King of Thorns (2 page)

I should have stabbed Jorg when I had the chance. If my hands would do what I told them more often. If they would stop trembling the quill, learn to sew
properly, stab murdering nephews when instructed…Friar Glen said the boy tore most of my dress off. Certainly it’s a ruin now. Beyond the rescue of even these empty ladies with their needles and thread.

I’m being too mean. I blame the ache in my head. Sareth tells me be nice. Be nice. Maery Coddin isn’t all sewing and gossip. Though she’s sewing now and tutting with the rest of them. Maery’s worth talking to on her own, I suppose. There. That’s enough nice for one day. Sareth is always nice and look where that got her. Married to an old man, and not a kind one but a cold and scary one, and her belly all fat with a child that will probably run as savage as Jorg Ancrath.

I’m going to have them bury Hanna in the forest graveyard. Maery tells me she’ll lie easy there. All the castle servants are buried there unless their families claim them. Maery says she’ll find me a new maidservant but that seems so cold, to just replace Hanna as if she were torn lace, or a broken vase. We’ll go out by cart tomorrow. There’s a man making her coffin now. My head feels as if he’s hammering the nails into it instead.

I should have left Jorg to die on the throne-room floor. But it didn’t feel right. Damn him.

We’ll bury Hanna tomorrow. She was old and always complaining of her aches but that doesn’t mean she was ready to go. I will miss her. She was a hard woman, cruel maybe, but never to me. I don’t know if I’ll cry when we put her in the ground. I should. But I don’t know if I will.

That’s for tomorrow. Today we have a visitor. The Prince of Arrow is calling, with his brother Prince Egan and his retinue. I think Sareth would like to match me there. Or maybe it’s the old man, King Olidan. Not many of Sareth’s ideas are her own these days. We will see.

I think I’ll try to sleep now. Maybe my headache will be gone in the morning. And the strange dreams too. Maybe Mother’s vase knocked those dreams right out of me.

Open the box, Jorg.

I watched it. A copper box, thorn patterned, no lock or latch.

Open the box, Jorg.

A copper box. Not big enough to hold a head. A child’s fist would fit.

A goblet, the box, a knife.

I watched the box and the dull reflections from the fire in the hearth. The warmth did not reach me. I let it burn down. The sun fell, and shadows stole the room. The embers held my gaze. Midnight filled the hall and still I didn’t move, as if I were carved from stone, as if motion were a sin. Tension knotted me. It tingled along my cheekbones, clenched in my jaw. I felt the table’s grain beneath my fingertips.

The moon rose and painted ghost-light across the stone-flagged floor. The moonlight found my goblet, wine untouched, and made the silver glow. Clouds swallowed the sky and in the darkness rain fell, soft with old memories. In the small hours, abandoned by fire, moon, and stars, I reached for my blade. I laid the keen edge cold against my wrist.

The child still lay in the corner, limbs at corpse angles, too broken
for all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Sometimes I feel I’ve seen more ghosts than people, but this boy, this child of four, haunts me.

Open the box.

The answer lay in the box. I knew that much. The boy wanted me to open it. More than half of me wanted it open too, wanted to let those memories flood out, however dark, however dangerous. It had a pull on it, like the cliff’s edge, stronger by the moment, promising release.

“No.” I turned my chair toward the window and the rain, shading to snow now.

I carried the box out of a desert that could burn you without needing the sun. Four years I’ve kept it. I’ve no recollection of first laying hands upon it, no image of its owner, few facts save only that it holds a hell which nearly broke my mind.

Campfires twinkled distant through the sleet. So many they revealed the shape of the land beneath them, the rise and fall of mountains. The Prince of Arrow’s men took up three valleys. One alone wouldn’t contain his army. Three valleys choked with knights and archers, foot-soldiers, pikemen, men-at-axe and men-at-sword, carts and wagons, engines for siege, ladders, rope, and pitch for burning. And out there, in a blue pavilion, Katherine Ap Scorron, with her four hundred, lost in the throng.

At least she hated me. I’d rather die at the hands of somebody who wanted to kill me, to have it mean something to them.

Within a day they would surround us, sealing the last of the valleys and mountain paths to the east. Then we would see. Four years I had held the Haunt since I took it from my uncle. Four years as King of Renar. I wouldn’t let it go easy. No. This would go hard.

The child stood to my right now, bloodless and silent. There was no light in him but I could always see him through the dark. Even through eyelids. He watched me with eyes that looked like mine.

I took the blade from my wrist and tapped the point to my teeth. “Let them come,” I said. “It will be a relief.”

That was true.

I stood and stretched. “Stay or go, ghost. I’m going to get some sleep.”

And that was a lie.

The servants came at first light and I let them dress me. It seems a silly thing but it turns out that kings have to do what kings do. Even copper-crown kings with a single ugly castle and lands that spend most of their time going either up or down at an unseemly angle, scattered with more goats than people. It turns out that men are more apt to die for a king who is dressed by pinch-fingered peasants every morning than for a king who knows how to dress himself.

I broke fast with hot bread. I have my page wait at the doors to my chamber with it of a morning. Makin fell in behind me as I strode to the throne-room, his heels clattering on the flagstones. Makin always had a talent for making a din.

“Good morning, Your Highness,” he says.

“Stow that shit.” Crumbs everywhere. “We’ve got problems.”

“The same twenty thousand problems we had on our doorstep last night?” Makin asked. “Or new ones?”

I glimpsed the child in a doorway as we passed. Ghosts and daylight don’t mix, but this one could show in any patch of shadow.

