Prince of Thorns Page 9

  “Why are we waiting?” I asked. I had to raise my voice above the roar of the rain.

  The Nuban shrugged. “The road feels wrong.”

  “Feels more like a river—but why are we waiting?”

  He shrugged again. “Maybe I need a rest.” He touched a hand to his burns, and a wince showed me his teeth, very white where most of the brothers had a mouthful of grey rot.

  Five minutes passed and I kept my peace. We couldn’t get wetter if we’d fallen down a well.

  “How did you all get taken?” I asked. I thought of Price and Rike, and the notion of them surrendering to the King’s guard seemed somehow comical.

  The Nuban shook his head.

  “How?” I asked again, louder, above the rain.

  The Nuban glanced back along the road, then bent in close. “A dream-witch.”

  “A witch?” I made a face at him and spat water to the side.

  “A dream-witch.” The Nuban nodded. “The witch came in our sleep and kept us tied in dreams while the King’s men took us.”

  “Why?” I asked. If I took the witch seriously, and I didn’t, I knew for certain that my father didn’t employ any.

  “I think he was seeking to please the King,” the Nuban said.

  He stood without announcement and set off through the mud. I followed, but I held my tongue. I’d seen children tag after grown men throwing question after question, but I had put childhood aside. My questions could wait, at least until the rain stopped.

  We sploshed along at a good pace for the best part of an hour before he stopped again. The rain had graduated from deluge to a steady soak that fell with the promise of lasting the night and through the next morning. This time our pause in the hedgerow proved well judged. Ten horsemen thundered by, kicking up mud left and right.

  “Your king wants us back in his dungeons, Jorg.”

  “He’s not my king any more,” I said. I made to stand, but the Nuban caught my shoulder.

  “You left a rich life in the King’s own castle, and now you’re hiding in the rain.” He kept a close watch on me. He read too much with his eyes and I didn’t like it. “Your uncle sacrificed himself to keep you safe. A good man I think. Old, strong, wise. But you came.” He shook a clot of mud from his free hand. A silence stretched between us, the kind that invites you to fill it with confession.

  “There’s a man I want dead.”

  The Nuban frowned. “Children shouldn’t be this way.” The rain ran in trickles over the furrows on his brow. “Men shouldn’t be this way.”

  I shook loose and set off. The Nuban fell in beside me and we covered another ten miles before the light failed entirely.

  Our path took us by farmhouses and the occasional mill, but as night came we saw a cluster of lights below a wooded ridge a little south of us. From memory of Lundist’s maps I guessed it to be the village of Pineacre, until now nothing more to me than a small green dot on old parchment.

  “A bit of dry would be nice.” I could smell the wood-smoke. All of a sudden I understood how easily I’d sold the brothers my plan on the strength of warmth and food.

  “We should spend the night up there.” The Nuban pointed to the ridge.

  The rain fell soft now. It wrapped us in a cold blanket that leeched my strength away. I cursed my weakness. A day on the road had left me dead on my feet.

  “We could sneak into one of those barns,” I said. Two stood isolated, just below the treeline.

  The Nuban started to shake his head. In the east thunder rumbled, low but sustained. The Nuban shrugged. “We could.” The gods loved me!

  We made our way through fields turned half to swamp, stumbling in the darkness, me tripping over my exhaustion.

  The door to the barn groaned a protest, then squealed open as the Nuban heaved on it. A dog barked somewhere in the distance, but I doubted any farmer would dare the rain on the strength of a hound’s opinion. We reeled in and fell into the hay. Each limb felt leaden, I would have sobbed with the tiredness if I’d let it have its way.

  “You’re not worried the dream-witch will come after you again?” I asked. “She’s hardly going to be pleased if her present to the King has escaped.” I stifled a yawn.

  “He,” said the Nuban. “I think it’s a he.”

