King of Thorns

“Yes.” Makin didn’t lift his head.

“Well, here we are, both dying in a cave like Coddin is. Got anything you need to unburden, Sir Makin? Or do we need more extreme circumstances and even less time?”

“Nope,” Makin looked up, his face in shadow with just the curve of a cheekbone and the tip of his nose catching the lamplight. “Those men chose to follow you, Jorg. And they’d all be dead if it weren’t for your tricks.”

“And why did they choose to follow me? Why do you?” I asked.

I could hear rather than see him lick his teeth before answering. “There are no simple answers in the world, Jorg. Every question has sides. Too many of them. Everything is knotted. But you make the questions simple and somehow it works. For other men the world is not like that. Maybe I could have found a way to drag you back to your father years before you took yourself back—but I wanted to see you do what you promised to. I wondered if you really could win it all.”

“It seemed simple when I had Count Renar to hate,” I said.

“You were…” He smiled. “Focused.”

“It’s about being young too. I hardly recognize myself in that boy.”

“You’re not so different,” Makin said.

The snow around the diggers had a glow of its own now, the daylight reaching down through what remained to clear.

“I was consumed by me, by what I wanted. Nothing else mattered. Not my life, not anyone’s life. All of it was a price worth paying. All of it was worth staking on long odds just for the chance to win.”

Makin snorted. “That’s a place everyone visits on their way from child to man. You just went native.”

I reached into the pouch on my hip and slid my fingers around the box. “I have…regrets.”

“We’re all built of those.” Makin watched the diggers. A spear of daylight struck through into the cave.

“Gelleth I am sorry for…My father would think me weak. But if it were now—I would find another way.”

“There was no other way,” Makin said. “Even the way you took was impossible.”

“Tell me about your child,” I said. “A girl?”

“Cerys.” He spoke her name like a kiss, blinking as the daylight found us. “She would be older than you, Jorg. She was three when they killed her.”

We could see the sky now, a circle of blue, away to the east beyond the snow clouds.

“I follow you because I’m tired of war. I would see it stopped. One empire. One law. It doesn’t matter so much how or who, just being united would stop the madness,” Makin said.

“Heh, I can feel the loyalty!” I pushed up and stood, stretching. “Wouldn’t the Prince of Arrow make a better emperor?” I set off toward the exit.

“I don’t think he’ll win,” said Makin, and he followed.





In the long ago, in the gentle days, Brother Grumlow carved wood, worked with saw and chisel. When hard times come carpenters are apt to get nailed to crosses. Grumlow took up the knife and learned to carve men. He looks soft, my brother of the blade, slight in build, light in colour, weak chin, sad eyes, all of him drooping like the moustache that hangs off his lip. Yet he has fast hands and no fear of a sharp edge. Come against him with just a dagger for company and he will cut you a new opinion.





37





Wedding day


A hundred and twelve men climbed out of the cave below Blue Moon Pass. I let Watch-master Hobbs take his roll-call as they gathered on the new snow. It amazed me that the avalanche which had broken like a wave on the rocks below, and had run like milk into and around the cave, could now support my weight, letting my feet sink no more than an inch or two with each step. I listened to the names, to the replies, or more often to the silence that followed a name.

The new snow glittered below us, perfect and even, no trace of the blood, of the carnage strewn there only minutes before. And as Hobbs made his tally a thousand and a thousand and a thousand men died unseen beneath that fresh white sheet, held motionless, blind, struggling for breath and finding nothing.

Sometimes I feel the need of an avalanche within me. A clean page with the past swept away. Tabula rasa. I wondered if this one had wiped the slate for me. And then I saw a shadow beneath the whiteness at my feet, a child buried so shallow that the snow could not hide him. Not even the force of mountains could clean the stains from my past.

While Hobbs droned on I took the copper box from its place at my hip and sat on the slope, heels dug in.

A man is made of memories. It is all we are. Captured moments, the smell of a place, scenes played out time and again on a small stage. We are memories, strung on storylines—the tales we tell ourselves about ourselves, falling through our lives into tomorrow. What the box held was mine. Was me.

“What now then?” Makin slumped beside me.

Down beyond the farthest reach of the avalanche I could see movement, tiny dots, the remnants of Arrow’s force retreating to join his main army.