King of Thorns (26 page)

Or I could ask someone to help me lose it. They had old mothers in the slum quarter in Scorron who could grind up a bitter paste…and the babies would fall out of the women who went to them, tiny and dead. But that was in Scorron. I don’t know who to ask here. Maery Coddin maybe, but she’s too good, too clean. She would tell Sareth and Sareth would tell King Olidan and who knows what he would do to me for spoiling his plans, for not playing his game of statehood like a good pawn, for falling off the board.

Better I should marry Prince Orrin or Egan. Quickly before it shows. Egan wouldn’t wait for the wedding. He would be on me in a moment. He would never know it wasn’t his. Orrin would wait.

“Where’s Coddin, dammit?”

“Back down there.” Watch-master Hobbs pointed down the valley. The grey rear-guard of the Watch sketched a ragged line ahead of the foremost of Arrow’s troops.

“Should have left him in the castle, Jorg,” Makin said, heaving a breath between every other word. “He’s too old for running.”

I spat. “Keppen’s a hundred if he’s a day, and he’d be up and down this mountain before you’d broke fast, Sir Makin.”

“He might be sixty,” Makin said. “A whack older than Coddin in any case, I’ll grant you.”

Watch-master Hobbs joined us on the ridge, with Captain Stodd beside him, his short beard white against a red face.

“Well?” Hobbs said.

I watched him.

“Sire,” he added.

It’s easy to lose faith on the mountain, but also to find it. Somehow being a few thousand feet closer to God makes all the difference.

Hobbs had good reason for his doubts in any case. Above us the valley narrowed to a steep-sided pass, a choke point that would slow three hundred men to the point where the men of Arrow might finally get to blood their swords after their long chase. Above that, the snowline and the long climb to Blue Moon Pass, blocked at this time of year despite the promise of its name. Below us ten times our number and more filled the valley, a carpet of men in constant motion, the sun glittering off helms, shields, the points of sword and spear.

“Let’s wait for Coddin,” I said. Even Coddin needed his faith restored.

“Sire.” Hobbs bowed his head. He took his bow in hand and waited, his breath heavy in his chest. A good man, or if not good, solid. Father picked him from the royal guard for the Forest Watch, not as punishment but to reward the Watch.

I looked away from the seething mass of men to the peaks, snow-clad, serene. The snowline waited for us not far above the choke point. The wind carried fresh snow, icy crystals in a thin swirl. None of us felt the cold. Ten thousand mountain steps burned in my legs, leaving them to tremble, and warming my blood close to boiling point.

To the west I could see God’s Finger. The tiredness in me was nothing compared to what I felt the day I hauled myself onto the tip of that finger and lay as dead beneath the bluest sky. I lay there for hours and in the end I stood, leaning into the teeth of the wind, and drew my sword.

When you climb take nothing that is not essential. I took a sword, strapped across my back. There’s a song behind the swinging of a sword. On God’s Finger it can be heard more clearly. I had climbed chasing the memory of my mother’s music, but the Spire had sung me a different song. Perhaps it’s that heaven is closer, perhaps the wind brings it. Either way I heard the sword-song that day and I made my blade
kata
, slicing the gale, spinning, turning, striking high then low. I danced to the sword-song in that high place for an hour maybe more, wild play with
an endless drop on every side. And then, before the sun fell too low, I left the blade on the rocks, an offering to the elements, and started down.

Standing on God’s Finger I had first understood why men might fight for a place, for rocks and streams, no matter who calls themselves king there. The power of place. I felt it again at the head of the valley with the hordes of Arrow swarming toward me.

“What ho, Coddin,” I said as my chancellor staggered to us. “You look half-dead.”

He hadn’t the breath for a reply.

“Do you have what I gave you?” I asked. At the time I hadn’t known why I gave it to him, only that I should.

Still gasping, Coddin shrugged off his pack and dug into it. “Be glad I didn’t drop it just to keep ahead of the enemy,” he said.

I took the whistle from him, a Highland whistle such as the goatherds use, a foot long with a leather-washered piston.

“I always trust you to deliver, Coddin,” I said, though I had Makin carry a second and had a third with Keppen. Trust is a fine thing but try not to build plans upon it.

“We’re none of us local men,” I said to my captains, voice raised for the Watch men starting to gather round. “Well, you are.” I pointed to a fellow in the second rank. “But most of us were born and raised in Ancrath.”

The last of the Watch were drawing in now, the men of Arrow a couple of hundred yards farther back, toiling over broken rock.

“You’re here with me, men of Ancrath, because you’re my best warriors, because you learned to fight in lands that are hard to defend and that others want to take. These Highlands of ours, however, are easier to protect, and hold bugger all save stones and goats.” That got a laugh or two. Some of the Watch still had go in them.

“Today,” I said. “We all become Highlanders.”

I took the whistle, held it high, and drove the piston home, not too
hard because that spoils the tone. It’s a steady pressure gives the best results.

A goat-whistle will carry for miles across the mountains. It’s pitched to let the wind take it and to bounce from rock to rock. One long blast would reach almost back to the Haunt. Certainly far enough to reach each and every Highlander I had hidden on the high slopes overlooking our path up the mountain. And not just any Highlanders these, but the men who had held these particular slopes from generation to generation. The men who like their fathers and grandfathers would take a rock for a walk. They kept their secrets well, the men of Renar, but from the tip of God’s Finger, that day years before, it had all been revealed to me.

