King of Thorns

“Your pardon?” I cup a hand to my ear.

If you are challenged, pretend not to hear. Move closer, lean in. Be quick as you set your hand over their mouth, palm flat to lips so there’s no edge to bite. Press them back against a wall if there is one. Stab in the heart. Don’t miss. Hold their eyes with yours. It gives them something to think about besides making a noise, and nobody wants to die alone in any case. Let the wall help them to the ground. Leave them in shadow.

I leave the dead man behind me. A second dies at the end of the next hall.

“You!” This one rounds a corner with sword in hand. Almost knocking me down.

Sharp hands. That’s what Grumlow said to me. Sharp hands. It’s his tutorial in knife-work. A sword’s all about the swinging, the thrust, the momentum, timing your move against that of your foe—a man with a knife is a man with sharp hands, nothing more. A knife-fight is a scary thing. That’s why men jab and feint, posture, run. Grumlow says the only thing to do is go in fast, go in first, kill him quick.

I go in fast. His sword falls on the long rug and doesn’t clatter.

Around the corner is the door I’m seeking. Locked. I take the key from the guard’s belt. The door opens on oiled hinges. Silent. The hinges never squeak on a nursery door. Babies fight sleep hard enough as it is.

The wet-nurse is snoring in a bed by the window. A lantern glows on the sill, its wick trimmed low. The shadows of the cot bars reach for me.

I should kill the nurse, but it looks like Old Mary who chased after Will and me in the long ago. I should kill her, but I let her sleep. She would be ill-advised to wake.

I drag the guard into the room and close the door. For a long moment I pause, picturing my escape routes. There is a second exit from the room, leading to the nurses’ quarters. As long as I have two ways to run I feel safe enough. There are passages that lead from the castle. Secret tunnels that lead to hidden doors in the High City. I couldn’t open those doors from the outside, but I can leave by them.

I take a deep slow breath. White musk—his mother’s scent. Another. I step to the cot and look upon my brother. Degran they call him. He’s so small. I hadn’t thought he would be so tiny. I reach in and lift him, sleeping. He barely fills my hands. He gives a gentle sigh.

The assassin’s work is dirty work.

I vowed to take the empire throne, to take the hardest path, to win the Hundred War whatever the cost. And here in two hands I hold a key to the Gilden Gate. The son of the woman who replaced my mother. The son my father set me aside for. The son on whom he has settled my inheritance.

“I came to kill you, Degran.” I whisper it.

He is soft and warm, his head big, his hands tiny, his hair so very fine. My brother.

The lamp glow catches the white scars along my arms as I hold him up. I feel the briar’s hooks in me.

I should twist his neck and be gone. In the game of empire this is not a rare move, not even unusual. Fratricide. So common there is a word for it. Oft times carried out in person.

So why do my hands shake so?

Do it and be done.

You are weak, Jorg. Even my father tells me to do it. Weak.

I feel the hooks so deep, finding the bone as I struggled to save William. The blood runs down me. I can feel it. Streaming down my cheeks, blinding me. The thorns hold me.

DO IT.

No.

I will burn the world if it defies me, carry ruin to every corner, but I will not kill my brother. Not again. I came here to make that choice. To show that I could have chosen to. To weigh the decision in my hands.

And I set Degran back down among his covers. The nurse has put a woolly sheep there with stubby legs and button eyes. Sleep brother, sleep well.

He rolls limp from my hands, white where my fingers have touched him. I don’t understand. Ice forms across me, a sick hollowness fills me until I am nothing but a brittle shell. I prod him.

“Wake up.”

I shake the covers under him. Shake the cot. “WAKE UP.”

He flops, limp, with the white prints of my hands on his soft flesh like accusations.

“Wake up!” I scream it but not even the nurse wakes.

Sageous is there, in the corner of the room, all aglow. “Necromancy, Jorg. How many edges does that sword have?”

“I didn’t kill him. He was mine to kill and I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.” Sageous’s voice is calm where mine is shrill.

“I didn’t want this!” I shout.

“The necromancy listens to your heart, Jorg. It listens to what you can’t say. Does what the secret core of you wants and needs. It isn’t fooled by posturing. You have the death of small things in your fingers. A small thing died.”

“Take it back.” I’m begging. “Bring him back.”