  I pursed my lips. In my dreams the witches were always women. They’d hide in a dark room I’d never noticed before. A room whose open doorway stood off the corridor I had to follow. I’d pass the entrance and the skin on my back would crawl, invisible worms would tingle their way across the backs of my arms. I’d see her, sketched by shadows, her pale hands like spiders writhing from black sleeves. In that moment, when I tried to run, I’d become mired, as if I ran through molasses. I’d struggle, trying to shout, vomiting silence, a fly in the web, and she would advance, slow, inevitable, her face inching into the light. I’d see her eyes . . . and wake screaming.

  “So you’re not worried he’ll come after you again?” I asked.

  Thunder came in a sudden clap, shaking the barn.

  “He has to be close,” the Nuban said. “He has to know where you are.”

  I let go of a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been keeping.

  “He’ll send his hunter after us instead,” the Nuban said. I heard the rustle as he pulled the hay down on himself.

  “That’s a pity,” I said. It had been a long time since I’d dreamed of my own dream-witch. I rather liked the idea that she might be chasing us here, to this barn, in the jaws of the storm. I settled back into the prickle of the hay. “I’ll see if I can dream a witch tonight, yours or mine, I don’t care. And if I do, this time I’m not running anywhere. I’m going to turn around and gut the bitch.”

  16

  Four years earlier

  Thunder again. It held me for a moment. I felt it in my chest. Then the lightning, spelling out the world in harsh new shapes. I saw visions in the after-images. A baby shaken until the blood came from its eyes. Children dancing in a fire. Another rumble rattled the boards, and the darkness returned.

  I sat in the confusion between sleep and the waking world, surrounded by the creak of wood, the shake and rattle of the wind. Lightning stabbed again and I saw the interior of the carriage, Mother opposite, William beside her, curled upon the bench-seat, his knees to his chest.

  “The storm!” I twisted and caught the window. The slats resisted me, spitting rain as the wind whistled outside.

  “Shush, Jorg,” Mother said. “Go back to sleep.”

  I couldn’t see her in the dark, but the carriage held her scent. Roses and lemon-grass.

  “The storm.” I knew I’d forgotten something. That much I remembered.

  “Just rain and wind. Don’t let it frighten you, Jorg, love.”

  Did it frighten me? I listened as the gusts ran their claws across the door.

  “We have to stay in the carriage,” she said.

  I let the roll and rock of the carriage take me, hunting for that memory, trying to jog it loose.

  “Sleep, Jorg.” It was more of a command than a recommendation.

  How does she know I’m not asleep?

  Lightning struck so close I could hear the sizzle. The light crossed her face in three bars, making something feral of her eyes.

  “We have to stop the carriage. We have to get off. We have to—”

  “Go to sleep!” Her voice carried an edge.

  I tried to stand, and found myself weighed down, as if I were wading in the thickest mud . . . or molasses.

  “You’re not my mother.”

  “Stay in the carriage,” she said, her voice a whisper.

  The tang of cloves cut the darkness, a breath of myrrh beneath it, the perfume of the grave. The stink of it smothered all sound. Except the slow rasp of her breath.

  I hunted the door handle with blind fingers. Instead of cold metal I found corruption, the softness of flesh turned sour in death. A scream broke from me, but it couldn’t pierce the silence. I saw her in the next fl
ash of the storm, skin peeled from the bone, raw pits for eyes.

  Fear took my strength. I felt it running down my leg in a hot flood.

  “Come to Mother.” Fingers like twigs closed around my arm and drew me forward in the blackness.

  No thoughts would form in the terror that held me. Words trembled on my lips but I had no mind to know what they would be.

  “You’re . . . not her,” I said.

  One more flash, revealing her face an inch before mine. One more flash, and in it I saw my mother dying, bleeding in the rain of a wild night, and me hung on the briar, helpless in a grip made of more than thorns. Held by fear.

  A cold rage rose in me. From the gut. I drove my forehead into the ruin of the monster’s face, and took the door handle with a surety that needed no sight.

  “No!”

  And I leapt into the storm.

  The thunder rolled loud enough to wake even the deepest buried. I jerked into a sitting position, confused by the stink of hay and the prickle of straw all around me. The barn! I remembered the barn.

