Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire 1)

Father inclined his head, as if the crown weighed heavy upon him. Pale eyes watched me from the shadow of his brow. “We will have an account of this rout.”

“Lord Vincent de Gren . . .” I counted him off on my index finger.

An intake of breath hissed through the aristocracy.

“Even the Watch Master!” Queen Sareth struggled to her feet. “He has even lost the Watch Master! And this boy seeks our throne?”

“Lord Vincent de Gren,” I resumed my count. “I had to push him over the Temus Falls. He vexed me. Coddin is the Watch Master now, low born but a sound fellow.”

“Jed Willox.” I counted a second finger. “Killed in a knife fight over a game of cards, two days’ march past the Gelleth border.”

“Mattus of Lee.” I counted a third finger. “Apparently he urinated on a bear by mistake. It seems that the legendary woodcraft of the Forest Watch may be somewhat overstated. And . . . that’s it.”

I held the three fingers at arm’s length above my head and turned left, then right, to survey my audience.

“The losses among my own picked men were similarly grievous, but in our defence you must consider that the razing of a castle defended by nine hundred Gellethian veterans is a dangerous undertaking. With two hundred and fifty lightly-armed forest rangers, there is a limit to what can be achieved without casualties.”

“The coward never reached Castle Red!” The Queen pointed at me—as if anyone would mistake her target—and her voice became a shriek.

I smiled and held my peace. Women are apt to lose perspective when fat with child. I saw Katherine try to press Sareth back into her throne.

“I ordered you to assault the Castle Red.” Father’s words held no hint of anger, and carried all the more threat for it.

“Indeed.” I advanced on the throne, leaving Sir Makin in my wake. “Bring me Gelleth, you said.”

A yard separated us, no more, before the first palace guard thought to raise his crossbow. Father lifted a finger, and we paused, me and the guard sweating in his hauberk.

“Bring me Gelleth, you said. And you were good enough to grant me the Forest Watch to do it with.”

I reached into the road-sack at my hip, ignoring the crossbows held on me, and the fingers ever tighter on their triggers.

“Here is Merl Gellethar, Lord of Gelleth, master of the Castle Red.” I opened my hand and dust trickled through my fingers. “And here,” I drew out a chunk of rock no bigger than a walnut. “Here is the largest stone that remains of the Castle Red.”

I let the stone fall, dropped into silence. Neither dust nor stone were what I purported, of course, but the truth lay there on the throne-room floor. Merl Gellethar was dust on the wind, and his castle rubble.

“We killed them all. Every man in that fortress is dead.” I looked to the Queen. “Every woman. Lady, scullion, drudge, and whore.” My eyes fell to her belly. “Every child, every babe in cradle.” I raised my voice. “Every horse and dog, every hawk and every dove. Each rat, and down to the last flea. Nothing lives there. Victory does not come in half measures.”

Father lurched to his feet.

In one pace I stood almost nose to nose with him. I couldn’t read what his eyes held, but the old fear had left me, as if it too had trickled from my hands.

“Give me my birthright.” I kept all colour from the words, though my jaw ached from the strain of it. “Let me lead our armies, and I will take the Empire, and make it whole once more. Set aside the heathen. And his plans.” I glanced toward the new queen at that.

I should have kept my eyes on him, should have remembered where I got my mean streak.

I felt a sharp pain under my heart. It made me bite off my sentence, nearly my tongue too. I tasted blood, hot and copper. One step back, two, staggering now. I saw the blade, exposed in Father’s hand when I slipped from it.

Is this a dagger I see before me? The quotation bubbled up, and laughter too, breaking out of me, crimson with spittle. I wanted to speak, but for once words escaped me, leaking away with my life’s blood.

The throne-room swam before me, its architecture no longer certain in the face of such betrayal. Every eye watched my retreat toward the great doors. Their stares lanced me, lords and ladies, Princess, Queen, and King. The legs that had borne me league upon league from Gelleth now turned traitor, as if each mile from the ruin of the Castle Red settled upon my shoulders and left me drunk with weariness.

He stabbed me!

There was a time when I loved my father. A time remembered, in dreams, or in rare waking moments, like the shadow of a high cloud crossing my mind. There’s a laughing face from a year I no longer own, from a season when I was too young to see the distance between us. The face is bearded, fierce, but without threat.

Is this a dagger I see before me? My mouth wouldn’t frame the joke. The laugh burst from me, and I fell, as if the knife had cut my strings.

For an eternity I lay before them, my cheek to the cold marble. I heard Makin roar. I heard the clatter as he went down beneath too many guards. The slow thud of a heartbeat filled me.

When I fell I saw the blackness of my father’s hair, darker than night, with the faintest sheen of emerald like a magpie’s wing.

“Take this away.” He sounded weary. The slightest hint of human weakness at the last.

“Will he lie by his mother’s tomb?” A new voice. The words drew out to fill an age, but somewhere in me they echoed and I saw their owner, Old Lord Nossar who bore us on his shoulders, Will and I, a lifetime ago. Old Nossar, come to carry me one last time. I heard the answer, too faint and deep for distinction. My eyes went blind. I felt the floor scrape against my cheek, and then no more.

38

I swallowed darkness, and darkness swallowed me.

Without light, without the beat of a heart to count the time, you learn that eternity is nothing to fear. In fact, if they’d just leave you to it, an eternity alone in the dark can be a welcome alternative to the business of living.

Then the angel came.

The first glimmers felt like paper-cuts on my eyes. The illumination built from a distant pinpoint, splinters of light lodging in the back of my mind. A dawn came, and in an instant, or an age, darkness fled, leaving no hint of shadow to record its passage.

“Jorg.”

Her voice flowed through the octaves, an echo of every kind word and every promise fulfilled.

“Hello.” My voice sounded like a cracked reed. Hello? But what do you say to heaven when you meet her? Two syllables, weakness and doubt underwriting both.

She opened her arms. “Come to me.”

I crouched, naked on a floor too white for any shadow to dare. I could see the dirt on my limbs, like veins, and blood, blood from the wound that killed me, dried and black as sin.

“Come.”

I tried to look at her. No point in her held constant. As if definition were a thing for mortals, a reduction that her essence would not allow. She wore pale, in shades. She had the eyes of everyone who ever cared. And wings—she had those too, but not in white and feathers, rather in the surety of flight. The potential of sky wrapped her. Sometimes her skin seemed to be clouds, moving one across the other. I looked away.

I crouched there, a knot of flesh and bone, with only dirt and old blood to define me beneath the scrutiny of her brilliance.