King of Thorns

“Every new thing I hear about this Ferrakind is a new good reason not to go anywhere near him,” Makin said.

“We’re here because he’s gone soft on the little monster,” Row said from the doorway. He hadn’t been invited to the conversation. None of them had. But on the road any raised voice is an invitation for an audience. Although strictly we weren’t on the road. We were in chambers set aside for guests in a smaller hall paralleling the Duke of Maladon’s great hall.

“Or hard on him.” Rike leaned in under the door lintel, a nasty leer on him. Since I took the copper box he seemed to feel he had license to speak his mind.

I turned to the doorway. “Two things you should remember, my brothers.”

Grumlow, Sim, and Kent appeared as faces poking out behind Rike.

“First, if you answer me back on this I swear by every priest in hell that you will not leave this building alive. Second, you may recall a time when you and our late lamented brothers were busy dying outside the Haunt. And whilst the Count of Renar’s foot-soldiers were killing you. Killing Elban, and Liar, and Fat Burlow…Gog had the whole of the count’s personal guard, more than seventy picked men, either as burning pools of human fat, or too damn scared to move. And he was seven. So right now the kind of man he grows into, and whether he grows up at all, is a question of far greater interest to me than whether you sorry lot live to see tomorrow. In fact there are a lot of questions more important to me than whether you get a day older or not, Rike, but that one is top of the list.”

“You still need me there,” Makin said. Too many years guarding me had turned a duty into a habit, an imperative.

“If things go well I won’t need you,” I said. “And if they go badly, I don’t think an extra sword or two will help. He has a small army of trolls at his beck and call, and he can set men on fire by thinking about it. I don’t believe a sword will help.”

I left Makin still arguing and the others slinking around like whipped dogs. Well, not Red Kent. He had his new axe. Not a new one in truth but a fine one, forged in the high north and traded from the longships off Karlswater. Kent raised the axe to me as I left, nodded, and said nothing.

Gorgoth and Gog waited for me at the Duke’s storerooms, a sack of provisions between them and waxed blankets in case we needed shelter on the slopes.

We set off for the Heimrift with a fine spring morning breaking out all around us. We all walked. I’d grown used to Brath and had no desire to leave him untended on the side of a volcano. For all I knew trolls were partial to horsemeat. I quite like it myself.

Sindri caught us half a mile down the road, his plaits bouncing off his back as he cantered along.

“Not this time, Sindri, just me and the pretty boys here,” I said.

“You’ll want me until you’re clear of the forest.”

“The forest? We had no problems before,” I said.

“I watched you.” Sindri grinned. “If you had gone wrong I would have guided you. But you were lucky.”

“And what should I be scared of in the forest?” I asked. “Green trolls? Goblins? Grendel himself? You Danes have more boogie-men than the rest of the empire put together.”

“Pine men,” he said.

“How do they burn?” I asked.

He laughed at that, then let the smile fall from him. “There’s something in the forest that lets the blood from men and replaces it with pine sap. They don’t die, these men, but they change.” He pointed to his eyes. “The whites turn green. They don’t bleed. Axes don’t bother them.”

I pursed my lips. “You can guide us. I’m busy today. These pine men will have to come to the Highlands and get in line if they want a part of me.”

And so we walked, with Sindri leading his horse, along the forest paths he judged safe, and we watched the trees with new suspicions.

By noon the woods thinned and gave over to rising moorland. We marched through waist-deep bracken, thick with stands of gorse scratching as we passed, and everywhere heather, trying to trip us, clouds of pollen blazing our trail.

Sindri didn’t have to be told to leave. “I’ll wait here,” he said, and nestled back in the bracken on a slope that caught the sun. “Good luck with Ferrakind. If you kill him you’ll have at least one friend in the north. Probably a thousand!”

“I’m not here to kill him,” I said.

“Probably for the best,” Sindri said.