King of Thorns

3

Wedding Day

Marriage was ever the glue that held the Hundred in some semblance of unity, the balm to induce scattered moments of peace, pauses in the crimson progress of the Hundred War. And this one had been hanging over me for close on four years.

I walked along the chapel aisle between the high and mighty of Renar, none of them so high or so mighty, truth be told. I’ve checked the records and half of them have goat-herders for grandparents. It surprised me that they had stayed. If I were them I would have acted on Red Kent’s sentiment and been off across the Matteracks with whatever I could carry on my back.

Miana watched me, as fresh and perky as the lilies on her head. If the ruined left side of my face scared her she didn’t show it. The need to trace the scarred ridges on my cheek itched in my fingertips. For an instant the heat of that fire ran in me, and the memory of pain tightened my jaw.

I joined my bride-to-be at the altar and looked back. And in a moment of clarity I understood. These people expected me to save them. They still thought that with my handful of soldiers I could hold this castle and win the day. I had half a mind to tell them, to just say what any who knew me knew. There is something brittle in me that will break before it bends. Perhaps if the Prince of Arrow had brought a smaller army I might have had the sense to run. But he overdid it.

Four musicians in full livery raised their bladder-pipes and sounded the fanfare.

‘Best use the short version, Father Gomst,’ I said in a low voice. ‘Lots to do today.’

He frowned at that, grey brows rubbing up against each other. ‘Princess Miana, I have the pleasure of introducing His Highness Honorous Jorg Ancrath, King of the Renar Highlands, heir to the lands of Ancrath and the protectorates thereof.’

‘Charmed,’ I said, inclining my head. A child. She didn’t reach much above my ribs.

‘I can see why your miniature was in profile,’ she said, and sketched a curtsey.

That made me grin. It might be destined to be a short marriage but perhaps it wouldn’t be dull. ‘You’re not scared of me then, Miana?’

She reached to take my hand by way of answer. I pulled it back. ‘Best not.’

‘Father?’ I nodded the priest on.

‘Dearly beloved,’ Gomst said. ‘We are gathered together here in the sign of God …’

And so with old words from an old man and lacking anyone ‘here present’ with just reason, or at least with just reason and the balls to say so, little Jorgy Ancrath became a married man.

I led my bride from the chapel with the applause and hoorahs of the nobility ringing behind us, almost but not quite drowning out those awful pipes. The bladder-pipe, a local Highlands speciality, is to music what warthogs are to mathematics. Largely unconnected.

The main doors lead onto a stairway where you can look down into the Haunt’s largest courtyard, the place where I cut down the previous owner. Several hundred packed the space from the curtain wall to the stairs, more thronging out beyond the gateway, swarming beneath the portcullis, a light snow sifting down on all of them.

A cheer went up as we came into the light. I took Miana’s hand then, despite the necromancy lurking in my fingers, and lifted it high to acknowledge the crowd. The loyalty of subject to lord still amazed me. I lived fat and rich off these people year after year while they squeezed a mean life out of the mountainsides. And here they were ready to face pretty much certain death with me. I mean, even that blind faith in my ability to buck the odds had to allow a fairly big chunk of room for doubt.

I got my first proper insight into it a couple of years back. A lesson that life on the road hadn’t taught me or my Brothers. The power of place.

My royal presence was requested for a bit of justice-making in what they call in the Renar Highlands a ‘village’, though pretty much everywhere else people would call it three houses and a few sheds. The place lies way up in the peaks. They call it Gutting. I heard that there’s a Little Gutting slightly higher up the valley, though it can’t be much more than a particularly roomy barrel. Anyhow, the dispute was over where one scabby peasant’s rocks ended and another one’s started. I’d hauled myself and Makin up three thousand foot of mountain to show a bit of willing in the business of kinging it. According to reports, several men of the village had been killed already in the feud, though on closer inspection casualties were limited to a pig and the loss of a woman’s left ear. Not so long ago I would just have killed everyone and come down the mountain with their heads on a spear, but perhaps I just felt tired after the climb. In any event I let the scabby peasants state their cases and they did so with enthusiasm and at great length. It started to get dark and the fleas were biting so I cut it short.

