Emperor of Thorns (The Broken Empire, Book 3)

The carriage jolted across frost-stiffened mud and Chella cursed again. On the bench opposite, Kai looked far more comfortable, on the edge of sleep almost, as if bounced in his nurse’s arms. She clutched the armrest, fingers white on the leather. Five years starved of necromancy, five years since the Ancrath boy had drained her, shrivelled up her power in the firestorm of his ghosts. She had thought the Dead King merely cruel to punish her so, to leave her stranded once more on the shores of life, plagued by the everyday aches and pains of flesh, mocked by trivialities like temperature. Now she appreciated his cunning too.

‘Damnation.’ Chella hugged her furs close about her. ‘Who made the autumn so chill?’

‘Who decided to hold Congression on the edge of winter?’ Kai asked. ‘That’s the more reasonable question.’

Chella felt cold, not reasonable. Kai’s easy manner irked her. She returned often now to the day the mire-ghouls had dragged him and the girl to her through the reeds. Mud and slime in their hair, horror frozen into their fresh young faces. Each display of his returning confidence, each hint of the mild contempt that hid behind his smile, made her regret deciding to use him the more. Better he had died with his pert little strumpet.

Necromancy at its heart is a guilty pleasure, a surrender to the darkest instinct. The fact that Golden Boy had picked up his old self-assurance again, his charm and his winning smile, as if he just dabbled in a secret vice, a necessary evil, dug at her moment to moment. That he proved so good at it made her want to claw the face off him. He seemed to think it something he could set aside when no longer required, like he had that girl. What was her name? Sula? She wondered if Kai could still remember it.

Necromancy has to cost you. It had certainly cost Chella. Jorg might have taken a bite for free, but all he got was a taste. Golden Boy on the other hand had picked it up as though it were nothing but juggling, and had yet to drop a ball.

‘I hate being alive,’ Chella spoke to the passing world through the carriage grille, hedgerows edged with hoarfrost so thick that every twig bristled with thorns of ice.

‘And yet we hang to it so dear,’ Kai said. ‘Sometimes by fingertips.’

He had walked the dry lands now. Thought he knew it all. Thought he knew both sides of the coin from his stumbling in the borders where newly dead sometimes lost their way. Chella wondered how the deep voyaging would change him. What it would be that took the ease from his smile. Somewhere past Absolution, in the places where angels fear to tread, maybe even across the black sands to the caves where lichkin dwell. It waited for him out there – and on the day of his dark epiphany she would forgive him his slights and his superiority for they would be broken things that no longer held use for him. Until that day, though … one more cheerful encouragement and she would take his face.

The roll and rock of the carriage made her stomach jump. Her bones ached so it hurt to sit. And the cold, the damp, insidious cold! She wiped her nose, leaving a glistening trail across the back of her hand, then sniffed, noting and pretending to ignore Kai’s look of faint disgust.

We play with corpses and my mucus offends him!

Being so alive made her petty and weak.

The carriage rolled to a halt, the coachman banging three times on the roof.

Kai looked up. ‘Trouble?’

Chella sensed nothing but in her diminished state that meant little. She shrugged, leaned forward, and opened the carriage door.

Axtis stood in the mud, his golden armour bright in the winter sun, hurting her eyes. More of the Gilden Guard pressed around him on horseback. ‘Smoke rising over the town ahead.’

‘Which town?’ Chella squinted. Leaving the carriage didn’t appeal, the sun promised warmth, but it lied.

‘Gottering.’

‘Never heard of it. Send riders ahead and drive on.’ She leaned back into the carriage and closed the door. ‘Two hundred and fifty men! Worried over smoke. If the place was one big bonfire we could ride through.’

‘Perhaps our friends have been here before us.’ Kai caught the mist of his breath and shaped it into a question mark, fading between them. Old tricks.

‘Lichkin are no one’s friends, Wind-sworn. You’d do well to remember that.’

The carriage juddered into motion again and before long rolled on into smooth mud and tinkling ice crusts.