Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

‘You knew?’ The flood reached my chest. Without its support I doubted I could stand. When it touched the wound I felt the coldness pour into me, as if black water were filling me like a hollow gourd.

‘It’s good that you won’t see your boy,’ my father told me. ‘You’re too weak to raise a son.’ His wolfskin lifted on the flood but it meant nothing to him. He watched me with just the hint of a smile, a thing as cold as his regard.

The water spilled around my neck, putting a chatter in my teeth, my hair floating around me, drawn by the current. The weight of my armour, of the sword held in a numb hand, the pull of the mud, all held me down.

I thought of my child, of Miana with the white hand seared on her belly, and a spark of anger lit in me despite the cold. ‘You were mine to kill, old man.’ I snarled it before the water closed my mouth and swallowed me.

I looked up at a distant surface through dark weeds – the tangled drift of my hair. Far above me, impossibly far, a rippled surface fracturing the daylight to send weak glimmers down into the icy depths. A hand hung over me, limp, reaching for the sky. My hand. The dim and greenish light moved ripple patterns across my fingers.

I stared. Stared at that distant sun. It could be a million miles away. Lundist had said a million. More than a million. The waters held me. I hung limp and stared until that twinkling patch of green-tinted light became all I could see, became my world.

Shapes resolved. Green-tinted. And it seemed, though the water held me, though my chest ached for air and my heart pounded behind my ribs, that I looked not at the sky through water, but through the faint green stain of Attar glass into an inn room. A room where a fire burned in the hearth, where Miana lay, and Katherine crouched at her side.

I saw the lichkin come for them, the door flying apart in splinters. It walked in, slow and measured, a bone-thing, shrouded in dead space where the eye can’t see. The creature had left us a trap in the Hollow Wood and waited for us to leave. While we lay drowning the lichkin slipped into Gottering.

Guardsmen came hard on its heels. On her heels. Somehow I knew the lichkin for a she. They fell choking, perhaps drowning with their own ghosts, strangled by lost loves, choked by disapproving parents, or whatever tawdry fragments of their past haunted them. We all carry the seeds of our own destruction with us, we all drag our history behind us like rusted chain.

Katherine rose to meet her.

‘You shouldn’t have come.’ Somehow Katherine’s voice reached me, cut through to my dying brain, past the thunder of my heart.

The lichkin advanced on Katherine, only its hands clear to me, white, bone-like, root-like. My vision pulsed and prickled. In a moment I would take the breath my body screamed for.

‘You don’t know much, dead-thing.’ Katherine stood before it, the muted reds of her travel-gown swaying around her. Even dying I saw her beauty. Without desire – just as a statement, like the glory of a stained-glass window, or the play of light and shadow across mountains. I saw her fear too, and the strength that held it down.

Those hands reached for her, fast but slowing, as if finding some invisible resistance.

‘You can’t be very old, dead-thing,’ she said. ‘It’s written in the oldest books. Sleep and death are brother and sister. The Bard knew it. For in death’s sleep what dreams will come? And believe me dead-thing, I know dreams.’

The lichkin howled and raised a grey swirl around Katherine. Her skirts whipped about her. At Katherine’s feet Miana twisted and moaned. Shapes moved in that swirl. Shapes and suggestions.

‘Enough,’ Katherine said, sharp voiced. ‘Ghosts, is it? But dreams are populated by ghosts and little else. Ghosts are made of dreams, dead dreams, lost dreams, bad dreams, dreams that get stuck in tight little circles, that carve their own rut in the fabric of the world and won’t let go.’

Katherine’s hand snaked out and caught something from the swirl, held it by the throat. To me it was Orscar from the monastery, Sunny lashed to the Bad Dogs’ pole, Lesha wanting me to save her, the boy in Albaseat beaten by the smith. You can’t save them all so why save any? She choked it, fingers turning white with strain. At the last Father’s face hung there, black with blood. And then, poof, it was gone, a wisp of smoke, nothing more.

Katherine stepped forward, a quick step. And the lichkin flinched. It turned to run. But she caught it. Caught its bone-white hand in hers. Katherine held the lichkin, rigid with effort, hand growing white, veins growing dark and darker still, but she refused to release it.

‘You shouldn’t have come.’

And I broke the surface. Retching and gasping, I sat up, the water about me a foot deep, eighteen inches maybe. No more. I drew in the sweetest breath and parted the black veil of my hair. All about me, at the edge of the Hollow Wood, the brothers sat, choking and gasping, spitting water, purple in the face.





26


Chella’s Story