‘Gebbin is it?’ I said to the plaintiff. He nodded. ‘Basically, Gebbin, you just hate the hell out of this fellow here and I really can’t see the reason for it. The thing is that I’m bored, I’ve got my breath back, and unless you tell me the real reason you hate …’

‘Borron,’ Makin supplied.

‘Yes, Borron. Tell me the real reason and make it honest, or it’s a death sentence for everyone except this good woman with the one ear, and we’ll be leaving her in charge of the remaining pig.’

It took him a few moments to realize that I really meant what I said, and then another couple mumbling before he finally came out with it and admitted it was because the fellow was a ‘furner’. Furner turned out to mean foreigner and old Borron was a foreigner because he was born and lived on the east side of the valley.

The men cheering Miana and me, waving their swords, bashing their shields and hollering themselves hoarse, might have told anyone who asked how proud they were to fight for his Highness and his new queen. The truth, however, is that at the bottom of it all they simply didn’t want the men of Arrow marching all over their rocks, eyeing up their goats, and maybe leering at their womenfolk.

‘The Prince of Arrow has a much bigger army than you,’ Miana said. No ‘your highness’, no ‘my lord’.

‘Yes he does.’ I kept waving to the crowd, the big smile on my face.

‘He’s going to win, isn’t he?’ she said. She looked twelve but she didn’t sound twelve.

‘How old are you?’ I asked, a quick glance down at her, still waving.

‘Twelve.’

Damn.

‘They might win. If each of my men doesn’t kill twenty of theirs then there’s a good chance. Especially if he surrounds us.’

‘How far away are they?’ she asked.

‘Their front lines are camped three miles off,’ I said.

‘You should attack now then,’ she said. ‘Before they surround us.’

‘I know.’ I was starting to like the girl. Even an experienced soldier like Coddin, a good soldier, wanted to hunker down behind the Haunt’s walls and let the castle earn its keep, if you’ll pardon the pun. The thing is, though, that no castle stands against odds like the ones we faced. Miana knew what Red Kent knew, Red Kent who cut down a patrol of seventeen men-at-arms on a hot August morning. Killing takes space. You need to move, to advance, to withdraw, and sometimes to just plain run for it.

One more wave and I turned my back on the crowds and strode into the chapel.

‘Makin! Are the Watch ready?’

‘They are.’ He nodded. ‘My king.’

I drew my sword.

The sudden appearance of four foot of razored builder-steel in the house of God resulted in a pleasing gasp.

‘Let’s go.’

From the journal of Katherine Ap Scorron

October 6th, Year 98 Interregnum

Ancrath. The Tall Castle. Chapel. Midnight.

The Ancraths’ chapel is small and draughty, as if they hadn’t much time for the place. The candles dance and the shadows are never still. When I leave the friar’s boy will snuff them.

Jorg Ancrath has been gone close on a week. He took Sir Makin with him from the dungeons. I was glad for that, I liked Sir Makin and I cannot truly blame him for what happened to Galen: that was Jorg again. A crossbow! He could never have bested Galen with a blade. There’s no honour in the boy.

Friar Glen says Jorg near tore the dress off me after he hit me. I keep it at the back of the long closet in the bride chest Mother packed for me before we left Scorron Halt. I keep it where the maids don’t look, and my hands lead me back there. I run the tatters through my fingers. Blue satin. I touch it and I try to remember. I see him standing there, arms wide, daring the knife in my hand, weaving as though he were too tired to stand, his skin dead white and the black stain around his chest wound. He looked so young. A child almost. With those scars all across him where the thorns tore him. Sir Reilly says they found him hanging, near bloodless, after a night in the thorns with the storm around him and his mother lying dead.

And then he hit me.

I’m touching the spot now. It’s still sore. Lumpy with scab. I wonder if they can see it through my hair. And then I wonder why I care.

I’m bruised down here too. Bruised black, like that stain. I can almost see the lines of fingers on my thigh, the print of a thumb.

He hit me and then he used me, raped me. It would have been nothing to him, a mercenary from the road, it would have meant nothing to him, just something else to take. It would rank small amongst his crimes. Maybe not the largest even against me, for I miss Hanna and I did cry when we put her in the ground, and I miss Galen for the fierceness of his smile and the heat he put in me whenever he came near.

