King of Thorns (The Broken Empire 2)

“Your mother used to come here when we were children,” Robert said.

“She taught us the star names,” I said. “Though William was young for it. He could only ever find the dog star and the Pole Star.” I saw Will pointing, arm stretched out as if to touch each star, finger questing.

“Sirius and Polaris.” Robert sipped his wine. “I can’t remember much more. Rowen had the mind for it. In some twins the gifts are not shared out evenly. She got the brains and the looks. I got…a knack with horses.”

“I got a knack with killing.” The wine ran over my tongue, its flavour dark and layered.

“More than that, surely.” Robert pointed out a constellation through the window arch. “What’s that one?”

“Orion.” I stood and stepped to look out. “Betelgeuse, Rigel, Bellatrix, Mintaka, Alnilam, Alnitak, Saiph.” I named the giant’s parts. “Did you feel her die? Are twins like that?”

“No.” He stared into his goblet.

“Perhaps.” He set the wine before him. “Perhaps it was like that for her. When I got trapped against Crab Cliff by the spring tide Rowen knew where to bring the guard with ropes. We were just children, not even ten years old, but she knew somehow. Another talent that didn’t split even between us.”

I watched him, half-resentful that he had so many years with her. She was my mother and yet everything about her escaped me, a little more each day, sand through fingers. I couldn’t draw her face, tell you the colour of her eyes, or any concrete thing, just angles, glimpses, moments, the scent and softness of her. The security she gave—and the night when I learned it to be a lie.

“I went to the grouch chamber this morning,” I said.

The Builders’ view-ring hung on a thong about my neck, under the tunic Robert’s dresser had given me. I considered drawing it out to show him, but didn’t. Habits learned on the road die hard. I had laid hands on it and it was mine; I would keep my advantage hidden. The metal weighed heavy over my heart. Perhaps guilt feels like that.

“All that dust and spiders just to have an old ghost tell you to go to hell.” My uncle sipped his wine. “I used to go down a few times a year. But the grouch never changes, and in the end I did.”

“Do you know what the machinery does?” I asked.

“Who knows what any of that devilry is for? It pumps water—I understand that much, but they say everything the Builders made did ten different things. My father has left it alone for sixty years, his father left it untouched, and his father before him. It’s from a world best forgotten. Gelleth should have taught you that.”

My wine tasted sour. The light of that Builders’ Sun reached even here into a summer’s night on the Horse Coast. He was wrong in any case. The Builders weren’t gone, we couldn’t forget them. Their ghosts echoed in machinery buried in our vaults, their eyes watched us from above clouds, we fought our little wars in their shadow. Perhaps we even waged those wars at their instigation, something to keep us busy, to have us too focused on the now to think about the then.

“Gelleth taught me a lot of things. That we’re children in a world we don’t own or understand. That we stand alone and whether I fail or succeed depends on the strength of my will. On how far I will go. And that no one will come to help us in our hour of need.” And that some things can’t be fixed even if you bring the sun to earth and crumble mountains.

I thought of Gelleth, of the ghosts Chella drew from me. Since the night of storm and thorns I’d been haunted by what others had done to me. Gelleth taught me I could also be haunted by what I’d done to others.

The dead child watched me, broken against the tower battlements, blood and hair, a reminder of William and the milestone, his eyes two bright points of starlight. Another ghost, another misfortune seeking a home.

“You never came. I thought you would come for me.” In my mind I had seen Uncle Robert ride to the Tall Castle a hundred times, with the cavalry of the House Morrow streaming behind him, to demand an accounting for his sister’s death, to claim his nephew and take him home. “If Morrow had ridden to avenge Mother’s death there would have been no Gelleth.” No years on the road. No rivers of blood. No dead child watching.

Robert studied his goblet. “You fled Ancrath before news of Rowen’s death even reached us here. Olidan was slow to send word, and the word was slow to find its way.”

“But you didn’t come.” Old anger ignited within me and I went quickly to the stair in case it boiled out. I had climbed the steps a king, a man pressing fifteen years, and now a hurt and wrathful child shouted through me, through the years.

“Jorg—”

“No!” The hand I raised to keep him in his seat shook with the fierceness of what I held back and the air seemed to shimmer with heat. I hadn’t known the memories would seize me like this.

I ran from the tower, scared that I might find the blood of a second uncle on my hands.

* * *

We calmed the hurt between us the next morning, but with pleasantries and empty words of the kind that are layered over rather than used to scour clean. I didn’t let him speak of it again. Instead I spoke of Ibn Fayed and of Qalasadi. I had been to considerable lengths to get an accounting for Mother’s death and for William’s, and yet here were two men who had come within moments of taking Mother’s whole family from me—Uncle, Grandmother, Grandfather. What’s more, the mathmagician had, with a cool head, seen through my secret and chosen to take them all before they even knew I was amongst them, to kill with poison all my mother’s kin and to see me die for it under horrible restitution. There seemed no malice in it, only calculation, but I couldn’t leave such an equation unbalanced. It wouldn’t be proper.

Robert tried to turn me from revenge. “Ibn Fayed will come to us in time and break his strength here. That will be the time for his accounting.” But I had more immediate plans. Revenge can be the easy path to follow though I have often painted it as the hardest.

I left for the last time months later, suntanned, taller, provisioned, and laden with gifts. My saddlebags bulged with them, tempting enough for any bandits I might meet. I kept what mattered most about my person. The thorn-patterned box, the Builders’ view-ring, and the weapon that killed Fexler Brews more than nine hundred years previously, a hard and heavy lump strapped beneath my arm. I’ve always seen “no” as a challenge rather than an answer.

Above those treasures though I left with a message, a mantra if you like. Do not open that box. Open it and my work is undone. Open it and you’re finished.

Never open the box.

You won’t see Brother Grumlow try to knife you, only the sorrow in his eyes as you fall.

45

Wedding day

The crash of a rock against the keep wall drowned me out. A shield fell off its hook and clattered to the floor, dust sifted down from above.

“The gate will not hold,” I said again.

“Then we will fight them in the courtyard,” Sir Hebbron said.

I chose not to mention that he had surrendered to me in the same courtyard four years earlier, with just Gog and Gorgoth at my back rather than the Prince of Arrow’s fourteen thousand men.