King of Thorns

‘Yes.’ I swung up into Brath’s saddle.

We set off at slow walk.

‘Any of that spice left, Brother Jorg?’ Makin asked.

‘I must have swallowed it all for the pain,’ I said, patting my belt pouch.

Makin rolled his eyes. He glanced back at the ruined farmstead. ‘Christ bleeding. There was enough—’

The faint sound of cymbals cut him off. The clash of cymbals, the whirr of cogs, stamping, and a child laughing.

‘Leave anything else behind, Jorg?’ he asked.

‘Red Kent was right,’ I said. ‘It was cursed. Evil. Better the hurt fall on the peasants, neh?’

On the plains the winds can make your eyes sting.

Rike pulled on his reins and started back.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

And he didn’t.

Sleep came hard that night. Perhaps soft months in the Haunt had left me wanting the comfort of a bed. Sleep came hard and the dreams came harder, dragging me under.

I lay in a dark room, a dark room sour with the stink of vomit and animals, and saw nothing but the glitter of her eyes, child’s eyes. Heard only the tick tick tick of the watch on my wrist and the rasp rasp rasp of her breath, hot and dry and quick.

I lay for the longest time with the tick and the rasp and the glitter of her eyes.

We lay and a warm river carried us, thick with the scent of cloves.

Tick, breath, tick, breath, tick, breath.

And then I woke, sudden and with a gasp.

‘What?’ someone murmured. Perhaps Kent in his blankets.

‘Nothing,’ I said. The dream still tangled me. ‘I thought my watch stopped.’

But it wasn’t the watch.

In the grey dawn Makin rose beside me cracking his face with a yawn, spitting, and rubbing his back. ‘Jesu but I’m sore.’ He cast a bleary glance my way. ‘Nothing a pinch of clove-spice wouldn’t fix.’

‘The child died last night,’ I told him. ‘Easy rather than hard.’

Makin pursed those thick lips of his and said no more about it. Perhaps thinking of his own child lost back among the years. He didn’t even ask how I knew.

The years never seem to weigh on Brother Maical, as if his inability to count their passing protects him from their passage. He watches the world through calm grey eyes, broad-chested, thick limbed. Brother Grumlow cuts Maical’s hair close, with a tail at the rear, and shaves his beard leaving him clean-cheeked and sharp. And if no one told you that his thoughts rattle in an empty head you might think Brother Maical as capable a rogue as rides among the Brothers. In battle though his hands grow clever, and you’d think him whole, until the din fades, the dying fall, and Maical wanders the field weeping.

9

Four years earlier

The Highlands has lowland, though precious little of it and what there is lies stony and grows yet more stones when farmed. In my three months as king I had stuck to the mountains. Only now, when the road led me north to Heimrift, did I discover the fringes of my kingdom where it brushed against Ancrath and the Ken Marshes.

We rode from the ruined farm, from the peasants, Marten and Sara, whose names had stayed with me this once, and from their dead girl, Janey, whose breath stopped one night on the edge of spring before we’d gone twenty miles down the trail. We kept to the border lands where road-brothers are wont to travel and opportunity abounds. The further into a kingdom a bandit-troop can venture without serious resistance is a measure of that kingdom’s softness. Thurtan was always soft around the edges, the Ken Marshes softer still. Ancrath, we would say, was hard. Hard enough to break your teeth on.

‘Why have we stopped?’ Makin wanted to know.

The road forked. An unmarked junction, a dirt road scored through dreary hills where Ancrath met the Marshes met the Highlands. The wind rippled through the long grass. Any place three nations touch will grow well given half a chance. Blood makes for rich soil.

‘There’s two choices. Take the one that’s not Ancrath,’ he said.

I closed my eyes. ‘Do you hear that, Makin?’

‘What?’

‘Listen,’ I said.

‘To what?’ He cocked his head. ‘Birds?’

‘Harder.’

‘Mosquitoes?’ Makin asked, a frown on him now.

‘Gog hears it,’ I said. ‘Don’t you, lad?’

I felt him move behind me. ‘A bell?’

‘The bell at Jessop where the marsh-tide brings the dead. It’s got a voice so deep it just crawls over the bogs, mile after mile,’ I said.

That bell had called me back home once before. That bell had let me know I had a new brother lurking in a stranger’s belly, being put together piece by piece by piece beneath dresses fit for a queen. Under silk and lace. And now it reminded me of the Prince of Arrow’s words. Words his sword nearly knocked clean out of my head. That my little brother had come out to play, and the cradle toys my father first gave him were the rights to my inheritance.

‘We’ll go this way,’ I said, and turned along the harder path.

‘The Heimrift is that way,’ Makin said. He pointed to be clear. ‘I’m not arguing. I just don’t want anyone saying I didn’t mention it, you know, when we’re all lying on the ground bleeding to death.’

He was arguing as it happened, but he had a case and I didn’t stop him.

We rode for an hour or so, leaving the sourness of the boglands behind us. Spring races through Ancrath before it starts to struggle up the slopes into the Highlands. We came to woodlands, with leaves unfurling on every branch, as if one blow of spring’s green hammer had set them exploding from the bud. I took the Brothers from the road and we followed trails into the woods. If you don’t want to meet anyone, take the forest path, especially in Ancrath since I stole Father’s Forest Watch from him.

Spring warmth, the luminous green of new leaves, the song of thrush and lark, the richness of the forest breathed in and slowly out … Ancrath has charms unknown in the Renar Highlands, but I’d started to appreciate the wildness in my new kingdom, the raw rock, unobtainable peaks, even the endless wind scouring east to west.

Grumlow leaned over and snagged something from Young Sim’s hair. ‘Woodtick.’ He cracked it between his nails. Even Eden had a snake problem.

The head-cart started to snag on bushes and dead-fall as the trails grew narrow. Rike’s cursing came more frequent and more dire, prompted by repeated slaps in the face from branch after branch.

‘Shouldn’t ride so high, Little Rikey,’ I told him.