He hit me, and then he used me? That sick boy, daring the knife, barely able to stand?

October 11th, Year 98 Interregnum

Ancrath. The Tall Castle. My chambers.

I saw Friar Glen in the Blue Hall today. I’ve stopped going to his services but I saw him in the hall. I watched his hands, his thick fingers and his thick thumbs. I watched them and I thought of those fading bruises, yellow now, and I came to the tall closet, and here I am with the torn satin in my hands.

Skin, bones, and mischief comprise Brother Gog. Monster born and monster bred but there’s little to mark him from Adam save the stippled crimson-on-black of his hide, the dark wells of his eyes, ebony talons on hand and foot, and the thorny projections starting to grow along his spine. Watch him play and run and laugh, and he seems too at ease to be a crack in the world through which all the fires of hell might pour.

Watch him burn though, and you will believe it.

4

Four years earlier

I took my uncle’s throne in my fourteenth year and found it to my liking. I had a castle, and staff of serving maids, to explore, a court of nobles to suppress, or at least what counted as nobles in the Highlands, and a treasury to ransack. For the first three months I confined myself to these activities.

I woke soaked with sweat. I normally wake suddenly with a clear head, but I felt as though I were drowning.

‘Too hot …’

I rolled and fell from the bed, landing heavy.

Smoke.

Shouting in the distance.

I uncovered the bed-lamp and turned up the wick. The smoke came from the doors, not seeping under or between but lifting from every inch of the charred wood and rising like a rippled curtain.

‘Shit—’ Burning to death has always been a worry of mine. Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I’m scared of immolation. Also spiders.

‘Gog!’ I bellowed.

He’d been out there in the antechamber when I retired. I moved toward the doors, coming at them from the side. An awful heat came off them. I could leave by the doorway or try to fit myself through the bars on any of three windows before negotiating the ninety-foot drop.

I took an axe from the wall display and stood with my back to the stone, next to the doors. My lungs hurt and I couldn’t see straight. Swinging the axe felt like swinging a full-grown man. The blade bit and the doors exploded. Orange-white fire roared into the room, furnace-hot, in a thick tongue forking time and again. And, almost as suddenly, it died away like a cough ending, leaving nothing but scorched floor and a burning bed.

The antechamber felt hotter than my bedchamber, char-black from floor to ceiling, with a huge glowing coal at its centre. I staggered back toward my bed. The heat took the water from my eyes and for a moment my vision cleared. The coal was Gog, curled like a new-born, pulsing with flame.

Something vast broke from the doorway leading to the guards’ room beyond. Gorgoth! He scooped the boy up in one three-fingered hand and slapped him with the other. Gog woke with a sharp cry and the fire went out of him in an instant, leaving nothing but a limp child, skin stippled red and black, and the stink of burned meat.

Without words I stumbled past them and let my guards help me away.

They practically had to drag me to the throne-room before I found my strength. ‘Water,’ I managed. And when I’d drunk and used my knife to trim away the burned ends of my hair, I coughed out, ‘Bring the monsters.’

Makin clattered into the hall still pulling on a gauntlet. ‘Again?’ he asked. ‘Another fire?’

‘Bad this time. An inferno,’ I said. ‘At least I won’t have to look at my uncle’s furniture any more.’

‘You can’t let him sleep in the castle,’ Makin said.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘Now.’

‘Put a quick end to it, Jorg.’ Makin pulled the gauntlet off. We weren’t under attack after all.

‘You can’t let him go.’ Coddin arrived, dark circles under his eyes. ‘He’s too dangerous. Someone will use him.’

And there it hung. Gog had to die.

Three clashes on the main doors and they swung open. Gorgoth entered the throne-room with Gog, flanked by four of my table-knights, who looked like children beside him. Seen in amongst men the leucrota looked every bit as monstrous as the day I found them under Mount Honas. Gorgoth’s cat-eyes slitted despite the gloom, blood-red hide almost black, as if infected with the night.

‘What are you, Gog, eight years now? And busy trying to burn down my castle.’ I felt Gorgoth’s eyes upon me. The great spars of his ribcage flexed back and forth with each breath.

‘The big one will fight,’ Coddin murmured at my shoulder. ‘He will be hard to put down.’

