King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

Miana didn’t have to shout it at me. I could hear them through the windows, the deep resonances of the scorpions as they fired their spears, the screams, the crash of swords, the strum of bowstrings from the men on my walls, firing down into their own castle now. And the drums! The furious pounding of Uncle Renar’s battle-drums. A beat so loud and fierce that it picks up even the meekest of men and makes them part of the beast. They drum courage into you.

Uncle should have played them that day I came a-calling.

None of it mattered. Sageous’s poison dreams bubbled through me, but all their work only played variations around a nightmare of my own making. I killed my brother. After years defined only by the quest for revenge—years consumed by the need to reach William’s murderer—I took the life of my brother, a baby who could barely fill my hands.

“Jorg!”

I ignored her. I held my hands before my face, remembered the feel of him, remembered the realization that he was dead. Degran. My brother.

Tutor Lundist showed me a drawing once. An old woman’s face. Look again, he said, it’s a young girl. And it was. Just a trick of the mind. Nothing had changed, not one line of the drawing, and yet everything was different. The box gave me Degran back and he had spoken to me across the years. Look again, he had said to me. Look at your life—now look again. And suddenly nothing mattered.

She slapped me, the little bitch slapped me, and for a second that mattered. She’d put her whole body into it. But the anger died quicker than it came.

Then a siege rock hit the window to our right. Fragments of stone flew across the room, smashing on the far wall. Dust rose around us.

“I’m not going to die here,” Miana said.

She had her hand in my hair. She turned my head to the window and its torn bars. Part of the wall below the window had fallen away and we could see the courtyard, where the peasants had gathered to cheer us that morning. A wedge of Arrow’s men, marked by their scarlet cloaks, had driven in through the ruins of the portcullis that Gorgoth had once held open for me. My soldiers, half of them goatherds with the swords I’d given them, hemmed the enemy in. I saw the blue of Lord Jost’s small contingent and the gleam of their plate armour. The odds were against the intruders, but the weight of numbers behind drove them forward as they died. The Prince of Arrow poured his men into the killing field, my archers and troops reducing them but not stopping them. And under it all, pulsing through it, the throb of the battle drums.

“Do something!” Miana shouted.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Everyone dies.” My past, my ghosts, danced around me, the dead, the betrayed. I considered diving through the shattered wall into the foe over the heads of my men. Could I make such a leap? With a run maybe. A short run, and a long drop into eternity.

She slapped me again. “Give me the ruby.”

I fished out the bag and put it in her hand. “You deserved a better husband.”

Miana gave me a look of contempt. “I deserved a stronger one. There’s no victory without sacrifice. My mother taught me that. You have to raise the stakes and raise them again.”

“She was a warrior?” I shook my head hard. Dreams showered from me. The dead held me with cold hands, tearing my insides.

“A card player,” Miana said.

Miana went to the fireplace and picked up one of the two fire screens, an exotic tapestry in an ebony frame. She beat it into splinters against the wall and repeated the process with the second one. Outside the wedge of scarlet developed into a semi-circle around the broken gates. Beyond the walls a blood-red sea would be surging forward.

Miana picked the two heavy stone bases from the wreckage of the fire screens and placed the ruby between them. She tried to tear strips from the tapestries, and finding them too resistant she tore lengths from the hem of her wedding dress.

Despite the emptiness pulsing inside me, a tickle of curiosity scratched at the back of my mind.

A stray arrow struck up through the window on the left and buried itself in the ceiling.

Miana bound both the stone bases together, good and tight, with the ruby between them.

“Is Lord Jost still fighting?” she asked.

I crawled to the broken wall, blinking to clear my sight. “I can see knights from the House Morrow. I think one of them is Jost.”

Miana bit her lip. “Sometimes you can only win if you’re prepared to sacrifice everything,” she said.

I started to wonder if I didn’t get my darkest streak from my mother’s side of the family.

Her eyes grew bright. Tears for the dead.

“Miana, what—”

She ran at the gap, feet falling to the drumbeat, and hurled the stone bases out. I wouldn’t have thought she could throw so hard or so far. The package sailed over the heads of the men, fighting, dying, pressing in the crush to be at each other. It flew over the Highlanders, over Jost, over Arrow’s red-cloaked foot-soldiers, bounced once in a clear spot to the left of the gates, and smacked against the outer wall.

I remember only light and heat. The boom was heard as far away as Gutting, but I heard nothing. A hot fist knocked the air from me. I saw Miana thrown back toward the fireplace. The burn on my face ignited as if it were on fire again and I howled. A moment before nothing had mattered, but we are made of flesh before we are made of dreams, and flesh cares about pain.

When I rolled to my hands and knees I could smell my own charred skin, as if the burn really had reignited. I crawled to the hole and looked out. For long moments I saw only smoke. There was no sound, none at all. Then the mountain wind hauled the smoke off-stage and the ruination lay before me. The front walls of the Haunt were gone. All the tanneries, taverns, abattoirs, animal pens before them…gone. Just smoking rubble. And out beyond that, the Prince’s huge army, tattered, wide avenues of destruction carved through it by chunks of masonry the size of wagons tumbling down the slope.

The damage appeared to have been wrought by the walls exploding. Although most of the force seemed to have been directed away from us, the heat and fire had been confined within the courtyard. Rank upon rank of blackened corpses radiated from the spot where the ruby broke and released, in one moment, the flame magics hoarded inside it over many years. The bodies closest to the release looked crisp. Those farther back still burned. The dead where Lord Jost and his men had fought looked red and melted. Farther back still and men rolled in horrific agony. Back farther their lungs hadn’t been seared and they could scream. And back farther still, closer to the base of the keep, survivors struggled up from under the dead who had shielded them.

The timbers supporting the walkways for the archers burned. The shutters on the windows facing the courtyard burned. The remnants of my scorpions burned. Something lodged in the bone of my cheek burned with its own heat and in every flame possibilities danced. I could see them. As if the fire were a window into hot new worlds.

I guessed I had lost three hundred of my remaining eight hundred men. In two heartbeats a twelve-year-old girl had destroyed the prime fighting men of Renar.

I looked out across the slopes. The Prince of Arrow had lost five thousand, maybe seven thousand. In two heartbeats the Queen of the Highlands had cut her foe in half.

I shouted down into the courtyard. I could barely hear myself over the ringing in my ears. I tried again. “Into the keep! Into the keep.”