King of Thorns

“Ten centuries, maybe twelve,” she said. “Palaces have crumbled in that time. The statues of emperors lie ruined and buried. And this…” She held it up. An eye made slow rotations in the greenish swirl. “Still whole.”


“Is it your eye?” I asked.

“The very same.” She watched me with her bright one and set the other on the rug in its Builder flask.

“I sacrificed it for wisdom,” she said. “As Odin did at Mimir’s well.”

“And did you get wisdom?” I asked. An impertinent question perhaps from a boy of fourteen but she had asked to see me, not I her, and the longer I sat there, the smaller and older she looked.

She grinned, displaying a single rotting tooth-stump. “I discovered it would have been wise to leave my eye next to the other one.” The eye came to rest at the bottom of the jar, aimed slightly to my left.

“I see you have a baby with you,” she said.

I glanced to my side. The baby lay dead, brains oozing from his broken skull, not much blood but what there was lay shockingly red on his milk-white scalp. He seldom looked so clear, so real, but Ekatri’s yurt held the kind of shadows that invited ghosts. I said nothing.

“Show me the box.” She held out her hand.

I took it from its place just inside my breastplate. Keeping a tight grip I held it out toward her. She reached for it, quicker than an old woman has a right to be, and snatched her hand back with a gasp. “Powerful,” she said. Blood dripped from her fingers, welling from a dozen small puncture wounds. The fact that there was blood to spill in those bony old fingers surprised me.

I put the box back. “I should warn you that I’m not taken with horoscopes and such,” I told her.

She licked her lips again and said nothing.

“If you must know, I’m a goat,” I said. “That’s right, a fecking goat. There’s a whole nation of people behind the East Wall who say I was born in the year of the goat. I’ve no time for any system that has me as a goat. I don’t care how ancient their civilization is.”

She gave the flask a gentle swirl. “It sees into other worlds,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

“That’s good then?” I said.

She tapped her living eye. “This one sees into other worlds too,” she said. “And it has a clearer view.” She took a leather bag from within her rags and set it by the jar. “Rune stones,” she said. “Maybe if you go east and climb over the great wall you will be a goat. Here in the north the runes will tell your story.”

I kept my lips tight shut, remembering my pledge at last. She would tell me about the future or she wouldn’t. What she told me without questions to answer might be true.

She took a handful from the bag, grey stones clacking soft against each other. “Honorous Jorg Ancrath.” She breathed my name into the stones, then let them fall. It seemed that they took a lifetime to reach the rug, each making its slow turns, end to end, side to side, the runes scored across them appearing and reappearing. They hit like anvils. I can feel the shake of it even now. It echoes in these bones of mine.

“The Perth rune, initiation,” she said. “Thurisaz. Uruz, strength.” She poked them aside as if they were unimportant. She turned a stone over. “Wunjo, joy, face down. And here, Kano, the rune of opening.”

I set a finger to Thurisaz and the v?lva sucked a sharp breath over grey gums. She scowled and batted at my hand to move it, the stone cold to touch, the witch’s hand colder, thin skin like paper. She hadn’t spoken the rune’s name in the empire tongue but I knew the old speech of the north from Lundist’s books.

“The thorns,” I said.

She flapped at me again and I withdrew my hand. Her fingers passed swiftly over the rest, counting. She swept them all away and poured them back onto the others still in the bag. “There are arrows ahead of you,” she said.

“I’m going to be shot?”

“You will live happy if you don’t break the arrow.” She picked up the flask and stared one eye into the other. She shivered. “Open your gates.” In her other hand the Wunjo rune stone, as if she hadn’t put it into the bag. Joy. She turned it over, blank side up. “Or don’t.”

“What about Ferrakind?” I asked. I wasn’t interested in arrows.

“Him!” She spat a dark mess into her furs. “Don’t go there. Even you should know that, Jorg, with your dark heart and empty head. Don’t go anywhere near that man. He burns.”

“How many stones do you have in that bag, old woman?” I asked. “Twenty? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-four,” she said, and laid her claw on the bag, still bleeding.

“That’s not so many words to tell the story of a man’s life,” I said.

“Men’s lives are simple things,” she said.

I felt her hands on me, even though one lay on the bag and the other held the flask. I felt them pinching, poking, reaching in to pick through my memories. “Don’t,” I said. I let the necromancy rise in me, acid at the back of my throat. The dead things above us twisted, a dry paw twitched, the black twist of a man’s entrails crackled as it flexed, snake-like.