Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

Makin shrugged. ‘Everyone is. He puts the fright in you. He’s got the look. That’s what does it. Cold eyes. Makes you shiver.’


I’ve been known for bold moves at times, for daring the challenge even when I’ve known I shouldn’t. Under that grey sky though, with a cold wind blowing wet from the north, I felt no inclination to catch up to the carriage labouring ahead of us and demand an accounting for the past. My chest ached along the thin seam of that old scar and for once I found myself wanting to let something lie.

We rode without talking, the column moving around us, so many guardsmen in their fine armour, so sure in their purpose. The chill breeze nagged at me and all my yesterdays crowded at my shoulder, wanting their turn to rattle in my skull.

‘Cerys,’ I said.

Makin pushed back his helm and looked at me.

‘Killed when she had three years to her. Tell me.’ I had thought that if we ever spoke of Makin’s daughter it would be in maudlin drunkenness in the small hours before dawn, or perhaps as with Coddin it would take a mortal wound to turn our conversation to matters of consequence. That it might happen riding in the mud in the cold light of day surrounded by strangers had not occurred.

Still Makin watched me, jolting in the saddle, unaccustomed stiffness in that flexible face of his. For the longest moment I thought he wouldn’t speak.

‘My father had lands in Normardy, a small estate outside the town of Trent. I wasn’t the first son. I got married off to a rich man’s daughter. Her father and mine settled some acres on us and a house. The house came a couple of years after our official marriage. Something less than a mansion, more than a farmhouse. The sort of place you might have raided when you led the brothers on the road.’

‘It was outlaws?’ I asked.

‘No.’ His eyes glittered, bright with memory. ‘Some official dispute, but too petty to be called a war. Trent and Merca quarrelling over their boundaries. A hundred soldiers and men-at-arms on each side, no more. And they met in my wheatfield. We were both seventeen, Nessa and me, Cerys three. I had a few farmhands, two house servants, a maid, a wet-nurse.’

Even Rike had the sense to say nothing. Nothing but the clomp of hooves in mud, Gorgoth’s heavy footfalls, the creak of harness, dull chinks of metal on metal, the high sharp arguments of birds invisible against the sky.

‘I didn’t see them die. I might have been lying in the dirt by the main door clutching my chest. Nessa likely got cut down while I lay there looking at the clouds. I blacked out later. Cerys hid herself in the house and the fire probably reached her after I’d been dragged unconscious into a ditch. Children do that, they hide from the fire rather than run, and the smoke finds them.

‘Took me six months to recover. Stabbed through a lung. Later, I raided into Merca, with a band who survived that day. I found out that the lord’s boy who led that raid had been sent to a cousin’s in Attar to keep him safe. We met a year later. I tracked him to a little fort-town about twenty miles north of here.

‘My route back took me through Ancrath, and I stayed there. In time I found service with your father. And that’s all there is to it.’

Makin didn’t have a grin on him, though I’ve seen him smile at death time and again. He kept his eyes on the horizon but I knew he saw further than that. Across years. ‘That’ is never all there is to it. Hurt spreads and grows and reaches out to break what’s good. Time heals all wounds, but often it’s only by the application of the grave, and while we live some hurts live with us, burning, making us twist and turn to escape them. And as we twist, we turn into other men.

‘And how long does it take for a child that you cross nations to avenge, because you couldn’t save her when saving her was an option, to become a child that you knife because you couldn’t accept him when accepting him was an option?’

Makin gave half a grin then though he didn’t look away from whatever past held him. ‘Ah, Jorg, but you were never as sweet as Cerys, and I was never as cold as Olidan.’

Another day passed and we trailed the Ancrath column through Attar’s heartlands. Everywhere peasants came on rag-bound feet to watch us pass, wreathed in the smoke from fields where red lines of fire ate the stubble. They abandoned the harvest’s funeral rites, the laying and the stacking of crops, the pickling and the drying for winter, to watch the Gilden Guard and see the pennants of jet and gold flutter on high. Empire meant something to them. Something old and deep, a half-forgotten dream of better things.

In the late afternoon, sunshine broke through a fissure in the clouds and Miana emerged from Lord Holland’s carriage to ride a sedate mile side-saddle as we plodded through a ford town with the unlikely name of Piddle. Marten took to saddle as well and when Miana retired he kept at my side.

‘She’s finding it difficult, sire,’ he said, unprompted.