Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘When we get there we’ll see.’ Jorg scooped some stray buttons from the floor and set a hand to the door. ‘And when I’m crowned we’ll have our last kiss.’


As if she’d ever bend the knee and kiss his hand. The arrogance of it made her snarl.

‘Back to your lady love now, Jorg?’ Chella set a smile on her lips but it didn’t fit well.

‘She’s too good for the likes of me, Chella. I’m soiled goods, past repair. I belong with our kind.’ He flashed that smile again and pushed out the door. ‘Come near my son and I’ll kill you, Chella.’ And he was gone.





40


I kept Brath to a gentle trot, passing the guard of the Drowned Isles delegation and drawing ever closer to the golden army surrounding the delegations of Ancrath and Renar. Katherine with Father’s two votes, me with my seven.

Katherine would know. Somehow she would know, even if she didn’t trespass in my dreams she’d smell Chella on me. Miana would just shake her head in that way that makes her look like someone’s mother rather than the child she is. ‘Never tell me, never let me be told.’ That’s all she ever asked of me. And I’ve held to it as far as I know. Clearly, she deserved better, but it would require a better man to give it.

I found a foolish smile on my lips and wiped it away. My tongue ached and I had lines of fire across my back. Nail wounds always hurt more than the shallow cut of a blade. Taking Chella had been ill advised, but my whole life has been a series of dangerous choices wrestled around to better outcomes. Not that it had been a choice, not truly. There are times when we realize we’re just passengers, all our intellect and pontification, carried around in meat and bones that knows what it wants. When flesh meets fire it wants to pull back and does so whatever you might have to say about it. There can be times, when man meets woman, that the same forces work in reverse.

Makin rode with me from the rear of our column to Holland’s carriage.

‘You’re leaving them alone to plot now?’ He had a suspicious look on him, as though he knew I’d been up to something.

‘A judgment call,’ I said. ‘I don’t judge they’ll be calling on us. And if they do …’

‘Missing our company, were you?’ Makin pulled alongside, shoulder to shoulder, putting the faint scent of clove-spice in the air. It worried me he took so much, blunting the true Makin, but I could hardly counsel sense. Red Kent joined us as we moved further up the column. ‘Missing us?’ he echoed Makin.

‘Missing you? You remember Chella from the leucrota halls, from the swamp. How long would you like to ride in her carriage?’

Both men rode in silence for a minute, staring out across the fields. Which part of those encounters they might have been visualizing I couldn’t say. Holland’s carriage came into view as we rounded a long bend.

‘Just long enough,’ Makin said, answering my forgotten question. ‘I’d ride with her long enough.’

Kent reached out and tugged up the collar of my road-tunic, not something he’d done since I was ten, and certainly not since I was king. ‘Mosquito bite,’ he rasped in that burned voice of his, and touched his neck. ‘Big one from the looks of it, like what we had us back in the Cantanlona marsh.’

I climbed to the carriage footplate from Brath’s saddle without having the driver stop.

‘Did you miss me, Father Gomst?’ I slammed the door behind and threw myself between Katherine and Miana, one scrambling to get her book out of the way, the other hauling my son clear.

‘Did Orrin ever tell you about the day we met on the road, Katherine?’ I didn’t give the good bishop a chance to reply.

She closed her book, some small and battered tome in red leather. ‘No.’

‘Hmm. And there was me thinking I’d made an impression.’

‘But Egan did, several times. And Egan was a man of few words,’ she said. Behind me, William started to fuss for the breast.

‘He said Orrin was a fool for toying with you, for letting you live, said he would have killed you in three heartbeats.’

‘Well I was only fourteen,’ I said. ‘In the end I bested him in less than three heartbeats. In any case, I had a friend with me that day who would have roasted Orrin in his armour by way of a victory prize. So once again, even with hindsight, Orrin was the wisest man there.’