King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

Sim had his harp with him, a battered thing but quality, stolen from a very rich home once upon a time. He’d pulled it from his saddlebag and unwrapped it with the kind of care he usually reserved for weapons. As our drinks arrived he started to pluck a tune from it. He had quick fingers did Sim, quick and clever, and the notes rolled out fast enough to make a river.

By the time I left for my bed, in the inn across the road, the storm had passed. Sim and Makin had half the locals bawling out “Ten Kings,” and Sim’s voice, high and clear, followed me out of the door, rising over the deeper refrain and Makin’s enthusiastic baritone. Strains of “The Shallow Lady” reached up through the window as I poked my way in under crawling blankets and let the bugs set to. At least it was dry. I fell asleep to the faint sounds of the nonsense doggerel “Merican Pie.”

I woke much later in the calm dead hours of the night, still tangled in the song though all lay quiet save for the brothers’ snoring.

Chevylevy was dry.

Moonlight reached across the room and offered me two figures in the doorway, one supporting the other. Makin stopped to close the door behind him. Sim hobbled on, something broken about his walking.

“Trouble?” I sat up, the ale still spinning in me.

My, my, missamerican pie.

Why two drunk brothers staggering in should spell trouble I couldn’t have said, but I knew trouble was what we had.

Makin turned, pulling aside the hood on the lantern he’d brought up with him. “I found him in the street,” he said. “Left him an hour ago with five locals, the last in the tavern.”

Sim looked up. They’d given him a hell of a beating, lips split and swollen, half a tooth gone, one eye full of blood. From the way he moved I guessed he’d be pissing pink for a week. In fact something in the way he moved suggested other kinds of hurt had been done to him.

“They took my harp, Brother.” He turned out his empty hands. It had been a time and a half since Sim had called me Brother. I wondered what else had been taken.

I kicked Rike in the head. “Up!” Kent and Grumlow were already rising from the floor. “Get up,” I said again.

“Trouble?” Kent asked, echoing my own question. He sat still in the dark, moonlight making black pits of his eyes. Always ready for trouble was Red Kent, though he never sought it out.

Grumlow found his feet quick enough and took Sim’s arm. The boy flinched him off but Grumlow took firmer hold and led him to the window. “Bring the lantern, Makin, some stitches needed here.”

“Five of them?” I asked.

Sim nodded as he passed me.

“I can’t let this stand,” I said.

Makin let the lantern drop an inch or two at that. “Jorg—”

“They took the harp,” I said. “That’s an insult to the Brotherhood.” I let the pride of the Brotherhood take the slur: it would shame Sim to have this be for him.

Makin shrugged. “Sim cut at least one of them. There’s a trail of blood in the street.”

“Were they armed?” I asked. Know thy enemy.

Makin shook his head. “Knives. Probably have their wood-axes to hand by now. Oh, and the short one, he had a bow. Likes to do a bit of hunting he said.”

My, my.

I threw the bundle of my blankets at Rike and made for the door. “Let’s be about it then. You too, Brother Sim, you’ll want to see this.”

I let Rike go first into the street and followed, watching the dark windows, the lines of the rooftops. Makin found the trail of blood drops again, black in the cold light of the moon, and we followed, past the church, past the well, along the alley between tannery and stables, the dull rumble of Gorgoth’s snore from within deeper than the snort of horses. Past a warehouse, a low wall, and out into the rough pasture between town and forest. We gathered with our backs to a barn, the last building before the woods took over. No one had to be told—your enemy has a bow, you keep a building at your back and don’t let the light silhouette you.

“They’re in the forest,” Grumlow said.

“They won’t be far in.” Makin set the lantern to one side, its light hidden.

“Why not?” Grumlow asked, eyes on the black line of the trees.

“The moon won’t reach in there. Not a place to walk blind.” I lifted my voice loud enough for the men in the woods. “Why don’t you come out? We only want to talk.”

An arrow hammered into the barn wall yards above my head; laughter followed. “Send your girlfriend in after us if she wants some more.”

Grumlow took a step forward at that, but he wasn’t dumb enough to take another. Rike on the other hand took two and would have taken more if I hadn’t barked his name. It was Rike’s true brother, Price, who took young Sim from that Belpan brothel in the long ago. Why he picked one child to save and made red slaughter of the rest, along with the grown whores and their master, none of the brothers could ever tell me, but it seemed to matter to Rike that he had. And there it is, proof if proof were needed, that though God may mould the clay and fashion some of us hale, some strong, some beautiful, inside we make ourselves, from foolish things, breakable, fragile things: the thorns, that dog, the hope that Katherine might make me better than I am. Even Rike’s blunt wants were born of losses he probably remembered only in dreams. All of us fractured, awkward collages of experience wrapped tight to present a defensible face to the world. And what makes us human is that sometimes we snap. And in that moment of release we’re closer to gods than we know. I told Rike no, but hardly a part of me didn’t want to charge those woods.

“It’ll have to keep for morning,” Makin said.

I didn’t like to admit it but he was right. I would have left it there save for Gorgoth coming along the alley beside the barn. A strange mix of clever and stupid, that one. He made a nice target with the moon bright behind him, a big one too. I heard the hiss of an arrow and then his deep grunt.

“Here, idiot!” I called out to him and he lumbered to my side, Gog scampering around his legs. Makin lifted the lantern but I kept him from opening the hood. “He’s not dead. He can wait.”

“Take more than an arrow,” Rike muttered.

Even so, light blossomed and we saw the shaft jutting from Gorgoth’s shoulder, the head buried only an inch deep or so, as if the leucrota’s flesh were oak.

“Makin! I said no—”

But it wasn’t Makin. The light bled from Gog’s eyes, hot and yellow.

I could have told Gog no, bundled him around a corner and left the woodsmen till morning, but the fire that burned in Gog at seeing Gorgoth harmed echoed a colder fire that lit in me when Sim hobbled through that door. I’d grown tired of saying no. Instead I took Gog’s hand, though the ghosts of flame whispered across his skin.

He looked up at me, eyes white like stars. “Let it burn,” I told him.

Something hot ran through me, up my arm, along the marrow of my bones, hot like a promise, anger made liquid and set running.

“What’s cooking?” The taunt rang out from the tree-line, somewhere out past an old cowshed sagging in its beams.

Gog and I walked toward the sound, slow footsteps, the ground sizzling where his bare feet touched wet grass.

“The hell?” Voices raised in concern in the dark of the woods. An arrow zipped through the night, wide of its mark, the glowing child a disconcerting target, fooling the eye.