King of Thorns

“Enough.” He stepped away.

I found it hard not to follow him, to press the attack, but I let my sword drop. There had been a joy in it, in the purity, living on the edge of my blade without thought. My heart pounded and sweat soaked me, but I had nothing of the anger that normally builds even in practice sessions. We had made a thing of beauty.

“Could you beat me?” I asked, pulling in a breath. The old man seemed hardly winded.

“We both won, boy,” he said. “If I’d taken a victory we would have both lost.”

I took that as a yes. But I understood him. I hoped that I would have had the grace to step back if I saw him weaken. Not to do so would have spoiled the moment.

Shimon sheathed his sword. “Enjoy your lunch, guardsman,” he said.

“That’s it?” I asked as he turned to go. “No advice?”

“You don’t try hard enough at the start, and you try too hard at the end,” he said.

“Hardly technical.”

“You have a talent,” he said. “I hope you have other talents too. They will probably bring you more happiness.”

And he went.

“Unreal,” Greyson said when I returned to the table. “I’ve never seen a thing like that.”

And that was all the time I had to bask in my glory. The bell sounded to let us know lunch had ended and I got to go back to guarding the Lowery Gate.

The Lowery Gate nearly broke me. I gave deep consideration to naming myself to my grandfather. In the end though, I wanted to see how this court worked from the inside, how my relatives went about their lives, who they really were. I guess I wanted a window into my past and not to mucky it up with my own surprises.

I slept again in the guardhouse and woke to new duties. Qalasadi didn’t appear to have gone to my uncle. I suspected that he thought I would wield some influence once my identity was known and he didn’t want to make an enemy of me. If he didn’t let my secret slip, who would know that he ever knew it? And so he would face no censure for not revealing me.

My new assignment was as personal guard to Lady Agath, a cousin of my grandfather’s who had been living at Castle Morrow for some years. A fat old lady, getting to the point where the weight started to slip from her as it does with the very old. Live long enough and we all die skinny.

Lady Agath liked to do everything slowly. She paid me no attention other than to moan that my scar was ugly to look at and why couldn’t she have a presentable guard? To the wrinkles brought by her advanced years she added those that fat people acquire as they start to deflate. The overall effect was alarming, as if she were a shed skin, discarded perhaps by a giant reptile. I followed her around Castle Morrow at a snail’s pace, which afforded me the time to look the place over, at least the part of it lying between the privy, the dining hall, Lady Agath’s bedchamber, and the Ladies’ Hall.

“Be still, boy, you’re never still,” Lady Agath said.

I hadn’t moved a muscle for five minutes. I continued the habit and held my tongue.

“Don’t be smart with me,” she said. “Your eyes are always flitting from one thing to the next. Never still. And you think too much. I can see you thinking right now.”

“My apologies, Lady Agath,” I said.

She harrumphed, jowls quivering, and settled back in her black lace. “Play on,” she told the minstrel, a dark and handsome fellow in his twenties who had a sufficient combination of looks and talent to hold the attention of Agath and three other old noblewomen at one end of the Ladies’ Hall.

The Ladies’ Hall appeared to be where Horse Coast women came to die. For certain there weren’t any ladies there on the right side of sixty.

“You’re doing it again,” Lady Agath hissed.

“My apologies.”

“Go to the wine-cellar and tell them I want a jug of wine, Wennith red, something from the south slopes,” Lady Agath told me.

“I’m not supposed to leave you unattended, Lady Agath,” I said.

“I’m not unattended, I have Rialto here.” She waved toward the minstrel. “I always have my wine from the cellar. I don’t know what they do to it in that kitchen but they ruin it. Leave it open to the air I guess. And the girls always dawdle so,” she remarked to the other ladies. “Go, boy, quick about it.”

I had my doubts as to whether Rialto could protect Lady Agath from an angry wasp, let alone any other threats, but I didn’t feel her to be in any danger, and I didn’t much care if she was, so I left without complaint.