King of Thorns

I felt him try to weave my vision, try to walk away in dream. And then I saw her. A ghost of her. Katherine white with anger and the more beautiful with it. A ghost of her at his shoulder, waiting in the place he sought to run to, like a mirage on hot sand, her lips moving without sound, chanting something. I could see her sitting on horseback, with the same knights around her that she brought with her from Arrow’s palace. Somewhere back in the mass of that army Katherine rode her horse blind, her eyes bound by visions as she cast spells of her own. And with each silent word from the tight line of her mouth Sageous grew more solid, more there.

I reached for him. “I met a man who wasn’t there…” My hands almost found the heathen, the stuff of him slipping away as my fingers closed. What had Fexler said? It’s all about will. Put aside the skulls, the smokes, the wording of spells, and at the bottom of it all is desire. “He wasn’t there again today.” Wanting makes it so. “Oh, how I wish he’d always stay.” And my grasping hands found him. Whatever may be said about the aftertaste, in the moment revenge tastes sweeter than blood, my brothers.

I seized his head and tore it from his shoulders as though I were a troll and he only human, for he had walked too long in dream and his flesh was rotten with it, tearing like the scribbled parchment it resembled. He made his own silent screams then and tried to die. But I held him there. I let the necromancy bind him into his skull.

“There is not sufficient hurt in this world for you.” And the fire that burned in my bones, that echoed in my blood, lit about my hands and he burned with it also, trapped, living, and consumed.

I threw his head toward the oncoming troops. It bounced flaming on the rocks, flesh bubbling, lips writhing.

Burning was too good for him.

I walked toward the flaming wreck of the trebuchet, the fire running up my arms now.

“Jorg?” Makin asked, his voice quiet as if at least half of him was hoping not to be noticed.

“Better run,” I said.

“We can’t outrun them,” Rike growled.

“From me,” I said.

The fire leapt as I approached it. It looked like glass, like a window. Behind me Makin and the others ran. I laughed. The joy of it, the roaring joy of destruction. That’s why the flames dance. For joy.

“There’s only one fire,” I said, and I knew Gog watched me from it.

I reached into the blaze and found him, flame-made, his white-hot hand in mine, the fragments of his lost body still in my flesh, preserving me. In the core of me this new fire magic—call it magic, or understanding, or empathy—made war on the necromancy that still infected my blood.

The Prince’s troops passed Rigden Rock, a spear flew by my head.

“Come to me,” I said, “Brother Gog.”

“Truly?” he asked. “There will be no end to this—like the sun beneath the mountain.”

A million images tumbled through me. Faces, moments, places, brothers of every kind. The weariness of the world. And the fire consumed it. I knew then how Ferrakind felt.

“Let it all burn.”

And Gog flowed into me. A river of fire, eating the death-magic and making something new, a darker fire that ran like poison, coiling about my limbs.

The first of Egan’s army reached me and the fire lifted from my hands. The men shredded, their flesh lifting from them as sea foam before a wind, their bones igniting as they fell. The dark-fire ran, jumping from man to man as the soldiers tried to flee, tried to turn and run, only to find their comrades not yet understanding, surging forward.

I walked amongst them and death walked with me.

Death and fire. Ferrakind howled at me from the place where fire lives, a song of destruction, stripping away what makes me. Ferrakind and every other lost to flame, all one now, fused, screaming for me to join them. And in the dry place into which the dead fall, other voices, just as compelling, implacable. The Dead King reached for me, along the paths through which necromancy flowed into my core, flooding me. These two among the many, both of them fought to claim me, dogs over a bone. And while they fought death and flame blossomed about me in conflagration, and men died, in tens, in scores, in hundreds, in stinking, steaming, screaming heaps.





49





Wedding day