King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

I told them I would have to consider.

Sareth thinks I’m mad not to choose one and jump at the chance to leave Ancrath.

Maery Coddin says I should choose Orrin. He has more land, more prospects, and enough fire to melt her but not so much as to scorch her.

But I chose to wait.

February 8th, Year 99 Interregnum

Tall Castle. Library. Cold and empty.

Sareth has squeezed out her Ancrath brat. She howled about it, loud enough for half the castle to know more than they ever wanted about the business of pushing a big slimy head through a hole where even fingers feel tight. She sent me away after only a few hours. For my sulking she said. Truly, I was glad to go.

I should be happy for her. I should be thankful they both lived. I do love her, and I suppose I will come to love the boy. It’s not his fault he’s an Ancrath. But I’m scared.

It wasn’t sulking. It was fear. She howled the rest of the day and into the night before she got it out of her. I knew she had a dirty mouth, but the things she shouted near the end. I wonder how the servants will look on her now. How the table-knights will watch their queen behind their visors.

I’m scared and this quill puts the fear wavering into each letter. I’m trembling and I have to write slow and firm just to be able to read what I’ve set down.

I missed my time last month, and again this month. I think before the year is out it will be me screaming and not caring what I say or who hears. And there won’t be flags out and prayers in chapel for my bastard. Not like there were for little Prince Degran at midnight. Not even if my baby has the same black hair slime-plastered to its head and the same dark eyes watching out of a squashed up face.

I hate him. How could he? How could he spoil everything?

I dreamed of Jorg last night, coming to me, and my belly all fat, taut and hot and stretched, stretching like the bastard wanted out of me, little hands sliding beneath my skin. I dreamed Jorg brought a knife with him. Or it was my knife. The long narrow one. And he cut me open, like Drane guts fish in the kitchen, and he pulled the baby out scarlet and screaming.

I should tell somebody. I should go to Friar Glen with the story. How Jorg raped me. And seek forgiveness, though Christ knows why I should be the one to ask. I should go. They would send me to the Holy Sisters at Frau Rock.

But I hate that man, that stocky friar with his blank eyes and thick fingers. I don’t know why but I hate him even more than Jorg Ancrath. He makes my skin want to drop off and crawl away.

Or I could ask someone to help me lose it. They had old mothers in the slum quarter in Scorron who could grind up a bitter paste…and the babies would fall out of the women who went to them, tiny and dead. But that was in Scorron. I don’t know who to ask here. Maery Coddin maybe, but she’s too good, too clean. She would tell Sareth and Sareth would tell King Olidan and who knows what he would do to me for spoiling his plans, for not playing his game of statehood like a good pawn, for falling off the board.

Better I should marry Prince Orrin or Egan. Quickly before it shows. Egan wouldn’t wait for the wedding. He would be on me in a moment. He would never know it wasn’t his. Orrin would wait.

22

Wedding day

“Where’s Coddin, dammit?”

“Back down there.” Watch-master Hobbs pointed down the valley. The grey rear-guard of the Watch sketched a ragged line ahead of the foremost of Arrow’s troops.

“Should have left him in the castle, Jorg,” Makin said, heaving a breath between every other word. “He’s too old for running.”

I spat. “Keppen’s a hundred if he’s a day, and he’d be up and down this mountain before you’d broke fast, Sir Makin.”

“He might be sixty,” Makin said. “A whack older than Coddin in any case, I’ll grant you.”

Watch-master Hobbs joined us on the ridge, with Captain Stodd beside him, his short beard white against a red face.

“Well?” Hobbs said.

I watched him.

“Sire,” he added.

It’s easy to lose faith on the mountain, but also to find it. Somehow being a few thousand feet closer to God makes all the difference.

Hobbs had good reason for his doubts in any case. Above us the valley narrowed to a steep-sided pass, a choke point that would slow three hundred men to the point where the men of Arrow might finally get to blood their swords after their long chase. Above that, the snowline and the long climb to Blue Moon Pass, blocked at this time of year despite the promise of its name. Below us ten times our number and more filled the valley, a carpet of men in constant motion, the sun glittering off helms, shields, the points of sword and spear.

“Let’s wait for Coddin,” I said. Even Coddin needed his faith restored.

“Sire.” Hobbs bowed his head. He took his bow in hand and waited, his breath heavy in his chest. A good man, or if not good, solid. Father picked him from the royal guard for the Forest Watch, not as punishment but to reward the Watch.

I looked away from the seething mass of men to the peaks, snow-clad, serene. The snowline waited for us not far above the choke point. The wind carried fresh snow, icy crystals in a thin swirl. None of us felt the cold. Ten thousand mountain steps burned in my legs, leaving them to tremble, and warming my blood close to boiling point.

To the west I could see God’s Finger. The tiredness in me was nothing compared to what I felt the day I hauled myself onto the tip of that finger and lay as dead beneath the bluest sky. I lay there for hours and in the end I stood, leaning into the teeth of the wind, and drew my sword.

When you climb take nothing that is not essential. I took a sword, strapped across my back. There’s a song behind the swinging of a sword. On God’s Finger it can be heard more clearly. I had climbed chasing the memory of my mother’s music, but the Spire had sung me a different song. Perhaps it’s that heaven is closer, perhaps the wind brings it. Either way I heard the sword-song that day and I made my blade kata, slicing the gale, spinning, turning, striking high then low. I danced to the sword-song in that high place for an hour maybe more, wild play with an endless drop on every side. And then, before the sun fell too low, I left the blade on the rocks, an offering to the elements, and started down.

Standing on God’s Finger I had first understood why men might fight for a place, for rocks and streams, no matter who calls themselves king there. The power of place. I felt it again at the head of the valley with the hordes of Arrow swarming toward me.

“What ho, Coddin,” I said as my chancellor staggered to us. “You look half-dead.”

He hadn’t the breath for a reply.

“Do you have what I gave you?” I asked. At the time I hadn’t known why I gave it to him, only that I should.

Still gasping, Coddin shrugged off his pack and dug into it. “Be glad I didn’t drop it just to keep ahead of the enemy,” he said.

I took the whistle from him, a Highland whistle such as the goatherds use, a foot long with a leather-washered piston.

“I always trust you to deliver, Coddin,” I said, though I had Makin carry a second and had a third with Keppen. Trust is a fine thing but try not to build plans upon it.

“We’re none of us local men,” I said to my captains, voice raised for the Watch men starting to gather round. “Well, you are.” I pointed to a fellow in the second rank. “But most of us were born and raised in Ancrath.”