  A single point of illumination broke the night. A lantern’s glow. It hung from a beam close by the barn door. A figure, a man, a tall one, stood in the fringes of the light. The Nuban lay at his feet, caught in a troubled sleep.

  I made to cry out, then bit my cheek hard enough to stop myself. The copper tang of the blood sharpened away the remnants of my dream.

  The man held the biggest crossbow I’d ever seen. With one hand he began to wind back the cable. He took his time. When you’re hunting on behalf of a dream-witch I guess you’re never in a rush. Unless one of your victims escapes whatever dreams have been sent to keep them sleeping . . .

  I reached for my knife, and found nothing. I guessed it lost along whatever path my nightmare had led me through the hay. The lantern struck a gleam from something metal by my feet. A baling hook. Three more turns on that crank and he’d be done. I took the hook.

  The storm howl covered my approach. I didn’t sneak. I walked across slow enough to be sure of my footing, fast enough to give ill fortune no time to act against me.

  I’d thought to reach around and cut the bastard’s throat, but he was tall, too tall for a ten-year-old’s reach.

  He lifted the crossbow to sight down at the Nuban.

  Wait when waiting is called for. That’s what Lundist used to tell me. But never hesitate.

  I hooked the hunter between the legs and yanked up as hard as I could.

  Where the crash of thunder and the roar of the wind had failed, the hunter’s scream succeeded. The Nuban woke up. And to his credit there was no wondering where he was or what was happening. He surged to his feet and had a foot of steel through the man’s chest in two heartbeats.

  We stood with the hunter lying between us, each with our weapon blooded.

  The Nuban wiped his blade on the hunter’s cloak.

  “That’s a big old crossbow!” I toed it across the floor and marvelled at the weight of it.

  The Nuban lifted the bow. He ran his fingers over the metalwork inlaid on the wood. “My people made this.” He traced the symbols and the faces of fierce gods. “And now I owe you another life.” He hefted the crossbow and smiled, his teeth a white line in the lantern glow.

  “One will be enough.” I paused. “It’s Count Renar that has to die.”

  And the smile left him.

  17

  The old corridors enfolded me and four years became a dream. Familiar turns, the same vases, the same suits of armour, the same paintings, even the same guards. Four years and everything was the same, except me.

  In the niches small silver lamps burned oil squeezed from whales in distant seas. I walked from one pool of light to the next, behind a guard whose armour beggared my own. Makin and Gomst had been led to separate destinations, and I went alone to whatever reception awaited. The place still made me feel small. Doors built for giants, ceilings soaring so high that a man with a lance could scarcely touch them. We came to the west wing, the royal quarters. Would Father meet me here? Man to man in the arboretum? Souls bared beneath the planetarium dome? I had imagined him seated in the black claw of his throne, brooding above the court, and me led toward him between the men of the Imperial Guard.

  I followed the single guard, feeling vaguely cheated. Did I want to be surrounded by armed men? Had I grown so dangerous? To be heaped with chains? Did I want him to fear me? Fourteen years old, and the King of Ancrath quaking behind his bodyguard?

  I felt foolish for a moment. I brushed a hand over the hilt of my sword. They’d cast the blade from the metal that ran through the castle walls. A true heirloom, with a heritage at the Tall Castle predating mine by a thousand years at least. I ached for a confrontation then. Voices rose at the back of my mind, clamouring, fighting one against the other. The skin on my back tingled, the muscle beneath twitched for action.

  “A bath, Prince Jorg?”

  It was the guardsman. I nearly drew on him.

  “No,” I said. I forced myself to calmness. “I’ll see the King now.”

  “King Olidan has retired, Prince,” the guard said. Was he smirking at me? His eyes held an intelligence I didn’t associate with the palace guard.

  “Asleep?” I would have given a year of my life to take the surprise from those words. I felt like Captain Coddin must have: the butt of a joke I had yet to comprehend.

  “Sageous awaits you in the library, my prince,” the man said. He turned to go, but I had him by the throat.

  Asleep? They were playing with me, Father and this pet magician of his.

