King of Thorns

She smiled and made a kiss with crimson lips. “Are you angry because I showed you your ghosts? It wasn’t me who made them, Jorg.”


That stole the certainty from me. I saw Ruth again, and her mother, scalded by the hot light of the Builders’ Sun. “I didn’t know—”

“You didn’t know a sun would burn them. You thought a cloud of poison would roll out and devastate the land. Isn’t that right? So, if Ruth and her mother and her child were choking on their own intestines, bleeding from eyes and anus, screaming different screams, that would be all right? That would be fine because that was the plan?” Chella stepped closer. Relentless.

I couldn’t answer that. I had thought to poison the Castle Red, and I had known it would be everyone in it, not just the warriors. And if the toxins had spread? I had no idea how far they might go. And I hadn’t cared.

“You know what men are really afraid of, Chella?” I asked.

“Tell me.” She ran her hands up her thighs, across her belly, smearing dark skin with darker mud.

Makin pressed the Nuban’s bow into my palm. I grasped it. The thing nearly too heavy to hold in one hand.

“Men are afraid of dying. Not of death. Men want it to be quick, clean. That’s the worst thing, the wound that lets you linger. Ain’t that right, Makin?”

“Yes,” he said. Makin isn’t a man of few words, but it’s difficult to break into a necromancer’s spell.

“Linger,” I said. “That’s a word that frightens the Brothers. Don’t let me linger, they say. And you know what undeath is, Chella? It’s the ultimate in lingering. A coward dies a thousand times, the Bard told us. And what about you? You’ve died just once but you’ve lingered a thousand times longer than you should.”

“Don’t mock me, child,” Chella said. Her ribs stood out now, her cheeks hollowed. “I hold more power—”

“You can show me my ghosts, Chella. You can try to scare me with death and with dead things, so that I’ll choose your path. But I have my own road to follow. My ghosts are my own and I will deal with them alone. You are a thing of rot and fear and you should find a grave that will take you.”

The time when nothing could put fear in me had passed. It seems terror is a companion in the soft years when everything is new, and returns to us with age, as we acquire things to lose. Perhaps I didn’t have my full share of old man’s cowardice just yet, but Gelleth’s ghosts and knowing how many dead things swam beneath the mud, ready for the necromancer’s call, had set a coldness in my bones. I had a prince to defeat, perhaps Katherine to woo, a comfortable throne to warm. Being drowned in slime by dead men didn’t fit into those plans.

“It wasn’t just ghosts I brought with me from Gelleth, Jorg.” Chella raised her arms high, a languid motion.

Other forms started to emerge from the mire, human forms.

I stuck my sword into the ground and lifted the Nuban’s bow.

“I’ve been collecting,” Chella said.

The shape rising in front of her held familiar lines, a broad and powerful build, darkest in the places where the mud lay thin. A hole in his chest.

“I think he wants his bow back,” Chella said.

To her left a bloated form, guts hanging like black sausage from his slit belly. Others around us, clawing and shaking the mud from their faces. One stood head and shoulders above the rest, flesh hanging from his bones in tatters.

“I’ve walked where you walked, Jorg, taken what you tried to burn, and dug where you buried. Even in the shadow of your walls.”

I knew them all. The Nuban between Chella and my bow…his bow, Fat Burlow to her left. Gemt with patches of dull red hair showing through the muck, head stitched back on, Brother Gains, Brother Jobe, Brother Roddat. Old Elban who always prayed for a quiet grave, Liar whose body we never found to bury even though he fell at the Haunt, and Brother Price all bones and tatters from four years in the ground. And more rising in the deep mire or hauling themselves onto firmer ground from the standing pools.

Chella watched me over the Nuban’s shoulder, using him as her shield. Another lesson in the value of attacking without hesitation.

“Join with me.” Her voice fluttered from corrupt lungs. Her eyes glittered, sunken in their sockets as if lifting my Brothers from the depths had sucked vitality from her. “My brother’s strength runs in you, all but unused, fading, wasted.”

Brother? The necromancer I cut down was her brother?

“My thanks, lady, but I’ve had my fill of necromancers.” I fired both bolts from the Nuban’s bow. One punched a hole in his shoulder. The other passed through Chella’s neck just to one side of her throat.

The Nuban, almost turned around by the impact, straightened and faced me again, no expression on his grey lips. Chella put a hand to her neck and twisted her head with a noise like popping cartilage.

“We’re family, Jorg. Families argue. But I forgive you, and when I’ve taken you down into the marsh with me…when we’re together in the cold deep places…embracing like family do…you’ll forgive me too.”