Prince of Thorns

“You’ll give me a life, brother, or I’ll take yours as forfeit,” I said.

More laughter from the cells, and this time the Nuban joined in. “Who do you want killed, Little Brother?” He set the key in the lock.

“I’ll tell you when we see him,” I said. To specify Count Renar now would raise too many questions. “I’m coming with you.”

Lundist rushed forward at that. He pivoted past the Nuban, delivering a kick to the back of his knee. I heard a loud click as the black man went down.

The Nuban twisted as he fell, and lunged for Lundist. Somehow the old man evaded him, and when the Nuban sprawled at his feet, Lundist kicked him in the neck, a blow that cut off his oath and left him limp on the stone floor.

I almost skipped free, but Lundist’s fingers knotted in my hair as it streamed behind me. “Jorg! This is not the way!”

I fought to escape, snarling. “It’s exactly the way.” And I knew it to be true. The wildness in the Nuban, the bonds between these men, the focus on what will make the difference—no matter what the situation—all of it echoed in me.

From the corner of my eye I caught sight of the cell door opening. The click had been the key turning.

Lundist held my shoulders and made me face him. “You’ve no place with these men, Jorg. You can’t imagine the life they lead. They don’t have the answers you want.” He had such intensity to him, I could almost believe he cared.

A figure emerged from the cell, stooping to come through the doorway. I’d never seen a man so big, not Sir Gerrant of the Table Guard, not Shem the stablehand, nor the wrestlers from The Slavs.

The man came up behind Lundist, quick, a rolling storm.

“Jorg, you think I don’t understand—” The sweep of a massive arm cut off Lundist’s words and sent him to the stone floor with such force I’d have winced even if he hadn’t taken a handful of my hair with him.

The man towered over me, an ugly giant in stinking rags, with his hair hanging down in matted curtains. The scale of him mesmerized me. He reached for me, and I moved too slow. The hand that caught me could almost close around my waist. He lifted me level with his face, and his filthy mane parted as he looked up.

“Jesu, but you’re one hideous offence to the eye.” I could tell he was going to kill me, so no point in being tactful. “I can see why the King wants to execute you.”

Even from the anonymity of the cells the laughter was hesitant. Not a man to mock, then. Nothing soft in his face, just brute lines, scar, and the jut of bone beneath coarse skin. He lifted me, as if to dash me on the stone, like throwing down an egg.

“No!”

I could see under the giant’s arm, an old man and a red-haired youth had followed him out and were now helping the Nuban to his feet.

“No,” the Nuban said again. “I owe him a life, Brother Price. And besides, without him, you’d still be in that cell waiting on the pleasures of the morrow.”

Brother Price gave me a look of impersonal malice, and let me fall as though I’d ceased to exist. “Let them all out.” He growled the words.

The Nuban gave the keys to the old man. “Brother Elban.” Then he came across to where I’d landed. Lundist lay close by, face to the floor, blood pooling around his forehead.

“The gods sent you, boy, to loose me from that table.” The Nuban glanced at the torture rack, then at Lundist. “You come with the brothers now. If we find the man you want dead, I kill him, maybe.”

I narrowed my eyes. I didn’t like that “maybe.”

I looked to Lundist for a moment. I couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. I sensed a ghost of the guilt I should perhaps have felt, the itch from an amputated limb, still niggling though the flesh has long since gone.

I stood beside the Nuban, with Lundist at my feet, and watched as the outlaws released their comrades. I found myself staring into the orange heat of the coals, remembering.

I remembered a time when I lived in the lie. I lived in a world of soft things, mutable truths, gentle touches, laughter for its own sake. The hand that pulled me from the carriage that night, from the warmth of my mother’s side, into a night of rain and screaming, that hand pulled me out by a doorway that I can’t go back through. We all of us pass through that door, but we tend to exit of our own volition, and by degrees, sniffing the air, torn and tentative.

In the days following my escape and illness, I saw my old dreams grow small and wither. I saw my child’s life yellow on the tree and fall, as if a harsh winter had come to haunt the spring. It was a shock to see how little my life had meant. How mean the dens and forts in which William and I had played with such fierce belief, how foolish our toys without the intensity of an innocent imagination to animate their existence.

Every waking hour I felt an ache, a pain that grew each time I turned the memory over in my hand. And I returned to it, time and again, like a tongue to the socket of a missing tooth, drawn by the absence.