‘Eight years,’ Gog repeated. He didn’t know but he liked to agree with me. His voice had been high and sweet when we met beneath Mount Honas. Now it came raw and carried the crackle of flame behind it as if he might start breathing the stuff out like a damned dragon.

‘I will take him away,’ Gorgoth said, almost too deep to hear. ‘Far.’

Play your pieces, Jorg. A silence stretched out.

I wouldn’t be sitting in this throne if Gorgoth hadn’t held the gate. Or sitting here if Gog hadn’t burned the Count’s men. The skin on my face still clung tight, my lungs still hurt, and the stink of burnt hair still filled my nostrils.

‘I’m sorry about your bed, Brother Jorg,’ Gog said. Gorgoth flicked his shoulder, one thick finger, enough to stagger him. ‘King Jorg,’ Gog corrected.

I wouldn’t be sitting on the throne but for a lot of people, a stack of chances, some improbable, some stolen, but for the sacrifice of many men, some better, some worse. A man cannot take on new burdens of debt at every turn or he will buckle beneath the weight and be unable to move.

‘You were ready to give this child to the necromancers, Gorgoth,’ I said. ‘Him and his brother both.’ I didn’t ask if he would die to protect Gog. That much was written in him.

‘Things change,’ Gorgoth said.

‘Better they find a quick death, you said.’ I stood. ‘The changes will come too fast in these ones. Too fast to be borne. The changes will turn them inside out, you said.’

‘Let him take his chance,’ Gorgoth said.

‘I nearly died in my bed tonight.’ I stepped down from the dais, Makin at my shoulder now. ‘The royal chambers are in ashes. And dying abed was never my plan. Unless t’were as emperor in my dotage beneath an over-energetic young concubine.’

‘It cannot be helped.’ Gorgoth’s hands closed into massive fists. ‘It’s in his dena.’

‘His dinner?’ My hand rested on the hilt of my sword. I remembered how Gog had fought to save his little brother. How pure that fury had been. I missed that purity in myself. Only yesterday every choice came easy. Black or white. Stab Gemt in the neck or don’t. And now? Shades of grey. A man can drown in shades of grey.

‘His dena. The story of every man, written at his core, what he is, what he will be, written in a coil in the core of us all,’ Gorgoth said.

I’d never heard the monster say so many words in a row. ‘I’ve opened up a lot of men, Gorgoth, and if anything is written there then it’s written red on red and smells bad.’

‘The centre of a man isn’t found by your geometry, Highness.’ He held me with those cat’s eyes. He’d never called me Highness before either. Probably the closest to begging he would ever come.

I stared at Gog, crouched now, looking from me to Gorgoth and back. I liked the boy. Plain and simple. Both of us with a dead brother that we couldn’t save, both of us with something burning in us, some elemental force of destruction wanting out every moment of every day.

‘Sire,’ Coddin said, knowing my mind for once. ‘These matters need not occupy the king. Take my chambers and we’ll speak again in the morning.’

Leave and we’ll do your dirty work for you. The message was clear enough. And Coddin didn’t want to do it. If he could read me I surely could read him. He didn’t want to slit his horse’s throat when a loose rock lamed it. But he did. And he would now. The game of kings was never a clean game.

Play your pieces.

‘It can’t be helped, Jorg,’ Makin set a hand to my shoulder, voice soft. ‘He’s too dangerous. There’s no knowing what he’ll become.’

Play your pieces. Win the game. Take the hardest line.

‘Gog,’ I said. He stood slowly, eyes on mine. ‘They’re telling me you’re too dangerous. That I can’t keep you. Or let you go. That you are a chance that can’t be taken. A weapon that can’t be wielded.’ I turned, taking in the throne-room, the high vaults, dark windows, and faced Coddin, Makin, the knights of my table. ‘I woke a Builders’ Sun beneath Gelleth, and this child is too much for me?’

‘Those were desperate times, Jorg,’ Makin said, studying the floor.

‘All times are desperate,’ I said. ‘You think we’re safe here, on our mountainside? This castle might look big from the inside. From a mile off you can cover it with your thumb.’

I looked at Gorgoth. ‘Maybe I need a new geometry. Maybe we need to find this dena and see if the story can’t be rewritten.’

