King of Thorns

My uncle stood up at that.

I released the edges of the window. With a quick motion I threw my dagger. It struck the centremost platter and yellowed slices of potato sprinkled with sea-salt and crushed black peppercorns leapt across the table. The spider bite had left my finger joints sore and swollen and the knife went far closer to one of the old women’s ears than I had intended.

More shrieks. “It’s that damnable boy!” Lady Agath cried, having finally laid eyes on me.

“You don’t approve of our meal arrangements…Nephew?” Lord Robert asked.

“I think if you ate the contents of that platter I might soon be lacking relatives in the south. In fact, I could even be legal heir to the earldom!”

“You’d better come down here, Jorg,” my grandfather said.

To my shame I had to be helped down with a ladder. The drop would have broken my legs and the inner walls of the great hall were plastered smooth. Clambering down a ladder arse first to the room wasn’t the most impressive of entrances, but I had just saved their lives.

“You think our food is poisoned?” Grandfather asked.

I took a silver fork and speared a slice of the potato. “Have Qalasadi brought here and see if he would like a taste.”

Lord Robert frowned. “Just because we’re at odds with Ibn Fayed doesn’t mean all Moors are out to get us.”

Earl Hansa nodded to the guardsman at his shoulder and the man set off on an errand.

“Even so, he is guilty,” I said. “And in such a manner that there is no proof other than to see if he will sample a little of your saffron.”

“The saffron?” the Earl asked.

“You’ll find you’ve recently had a new consignment come to the kitchens, properly sealed and kept safe both for its intrinsic value and for your protection. It is probably part of a larger supply that is busy killing rich folk up and down the coast. A seemingly random act of pointless destruction. But I know a man capable of calculating that part of this same consignment would end up on your table, Earl Hansa. A man who also knew my identity and thought I’d make a perfect villain, and that I would accept the blame with the good graces of my line.”

“Dig a deeper hole with your sword, you mean?” Lord Robert asked, a slight smile on his lips.

For a moment I wondered if Qalasadi had factored in even my arrival, wondered if I were not some chance victim to pin his crime on but part of some larger calculation. I pushed that thought aside as both unlikely and unsettling. “Our mathmagician made only one mistake. It’s unfair perhaps to even call it a mistake. I expect he considered the possibility and decided it remote enough to chance. He didn’t think it likely you would let the cooks waste such fine ingredients on mere guards.”

The man who left on Grandfather’s errand returned. “Qalasadi is not in his quarters, Earl Hansa, and neither is he in the observatory.”

It turned out Qalasadi left the castle as soon as news of the guards’ sickness reached him.





FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON


March 26th, Year 99 Interregnum

Rennat Forest. Late afternoon.


I had thought I might write about Hanna at her graveside. Sareth says I take this journal everywhere, that I have too little in my life if I can’t be without it. People who are truly living, she says, don’t need to write about it every minute—they’re too busy getting on with real things. But Sareth hasn’t left the Tall Castle in a year, and whilst that baby is sucking the milk out of her I’m sat in Rennat Forest with monsters!

There’s an ogre at least ten foot tall with a mouthful of sharp teeth and slit-eyes. It glanced my way at first but now it just stands carving a chunk of deadfall, not with a knife but with the black nail on a finger as thick as my wrist.

The second monster is just a little boy really. A skinny one but nearly naked and marked with patterns in red and black, like ripples or flames. He scampers from bush to bush, trying to keep hidden, watching me with big black eyes. When he runs you can see his claws.

I’m distracting myself. I don’t want to think about what Jorg said.

The monster-child is called Gog. He says Jorg named him, after those giants in the bible. I told him there should be a Magog too. He looked so sad at that and the forest felt too hot all of a sudden as if it were the highest of high summers.

“And what will you be when you grow up, Gog?” I asked him to take his mind from whatever had upset him.

“I want to be big and strong,” he said. “To make Jorg happy. And I want to be happy, to stop Gorgoth being sad.” He looked at the ogre.

“And what do you want for you?” I asked him.