“New ones,” I said. “I’m getting married before noon and I haven’t got a thing to wear.”

“Princess Miana is being attended by Father Gomst and the Sisters of Our Lady,” Coddin reported. He still looked uncomfortable in chamberlain’s velvets; the Watch-Commander’s uniform had better suited him. “There are checks to be carried out.”

“Let’s just be glad nobody has to check
my
purity.” I eased back into the throne. Damn comfortable: swan-down and silk. Kinging it is pain in the arse enough without one of those gothic chairs. “What does she look like?”

Coddin shrugged. “A messenger brought this yesterday.” He held up a gold case about the size of a coin.

“So what does she look like?”

He shrugged again, opened the case with his thumbnail and squinted at the miniature. “Small.”

“Here!” I caught hold of the locket and took a look for myself. The artists who take weeks to paint these things with a single hair are never going to spend that time making an ugly picture. Miana looked acceptable. She didn’t have the hard look about her that Katherine does, the kind of look that lets you know the person is really alive, devouring
every moment. But when it comes down to it, I find most women attractive. How many men are choosy at eighteen?

“And?” Makin asked from beside the throne.

“Small,” I said and slipped the locket into my robe. “Am I too young for wedlock? I wonder…”

Makin pursed his lips. “I was married at twelve.”

“You liar!” Not once in all these years had Sir Makin of Trent mentioned a wife. He’d surprised me; secrets are hard to keep on the road, among brothers, drinking ale around the campfire after a hard day’s blood-letting.

“No lie,” he said. “But twelve is too young. Eighteen is a good age for marriage, Jorg. You’ve waited long enough.”

“What happened to your wife?”

“Died. There was a child too.” He pressed his lips together.

It’s good to know that you don’t know everything about a man. Good that there might always be more to come.

“So, my queen-to-be is nearly ready,” I said. “Shall I go to the altar in this rag?” I tugged at the heavy samite collar, all scratchy at my neck. I didn’t care of course but a marriage is a show, for high- and low-born alike, a kind of spell, and it pays to do it right.

“Highness,” Coddin said, pacing his irritation out before the dais. “This…distraction…is ill-timed. We have an army at our gates.”

“And to be fair, Jorg, nobody knew she was coming until that rider pulled in,” Makin said.

I spread my hands. “I didn’t know she would arrive last night. I’m not magic you know.” I glimpsed the dead child slumped in a distant corner. “I had hoped she would arrive before the summer ended. In any case, that army has a good three miles to march if it wants to be at my gates.”

“Perhaps a delay is in order?” Coddin hated being chamberlain with every fibre of his being. Probably that was why he was the only one I’d trust to do it. “Until the conditions are less…inclement.”

“Twenty thousand at our door, Coddin. And a thousand inside our
walls. Well, most of them outside because my castle is too damn small to fit them in.” I found myself smiling. “I don’t think conditions are going to improve. So we might as well give the army a queen as well as a king to die for, neh?”

“And concerning the Prince of Arrow’s army?” Coddin asked.

“Is this going to be one of those times when you pretend not to have a plan until the last moment?” Makin asked. “And then turn out to really not have one?”

He looked grim despite his words. I thought perhaps he could still see his own dead child. He had faced death with me before and done it with a smile.

“You, girl!” I shouted to one of the serving girls lurking at the far end of the hall. “Go tell that woman to bring me a robe fit to get married in. Nothing with lace, mind.” I stood and set a hand to the pommel of my sword. “The night patrols should be back about now. We’ll go down to the east yard and see what they have to say for themselves. I sent Red Kent and Little Rikey along with one of the Watch patrols. Let’s hear what they think about these men of Arrow.”

Makin led the way. Coddin had grown twitchy about assassins. I knew what lurked in the shadows of my castle and it wasn’t assassins that I worried about. Makin turned the corner and Coddin held my shoulder to keep me back.

“The Prince of Arrow doesn’t want me knifed by some black-cloak, Coddin. He doesn’t want drop-leaf mixed into my morning bread. He wants to roll over us with twenty thousand men and grind us into the dirt. He’s already thinking of the empire throne. Thinks he has a toe past the Gilden Gate. He’s building his legend now and it’s not going to be one of knives in the dark.”

“Of course, if you had more soldiers you might be worth stabbing.” Makin turned his head and grinned.

We found the patrol waiting, stamping in the cold. A few castle women fussed around the wounded, planting a stitch or two. I let the commander tell his tale to Coddin while I called Red Kent to my side.
Rike loomed behind him uninvited. Four castle years had softened none of Rike’s edges, still close on seven foot of ugly temper with a face to match the blunt, mean, and brutal soul that looked out from it.

“Little Rikey,” I said. It had been a while since I’d spoken to the man. Years. “And how’s that lovely wife of yours?” In truth I’d never seen her but she must have been a formidable woman.

“She broke.” He shrugged.

I turned away without comment. There’s something about Rike makes me want to go on the attack. Something elemental, red in tooth and claw. Or perhaps it’s just because he’s so damn big. “So, Kent,” I said. “Tell me the good news.”

“There’s too many of them.” He spat into the mud. “I’m leaving.”

“Well now.” I threw an arm around him. Kent don’t look much but he’s solid, all muscle and bone, quick as you like too. What makes him though, what sets him apart, is a killer’s mind. Chaos, threat, bloody murder, none of that fazes him. Every moment of a crisis he’ll be considering the angles, tracking weapons, looking for the opening, taking it.