufficient weight to considerably lighten my gold supply. Ideally the Brothers would be steered onto a ship that would take them north up the coast and abandon them in a minor port. Makin would be too busy vomiting to notice which side of the boat the land lay off. Failing that, they need only arrest Makin and hold him a week or two—long enough for my trail to grow cold and to remind him that in the end when your king tells you to do something, you do it.

  I like the sea. Even with a gentle swell, with the coast in plain view just ten miles to starboard, it sets me in mind of mountains in motion. I like the nautical phrases. Splice this, belay that. If Lundist proves right and we are all reborn, I’ll go once more round life’s wheel as a pirate. Everything about the ocean puts me in a good mood. The smell and the taste of it. The cry of seagulls. God jammed some kind of magic down their throats. No wonder the crows want to murder them and the ravens are unkind.

  Captain Nellis didn’t like me being on the quarterdeck, or so he said, but I spent my time there, legs dangling through the rail with him behind me, dwarfed by the wheel. He could have roped it off for all the steering he did, but he seemed to like to hold it while he shouted at his men. To my eye he steered them as little as he did the ship. His curses and instructions rolled off the crew and they went about their tasks oblivious.

  “I’ll buy me a ship one day,” I said.

  “Surely,” Captain Nellis spat something thick and unpleasant onto the deck. Without men like him and Row, decks probably wouldn’t need swabbing at all.

  “A big one, mind. Not a barge like this. Something that cuts the waves rather than wallows about in them.”

  “A young sell-sword like yourself shouldn’t set his sights so low,” Nellis growled. “Buy a whole fleet.”

  “A valid point, Captain. Very valid. If my kingdom ever gets a coastline I will buy a fleet. I’ll be sure to name one of them the Spitting Nellis.”

  And so for the rest of that day, and most of the next, the Sea-goat wallowed its way sedately around the shore, stopping once in a small port to unload a huge copper pot and to fill the space with red-finned fish called…red-fin. I slept a night in a hammock, below decks, rolling in the gentle arms of coastal waters and dreaming of absolutely nothing. I can only recommend hammocks if you’re at sea. On dry land there seems no point to them. And sleep above deck if you have the chance. The Sea-goat had an appropriately animal smell to it in the stale heat of its hold.

  My grandfather’s castle is called Morrow. It overlooks the sea, standing as close to a high cliff as a brave child might, but not so close as a foolhardy one. It has an elegance to it, being tall and slender in its towers, and sensibly tiled on its many roofs, having fought fiercer and more prolonged battles with ocean storms than with any army trekking to it overland.

  The port of Arrapa lies just two miles north of Castle Morrow and I disembarked there, taking some pleasure in unsettling Captain Nellis with enthusiastic thanks for his services. I left the crew unloading red-fin and taking on crates of saddles destined for Wennith Town. Why the fishermen of Arrapa couldn’t catch their own red-fin I never did find out.

  A well-maintained cart track winds up from the port to Castle Morrow. I walked, enjoying the sunshine, and turned down the offer of a ride in a charcoal man’s cart.

  “It gets steep,” he said.

  “Steep’s fine,” I said. And he flicked his mule on.

  I wanted to come incognito to Castle Morrow, wanted it bad enough to see Makin thrown in a cell rather than risk him spoiling my cover. It has to be said that my experience with relations has been a mixed bag. Having a father like mine breeds caution in these situations. I needed to see these new family members in their element, without the complications of who I was or what I wanted.

  Add to the mix the fact that my grandfather and uncle were said to hate Olidan Ancrath with a passion for the way he sold the absolution for Mother’s death—as if his brother had merely inconvenienced him by sending assassins to kill her. I might be my mother’s son but I have more than my fair share of Father’s blood and with the tales Grandfather was like to have heard of me it would not be unreasonable for him to see me cast in the image of Olidan rather than the child of his beloved Rowen.

  I had a sweat on me by the time I reached the castle gates, but the cliff tops caught a sea breeze and I let it cool me. I stepped up to the archway. Double portcullis, well-crafted merlons topping the gatehouse, arrow slits positioned with some thought—in all a nice bit of castle-building. The smallest of three guardsmen stepped to intercept me.

  “I’m looking for work,” I said.

  “Nothing for you, son.” He didn’t ask what kind of work. I had a big sword on my belt, a scorching hot breastplate over my leathers, and a helm at my hip.

