Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

It might be said that destruction and disaster have always dogged my heels, but never before had that curse been so manifest. I travelled to Vyene and hell followed in my wake.

We stopped that night in the town of Allenhaure and ate at table within a great beer hall that could hold close on three hundred of the Gilden Guard. In Allenhaure at least, on the very doorstep of the empire’s heartland, neither winter nor the Dead King’s blight had yet sunk their teeth. The locals brought huge haunches of roast meat on wooden platters, lamb in a crust of garlic, herb, and hazelnut, beef unadorned and bleeding. Beer too, blonde with a thick white head, in tankards built like barrels of wooden stays bound by hoops, and in glass steins for the high table. They seemed genuinely pleased to see us, a festival atmosphere throughout. I wondered though if it were merely that if they feted us the guard might choose to restock provisions at the next town.

The beer had a clean taste, sharp, and I drank too much of it, perhaps to dim the images from Chella’s carriage, playing again and again through my mind, making me feel at once both sullied and hungry for more. Late on in the evening I leaned across Miana and took our son from the crib at her side.

‘Don’t wake him, Jorg!’

‘Oh shush, I’m taking him for a walk. He’ll like it.’ To his credit William, still looking only half-human as new babies are wont to look, lay limp in sleep while I manhandled him to my chest, and seemed impervious to disturbance of any kind. A cold tremor ran through me as I remembered Degran lying in my hands, lifeless, a ragdoll. I bit down on the memory, refusing to let it cripple me each time I held my boy. The death burned out of my touch the day I broke the siege at the Haunt.

‘At least wrap him up warm, take the—’

‘Shush, woman.’ For such a tiny thing she held an endless supply of nagging. ‘Be thankful I’m not leaving him on a hillside like the Spartans.’

I carried him between rank upon rank of the Gilden Guard, all bent over their meat and beer, voices lifted in half a dozen songs. By the main doors, open to vent the stink and heat of the road-ripe hundreds within, I caught sight of Gorgoth, unmistakeable, just outside at the edge of the torchlight. I went out, William clutched to my chest.

‘Gorgoth.’ A name that feels good in the mouth.

‘King Jorg.’ He turned his cat’s eyes on me, his great head turning slowly on a tree-trunk neck. He had a gravitas about him, did Gorgoth, something leonine.

‘Of all the people I know.’ I moved to stand beside him and followed his gaze out into the night. ‘Of all of them, since the Nuban died – it’s your friendship, your respect, I wanted. And you’re the one not to give it. I didn’t want it because you didn’t give it – but I do want it.’ Perhaps the beer spoke for me, but it spoke true.

‘You’re drunk,’ he said. ‘You shouldn’t be holding a baby.’

‘Answer the question.’

‘It wasn’t a question.’

‘Answer it anyway,’ I said.

‘We can never be friends, Jorg. You have crimes on your soul, blood on your hands, that only God can forgive.’ His voice rolled away from us, deeper and darker than the night.

‘I know it.’ I lifted William closer to my face and breathed him in. ‘You and I know it. The rest of them, they somehow forget, convince themselves it can be swept away, misremembered. Only you and Katherine see the truth. And Makin, though it’s Makin he can’t forgive, not me.’

I passed William to Gorgoth, pressing him forward until the leucrota lifted one massive three-fingered hand to receive him. He stood very still, eyes wider than wide, staring at my son, almost lost in the width of his palm.

‘Men shun me – I have never held a baby,’ he said. ‘They think what corrupted me will pass to their children if I touch them.’

‘And will it?’ I asked.

‘No.’

‘Well then.’

We stood, watching the rise and fall of a tiny chest.

‘You’re right not to be a friend to me,’ I said. ‘But will you be a friend to William, as you once were to Gog?’ The boy would need friends. Better men than me.

The slowest nod of that great head. ‘You taught me that. Somehow you taught me what Gog was worth.’ He lifted William close to his face. ‘I will protect him, Jorg of Ancrath. As if he were my own.’





41


Chella’s Story


‘There’s no room at the inn.’ Kai twisted a grin at her. Allenhaure is full. He climbed back into the carriage, slipping off muddy boots.

‘Full of?’

‘King Jorg’s escort,’ Kai said.

‘So have Axtis press on to the next town,’ Chella said.

‘It’s a long haul to Gauss and the guard are always treated well here. Rumbles of discontent I’m hearing, as if there’s real men under all that gilding and those stern expressions.’

‘Not my concern. Let’s be moving.’ Though as she spoke the words it seemed that perhaps it was her concern. She tasted it at first, a wrongness in the air. ‘Wait.’

Kai paused, a boot half-returned to his foot. ‘What?’