King of Thorns

I don’t think I am. In heat that is. I can be a bitch. I can be a bitch every day. I made Maery Coddin cry today and I hardly meant to.

Even so, there’s something about Orrin and something else about Egan. Grandmother would say they both burn too bright. Too bright for regular folks, she’d say. But I’ve never counted myself regular. And if they do burn bright—if they do put heat in me—or me in heat—what of it? I fancy I put some heat in them. Or why would they both be back at the Tall Castle a moon after their first visit? I don’t think it’s for the pleasure of King Olidan’s company. I don’t think Orrin’s charm or Egan’s threat had much impact on that scary old man. I don’t think the devil would make Olidan pause. I don’t think he’d bow his head even if God himself sent an angel to his doors.

Sareth says both the Arrows are pointed my way. She has a dirty mouth. She says they’ll both ask for my hand. Even though I’m not Scorron’s first daughter and Father promised alliance and land to Olidan already. She says they’ll both ask for my hand but it’s not my hand they’re interested in, or my dowry. She said more, but her mouth is dirtier than my quill, black with ink though it is. And if they did ask, what would I say? It hardly seems that they can be brothers, one as bright and good as my Sir Galen, the other as dark and tempting as Jorg who killed him.

I dreamed again last night. I woke up speaking the words of that dream and now I can’t even remember the shape of it. I can remember a knife, a long knife. I know I need to use it. I remember Jorg hurt me. I should go back and read my journal, but somehow my hands don’t want to turn the pages back, only forward. I had a dream about that too.

Sageous is at the door again. The princes are waiting.

I don’t like that man’s eyes.





Gorgoth is like no other. There is no mould for the leucrota. Twisted by the Builders’ poisons they fall broken from the womb and follow strange paths as they grow. The ribs that pierce his flesh and reach from each side are black and thick, his hide more red than blood, and the muscle beneath surges as he moves. And though he is shaped for war and for horror, there are few men in Adam’s image whose approval would mean as much to me—and most of them lie dead.





14





Four years earlier


A day after we left the sands of Thar and started to ride through the Thurtan grasslands I took the box from Makin. I felt the sharp edges of the lost memory through the copper walls and sensed the poison held there. Makin once told me that a man who’s got no fear is missing a friend. With the thorn-patterned copper clutched uneasy in my fist I thought perhaps I had found that friend at last. I turned it one way, then the other. It held nothing good—only me. And a man should be a little scared of himself surely? Of what he might do. To know thyself must be terribly dull. I put the box at the bottom of my saddlebag and left it unopened. I didn’t ask after Katherine. I took a new knife from Grumlow and rode toward our business in Heimrift.

We rode north across wide acres where the wind whipped the spring grass into a thrashing sea and green ripples raced one after the other. A land made for horse, for galloping, for chasing between the dark borders of one forest and the next. I let Brath have his head and exhausted both of us as if all hell were at our heels. The Brothers kept pace as best they could, all of us wanting to leave Thar many miles behind. Old fires still burned there, unseen. In a thousand years Mount Honas, the place where I lit a Builders’ Sun, might be like Thar, a Promised Land that would return to man in time but for the now loved us not.


That night as we settled to sleep I saw the baby for the first time, lying dead in the long grass by our camp. I threw off my blanket and walked across to it, watched by Gorgoth, and by Gog who slept beside him now. The spot where the child had lain was empty. I caught a whiff of perfume, white musk maybe. With a shrug I returned to my bed. Some things are best forgotten.

We travelled the next day and the next along the banks of the River Rhyme that flows between Thurtan and its neighbours to the east. The Rhyme lands were once the Empire’s garden, farmed with exquisite care. Push a nation’s borders back and forth across a garden a dozen times and all that’s left is mud and ruin.

At one point we rode through a field of old-stones, hundreds upon hundreds in marching lines, single blocks a little taller than a man, a little wider, all set on end, lichen covered, knee-deep grass swaying around them. Ancient before the Builders came, ancient before the Greeks, Lundist told me. An uncomfortable power throbbed between the monoliths and I led the Brothers faster than was prudent to clear the field.

On the fourth day a soft rain wrapped us and fell without pause from dawn till dusk. I rode for a while beside Maical, rolling gently in the grey’s saddle. He always rode as if he were at sea, did Maical, slumping forward, rolling back, not an ounce of grace in him.