‘The child’s power is out of control, Jorg,’ Coddin said, a brave man to interject when I’m in full flow. The kind of man I needed. ‘It will only grow more wild.’

‘I’m taking him to Heimrift,’ I said. Gog is a weapon and I will forge him there.

‘Heimrift?’ Gorgoth relaxed his fists, knuckles cracking with loud retorts.

‘A place of demons and fire,’ Makin muttered.

‘A volcano,’ I said. ‘Four volcanoes actually. And a fire-mage. Or so my tutor told me. So let’s put the benefits of a royal education to the test shall we? At least Gog will like it there. Everything burns.’

5

Four years earlier

‘This is a bad idea, Jorg.’

‘It’s a dangerous idea, Coddin, but that doesn’t have to mean it’s bad.’ I laid my knife on the map to stop it rolling up again.

‘Whatever the chances of success, you’ll leave your kingdom without a king.’ He set a fingertip to the map, resting on the Haunt as if to show me my place. ‘It’s only been three months, Jorg. The people aren’t sure of you yet, the nobles will start to plot the moment you leave, and how many men-at-arms will you take with you? With an empty throne the Renar Highlands might look like an easy prize. Your royal father might even choose to call with the Army of the Gate. If it comes to defending this place I don’t know how many of your uncle’s troops will rally to your cry.’

‘My father didn’t send the Gate when my mother and brother were murdered.’ My fingers closed around the knife hilt of their own accord. ‘He’s unlikely to move against the Haunt now. Especially when his armies are busy acquiring what’s left of Gelleth.’

‘So how many soldiers will you take?’ Coddin asked. ‘The Watch will not be enough.’

‘I’m not going to take any,’ I said. ‘I could take the whole damn army and it would just get me into a war on somebody else’s lands.’ Coddin made to protest. I cut him off. ‘I’ll take my brothers. They’ll appreciate a spell on the road and we managed to traipse to and fro happily enough not so many years ago with nobody giving us much pause.’

Makin returned with several large map scrolls under his arm. ‘In disguise is it?’ he said and grinned. ‘Good. Truth be told, this place has given me itchy feet.’

‘You’re staying, Brother Makin,’ I told him. ‘I’ll take Red Kent, Row, Grumlow, Young Sim … and Maical, why not? He may be a half-wit but he’s hard to kill. And of course Little Rike—’

‘Not him,’ Coddin said, face cold. ‘There’s no loyalty in that one. He’ll leave you dead in a hedgerow.’

‘I need him,’ I said.

Coddin frowned. ‘He might be handy in a fight, but there’s no subtlety in him, no discipline, he’s not clever, he—’

‘The way I’d put it,’ said Makin, ‘is that Rike can’t make an omelette without wading thigh deep in the blood of chickens and wearing their entrails as a necklace.’

‘He’s a survivor,’ I said. ‘And I need survivors.’

‘You need me,’ said Makin.

‘You can’t trust him.’ Coddin rubbed his forehead as he always did when the worry got in him.

‘I need you here, Makin,’ I said. ‘I want to have a kingdom to come back to. And I know I can’t trust Rike, but four years on the road taught me that he’s the right tool for the job.’

I lifted my knife and the map sprung back into its roll. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

Makin raised his eyes and tipped his maps unopened on to the table.

‘Mark me out a decent route will you, Coddin, and have that scribe lad copy it down.’ I stood straight and stretched. I’d need to find something to wear. One of the maids had burned my old rags and velvet’s no good for the road. It’s like a magnet for dust.

Father Gomst met Makin, Kent and me on our way to the stables. He’d hurried from chapel, red in the face, the heaviest bible under one arm and the altar cross in his other hand.

‘Jorg—’ He stopped to catch his breath. ‘King Jorg.’

‘You’re going to join us, Father Gomst?’ The way he paled made me smile.

‘The blessing,’ he said, still short of wind.

‘Ah, well bless away.’

Kent went to his knees in an instant, as pious a killer as I ever knew. Makin followed with unseemly haste for a man who’d sacked a cathedral in his time. Since Gomst walked out of Gelleth by the light of a Builders’ Sun, without so much as a tan to show for it, the Brothers seemed to think him touched by God. The fact we all did the same with far less time at our disposal didn’t register with them.