  “This game,” I said. “I expect it will provide amusement to somebody, but, if you . . . worry me . . . one more time, I will kill you. Think on it. You’re a piece in somebody else’s game, and all you’ll earn from it is a sword through the stomach, unless you redeem yourself in the next twenty seconds.”

  It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

  “Prince, I . . . Sageous is waiting for you . . .” I could see I’d turned his smug superiority into terror. I’d stepped outside the rules of play. I squeezed his throat a little. “Why would I want to speak to this . . . Sageous? What’s he to me?”

  “He—he holds the King’s favour. Pl-please, Prince Jorg.”

  He got the words out past my fingers. It takes no great strength to throttle a man if you know where to grip.

  I let him go and he fell, gasping. “In the library you say? What’s your name, man?”

  “Yes, my prince, in the library.” He rubbed at his neck. “Robart. My name is Robart Hool.”

  I strode out across the Hall of Spears, angling for the leathered door to the library. I paused before it, turning back to Robart. “There are turning points, Robart. Forks in the path we follow through our lives. Times that we look back to and say, ‘If only.’ This is one of those times. It’s not often we get them pointed out to us. At this point you’ll either decide to hate me, or to serve me. Consider the choice carefully.” I threw the library door open. It slammed back into the wall and I walked through.

  In my mind the library walls stretched to the very heavens, thick with books, pregnant with the written word. I learned to read at three years of age. I was talking with Socrates at seven, learning form and thing from Aristotle. For the longest time I had lived in this library. Memory dwarfed reality: the place looked small now, small and dusty.

  “I’ve burned more books than this!” I said.

  Sageous stepped out from the aisle given over to ancient philosophy. He was younger than I expected, forty at the most, wearing just a white cloth, like the Roman togara. His skin held the dusky hue of the middle-lands, maybe Indus or Persia, but I could see it only in the rare spots the tattooist’s needle hadn’t found. He wore the text of a small book on his living hide, cut there in the flowing script of the mathmagicians. His eyes—well, I know we’re supposed to cower beneath the gaze of potent men, but hi
s eyes were mild. They reminded me of the cows on the Castle Road, brown and placid. His scrutiny was the thing that cut. Somehow those mild eyes dug in. Perhaps the script beneath them bore the power. All I can say is that, for a time uncounted, I could see nothing but the heathen’s eyes, hear nothing but his breath, stir no muscle but my heart.

  He let me go, like a fish thrown back into the river, too small for the pot. We stood face to face, inches apart, and I’d no memory of closing the gap. But I’d come to him. We stood among the books. Among the wise words of ten thousand years. Plato to my left, copied, copied, and copied again. The “moderns” to my right, Russell, Popper, Xiang, and the rest. A small voice inside me, deep inside, called for blood. But the heathen had taken the fire from me.

  “Father must depend upon you, Sageous,” I said. I twisted my fingers, wanting to want my sword. “To have a pagan at court must vex the priests. If the pope dared leave Roma these days, she’d be here to curse your soul to eternal hellfire!” I had nothing but dogma with which to beat him.

  Sageous smiled, a friendly smile, like I’d just run an errand for him. “Prince Jorg, welcome home.” He had no real accent, but he ran his words out fluid and musical, like a Saracen or a Moor.

  He stood no taller than me, in fact I probably had an inch on him. He was lean too, so I could have taken him to the floor there and then, and choked the life out of him. One murderous thought bubbled up after another, and leaked away.

  “There’s a lot of your father in you,” he said.

  “Have you got him tamed too?” I asked.

  “One doesn’t tame a man like Olidan Ancrath.” His friendly smile took an edge of amusement. I wanted to know the joke. He could manage me but not my father? Or he could manipulate the King and chose to cover the fact with a smirk?

  I imagined the heathen’s tattooed head shorn from his shoulders, his smile frozen and blood pumping from the stump of his neck. In that instant I reached for my sword and threw all my will behind the action. The pommel felt cold beneath my touch. I curled my fingers around the hilt, but before I could squeeze them tight, my hand fell away like a dead thing.