Prince of Thorns

“Should have taken your moment, Scar-face,” I said.

I got back onto the street just in time to meet some huge red-faced bastard of a house-trooper who’d run his way up the hill. He pretty much exploded as the Nuban’s bolts hit him. Then they were on us. The Nuban picked up his mattock and Red Kent grabbed his axe. Roddat came past me with his spear and found a man to pin with it.

They came in two waves. There were the dozen or so who’d kept up with Marclos’s bodyguard and then behind them, another twenty coming at a slower pace. The rest lay strewn along the main street or dead in the ruins.

I ran past Roddat and the man he’d skewered. Past a couple of swordsmen who didn’t want me bad enough, and I was through the first wave. I could see that skinny bastard with the boils on his cheeks, there in the second wave, the one who’d joked about me on the fire.

Me charging the second wave, howling for Boil-cheeks’s blood. That’s what broke them. And the men from the ridge? They never reached us. Little Rikey thought they might be carrying loot.

I reckon more than half of the Count’s men ran. But they weren’t the Count’s men any more. They couldn’t go back.

Makin came up the hill, blood all over him. He looked like Red Kent the day we found him! Burlow came with him, but he stopped to loot the dead, and of course that involves turning the injured into the dead.

“Why?” Makin wanted to know. “I mean, superb victory, my prince . . . but why in the name of all the hells run such a risk?”

I held my sword up. The brothers around me took a step back, but to his credit, Makin didn’t flinch. “See this sword?” I said. “Not a drop of blood on it.” I showed it around, then waved it at the ridge. “And out there there’s fifty men who’ll never fight for the Count of Renar again. They work for me now. They’re carrying a story about a prince who killed the Count’s son. A prince who would not retreat. A prince who never retreats. A prince who didn’t have to blood his sword to beat a hundred men with thirty.

“Think about it, Makin. I made Roddat here fight like a madman because I told him if they think you’re not going to give up, they’ll break. Now I’ve got fifty enemies who’re out there telling everyone who’ll listen, ‘That Prince of Ancrath, he’s not going to break.’ It’s a simple sum. If they think we won’t break, they give up.”

All true. It wasn’t the reason, but it was all true.





9


Four years earlier




The baton struck my wrist with a loud crack. My other hand caught hold as it rose. I tried to twist it free, but Lundist held tight. Even so, I could see his surprise.

“I see you were paying attention after all, Prince Jorg.”

In truth I had been somewhere else, somewhere bloody, but my body has a habit of keeping watch for me at such times.

“Perhaps you can summarize my points thus far?” he said.

“We are defined by our enemies. This holds true for men, and by extension, their countries,” I said. I’d recognized the book Lundist brought to the lesson. That our enemies shape us was its central thesis.

“Good.” Lundist pulled his baton free and pointed to the tablemap. “Gelleth, Renar, and the Ken Marshes. Ancrath is a product of her environs; these are the wolves at her door.”

“The Renar highlands are all I care about,” I said. “The rest can go hang.” I rocked my chair onto the back two legs. “When Father orders the Gate against Count Renar, I’m going too. I’ll kill him myself if they let me.”

Lundist shot me a look, a sharp one, to see if I meant it. There’s something wrong about such blue eyes in an old man, but wrong or not he could see to the heart with them.

“Boys of ten are better occupied with Euclid and Plato. When we visit war, Sun Tzu will be our guide. Strategy and tactics, these are of the mind, these are the tools of prince and king.”

I did mean it. I had a hunger in me, an aching for the Count’s death. The tight lines around Lundist’s mouth told me that he knew how deep the hunger ran.

I looked to the high window where sunlight fingered into the schoolroom and turned the dust to dancing motes of gold. “I will kill him,” I said. Then, with a sudden need to shock, “Maybe with a poker, like I killed that ape Inch.” It galled me to have killed a man and have no memory of it, not even a trace of whatever rage drove me to it.

I wanted some new truth from Lundist. Explain me, to me. Whatever the words, that was my question, youth to old age. But even tutors have their limits.