Prince of Thorns (The Broken Empire 1)

“Come to me.” Arms open. A mother’s arms, a lover’s, father’s, friend’s.

I looked away, but she drew me still. I felt her breathing. I felt the promise of redemption. I had but to lift my eyes and she would forgive me.

“No.”

Her surprise fluttered between us, a palpitation of the light. I felt tension in the muscles of my jaw, and the bitter taste of anger, hot at the back of my throat. Here at last were things familiar to me.

“Put aside your pain, Jorg. Let the blood of the Lamb wash your sins away.” Nothing false in her. She stood transparent in her concern. The angel held her gifts in open hands, compassion, love . . . pity.

One gift too many. The old smile twisted on my lips. I stood, nice and slow, head bowed still. “The Lamb doesn’t have enough blood for my sins. May as well hang a sheep for me as a lamb.”

“No sin is too great to repent,” she said. “There’s no evil that cannot be put aside.”

She meant it too. No lie could pass those lips. That truth, at least, was self-evident.

I met her eyes then, and the wash of her love, so deep and so without condition, nearly carried me away. I dug deep and fought her. I manufactured my smile once again, cursing myself for a slackjawed fool.

“I left few sins untasted.” I took a step toward her. “I cursed . . . in church. I coveted my neighbour’s ox. I stole it too, roasted it whole, and finished it off with gluttony, a deadly sin, the first of the Seven, learned at my mother’s breast.”

The hurt in her eyes hurt me, but I’d lived a life striking blows that cut two ways.

I moved around the angel, and my feet stained the floor, leaving bruises that faded in my wake.

“I coveted my neighbour’s wife. And I had her. Murder too. Oh yes, murder and more murder. So few sins untasted . . . If I’d not died so young, I’m sure I’d have met you with a full list.” Anger closed my jaw. Any tighter and my teeth would have exploded. “If I’d lived but five minutes longer, you could have put patricide at the head of the tally.”

“It can be forgiven.”

“I don’t require your forgiveness.” Veins of darkness reached across the floor, growing outward from where I stood.

“Let it go, Child.” A warmth and a humour ran through her words, so strong it nearly carried me with it. Her eyes stood as windows to a world of things made whole. A place built of tomorrows. It could all be made right. I could taste it, smell it. If she weren’t so sure of her success, she’d have had me, there and then.

I held to my anger, drank from my well of poison. These things are not good things, but at least they’re mine.

“I could go with you, Lady. I could take what you offer. But who would I be then? Who would I be if I let go the wrongs that have shaped me?”

“You would be happy,” she said.

“Someone else would be happy. A new Jorg, a Jorg without pride. I won’t be anyone’s puppy. Not yours, not even His.”

The night crept back like mist rising from the mire.

“Pride is a sin too, Jorg. Deadliest of the Seven. You have to let it go.” At last, a hint of challenge in her words. All I needed to give me strength.

“Have to?” Darkness swirled around us.

She held out her hands. The dark grew and her light quailed.

“Pride?” I said, my smile dancing now. “I am pride! Let the meek have their inheritance—I’d rather have eternity in shadows than divine bliss at the price you ask.” It wasn’t true, but to speak otherwise, to take her hand rather than to bite it, would leave nothing of me, nothing but pieces.

Glimmers held her now, glimmers against the velvet blackness. “Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God’s right hand.” Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. “In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.”

“Pride is all I have.”

I swallowed the night, and the night swallowed me.

39

“He’s not dead yet?” A woman’s voice, Teuton accent with a creak of age in it.

“No.” A younger woman, familiar, also Teuton.

“It’s not natural to linger so long,” the older woman said. “And so white. He looks dead to me.”

“There was a lot of blood. I didn’t know men had so much blood in them.”

Katherine! Her face came to me in my darkness. Green eyes, and the sculpted angles of her cheekbones.

“White and cold,” she said, her fingers on my wrist. “But there’s mist on the mirror when I hold it to his lips.”

“Put a pillow over his face and be done with it, I say.” I imagined my hands around the crone’s neck. That brought a hint of warmth.

“I did want to see him die,” Katherine said. “After what he did to Galen. I would have watched him die on the steps of the throne, with all that blood running down, one step after the next, and been glad.”

“The King should have slit his throat. Finished the job there and then.” The old woman again. She had a servant’s tone about her. Voicing her opinion in the security of a private place, opinions held back too long and grown bitter in the silence.

“It’s a cruel man who will take a knife to his only son, Hanna.”

“Not his only son. Sareth carries your nephew. The child will be born to his due inheritance now.”

“Will they keep him here, do you think?” Katherine said. “Will they lay him in his mother’s casket, beside his brother?”

“Lay the whelps with the bitch and seal the room, I say.”

“Hanna!” I heard Katherine move away from me.

They’d taken me to my mother’s tomb, a small chamber in the vaults. The last time I’d visited the dust had lain thick, unmarked by footprints.

“She was a queen, Hanna,” Katherine said. I heard her brush at something. “You can see the strength in her.”

Mother’s likeness had been carved into her coffer’s marble lid, as if she lay there at rest, her hands together in devotion.

“Sareth is prettier,” Hanna said.

Katherine returned to my side. “Strength makes a queen.” I felt her fingers on my forehead.

Four years ago. Four years ago I’d touched that marble cheek, and vowed never to return. That was my last tear. I wondered if Katherine had touched her face, wondered if she’d stroked the same stone.

“Let me end this, my princess. It would be a kindness to the boy. They’ll lay him with his mother and the little prince.” Hanna honeyed her voice. She set her hand to my throat, fingers coarse like sharkskin.

“No.”

“You said yourself that you wanted to see him die,” Hanna said. She had strength in that old hand. She’d throttled a chicken or three in her time, had Hanna. Maybe a baby once or twice. The pressure built, slow but sure.

“On the steps I did, while his blood was hot,” Katherine said. “But I’ve watched him cling to life for so long, with such a slight hold, it’s become a habit. Let him fall when he’s ready. It’s not a wound that can be survived. Let him choose his own time.”

The pressure built a little more.