King of Thorns be-2 Page 33

  More shrieks. “It’s that damnable boy!” Lady Agath cried, having finally laid eyes on me.

  “You don’t approve of our meal arrangements…Nephew?” Lord Robert asked.

  “I think if you ate the contents of that platter I might soon be lacking relatives in the south. In fact, I could even be legal heir to the earldom!”

  “You’d better come down here, Jorg,” my grandfather said.

  To my shame I had to be helped down with a ladder. The drop would have broken my legs and the inner walls of the great hall were plastered smooth. Clambering down a ladder arse first to the room wasn’t the most impressive of entrances, but I had just saved their lives.

  “You think our food is poisoned?” Grandfather asked.

  I took a silver fork and speared a slice of the potato. “Have Qalasadi brought here and see if he would like a taste.”

  Lord Robert frowned. “Just because we’re at odds with Ibn Fayed doesn’t mean all Moors are out to get us.”

  Earl Hansa nodded to the guardsman at his shoulder and the man set off on an errand.

  “Even so, he is guilty,” I said. “And in such a manner that there is no proof other than to see if he will sample a little of your saffron.”

  “The saffron?” the Earl asked.

  “You’ll find you’ve recently had a new consignment come to the kitchens, properly sealed and kept safe both for its intrinsic value and for your protection. It is probably part of a larger supply that is busy killing rich folk up and down the coast. A seemingly random act of pointless destruction. But I know a man capable of calculating that part of this same consignment would end up on your table, Earl Hansa. A man who also knew my identity and thought I’d make a perfect villain, and that I would accept the blame with the good graces of my line.”

  “Dig a deeper hole with your sword, you mean?” Lord Robert asked, a slight smile on his lips.

  For a moment I wondered if Qalasadi had factored in even my arrival, wondered if I were not some chance victim to pin his crime on but part of some larger calculation. I pushed that thought aside as both unlikely and unsettling. “Our mathmagician made only one mistake. It’s unfair perhaps to even call it a mistake. I expect he considered the possibility and decided it remote enough to chance. He didn’t think it likely you would let the cooks waste such fine ingredients on mere guards.”

  The man who left on Grandfather’s errand returned. “Qalasadi is not in his quarters, Earl Hansa, and neither is he in the observatory.”

  It turned out Qalasadi left the castle as soon as news of the guards’ sickness reached him.

  From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron

  March 26th, Year 99 Interregnum

  Rennat Forest. Late afternoon.

  I had thought I might write about Hanna at her graveside. Sareth says I take this journal everywhere, that I have too little in my life if I can’t be without it. People who are truly living, she says, don’t need to write about it every minute-they’re too busy getting on with real things. But Sareth hasn’t left the Tall Castle in a year, and whilst that baby is sucking the milk out of her I’m sat in Rennat Forest with monsters!

  There’s an ogre at least ten foot tall with a mouthful of sharp teeth and slit-eyes. It glanced my way at first but now it just stands carving a chunk of deadfall, not with a knife but with the black nail on a finger as thick as my wrist.

  The second monster is just a little boy really. A skinny one but nearly naked and marked with patterns in red and black, like ripples or flames. He scampers from bush to bush, trying to keep hidden, watching me with big black eyes. When he runs you can see his claws.

  I’m distracting myself. I don’t want to think about what Jorg said.

  The monster-child is called Gog. He says Jorg named him, after those giants in the bible. I told him there should be a Magog too. He looked so sad at that and the forest felt too hot all of a sudden as if it were the highest of high summers.

  “And what will you be when you grow up, Gog?” I asked him to take his mind from whatever had upset him.

  “I want to be big and strong,” he said. “To make Jorg happy. And I want to be happy, to stop Gorgoth being sad.” He looked at the ogre.

  “And what do you want for you?” I asked him.

  He looked at me with huge black eyes. “I want to save them,” he said. “Like they saved me.”

  Jorg’s men look as though they’ve never left the road. They’re bandits, not a king’s retinue. Sir Makin, who they say is a proper knight, is as filthy as the rest. There’s dried muck all over his armour and he stinks like a sewer. He has a way with him though, even with the dirt. Sir Makin has manners at least.

