King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

“Yes.” Gog sighed, exasperated, and struggled to turn away for some new game.

I had the image of a rug in my head. A rug with a wrinkle in it. I remembered it from softer days. From days when I slept in a world that never shook or burned, in a room where my mother would always come to say good night. A rug with a wrinkle in it and a maid trying to smooth it down with her foot. And every time she squashed it flat a new wrinkle would spring up close by. But never two. Because there was only one fold in the rug.

“You can take fire from one place and put it in another,” I said.

Gog nodded.

“Because there is only one fire, and we see pieces of it,” I said. “You squeeze one corner down and pull up another.”

Gog nodded and struggled to be off.

“And that’s all you ever do,” I said.

Gog didn’t answer, as if it were too obvious for comment. I let him go and he ran beneath the nearest table to play with a red-furred hound.

“The trolls?” Alaric said, with the air of a man forcing patience.

“We met some. Gorgoth can talk to them. They seem to like him,” I said.

Alaric waited. It’s a good enough trick. Say nothing and men feel compelled to fill the silence, even if it’s with things they would rather have kept secret. It’s a good enough trick, but I know it and I said nothing.

“The Duke of Maladon knows about the trolls,” Gorgoth said. The Danes flinched when he spoke, as if they thought him incapable of it and expected him to growl and snarl. “The trolls serve Ferrakind. The duke wishes to know why the ones we discovered were not in the fire-mage’s service.”

Alaric shrugged. “It’s true.”

“The trolls serve Ferrakind out of fear,” Gorgoth said. “Their flesh burns as easily as man-flesh. A few hide from him.”

“Why don’t they just leave the Heimrift if they want to live free?” I asked.

“Men,” he said.

For a moment I didn’t understand. It’s hard to think of such creatures as victims. I remembered their black-clawed hands, hands that could snatch the head off a man.

“They were once many,” Gorgoth said.

“You told me they were made for war, soldiers, so why hide?” I asked.

Gorgoth nodded. “Made for war. Made to serve. Not made to be hunted. Not to be scattered and hunted alone across strange lands.”

I pulled myself to my full height, topping six foot of late. “I think—”

“What do you think, Makin?” The Duke cut across me.

Makin caught my eye and offered the tiniest of grins. “I think all these things are the glimpses of the same fire,” he said. “Everything here comes back to Ferrakind. The dead trees, the lung-flake in your cattle, your lost harvests, the knocking down of your halls one brick, one gable, one rafter at a time, the trolls, the chances of either of you ever making a play for the empire throne, all of it, with Ferrakind burning at the centre.”

It’s always a different thing that makes the magic happen. Today it was his cleverness. But at the end of it all, you wanted Makin to be your friend.

21

Four years earlier

The Danes are settled Vikings in the main. The blood of reavers mixed with that of the farmers they conquered. Every Dane counts his ancestry back to the north, to some bloody-handed warrior jumping from his longship, but in truth the wild men of the fjords scorn the Danes and call them fit-firar—a mistake that has seen a lot of Vikings on the wrong end of an axe.

“You’re more use to me here, Makin.”

“You’re mad to go in the first place,” Makin said.

“It’s why we came,” I said.

“Every new thing I hear about this Ferrakind is a new good reason not to go anywhere near him,” Makin said.

“We’re here because he’s gone soft on the little monster,” Row said from the doorway. He hadn’t been invited to the conversation. None of them had. But on the road any raised voice is an invitation for an audience. Although strictly we weren’t on the road. We were in chambers set aside for guests in a smaller hall paralleling the Duke of Maladon’s great hall.

“Or hard on him.” Rike leaned in under the door lintel, a nasty leer on him. Since I took the copper box he seemed to feel he had license to speak his mind.

I turned to the doorway. “Two things you should remember, my brothers.”

Grumlow, Sim, and Kent appeared as faces poking out behind Rike.

“First, if you answer me back on this I swear by every priest in hell that you will not leave this building alive. Second, you may recall a time when you and our late lamented brothers were busy dying outside the Haunt. And whilst the Count of Renar’s foot-soldiers were killing you. Killing Elban, and Liar, and Fat Burlow…Gog had the whole of the count’s personal guard, more than seventy picked men, either as burning pools of human fat, or too damn scared to move. And he was seven. So right now the kind of man he grows into, and whether he grows up at all, is a question of far greater interest to me than whether you sorry lot live to see tomorrow. In fact there are a lot of questions more important to me than whether you get a day older or not, Rike, but that one is top of the list.”

“You still need me there,” Makin said. Too many years guarding me had turned a duty into a habit, an imperative.

“If things go well I won’t need you,” I said. “And if they go badly, I don’t think an extra sword or two will help. He has a small army of trolls at his beck and call, and he can set men on fire by thinking about it. I don’t believe a sword will help.”

I left Makin still arguing and the others slinking around like whipped dogs. Well, not Red Kent. He had his new axe. Not a new one in truth but a fine one, forged in the high north and traded from the long-ships off Karlswater. Kent raised the axe to me as I left, nodded, and said nothing.

Gorgoth and Gog waited for me at the Duke’s storerooms, a sack of provisions between them and waxed blankets in case we needed shelter on the slopes.

We set off for the Heimrift with a fine spring morning breaking out all around us. We all walked. I’d grown used to Brath and had no desire to leave him untended on the side of a volcano. For all I knew trolls were partial to horsemeat. I quite like it myself.

Sindri caught us half a mile down the road, his plaits bouncing off his back as he cantered along.

“Not this time, Sindri, just me and the pretty boys here,” I said.

“You’ll want me until you’re clear of the forest.”

“The forest? We had no problems before,” I said.

“I watched you.” Sindri grinned. “If you had gone wrong I would have guided you. But you were lucky.”

“And what should I be scared of in the forest?” I asked. “Green trolls? Goblins? Grendel himself? You Danes have more boogie-men than the rest of the empire put together.”

“Pine men,” he said.

“How do they burn?” I asked.

He laughed at that, then let the smile fall from him. “There’s something in the forest that lets the blood from men and replaces it with pine sap. They don’t die, these men, but they change.” He pointed to his eyes. “The whites turn green. They don’t bleed. Axes don’t bother them.”