King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

A Watch man screamed and fell to my left, an arrow through his neck. Just like Maical, but louder. Another shaft hit the rock behind me and shattered.

“I love thee for no good reason,” Coddin said, falling back into some accent from wherever he was born, his voice weak now.

I could hear the thud of boots. Steel on steel. Shouts.

“…but I do love thee well.”

I looked up, blinking. Down the slope Makin cut into the first of the enemy to reach us, an expert sword against exhausted common swords. No contest. At least until the odds mounted.

“Do something about that girl.” Coddin’s voice with new strength.

“Miana?” I asked. She should be safe in the castle. For now at least.

“Katherine of Scorron.” Another cough. “These things seem terribly important when you’re young. Matters of the heart and groin. They fill your world at eighteen. But believe me. When you’re the wrong side of forty-five and the past is a bright haze…they’re more important still. Do something. You’re haunted by many ghosts. I know that, though you hide it well.”

The men of the Watch massed before our position now, in full melee against the first few dozen of the enemy, with more pressing in moment by moment. They knew the bow like lovers know each other, but they could fight hand to hand too. Fighting on a steep slope of broken rock is not a skill you want to learn for the first time when somebody is trying to kill you, and the Watch had had years to learn the art, so for now they held.

“Miss an opportunity like Katherine and it will haunt you longer and more deeply than any ghost you keep now,” Coddin said.

Another arrow hit, closer than any before.

“Run!” I shouted.

Whatever other wisdom Coddin had been hoarding would have to keep. There’s a time for sentimental chatter and none of it is on a mountain whilst being shot at.

“Run!” I shouted. But I didn’t raise the purple ribbon on a shortbow, because I had a plan to carry out, and no part of it involved being hit by arrows.

26

Wedding day

I’d buried Brothers before, even friends, but never alive.

We left Coddin in his tomb, not dead but with his passage booked. We made a messy retreat, fighting across the ground where we’d buried him. I joined the fray and cut a path through the men of Arrow, as if I was planning to make my way right back to the Haunt. There’s something about a fight that makes you forget your troubles. Mainly it’s that all your troubles are suddenly very small in the face of the new problems swinging your way with sharp edges on them.

Perhaps there’s something wrong with me. Perhaps it’s part of those three steps I took away from the world of reasonable men, of good men. But there’s little that is more satisfying to me than a well-blocked sword blow followed by a swift riposte and the scream of an enemy. God, but the noise and feel of a blade shearing through flesh is as sweet as any flute speaking out its melody. Provided it’s not my flesh of course. It can’t be right. But there it is.

I fought well but the enemy just kept coming, as if dying were the only thing on their list today. We fell back and left them slipping in blood, tripping on corpses. Most of us managed to find the space to turn and run. Many of us didn’t.

About two thirds of the Watch made it through the neck of the valley and scrambled up the steeper slopes onto the broad shoulder of the mountain above. The rest, even if it were only a light wound that slowed them, were swallowed by the advancing army.

Wind is the cruellest cold. Exposed on the mountainside we felt those sharp fingers stealing our warmth. All the running and climbing didn’t matter. The wind put a chill in you even so, taking your strength one pinch at a time.

We struggled on through the wind, a ragged bunch without ranks or squads, the snow blinding now, small flakes too cold to stick to the rocks. Not far above us the snowline glittered, the whiteness hiding the folds and hollows, making it all of a likeness. Whiteness, stretching up to Blue Moon Pass, snow-choked and useless for escape, stretching beyond to the peak of Mount Botrang, and past that, the sky.

I caught Makin up, grey-faced and staggering. He looked at me, just a glance as if he were too tired to do anything but hang his head. He hadn’t the breath for words but his look, quick as it was, told me we were going to die on these slopes. Maybe on the next ridge, maybe farther up, on the snow with our blood making pretty crimson patterns against the white.

“Stick with me,” I said. I had a little go left in me. Not much, but some. “I have a plan.”

I hoped I had a plan.

The wind numbed my face. On the right where Gog had left me scarred it felt good. That twisted flesh had never stopped burning, as if shards of him found the bones in my jaw and cheek and lodged there with fire trapped inside. The wind made my face feel solid, like one block that would crack if I spoke again. I enjoyed the relief. I’ve become good at finding crumbs of comfort. Sometimes they’re all you have to eat.

Screams behind us as the slowest men of the Watch met the fastest men of Arrow.

I had my head down, concentrating on one foot then the next, hauling in one breath and throwing it out to make room for the one after. Beside me Makin looked to have retreated into that closed and lonely place that we all reach if we keep digging. Dig a little deeper than that and you’re in hell all of a sudden.

The snow took me by surprise. One moment thump thump thump over rocks and the next a silent wade through deep white powder. It took maybe four strides to go from bare rock to snow past my knees. Another hundred strides and my feet were as numb as my face. I wondered if I was dying piece by piece, a slow introduction rather than the traditional unexpected embrace.

The snowfield started to get us killed. Pushing a path through snow is hard work. Following in the beaten trail of two hundred men is easier. More men were caught. Natural selection had set the toughest of Arrow’s men at our heels with the weaker troops still struggling through the neck of the valley below the snowline.

“Up there!” I pointed to a place with nothing to distinguish it from any other acre of white. I could feel the box hot against my hip. I picked up the pace and left Makin plodding. “Up there!” I didn’t know why, but I knew.

I took the box in my hand and ran on, lungs filling with blood, or that’s how it felt.

The thing that tripped me wasn’t a rock. The snow had all the rocks covered, deep under our feet. What tripped me was something long and hard and near the surface. Broomstick came to mind as I fell. Then the box went schnick and my mind filled with entirely new things. Old things.

27

Wedding day

Schnick and the box opens. Memory drags me back to Rennat Forest to stand amongst gravestones and wildflowers in the spring sunshine.

“In any case, I have my heart set on a good man,” Katherine says.

“Who?” I ask.

“Prince Orrin,” she says. “The Prince of Arrow.”

“No,” I say. I don’t want to say anything, but I speak. I don’t want to admit any kind of interest, any form of weakness, but none of this is going as I planned, and plans are what I’m good at.