King of Thorns

“You don’t have to end like this, Egan.” I took hold of his neck. “There’s death in my fingers, you know? It hurt me when you named me fratricide, but it’s true. I killed poor Degran without even thinking about it. Can you feel it yet? Can you imagine what I can do when I am thinking about it? When I actually want to hurt you?”


He screamed then, as loud as I’ve ever heard a man scream.

“See?” I said, when there was a gap. “I’m not proud of how I learned to do that—but there it is, the devil makes work for idle hands—I can kill parts of your spinal cord and leave you in that much pain for the years before you die. I can paralyse you and take away your speech so no one will know how you suffer and you will not be able to seek or beg for an end.”

The Prince’s soldiers came on at a run, but they had a lot of mountainside to cover.

“What do you want?” he asked.

I had already killed the link between his mind and his muscles so he knew I wasn’t lying. I was only lying when I implied I might be able to restore it. “Let’s be friends,” I said. “I know I might not be able to trust you even if you called me brother…but do it anyway.”

“What?” Egan said.

“Jorg! We need to run!” Uncle Robert put a hand on my shoulder.

I ignored him and let more pain flood through Egan. “Call me brother.”

“Brother! BROTHER! You’re my brother,” he cried, then screamed, then gasped.

“Father Gomst, did you hear that?” I asked.

The old man nodded.

“Let’s make it official,” I said. “Adopt me into your family, Brother.”

I hurt him again.

“Jorg!” Makin pointed at the thousands coming our way, as if I hadn’t noticed.

“I…You’re adopted. You’re my brother,” Egan gasped.

“Excellent.” I let him fall. I stood and wiped his blood from my hands onto Makin’s cloak.

“We need to run!” Makin took a few quick steps toward the Haunt to encourage me.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “We’d never make it.”

“What’s your plan?” Makin asked.

“I’d hoped they would just give up. I mean it’s not as if they like this pile of dung.” I kicked Egan in the head, but not too hard: I might yet need that foot for running. “I’ve killed more than half of the bastards. Both their princes are gone. You’d think they’d just go home!” I shouted this last part at their ranks, close enough to see faces now.

“That’s it?” Uncle Robert asked. “You just hoped?”

I grinned and faced him. “I’ve lived the last ten years on hunches, bets, hope, and luck.”

The fire danced behind him as timbers fell from the trebuchet. The flames held that same strangeness as those in the castle, a flat brittle look. Crimson striations flushed through them, a stippled effect…

“I am going to watch you die.” Sageous stood to my left, naked but for a loincloth despite the cold, every inch of him written upon.

He had surprised me but I tried not to let it show. I stepped toward him.

“I’m not here. Will you never learn, Jorg of Ancrath?” I could see he hated me. That in itself made a small victory, putting some emotion in those mild cow-eyes of his.

“Are you not?” I asked.

He looked at Egan, limp and bleeding in his rainbow armour. “I could have done great things with that one. Do you know how long it took to find a man so powerful and yet so malleable? I couldn’t work with Orrin. He had less give in him than your father, and that’s saying a lot.”

“You set him to kill Orrin?” I asked.

“It wasn’t hard. It needed the slightest push in the right direction. Sweet Katherine proved too tempting and poor Orrin was just in the way. Men like Egan have only one answer to things being in their way.”

“So many little pushes, dream-witch,” I said.

“You probably don’t even remember the dream that made you beg to visit Norwood that day, do you, Jorg?”

“What?” Images bubbled at the back of my mind. The fair at Norwood. The bunting. I had wanted to go. I’d pestered my mother. I’d almost dragged them into that carriage. “It was you?”

“Yes.” He showed me a tight vicious smile. “Your sins cried out for it.” He mimicked me.

“I was a child…”

Sageous looked down at Egan. “They cry out for it now.”

A cold fire rose through me. “I’ll tell you what my sins cry out for, heathen. They cry out for more. They call for company.” And I stepped toward him.

“I am not here, Jorg,” he said.

“But I think you are.”