King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

We made our way without problem until we ran out of forest. The land around the Tall Castle is clear of trees and set to farming, to feed the king, and so that he may see his enemies advance.

I leaned against the trunk of a massive copper beech, one of the last great trees before the woods gave over to a two-acre field of ploughed earth peeping with green that might have been anything from carrots to kale for all I knew. More fields to the left and right, more beyond. A lone scarecrow watched us.

“I’ll go on alone,” I said. I started to unbuckle my breastplate.

“Go where?” Makin asked. “You can’t get in there, Jorg. Nobody could. And what for? What are you possibly going to achieve?”

“A man’s got a right to call in on his family now and again, Brother Makin,” I said.

I stripped the vambraces from my forearms, my breastplate, and finally the gorget. I like to have iron around my neck, kept it from a slitting once or twice, but armour wouldn’t save me where I was aimed.

I took the scabbard off my belt. “Kent, look after this for me.” His eyes widened, almost as if he didn’t know that’s how a leader binds his men, with trust.

“A sword like this…Sir Makin—”

“I gave it to you.” I cut him off.

“You need a sword, Jorg,” Maical said, confusion in his eyes. Behind him Sim watched me without comment, unwrapping his harp. He at least knew enough to settle down for a wait.

I magicked my old knife into my hand, a trick I learned off Grumlow. “This will do for what I have in mind, Brother Maical.”

“Give me two days,” I said. “If I’m not back by then, send Rike to take the castle by storm.”

And with a bow I left them to watch the carrots grow. Or the kale.

I made my way along the margins of the forest toward the Roma Road. They say you can put foot on that road and never leave it till you reach the pope’s front door. I planned to walk the other way.

There’s a cemetery near the Roma Road, mostly eaten by the forest, mostly forgotten. I hunted through it as a child, crumbled mausoleums choked with ivy, smothered with moss, cracked by trees. The cemetery covers acre upon hidden acre, a lost necropolis. Perechaise they call it in dusty books. The legends mean nothing to me, Beloved, 1845. Dearly departed, 1710. My heart lies here, 1908. Barely legible. So long ago even their calendar loses meaning.

The stones are set with a clear resin, harder than glass, which wards them in a skin no thicker than a hair. It took years before I noticed it. The weathering they’d suffered happened in the distant long ago. Now not even a hammer blow will mar them. The Builders held these old markers precious and kept them from the centuries.

I found my way through toppled gravestones close to the road where some of it is kept clear. Much has been robbed out. There’s a peasant’s cottage, a little to the west, entirely built from headstones, weathered granite markers with time-blurred legends remembering the dead for illiterate field-men. A house built of stories, to shelter a man who cannot read.

I found her by the road’s edge, hair pink with fallen blossom. The cycle of seasons has worn the definition from her features. But the beauty remains, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the grace in long limbs, the gentle swell of a child’s breast, a freckling of lichen. She needs no deep-carved runes to spell out her life. Here I buried my child. A message for which reading is not required. She died in the winter of a lost year, the daughter of a wealthy man who would have given all his wealth, and more, to buy her into spring.

I saw her first in autumn, long ago, when the leaves fell so thick they hid the stone dog she chases. Whilst I watched her other travellers hurried past on the road, clenched against the sharp-fingered wind. Some paused to wonder what she chased, hugging themselves, squinting into the rain. They moved on. I stayed. Maybe they wondered what they were chasing.

She’s after her dog. A little terrier, remembered in stone, lost that autumn in a drift of wet ochre. A centuries-old chase that has seen the death of everyone who cared, the end of every soul that knew the terrier’s name. A chase that saw the stilling of each hand to touch this child, the loss of every life that shared her world.

I came again with the snows on the first day of winter, to see my statue girl. My first love maybe. I watched and the snow fell, tiny crystals, the kind so perfect they almost chime against the ground. The light failed early and a wildness infected the wind, swirling the snow into rivulets of milk across the Roma Road, ice hissing over stone. A frost came and etched silver tracery across her dress, with only me to see.

The seasons turn, and here I am again, and still she waits for spring.

They buried high lords and high ladies here. Poets and bards. Now it’s a place for servant corpses. Close enough to the Tall Castle for sentimental ladies to visit their wet-nurses, far enough away to be seemly. They bury old servants, sometimes even faithful dogs, around my girl who waits for spring. Soft-hearted ladies from court come with their perfumed toys that have ceased to yap. And one time a boy of six, soaked and half-frozen, dragging something that might once have been a wolf.

“Hello, Jorg.”

I turned and between the old graves walked Katherine, the sun making magic of her hair.

10

Four years earlier

Hello, Jorg. Was that all she said to me? Katherine, there in the Rennat Forest, among the gravestones. Hello, Jorg?

I’m trying to wake up from something. Maybe I’ve always been trying. I’m drowning in confusion, somewhere high above me light dances on a surface, and past that the air is waiting. Waiting for me to draw breath.

I hardly know Katherine but I want her, with unreasonable ferocity. Like a sickness, like the need for water. Like Paris for Helen, I am laid low by irresistible longing.

In memory I study the light on her face, beneath the glow-bulbs of the Tall Castle, beneath the cemetery trees. I envy those patches of sunlight, sliding over her hair, moving unopposed the length of her body, across her cheekbones. I remember everything. I recall the pattern of her breath. In the heat of Drane’s kitchen I remember a single bead of sweat and the slow roll of it, down her neck, along the tendon, across her throat. I’ve killed men and forgotten them. Mislaid the act of taking a life. But that drop of sweat is a diamond in my mind’s eye.

“Hello, Jorg.” And my clever words desert me. She makes me feel my fourteen summers, more boy than man.

I want her beyond reason. I need to own, consume, worship, devour. What I’ve made of her in my mind cannot live in flesh. She’s just a person, just a girl, but she stands at the door to an old world, and although I can’t go back…she can come through, and maybe bring with her a scent of it, a taste of that lost warmth.

These feelings are too fierce to last. They can only burn, making us ash and char.

I see her in dreams. I see her against the mountains. High, snow-cold, snow-pure, unobtainable. I climb, and on the empty peak I speak her name to the wind, but the wind takes my words. It takes me too. Tumbling through void.

“Hello, Jorg.”

My flesh prickles. I rub at my cheek and my fingers come away bloody, sliced open. Every part of me burns with pins and needles. Real pins, real needles. I scream and like buds on the branch each prickle erupts, a hundred thorns sliding from my skin, growing from the bone. There are animals impaled, stabbed through like exhibits on a gamekeeper’s board. Rat, stoat, ferret, fox, dog…baby. Limp and watching.