King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

“Keep digging!” I shouted at the men around me. The entrance to the caves stood wide enough for three men. A black hole in the snow.

“How many men died in avalanches in the Matteracks last year, Makin?” I asked.

“I don’t know!” He looked at me as if I’d asked to have his babies. “None?”

“Three,” I said. “One the year before that.”

Some of the enemy were trying to flank us, spreading out around the melee to come at us from the side. I unslung my bow and loosed an arrow at the men on the left.

“We’re done,” Hobbs laboured across the slope, avoiding the diggers. To his credit he managed to add, “Sire.”

My arrow had hit a man just above the knee. Looked like an old fellow. Some old people just don’t know when to quit. He pitched forward and fell, rolling down the mountainside. I wondered if he’d stop before he reached the Haunt. “There’s a reason we lost four men in two years to avalanches,” I said.

“Carelessness?” Makin asked. One of the Prince’s more enterprising men had found his way uninjured around the edge of the battle below us. Makin made a quick parry then cut him down. A second soldier on the heels of the first took an arrow through his Adam’s apple.

The clash of metal on rock. The diggers had found the cave’s edges. The hole stood wide enough for a wagon to pass but it wouldn’t be getting any wider.

When the world is covered in snow it turns flat. All the hollows, all the bumps, are written into one unbroken surface like the white page ready for the quill. You may place on a snowfield whatever your imagination will produce, for your eyes will tell you nothing.

“Well?” Makin asked. The men of Arrow were pushing ever closer. He seemed in want of distraction and irritated that I’d drifted off into a daydream.

“You have to see the shades,” I said.

“Shades?”

I shrugged. I had time to waste: the cave was no use to us yet. “I thought that the power of being young was to see only black and white,” I said. I looked on as a man I knew among the Watch fell with the red point of a sword jutting from his back, hands locked on the neck of the blade’s owner.

“Shades?” Makin asked again.

“We never look up, Makin, we never raise our heads and look up. We live in such a vast world. We crawl across its surface and concern ourselves only with what lies before us.”

“Shades?” Makin kept stubbornly to his purpose. His thick-lipped mouth knew a thousand smiles. Smiles for winning hearts. Smiles for making friends. Smiles for tearing a laugh from the unwilling. Now he used his stubborn smile.

I shook my arms, willing life back into them. The line buckled here and there: soon enough there’d be call for my sword. “Shades,” I told him. When all you have to look at is white, given time you will see a symphony in shades of pale. The peasants in Gutting told me this—though in their own words. There are many types of snow, many shades, and even in one shade, many flavours. There are layers. There is granularity, powder. There is power and there is danger. “When I stabbed Brother Gemt I pre-empted something,” I said. “You understand, ‘pre-empt,’ Brother Makin?”

A thousand smiles; and one frown. He gave me the frown.

“I killed him for the hell of it, but also because it would only be a matter of time before he came against me. Before he tried to slit my throat in the night. And not just for the cutting of his hand.”

“What does bloody Gemt have to do with—” He cut down another man who slipped the line and I loosed an arrow at the men flanking our right side.

“There were four deaths in two years rather than forty because the Highlanders pre-empt avalanches,” I said. “They set them off.”

“What?”

“They watch the snow. They see the shades. They see the ups and downs, not the flat page. They dig and test. And then they pre-empt.” I waved my bow overhead, purple ribbon cracking in the wind. “In the caves. Now!”

When a slope looks dangerous the Highlanders take themselves above it by ridge and pass and cliff. They take with them straw, stones, a crude bowl of fired clay, kindling, charcoal—often from the burners in Ancrath’s woods—a glazed pot and a sheep’s bladder. They dig themselves a hole at the very top of the most treacherous layers, setting the bowl on top of several inches of packed straw. In the bowl they put kindling and charcoal, and set stones so that the pot will be held above the bowl. They fill the pot with snow and inflate the bladder, blowing into it as hard as they can and tying it off with a strip of gut-hide. They light the kindling and leave.

The men of the Watch started to pack into the caves. I had thought it would be crowded, once upon a time, back when I ordered the spades to be left there. I had wondered if we would all fit. Fewer than a hundred men made it in. We had space aplenty.

So much in life is simply a matter of timing.

I took my place at the cave mouth, eager to cross swords with the men of Arrow. I had the timing wrong. Plain and true. I should have said what mattered to Coddin days ago, months ago. My timing had been off.

Tired men die easy, as if they relish the prospect of infinity. My legs had the trembles but my arms were ready enough. I held my blade two-handed and took the first man in the eye with its point. Makin came to fight beside me. Beyond the enemy I could see forever. I could see the wildness and wideness of the mountains. Beyond them, the day moon, white like the memory of bone. Faint strains of the sword-song reached me as I crossed blades again, shearing partway through a man’s neck. My sword felt lighter, twitching to the song as if it held a life of its own and pulsed with its own blood. Snicker-snack, snicker-snack, and men fell away in pieces. The sun flashed crimson on my uncle’s sword as if heliographing a message to the Prince of Arrow.

“I’m sorry!” I shouted, for Makin and the others.

Timing.

We weren’t far enough ahead. The men of Gutting would have lit the fires in their bowls as they saw us emerge from the neck of the valley onto the mountain’s shoulder. I had thought we would reach the caves with a clear margin. That we would dig in and rake the slope with bow-fire. I was wrong. Just a few minutes’ error but plenty long enough for the enemy to fill the caves with our corpses.

Makin gave an oath and fell back, throwing himself beyond a swinging blade.

I nearly said “Sorry” again—but a mountain is a good place to die. If you’re going to die, try to make it somewhere with a view.

For moments without time I fought, enfolded with a fierce joy, the heat rising in me until the burns on my face blazed and the wind had no hold on me. Each part of that fight played out to a secret score and the timing that had eluded me returned in the scream of steel against steel. A wildness infected me and I thought of Ferrakind incandescent and consumed, whatever made him human abandoned to the inferno.

A block, a sway, step to the side, the ring and scrape of my sword as it slid from the foe’s sheared flesh. When a heavy blade meets the head of a man who has discarded his helm in the long climb, a red ruin is wrought. Worse than the neat butchery of the slaughterman in his abattoir is this destruction. Brain, skull, and hair follow the swing of your sword in a wet arc of crimson, white, and grey. Pieces of a face hang for a frozen moment: an accusing eye, its juices leaking, then everything falls and the next man stumbles through to battle, wearing scraps of the last.