King of Thorns

On the long journey south I questioned the motivation for my diversion more than once. More than a hundred times, truth be told. The fact of the matter was that I hadn’t found what I needed yet. I didn’t know what I needed, but I knew it wasn’t in the Haunt. My old tutor, Lundist, once said that if you don’t know where to look for something, just start looking where you are. For a clever man he could be very stupid. I planned to look everywhere.


We rode out on the sixth day. I sat in Brath’s saddle stiff in every muscle, my face aching and weeping.

“You’re still sick,” Makin said beside me.

“I’m sicker of sitting in that chair watching you gorge yourself as if your only ambition were to be spherical,” I said.

The Duke came to the doors of his hall with a hundred and more of his warriors to see us off. Sindri stood at his right hand, Elin at his left. Alaric led them in a cheer. Three times they roared and shook their axes overhead. They were a scary enough bunch saying farewell to friends. I didn’t fancy the chances of any they deemed to be enemies.

The Duke left his men to come to my side. “You worked a magic here, Jorg. It will not be forgotten.”

I nodded. “Leave the Heimrift in peace, Duke,” I said. “Halradra and his sons are sleeping. No need to go poking them.”

“And you have a friend up there.” He smiled.

“He’s no friend of mine,” I said. Part of me wished he was though. I liked Gorgoth. Unfortunately he was a good judge of men.

“Good travels.” Sindri came to stand beside his father, grinning as ever.

“Come back to us in the winter, King Jorg.” Elin joined them.

“You wouldn’t want to see this ugly face again.” I watched her pale eyes.

“A man’s scars tell his story. Yours is a story I like to read,” she said.

I had to grin at that, though it hurt me. “Ha!” And I wheeled Brath to lead my Brothers south.


Back on the road, and with regular applications of Ekatri’s black ointment, my face began to heal, the raw flesh congealing to an ugly mass of scar tissue. From the right you got handsome Jorgy Ancrath, from the left, something monstrous: my true nature showing through, some might say. The pain eased, replaced by an unpleasant tightness and a deeper burning around the bones. At last I could bear to eat. Now all the fine servings from the Duke’s table were trailing farther and farther behind us, I discovered that I had an awful hunger about me. And that’s a thing about the road. Out on a horse, trotting the ways of empire day after day with nothing to eat but what you can carry or steal, you discover that everything tastes good when your stomach is empty. If you look at a mouldy piece of cheese and your mouth doesn’t water—you’re just not proper hungry.

In the Haunt the cooks would honey-glaze venison and garnish it with baked, rosemary-sprinkled dormice just to tempt my palate. After days in the saddle I find that in order for food to tempt me it must be either hot or cold and preferably, though not essentially, if it is animal, that it should not be moving and should once have possessed a backbone.

Around the fire at camp on that first evening we made a subdued huddle, somehow more reduced by the absence of our smallest companion than by that of our largest. I stared at the flames and imagined a sympathetic tingling in the bones of my jaw, even under the deadening effect of the ointment.

“I miss the little fellow.” Grumlow surprised me.

“Aye.” Sim spat.

Red Kent looked up from the polishing of his axe. “Did he give good account of himself, Jorg?”

“He saved me and Gorgoth both,” I said. “And he finished the fire-mage before he died.”

“Sounds about right,” Row said. “He were a godless bastard, that one, but he had a fire in him, God did he.”

“Makin,” I said.

He looked up, the flames reflected in his eyes.

“Since Coddin is at home…” I paused then, realizing that I’d called the Haunt “home” for the first time. “Since Coddin is at home, and the Nuban isn’t with us…”

“Yes?” he said.

“I’m saying, if I set on a path that’s…maybe a little too harsh. Just let me know. All right?”

He pursed those too-fleshy lips of his then sucked air in through his teeth. “I’ll try,” he said. He’d been trying all these years, I knew that, but now I gave him permission.