  “How about some water then? I’ve sweated my way up from the beach and it’s a thirsty mile.”

  The guard nodded to a stone trough for horses by the side of the road.

  “Hmmm.” The water looked only marginally better than the stuff in the Cantanlona swamp.

  “Best be on your way, son. It’s a thirsty mile back to Arrapa too,” the guard said.

  I started to dislike the man. I named him “Sunny” for his disposition and his repeated claims of fatherhood. I reached inside my breastplate, trying not to touch the metal and failing. My fingers discovered the corner they were hunting and I pulled out a sealed letter, wrapped in stained linen. “Also, I have this for Earl Hansa,” I said, unfolding it from the cloth.

  “Do you now?” Sunny reached for it and I pulled it back at the same speed he moved his hand. “Best let me see that, son,” he said.

  “Best read the name on the front before you grubby it up too much, Father.” I let him take it, and used the linen to mop sweat from my forehead.

  To Sunny’s credit he held the letter with some reverence by the very corners, and although we both knew he couldn’t read, he played out the pantomime well, peering at the script above the wax seal. “Wait here,” he told me and set off into the courtyard beyond.

  I smiled for the two remaining guards then took myself off to a patch of shade where I slumped and let the flies have their way. I set my back to the trunk of the lone tree providing the shade. It looked to be an olive. I’d never seen the tree before but I knew the fruit, and the stones littered the ground. It looked old. Older than the castle perhaps.

  Sunny took almost an hour to return and by that time the horse trough had started to look tempting. He brought two house guards with him, their uniform richer, chainmail on their chests rather than the leathers of the wall guard who had to endure the heat.

  “Go with them,” Sunny said. I think he would have given a day’s wages to be able to send me back down the hill, and another day’s to be able to send me on my way with the toe of his boot.

  In the courtyard a marble fountain sprayed. The water jetted from many small holes in the mouth of a fish and collected in a wide circular pool. I had seen illustrations of fountains in Father’s books. Reference was made to the team of men needed to work the pump in order to maintain pressure. I pitied any men sweltering away in darkness to make this pretty thing function…but the fine spray made a cool heaven as we walked past.

  Many windows overlooked the courtyard, not shuttered but faced with pierced veils of stone, worked with great artistry in intricate patterns that left more air than rock. I couldn’t see into the shadows behind but I felt watched.

  We passed through a short corridor, floored with geometric mosaic, into a smaller courtyard where on a stone bench in the shade of three orange trees, a nobleman waited, plain dressed but with a gold band on his wrist and too clean to be anything but highborn. Not Earl Hansa; he was too young for that, but surely someone of his family. Of my family. I kept mor
e of my father’s features but this man shared some of my lines, high cheekbones, dark hair cropped close, watchful eyes.

  “I am Robert,” he said. He had the letter open in his hand. “My sister wrote this. She speaks well of you.”

  In truth I spoke well of myself when I set quill to parchment some months ago. I called myself William and said that I had proven a loyal aid to Queen Rowen, honest, brave, and gifted in both letter and number. I copied the slant and shape of the writing from an older letter, a crumpled scrap I kept close to my heart for many years. A letter from my mother.

  “I’m honoured.” I bowed deeply. “I hope that the Queen’s recommendation, God rest her, will find me a place in your household.”

  Lord Robert watched me, and I watched him. It felt good to find an uncle that I didn’t long to kill.

  41

  Four years earlier

  “You look very young, William. How many years are you? Sixteen? Seventeen?” Robert said.

  “Nineteen, my lord. I look young for my age,” I said.

  “And my sister has been dead nearly five years. So that makes you fourteen or fifteen when she wrote this?”

  “Fifteen, my lord.”

  “Early in life to have made such an impression. Honest, brave, numerate, literate. So why are you wandering so far from home in such poor circumstances, William?”

  “I served in the Forest Watch, my lord. After Queen Rowen was slain. And when the Watch-master led us against Count Renar who took your sister’s life, Queen Rowen I mean, I fought in the Highlands. But I have family in Ancrath, so when justice was served on the Count, I took to the roads so that I would be thought killed in the battle at the Haunt, and no punishments would fall on my relatives to make me surrender to King Olidan. Since then I have been making my way here, my lord, hoping to continue in service to Queen Rowen’s family.”