It took the blasts of seven trumpets to bring down the walls of Jericho, but they weren’t stacked to fall. One blast of a herder’s whistle set the mountainsides moving in the Renar Highlands. On both sides of the valley, along the full length, a dozen individual rockslides. The Highlanders know their slopes with an intimacy that puts lovers’ knowing of each other’s curves to shame. Big stones poised to fall, boulders on edge with levers set and ready, toppled with a shove and a grunt, rolling, colliding, cascading one into several into many into too many. We felt the ground tremble beneath our feet. The noise, like a millstone grinding, rattled teeth in loose sockets. In moments the whole valley had been set in motion and Arrow’s thousands vanished as the dust rose and stone churned flesh into bloody paste.

“Well, thank you, Coddin. Much appreciated.” I handed him back the whistle. “Hobbs,” I said. “When the dust clears enough for a good shot, if you could have the men knock down anyone still standing.”

“Christ Bleeding,” Makin said, staring into the valley below us. “How…”

“Topology,” I said. “It’s a kind of magic.”

“And what now, King Jorg?” Coddin asked, faith restored but still
focused on the numbers, knowing our chances against seventeen or sixteen thousand were scarcely better than our chances against twenty thousand.

“Back down, of course!” I said. “We can’t attack from up here now, can we?”

The journey back to the Haunt took us over fresh territory, a new and broken surface, littered with dead men turned into ground meat, and here and there along the way the cries of live ones trapped beneath us. We moved on, the grey of the Watch’s tatter-robes renewed with rock dust, the men pale with powdered stone and with horror.

The Prince’s army encircled the Haunt now, archers on the heights, siege machinery being hauled into place. All my troops at the castle crowded within the walls, space or not. There was no standing against the foe on open ground.

I could see units of bowmen descending in long files, presumably ordered east to meet our advance in light of the recent massacre. The Prince looked to be a fast learner. He anticipated my renewed attack. It didn’t seem likely that he would consider my three hundred men a mere nuisance this time.

“He shouldn’t be in a hurry,” Makin said beside me.

“He’ll reduce the walls and thin the ranks first,” said Coddin.

“He doesn’t need to get inside until the snows come, the big snows,”
said Hobbs. “Inside by the big snows. Winter by the fire. Over the passes when the spring clears them.”

“He wants in today,” I told them. “Tomorrow by the latest. He’ll go through the front gate.”

“Why?” Coddin asked. He didn’t argue, but he wanted to understand.

“Why waste a good castle?” I said. “A big push. A surrender. A dose of mercy and he has a new stronghold, a new garrison, and a small repair to make on the entrance. He doesn’t do half measures any more than I do. Go in hard, fast, get the job done.”

“A dose of mercy?” Makin asked. “You think that famous Arrow mercy has survived recent events?”

“Maybe not,” I said, my smile grim, “but I don’t intend to offer any either. Mark me, old friend, nobody gets out alive, not this time.”

“Red Jorg.” Makin clapped his hand to his chest as he had at Remagen Fort years before.

“A red day,” I said. I dipped two fingers into something that lived and laughed just hours ago and drew a crimson line down my left cheek then the right.

As we made our way back down the valley I fiddled with the copper box in its leather sack on my hip. All day I had felt Sageous trespassing through the edge of my imaginations, the half-dreams and daydreams to which he could find paths. My own sources, a spy network far less sophisticated than most of the Hundred maintained, told me the Prince of Arrow had a second army, far smaller than the one at my gates, headed for Ancrath and the Tall Castle, presumably to ensure my father kept his troops indoors. There seemed no reason for Sageous to be haunting my dreams unless he had joined Arrow when the balance of power became clear and now served as the Prince’s advisor, seeking of course to own his mind rather than merely guide it.

Then again, the dream-witch might be keeping himself at the Tall Castle. It might be that Sageous sought to know my plans in order to
sell them to Arrow and buy Ancrath’s independence for my father. Either way, I wasn’t going to show them to him.

I snagged the thread of memory that I’d been fishing for and pulled at it. The pre-laid plans that I stored in the box always emerged as sudden inspiration, moments of epiphany where disparate facts connected. I drew on the thread of my schemes but this time something went wrong. This time, despite my care, the box cracked open, a hair’s breadth, and I saw in my mind’s eye a dark light bleeding from beneath the lid. I hammered it down in an instant and it closed with a
schnick
.

For the longest moment I thought that nothing had escaped.

Then the memory lifted me.

“Hello, Jorg,” she says, and my clever words desert me.

“Hello, Katherine.”

And we stand among the graves with the stone girl and the stone dog between us, and blossom swirls like pink snow as the wind picks up, and I think of a snow-globe broken long ago and wonder how all this will settle.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” I say. “I’m told there are bandits in these woods.”

“You broke my vase,” she says, and I’m pleased that her tongue has turned traitor too.

Her fingers return to the spot where I hit her, where the vase shattered and she fell.

I have put her loved ones in the ground, but she talks about a vase. Sometimes a hurt is too big and we skirt around the edge of it, looking for our way in.

“To be fair, you were about to kill me,” I say.

She frowns at that.

“I buried my dog here,” I tell her. She has me saying foolish things already, telling her secrets she has no right to know. She’s like that
knock on the head I took from Orrin of Arrow. She steals the sense from me.