King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

The last of the Watch were drawing in now, the men of Arrow a couple of hundred yards farther back, toiling over broken rock.

“You’re here with me, men of Ancrath, because you’re my best warriors, because you learned to fight in lands that are hard to defend and that others want to take. These Highlands of ours, however, are easier to protect, and hold bugger all save stones and goats.” That got a laugh or two. Some of the Watch still had go in them.

“Today,” I said. “We all become Highlanders.”

I took the whistle, held it high, and drove the piston home, not too hard because that spoils the tone. It’s a steady pressure gives the best results.

A goat-whistle will carry for miles across the mountains. It’s pitched to let the wind take it and to bounce from rock to rock. One long blast would reach almost back to the Haunt. Certainly far enough to reach each and every Highlander I had hidden on the high slopes overlooking our path up the mountain. And not just any Highlanders these, but the men who had held these particular slopes from generation to generation. The men who like their fathers and grandfathers would take a rock for a walk. They kept their secrets well, the men of Renar, but from the tip of God’s Finger, that day years before, it had all been revealed to me.

It took the blasts of seven trumpets to bring down the walls of Jericho, but they weren’t stacked to fall. One blast of a herder’s whistle set the mountainsides moving in the Renar Highlands. On both sides of the valley, along the full length, a dozen individual rockslides. The Highlanders know their slopes with an intimacy that puts lovers’ knowing of each other’s curves to shame. Big stones poised to fall, boulders on edge with levers set and ready, toppled with a shove and a grunt, rolling, colliding, cascading one into several into many into too many. We felt the ground tremble beneath our feet. The noise, like a millstone grinding, rattled teeth in loose sockets. In moments the whole valley had been set in motion and Arrow’s thousands vanished as the dust rose and stone churned flesh into bloody paste.

“Well, thank you, Coddin. Much appreciated.” I handed him back the whistle. “Hobbs,” I said. “When the dust clears enough for a good shot, if you could have the men knock down anyone still standing.”

“Christ Bleeding,” Makin said, staring into the valley below us. “How…”

“Topology,” I said. “It’s a kind of magic.”

“And what now, King Jorg?” Coddin asked, faith restored but still focused on the numbers, knowing our chances against seventeen or sixteen thousand were scarcely better than our chances against twenty thousand.

“Back down, of course!” I said. “We can’t attack from up here now, can we?”

23

Wedding day

The journey back to the Haunt took us over fresh territory, a new and broken surface, littered with dead men turned into ground meat, and here and there along the way the cries of live ones trapped beneath us. We moved on, the grey of the Watch’s tatter-robes renewed with rock dust, the men pale with powdered stone and with horror.

The Prince’s army encircled the Haunt now, archers on the heights, siege machinery being hauled into place. All my troops at the castle crowded within the walls, space or not. There was no standing against the foe on open ground.

I could see units of bowmen descending in long files, presumably ordered east to meet our advance in light of the recent massacre. The Prince looked to be a fast learner. He anticipated my renewed attack. It didn’t seem likely that he would consider my three hundred men a mere nuisance this time.

“He shouldn’t be in a hurry,” Makin said beside me.

“He’ll reduce the walls and thin the ranks first,” said Coddin.

“He doesn’t need to get inside until the snows come, the big snows,” said Hobbs. “Inside by the big snows. Winter by the fire. Over the passes when the spring clears them.”

“He wants in today,” I told them. “Tomorrow by the latest. He’ll go through the front gate.”

“Why?” Coddin asked. He didn’t argue, but he wanted to understand.

“Why waste a good castle?” I said. “A big push. A surrender. A dose of mercy and he has a new stronghold, a new garrison, and a small repair to make on the entrance. He doesn’t do half measures any more than I do. Go in hard, fast, get the job done.”

“A dose of mercy?” Makin asked. “You think that famous Arrow mercy has survived recent events?”

“Maybe not,” I said, my smile grim, “but I don’t intend to offer any either. Mark me, old friend, nobody gets out alive, not this time.”

“Red Jorg.” Makin clapped his hand to his chest as he had at Remagen Fort years before.

“A red day,” I said. I dipped two fingers into something that lived and laughed just hours ago and drew a crimson line down my left cheek then the right.

As we made our way back down the valley I fiddled with the copper box in its leather sack on my hip. All day I had felt Sageous trespassing through the edge of my imaginations, the half-dreams and daydreams to which he could find paths. My own sources, a spy network far less sophisticated than most of the Hundred maintained, told me the Prince of Arrow had a second army, far smaller than the one at my gates, headed for Ancrath and the Tall Castle, presumably to ensure my father kept his troops indoors. There seemed no reason for Sageous to be haunting my dreams unless he had joined Arrow when the balance of power became clear and now served as the Prince’s advisor, seeking of course to own his mind rather than merely guide it.

Then again, the dream-witch might be keeping himself at the Tall Castle. It might be that Sageous sought to know my plans in order to sell them to Arrow and buy Ancrath’s independence for my father. Either way, I wasn’t going to show them to him.

I snagged the thread of memory that I’d been fishing for and pulled at it. The pre-laid plans that I stored in the box always emerged as sudden inspiration, moments of epiphany where disparate facts connected. I drew on the thread of my schemes but this time something went wrong. This time, despite my care, the box cracked open, a hair’s breadth, and I saw in my mind’s eye a dark light bleeding from beneath the lid. I hammered it down in an instant and it closed with a schnick.

For the longest moment I thought that nothing had escaped.

Then the memory lifted me.

“Hello, Jorg,” she says, and my clever words desert me.

“Hello, Katherine.”

And we stand among the graves with the stone girl and the stone dog between us, and blossom swirls like pink snow as the wind picks up, and I think of a snow-globe broken long ago and wonder how all this will settle.

“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” I say. “I’m told there are bandits in these woods.”

“You broke my vase,” she says, and I’m pleased that her tongue has turned traitor too.

Her fingers return to the spot where I hit her, where the vase shattered and she fell.

I have put her loved ones in the ground, but she talks about a vase. Sometimes a hurt is too big and we skirt around the edge of it, looking for our way in.

“To be fair, you were about to kill me,” I say.