The lads parted to let me up close. The gibbet stank worse than the head-cart, a crude thing of fresh-cut timber. Four cages hung there. Two held dead men. Very dead men. Legs dangling through the bars, raven-pecked to the bone. Flies thick about them, like a second skin, black and buzzing. The lads had taken a few pokes at one of the wrigglers, and he didn’t look too cheerful for it. In fact he looked as if he’d pegged it. Which was a waste, as we had a whole night ahead of us, and I’d have said as much, but for the wriggler with the mouth.
“So now the boy comes over! He’s finished looking for lewd pictures in his stolen book.” He sat crouched up in his cage, his feet all bleeding and raw. An old man, maybe forty, all black hair and grey beard and dark eyes glittering. “Take the pages to wipe your dung, boy,” he said fierce-like, grabbing the bars all of a sudden, making the cage swing. “It’s the only use you’ll get from it.”
“We could set a slow fire?” Rike said. Even Rike knew the old man just wanted us angry, so we’d finish him quick. “Like we did at the Turston gibbets.”
A few chuckles went up at that. Not from Makin though. He had a frown on under his dirt and soot, staring at the wriggler. I held up a hand to quiet them down.
“It’d be a shameful waste of such a fine book, Father Gomst,” I said.
Like Makin, I’d recognized Gomst through all that beard and hair. Without that accent though he’d have got roasted.
“Especially an ‘On Lycurgus’ written in high Latin, not that pidgin-Romano they teach in church.”
“You know me?” He asked it in a cracked voice, weepy all of a sudden.
“Of course I do.” I pushed both hands through my lovely locks, and set my hair back so he could see me proper in the gloom. I have the sharp dark looks of the Ancraths. “You’re Father Gomst, come to take me back to school.”
“Pr-prin . . .” He was blubbing now, unable to get his words out. Disgusting really. Made me feel as if I’d bitten something rotten.
“Prince Honorous Jorg Ancrath, at your service.” I did my court bow.
“Wh-what became of Captain Bortha?” Father Gomst swung gently in his cage, all confused.
“Captain Bortha, sir!” Makin snapped a salute and stepped up. He had blood on him from the first wriggler.
We had us a deathly silence then. Even the chirp and whir of the marsh hushed down to a whisper. The brothers looked from me, back to the old priest, and back to me, mouths hanging open. Little Rikey couldn’t have looked more surprised if you’d asked him nine times six.
The rain chose that moment to fall, all at once as if the Lord Almighty had emptied his chamber pot over us. The gloom that had been gathering set thick as treacle.
“Prince Jorg!” Father Gomst had to shout over the rain. “The night! You’ve got to run!” He held the bars of his cage, white-knuckled, wide eyes unblinking in the downpour, staring into the darkness.
And through the night, through the rain, over the marsh where no man could walk, we saw them coming. We saw their lights. Pale lights such as the dead burn in deep pools where men aren’t meant to look. Lights that’d promise whatever a man could want, and would set you chasing them, hunting answers and finding only cold mud, deep and hungry.
I never liked Father Gomst. He’d been telling me what to do since I was six, most often with the back of his hand as the reason.
“Run, Prince Jorg! Run!” old Gomsty howled, sickeningly self-sacrificing.
So I stood my ground.
Brother Gains wasn’t the cook because he was good at cooking. He was just bad at everything else.
4
The dead came on through the rain, the ghosts of the bog-dead, of the drowned, and of men whose corpses were given to the mire. I saw Red Kent run blind and flounder in the marsh. A few of the brothers had the sense to take the road when they ran, most ended in the mire.
Father Gomst started praying in his cage, shouting out the words like a shield: “Father who art in heaven protect thy son. Father who art in heaven.” Faster and faster, as the fear got into him.
The first of them came up over the sucking pool, and onto the Lichway. He had a glow about him like moonlight, something that you knew would never warm you. You could see his body limned in the light, with the rain racing through him and bouncing on the road.
Nobody stood with me. The Nuban ran, eyes wide in a dark face. Fat Burlow looking as if the blood was let from him. Rike screaming like a child. Even Makin, with a horror on him.
I held my arms wide to the rain. I could feel it beat on me. I didn’t have so many years under my belt, but even to me the rain fell like memory. It woke wild nights in me when I stood on the Keep Tower, on the edge above a high fall, near drowned in the deluge and daring the lightning to touch me.
“Our Father who art in heaven. Father who art . . .” Gomst started to gabble when the lich came close. It burned with a cold fire and you could feel it licking at your bones.
I kept my arms wide and my face to the rain.
“My father isn’t in heaven, Gomsty,” I said. “He’s in his castle, counting out his men.”
The dead thing closed on me, and I looked in its eyes. Hollow they were.
“What have you got?” I said.
And it showed me.
And I showed it.
There’s a reason I’m going to win this war. Everyone alive has been fighting a battle that grew old before they were born. I cut my teeth on the wooden soldiers in my father’s war-room. There’s a reason I’m going to win where they failed. It’s because I understand the game.
“Hell,” the dead man said. “I’ve got hell.”
And he flowed into me, cold as dying, edged like a razor.
I felt my mouth curl in a smile. I heard my laughing over the rain.
A knife is a scary thing right enough, held to your throat, sharp and cool. The fire too, and the rack. And an old ghost on the Lichway. All of them might give you pause. Until you realize what they are. They’re just ways to lose the game. You lose the game, and what have you lost? You’ve lost the game.
That’s the secret, and it amazes me that it’s mine and mine alone. I saw the game for what it was the night when Count Renar’s men caught our carriage. There was a storm that night too, I remember the din of rain on the carriage roof and the thunder beneath it.
Big Jan had fair hauled the door off its hinges to get us out. He only had time for me though. He threw me clear; into a briar patch so thick that the Count’s men persuaded themselves I’d run into the night. They didn’t want to search it. But I hadn’t run. I’d hung there in the thorns, and I saw them kill Big Jan. I saw it in the frozen moments the lightning gave me.
I saw what they did to Mother, and how long it took. They broke little William’s head against a milestone. Golden curls and blood. And I’ll admit that William was the first of my brothers, and he did have his hooks in me, with his chubby hands and laughing. Since then I’ve taken on many a brother, and evil ones at that, so I’d not miss one or three. But at the time, it did hurt to see little William broken like that, like a toy. Like something worthless.
When they killed him, Mother wouldn’t hold her peace, so they slit her throat. I was stupid then, being only nine, and I fought to save them both. But the thorns held me tight. I’ve learned to appreciate thorns since.