  The one they call Red Kent tries to be polite, my lady this and my lady that, bowing at every turn. It’s quite comical. When I thanked him for the water he brought me he blushed from neck to hairline. I think I know how he got his name.

  When he’s not waiting on me Kent spends most of his time whittling, carving away with his back against a tree and a black knife in hand. It’s a wolf he’s working on. It looks as though it’s climbing out of the wood, snarling at the world. He said he was a woodsman once. A long time ago.

  And there’s a boy, Sim. Very delicate features like that stage player who performed in court last week. He looks kind, but shy. He won’t speak to me but I see him looking when he thinks I can’t see. He’s the cleanest of all of them. I can’t think he would be much of a warrior. Surely he’s too slight to swing that sword of his.

  I know Sir Makin can fight. I remember that he put Sir Galen to the test when Jorg’s father set them against each other, though I think my Galen would have beaten him. Perhaps that’s why Jorg pushed over Sageous’s tree. To save Sir Makin.

  The other two, the two Jorg warned Red Kent to watch, are killers through and through. You can see it in their eyes. There’s a giant called Rike who’s nearly as tall as the ogre and as broad as a Slav wrestler. He just looks angry the whole time. And there’s an old man, maybe fifty, skinny, gristly, with grey stubble on his chin and as wrinkled as Hanna was. They call him Row and he has kind eyes, but there’s something about him that says his eyes are lying.

  And I’m sitting here scratching the paper with my quill to record rogues and vagabonds because my hand doesn’t want to follow where Jorg has gone, or to write what he might be doing, or to frame the words that are pounding through my head.

  I tried to stab Jorg but it was like a dream. I both knew and did not know what my hand was doing. I didn’t want to hear his pain or see him bleed. I don’t recall picking up the knife to take with me. I told myself to stop. But I didn’t stop.

  And now. If I had Friar Glen here. I would want to hear his pain and see him bleed. I would not tell myself to stop. But I would stop. Because for the first time in a long while my head feels clear, my thoughts are all my own, and I am not a killer.

  March 27th, Year 99 Interregnum

  Rennat Forest. Before noon. A high wind in the trees.

  Sir Makin has been pacing. He doesn’t say it but he’s worried about Jorg. We saw a patrol ride by earlier, between the fields. They’ll be looking for me. Sir Makin says the more of them looking for me, the fewer for Jorg to worry about in the castle.

  The big one. The huge one, really. Rike. He’s been saying they should go. That Jorg is captured or dead. Kent says Jorg helped them all escape the dungeons and if he’s stuck there in those same dungeons himself, they should go free him. Even Sir Makin says that’s madness.

  The night was cold and noisy. They gave me their cloaks, but I’d rather be cold than under those stinking, crawling things. Everything moves in the forest at night, creaking, or croaking, or rustling in dead leaves. I was glad to see the dawn. When I woke up, the boy, Sim, was standing against the tree beside me, watching.

  Breakfast was stale bread and bits of smoked meat. I didn’t like to ask what animal it came from. I ate it. My stomach was grumbling and I’m sure they could hear.


  Jorg has come back. His men are more scared now than when they thought he was lost. He’s a wild thing, his hair torn and spiky with blood, he won’t look at anything, his eyes keep sliding, he can hardly stand. He’s got blood on his hands, past his elbows, his nails are torn, two of them missing.

  Makin told him to sleep and Jorg just made this terrible sound. I think it might have been laughing. He says he won’t sleep again. Ever. And I believe him.

  Jorg keeps moving, fending off trees with his hands, colliding with whatever’s in his way. He says he’s been poisoned.

  “I can’t clean them,” he said. And he showed me his hands. It looks as though he’s rubbed the skin off.

  I asked him what was wrong and he said, “I’m cracked through and filled with poison.”

  He scares his men and he scares me too. Of all of us I am the one his eyes avoid the most. His eyes are red with crying but he doesn’t cry now, just a kind of dry hacking sob.

