King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

We walked out through the ruins of the sprawl-town where burning chunks of the Haunt’s outer walls had left only wreckage in their path. No trace of Jerring’s stables where Makin had once rolled in dung to be ready for the road.

Even now I could end this. The Prince would accept a peace: his progress was too important to him not to. And who would say that he would make a worse emperor than I? I could match the very worst of his crimes with my own then trump them with darker deeds.

There had been times aplenty, in the clarity of high places among the peaks, when I had thought to leave Orrin of Arrow a clear path. But things change. A different Jorg approached the duelling ground, a different Prince of Arrow. This wedding day had seen Jorg Ancrath remade in an older mould. I had that old thirst on me once again. Blood would flow.

Music rose around me, faint at first. A piece my mother used to play on the piano. A rare instrument, a complex thing of wires and keys and hammers, ancient, but the notes she scattered from her right hand were clear and high, pure like stars against the black and rolling melody from her left. Sometimes just a single ice-pure note can catch the breath in your lungs, and a second, off tempo, thrown into the void, can command chills across your skin. A small run, a flutter of the hand over the blue notes, can take you any where, any time, make you feel new, or settle the press of years upon you, heavy enough to stop you drawing breath.

We walked through broken stone, charred timbers. The melody pulsed under the crackle of flame, her left hand running through the deepest notes. Rike towered above me on one side, my uncle walked on the other. I felt the high refrain. I saw my mother’s hand finding the high notes, the black keys, the ones that made me ache inside my chest, like the cries of gulls above wild seas. After so many years of watching her hands play in silent memory, I heard her at last, I heard her music.

Down the mountainside, down toward the serried expanse of the Prince’s army. Still the music, the deep slow melody, the high and broken counterpoint, as if the mountains themselves had become the score, as if the glories of hidden caves and secret peaks had been wrapped around the ageless majesty of the ocean and turned into the music of all men’s lives, played out by a woman’s fingers, without pause or mercy, reaching in, twisting, laying us bare.

To the level ground before the grey bulk of Rigden Rock. The music slowing now, the notes scattered, just the counterpoint played out in the highest octave, sad notes, faltering, faint. I glanced at Makin, remembering that first day when he handed me a wooden sword. All those earnest boys of his ready to learn his game. I’d shown them that it wasn’t play, that it’s always about winning, but I don’t think they understood it even then, even with the best of them lying choking on the floor.

A great trebuchet lay burning by the rock. It must have ignited closer to the walls and been dragged this far before they realized it was a lost cause. I wondered if it were the one that threw the rock at my bedchamber. The flames watched me. They leaned toward me.

The Prince of Arrow stood waiting, the dragons still clutching his namesakes on the rainbow sheen of his Teuton armour. His five knights stood at the agreed distance and I left my seconds at the same remove. They made a funny line, Rike towering at the centre looking like six kinds of bad news. Makin and Robert to either side. Old Gomst on the right wearing every holy thing he owned in the hope that nobody would stick an arrow in him, and old Keppen on the left, a sour face on him as if he had no time for this foolishness.

I walked over to meet the Prince.

“Open your keep to me and we can end this.” The Prince’s voice muffled within his helm, dark eyes watching.

“You don’t really want me to,” I said. “Better this way.” I turned my blade to catch the light. “Stop trying to be your brother. Him I would have opened the gates for. Maybe.”

The Prince lifted his visor. He offered a fierce and joyless smile then pulled the helm clear, running a hand back across hair bristling, thick and short and black.

“Hello, Egan,” I said.

“I liked you better as road-filth,” he said. “It suited you.”

Smoke from the burning siege engine drifted across us. I heard Rike cough.

“I like your armour. I may take it for myself when they pry it from your corpse,” I said.

He frowned, black brows meeting. “You’re right-handed. What game is this?”

I set my left hand to my sword hilt. “I often fight right-handed. I hope you haven’t based your assessment of my skills on spies who saw that…I’m much better with my left.”

Egan shifted his weight onto his back heel. “You fought Orrin with your right…”

“True,” I said. “I was sorry to hear that you killed Orrin. He was a better man than both of us. Perhaps the best man of our generation.”

“He was a fool,” Egan said, fixing his helm in place again.

“Too easy with his trust maybe. I heard that you stabbed him in the back and watched him bleed to death?”

Egan shrugged. “He would never have fought me. He would have talked. And talked. And talked.” He spoke as if it were nothing, but it haunted him. I could see it in his eyes.

“And how did Katherine take news of Orrin’s death?” I asked.

I saw him pale. Just half a shade. “Prepare to defend yourself,” Egan said. He drew his sword. I paid it no heed.

“I told Orrin that I would decide about him on the day he came to the Highlands again,” I said. “I think that I would have followed him and called him emperor. I hope that I would have. You should have left it for two weeks—then you could have murdered him after moving through the Highlands. It would have worked out better for you.”

Egan spat. “We are two fratricides met for battle. Are you ready?”

“You know why I’ve practised with the sword every day since we last met?” I asked.

“So it would take me a few moments longer to kill you?” Egan asked.

“Nope.”

“Why then?”

“So you would believe that I’d stand against you in a fair fight,” I said.

I raised my right hand, pointing the gun at him from beneath the plate-sized buckler.

“What’s that?” asked Egan. He took a step back.

“It has the word COLT stamped into the metal if that helps. Think of it as a crossbow, but all squeezed down into one small tube. You can thank an echo called Fexler Brews for it,” I said.

I shot Egan in the stomach. The bullet punched a small hole in his armour. I knew from testing on a watermelon that the hole on the other side would be larger.

“Bastard!” Egan staggered back.

I made to shoot him in the leg but the gun jammed. “Lucky that didn’t happen first try, neh?” I drew my own blade, in my left hand.

He almost blocked the swing of my sword. I had to admit he was pretty good. The blade crunched into his knee and he went down.

The five knights Egan brought with him started to charge. I fiddled with the gun, banging it against the hilt of my sword. I raised it again and fired, once, twice, three, four, five times. They all went down with red holes in their faces. I would have missed with my left hand.

“Bastard!” Egan tried to crawl toward me.

“This is not your game!” I shouted. Loud enough for Arrow’s thousands to hear if they hadn’t been screaming for my blood as they surged forward. I shrugged. “I don’t play by the rules you choose.”