King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

“Camped a mile down the road.” He nodded north. “Watching for any more raiding parties.”

Odd to think of jolly old Nossar standing behind the raids. It put a sour edge on sweet memories. I remembered him in his feasting hall, with the faded maps stretched out across the table, how he pored over them. Nossar in his oak chair in the fort of Elm, grey beard and warm eyes. We played in that hall, Will and I, when we were no bigger than the child Sara carried past me. Nossar and his lines on the map. Gruff talk of “his boys” giving Renar’s boys a hiding.

“Are you ready to ride?” Makin asked.

“Soon.” I went to my horse. “Brath” the stablemaster called him and I’d not seen fit to change the name. Sturdy enough but not a patch on Gerrod who fell under that mountain I pushed over in Gelleth. I fished a few necessaries from my saddlebags and followed Sara.

The light had blinded me on the way out. The gloom left me blind on the way in. The stall stank. I hadn’t noticed it when I woke but it hit me now. Old vomit, sweat, animal dung. I believed the Prince of Arrow when he said he would protect the people, give them peace. I believed Jane when she said I needed better reasons for the things I made fate give me. I believed it all. Everything except that it meant anything to me.

I crouched by the woman. Already I had to reach for her name. “The new king didn’t protect you then?”

“There’s a king?” she said without interest, wanting me gone.

“Hello, Janey,” I said, turning the charm onto the girl instead. “Did you see I brought the biggest, ugliest man in the world to show you?”

Half a smile twitched on her lips.

“So what do you want, little Janey?” I asked. I didn’t know what I was doing here, crouched in the stink with the peasants. Maybe I just wanted to beat the Prince of Arrow at something. Or maybe it was just the echoes of that knock on the head. Perhaps Maical was knocked on the head as a baby and that knock had been echoing through his whole life.

“I want Davie.” She kept unnaturally still. Only her mouth moved. And her eyes.

“What do you want to be? To do?” I thought of my childhood. I wanted to be death on wings. I wanted to break the world open until it gave me what was mine.

“A princess,” Janey said. She paused. “Or a mermaid.”

“I tell her stories, sir,” the mother said, half-fearful even now, ruined and on the edge of despair. I wondered what she thought I might take from her. “My grandmother read,” she said. “And my family keeps the tales.” She stroked Janey’s hair. “I speak them when she’s hurting. To keep her mind from it. Fill her head with nonsense. She don’t rightly know what a mermaid is even.”

I bit my tongue then. Three impossible requests in as many moments. I’d followed them in thinking to be the king. Thinking of my crown and throne, my armies, gold and walls.

She wants her brother, she wants to be a princess, she wants to be a mermaid. And the waste will take her, screaming from her mother’s arms, to a cold slot in the ground. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t do a thing about it.

I touched her then, Janey, just a light touch on the forehead. She had enough death in her already and didn’t need me adding to it. But I touched her, with my fingers, just to feel it pulsing under the skin, eating at the marrow of her bones. The sickness in her called out to the necromancy lying in me, making a link. I could feel her heartbeat flutter under mine.

“Ready to ride, Jorg?”

“Yes.” I swung up into Brath’s saddle.

We set off at slow walk.

“Any of that spice left, Brother Jorg?” Makin asked.

“I must have swallowed it all for the pain,” I said, patting my belt pouch.

Makin rolled his eyes. He glanced back at the ruined farmstead. “Christ bleeding. There was enough—”

The faint sound of cymbals cut him off. The clash of cymbals, the whirr of cogs, stamping, and a child laughing.

“Leave anything else behind, Jorg?” he asked.

“Red Kent was right,” I said. “It was cursed. Evil. Better the hurt fall on the peasants, neh?”

On the plains the winds can make your eyes sting.

Rike pulled on his reins and started back.

“Don’t,” I said.

And he didn’t.

Sleep came hard that night. Perhaps soft months in the Haunt had left me wanting the comfort of a bed. Sleep came hard and the dreams came harder, dragging me under.

I lay in a dark room, a dark room sour with the stink of vomit and animals, and saw nothing but the glitter of her eyes, child’s eyes. Heard only the tick tick tick of the watch on my wrist and the rasp rasp rasp of her breath, hot and dry and quick.

I lay for the longest time with the tick and the rasp and the glitter of her eyes.

We lay and a warm river carried us, thick with the scent of cloves.

Tick, breath, tick, breath, tick, breath.

And then I woke, sudden and with a gasp.

“What?” someone murmured. Perhaps Kent in his blankets.

“Nothing,” I said. The dream still tangled me. “I thought my watch stopped.”

But it wasn’t the watch.

In the grey dawn Makin rose beside me cracking his face with a yawn, spitting, and rubbing his back. “Jesu but I’m sore.” He cast a bleary glance my way. “Nothing a pinch of clove-spice wouldn’t fix.”

“The child died last night,” I told him. “Easy rather than hard.”

Makin pursed those thick lips of his and said no more about it. Perhaps thinking of his own child lost back among the years. He didn’t even ask how I knew.

The years never seem to weigh on Brother Maical, as if his inability to count their passing protects him from their passage. He watches the world through calm grey eyes, broad-chested, thick-limbed. Brother Grumlow cuts Maical’s hair close, with a tail at the rear, and shaves his beard leaving him clean-cheeked and sharp. And if no one told you that his thoughts rattle in an empty head, you might think Brother Maical as capable a rogue as rides among the Brothers. In battle though his hands grow clever, and you’d think him whole, until the din fades, the dying fall, and Maical wanders the field weeping.

9

Four years earlier

The Highlands has lowland, though precious little of it and what there is lies stony and grows yet more stones when farmed. In my three months as king I had stuck to the mountains. Only now, when the road led me north to Heimrift, did I discover the fringes of my kingdom where it brushed against Ancrath and the Ken Marshes.

We rode from the ruined farm, from the peasants, Marten and Sara, whose names had stayed with me this once, and from their dead girl, Janey, whose breath stopped one night on the edge of spring before we’d gone twenty miles down the trail. We kept to the border lands where road-brothers are wont to travel and opportunity abounds. The farther into a kingdom a bandit-troop can venture without serious resistance is a measure of that kingdom’s softness. Thurtan was always soft around the edges, the Ken Marshes softer still. Ancrath, we would say, was hard. Hard enough to break your teeth on.