  My great aunt got a madness in her. Great Aunt Lucin. She must have been sixty, a small woman, plump, we all loved her. And one day she threw boiling water over her handmaid. She threw the water and then went wild, spouting nursery rhymes and biting herself. Father’s surgeon sent her to Thar. He said there was an alchemist there whose potions might cure her. And failing the potions, he had other methods. The surgeon said that this man, Luntar, could take out pieces of a person’s mind until what remained was healthy.

  My great aunt Lucin came back in a carriage two months later. She smiled and sang and could talk about the weather. She wasn’t my great aunt Lucin any more but she seemed nice enough, and she didn’t scald any more maids.

  I don’t want that for Jorg.

  Jorg has told his men to kill me, and some of them seem ready to do it. Rike looks keen. But Sir Makin has said Jorg doesn’t know his mind and they are to leave me alone.

  Jorg is saying he needs to kill Sareth too. He says it’s a kindness. He’s insistent. Kent and Makin had to wrestle him to the floor to stop him running back to the castle to do it. Now he’s lying in the dirt watching me. He keeps telling me what they do to men in his father’s dungeons. It can’t be true, any of it. It makes me sick to hear. I can taste vomit at the back of my throat.

  Jorg soiled himself. Half the time he seems to see something other than the forest about us. He watches nothing, stares with great intent, then screams, or laughs without warning.

  He’s been talking about our baby. I still call it ours. It feels better than saying it was Friar Glen who violated me. He’s been saying he killed it, even though it’s me that carries that sin, me that will burn for it. He says he killed the baby with his own hands. And now he’s crying. He still has tears then. He’s bawling, snot and forest dirt stuck to his face.

  “I held him, Katherine, a soft baby. So small. Innocent. My hands remember his shape.”

  I can’t hear him speak of this.

  I have told Sir Makin about Luntar and how to reach Thar.

  This is what Jorg said when they dragged him away and tied him to his horse:

  “We’re not memories, Katherine, we’re dreams. All of us. Each part of us a dream, a nightmare of blood and vomit and boredom and fear. And when we wake up-we die.”

  When they led his horse off, he shouted at me, but it seemed more lucid than what he said before.

  “Sageous has poisoned us both, Katherine. With dreams. He puts his hands into our heads and pulls the strings that make us dance, and we dance. None of it was true. None of it.”

  I walked across the fields to the Roma Road and followed it toward the Tall Castle until soldiers found me and escorted me back. I’ll say back. I won’t say home.

  As I walked, Jorg’s words ran through my head, again and again, as if some of his madness had got inside me. I kept thinking of the dreams I’ve been having. It seems to me I’ve heard Sageous called the dream-witch before, but somehow that fact faded away, became unimportant. It wasn’t that I forgot it, but I stopped seeing it. Just as I stopped seeing that knife I took to stab Jorg with.

  I’m seeing it now.

  The heathen has been in my head. I know it. He’s been writing stories there, on the inside of my skull, on the backs of my eyes, like he’s written on his skin. I will need to think on this. To unravel it. Tonight I am going to dream myself a fortress and sleep within its walls. And woe betide anyone that comes looking for me there.

  The soldiers brought me in through the Roma Gate into the Low City, across the Bridge of Change, the river running red with sunrise. I knew something awful had happened. All of Crath City held quiet as if some terrible secret were spreading through the alleys like poison in veins. Shutters-opened for the dawn-closed as we passed.

  Up in the Tall Castle the dull tone of a bell rang out over and over. The iron bell on the roof tower. I’ve been up to see it, but it’s never rung. I knew it had to be that one though-no other bell could make such a harsh, flat toll. And in answer a single deep voice from Our Lady.

  I asked the soldiers but they would say nothing, wouldn’t even guess. I didn’t recognize the men, only their colours, not castle guards but army units drafted in for the search.

  “Has he killed his father?” I asked them. “Has he killed him?”

  “We’ve been hunting for you all night, my lady. We’ve heard nothing from the castle.” The sergeant bowed his head and pulled off his helm. He was older than I had imagined, tired, swaying in his saddle. “Best let the news wait to tell itself.”

