King of Thorns

“Me?” Sageous asks. “I’m not even here, Jorg. I can’t do much more than keep that fat slattern asleep. Besides, I wanted you to do it. Why do you think I brought you here in the first place?”


“Brought me?” I can’t look at him, or Degran. Or even the shadows, in case Mother and William are watching me from the corner.

“With dreams of Katherine, to bring you to the castle, and dreams of William to lure you inside. Really, Jorg, I thought a clever child like you would have understood how I work by now. It’s not the killing dreams that are my best weapons—the most subtle tools have the most profound effect. A nudge here, a nudge there.”

“No.” As if shaking my head will make it a lie.

“I bleed for you, Jorg,” he says, all compassion and mild eyes. “I love you, but you have to be broken, it’s the only way. You should have died, and now only breaking you will restore equilibrium, only that will allow matters to take their course as they should.”

“Matters?”

“The Prince of Arrow will unite us. The empire will prosper. Thousands upon thousands that would have died will live. Science will return to us in the peace. And I will guide the emperor’s hand so that all might be well. Isn’t that worth more than you, Jorg? Isn’t that worth the life of a single baby?”

I scream and hurl myself at him, as if anger might wash away grief, but what I’ve done has put a crack right through me and into that crack Sageous pours madness, a torrent of it. I stagger blind and howling.

I see nothing more. Nothing until this moment finds me staring into an empty and lidless box.

So much madness and regret poured into me that it left no room for memory, nothing for the box. What instincts, luck, or guidance led me from the castle without discovery, or how many more corpses I left in my wake, I can’t say.

“Jorg?”

I turned and looked at Miana. My cheeks wet with tears. Sageous’s magics crawled under my skin, but it wasn’t his spells that emptied me. I killed my brother.

His ghost lay on the bed, stretched behind Miana. Not the soft babe, but the little boy of four he would have been. For the first time ever he smiled at me, as if we were friends, as if he were pleased to see me. He faded as I watched and I knew he wouldn’t return, wouldn’t grow, wouldn’t heal.

Someone hammered on the door. “Sire, the gate has given!”

I backed against the wall and slid to the floor. “I killed him.”

“Jorg?” Miana looked concerned. “The enemy are within our gates.”

“I killed my brother, Miana,” I said. “Let them come.”





FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON


March 28th, Year 99 Interregnum

Tall Castle. Chapel.


Degran is dead. My sister’s boy is dead. I can’t write of it.


March 29th, Year 99 Interregnum


Jorg did this. He left a trail of corpses to and from Degran’s door.

I will see him die for it.

There is such anger in me. I cannot unlock my teeth. If Friar Glen were not dead. If Sageous were not absent. Neither of them would live to see the morning.


March 31st, Year 99 Interregnum


We put him in the ground today. In the tomb where Olidan’s family lie. A small white marble casket for him. Little Degran. It looks too small for any child to fit in. It makes me cry to think of him in there, alone. Maery Coddin sang the Last Song for him, my nephew. She has a high, pure voice that echoed in the tomb and it made me cry. My sister’s ladies placed white flowers on the tomb, Celadine lilies, one each, weeping.

Father Eldar had to come up from Our Lady in Crath City to say the words, for we have no holy men in the castle. Jorg has stolen or killed them all. And when Father Eldar was done, when he’d read the passages, spoken of the Valley of Death and Fearing No Evil, we all walked away. Sareth didn’t walk. Sir Reilly had to carry her, screaming. I understood. If it were my baby, I couldn’t leave them. Dear God, I can just poison them from my belly, let them fall in blood and slime, but if I had held my child, seen his eyes, touched his lips…it would take more than Sir Reilly to drag me from him.


April 2nd, Year 99 Interregnum


I’ve gone back through this journal and followed the track of my dreams through its pages. At least the ones I wrote about, but I seem to have written about a lot of them, as if they were troubling me. I’ve no memory of them. Maybe they left me while I scratched them down.

I don’t want to turn the page back either. It feels as if another’s hand is on mine, holding it down. But I won’t be kept back.

I can see now—how the heathen played me, steered me like a horse with light flicks of a whip, just a turn here and there to set the path across a whole map. I don’t believe this magic is beyond me. I can’t accept that a thing like Sageous should be allowed such power and that I should not.