  A cold certainty gripped me. Jorg had killed Sareth. Throttled her for taking his mother’s place at Olidan’s side. I knew they would take me to her body, cold and white, stretched out in the tomb vaults where the Ancraths lie. I bit my lips and said nothing, only let the horses walk away the distance that kept me from knowing.

  We came through the Triple Gate, clattering, hooves on stone, grooms on hand to take the reins and help me dismount as if I were some old woman. The iron bell tolled all the while, a noise to make your head ache and jaws clench.

  In the courtyard someone had lit a myrrh stick, a thick wand of it smoking in a torch sconce by the windlass. If sorrow had a scent it would be this. We burn them in Scorron too, for the dead.

  From the window arch high above the chapel balcony, between the pulses of the bell, I heard keening. A woman’s voice. My sister had never made such cries before, but still I knew her, and the fear that had sunk its teeth into me back at the Roma Gate now twisted cold in my gut. The sounds of hurt, as raw and open as any wound, could not be for Olidan.

  44

  Four years earlier

  I went to see my grandmother in her chambers. Uncle Robert had warned me that she wore her years less well than Grandfather.

  “She’s not the woman she was,” he told me. “But she has her moments.”

  I nodded and turned to go. He caught my shoulder. “Be gentle with my mother,” he said.

  Even now they thought me a monster. Once I’d sought to build a legend, to set fear among those who might stand against me. Now I dragged those stories behind me into my mother’s home.

  The maid showed me in and steered me to a comfortable chair opposite the one Grandmother occupied.

  Of all of them, my grandmother had the most of Mother in her. Something in the lines of her cheekbones and the shape of her skull. She sat hunched with a blanket over her knees despite the heat of the day. She looked smaller than I remembered, and not just because I was no longer a child. It seemed she had closed on herself after her daughter’s death, as if to present a smaller target to a world grown hostile.

  “I remember you as a little boy-the man before me I don’t know at all,” she said. Her eyes moved across me, seeking something familiar.

  “When I see my reflection I feel the same thing myself, Grandmother.” And the box at my hip, in a velvet pocket now, felt too heavy to carry. I don’t know me at all.

  We sat in silence for a long minute.

  “I tried to save her.” I would hav
e said more but words wouldn’t come.

  “I know, Jorg.”

  The distance between us fell away then, and we spoke of years past, of times when we were both happier, and I had my window onto the world that I’d forgotten, and it was good.

  And by and by when I sat beside her feet, knees drawn to my chest, hand clasping wrist before them, that old woman sang the songs my mother had played long ago, as she had played them in the music room of the Tall Castle on the black keys and the white. Grandmother put words to music I remembered but couldn’t hear, and we sat as the shadows lengthened and the sun fell from the sky.

  Later, when comfortable silence had stretched into something that convinced me she had fallen asleep, I stood up to go. I reached the door without creak or scrape, but as my hand touched the handle Grandmother spoke behind me.

  “Tell me about William.”

  I turned and found her watching me with sharper eyes than before, as if a chance wind had stirred the curtains of age and showed her as she once was, strong and attentive, if only for a moment.

  “He died.” It was all I could find to say.

  “William was an exceptional child.” She pursed wizened lips and watched me, waiting.

  “They killed him.”

  “I met you both, you’re probably too young to recall.” She looked away to the hearth as if staring at the memory of flames. “William. There was something fierce in that one. You have a touch of it too, Jorg. Same mix of hard and clever. I held him and I knew that if he let himself love me or anyone else, he wouldn’t ever give it up. And if someone crossed him, that he would be…unforgiving. Maybe you were both bound to be a bit like that. Maybe that’s what happens when two people so strong, and yet so utterly different from each other, make children.”

  “When they broke him…” The lightning had shown him to me in three quick flashes as they carried him. One frozen moment had him staring at the thorns, into the heart of the briar. Looking at me. No fear in him. The second and he was scooped up by his legs. The third, dashed against that milestone, scarlet shards of skull among blond curls. “My little emperor” Mother used to call him. The blond of that line in a court filled with Steward-dark Ancraths.