Emperor of Thorns

52

‘Open the door.’

I stepped through quick as quick. ‘Close it.’ And the steel slammed down behind me.

The rulers of many nations crowded around me. I had found a replacement for my blooded cloak, cleaned the iron-wood rod and hidden it up the length of my sleeve, wrist to shoulder. I stood ready to answer their questions.

‘Where is Costos Portico?’

‘What happened in there?’

‘How are the doors working?’

Dozens more, all together, in shades from angry through indignant and down into fearful.

‘Lights on me.’ And high above us the constellation of Builder-lights grew dim, save for a tight and brilliant grouping that lit the space about me.

That shut them up.

I walked toward the middle of the chamber and the light followed me, the point of illumination moving across ceiling and floor. In the shadows before the dais Gorgoth crouched, fingers to the stone flagstones. Two quick bounds took me up the dais steps and I sat upon the throne, letting the rod of office slip free and setting it across my lap.

It was the sitting down that broke the spell. An angry clamour rose among them. These were, after all, rulers of nations.

‘Costos is dead,’ I said and the Hundred fell silent to hear me. ‘His vote passes to his advisors. His advisors are dead. His bannermen also.’

‘Murderer!’ Czar Moljon, still clutching his broken finger.

‘Many times over,’ I agreed. ‘But the events in the Roman room are a mystery that none of you observed, that passed unseen by the guard. There will of course be an inquiry, I may be charged, an imperial court may be convened. These however are matters for another day. This is Congression, gentlemen, and we have matters of state to decide.’

‘How dare you sit in Adam’s chair?’ A white-haired king from the east.

‘No law denies me,’ I said. ‘And I was tired. In any event it was Honorous’s chair last and if any wish to dispute my occupancy they may approach to discuss the matter.’ I set one hand upon the iron-wood rod. ‘Seating arrangements do not make emperors, gentlemen. That’s what we’re here to vote upon.’

I beckoned Taproot to me and leaned back in the throne, as uncomfortable a chair as I’d ever sat upon. Taproot climbed the steps quick enough, coming from the shadows into the light. I motioned him closer still.

‘You’ve found out who my friends are and who my enemies are?’ I asked.

‘Jorg! You’ve given me no time. I’ve hardly started to mingle. I-’ The silk of his doublet flapped around him.

‘But you have, haven’t you? You knew already.’

‘I know some of them, watch me!’ He nodded, a sharp grin, quick then gone. No one is immune to flattery.

‘Then get out there and have Makin, Marten, Kent, and Rike stand close to four of them who wish me ill. Gorgoth too, if he will. Tell him everyone is going to die if I don’t get to be emperor. Those words.’

‘Everyone? The whole of Congression? Jorg! Excess is no-’

‘Everyone everywhere,’ I said. ‘Just tell him.’

‘Everywhere?’ His hands fell still for a moment.

‘The lights will go off in a short while. Tell my brothers to be ready. When the light returns those men need to be dead. Have another set of names ready and then another. If I have to I will vote myself emperor.’

And Taproot left the dais faster than he came.

‘You’re listening to me aren’t you, Fexler?’

No reply.

‘The Dead King is coming.’ I didn’t know how I knew, but I knew. ‘And he’ll bring the world to ruin. Starting here.’ I turned the rod over in my hands. Over and over. ‘And to stop him — that would take such a force, such an act of magic, of will, that it would spin that wheel of yours and set the world cracking apart … and if that happens … Michael gets his way and you machines burn us all.’

A faint pulse in the light.

‘I would be right to guess that somewhere beneath me is an enormous bomb, would I?’

Again, the quiver in the light.

I leaned back into my uncomfortable throne and twirled the iron-wood like a baton. Likely I would be the shortest-reigning emperor in history. Out amongst the Hundred, Miana watched me. The man beside her, portly with grey sideburns and my son in his arms, was my father-in-law, Lord of Wennith. He didn’t seem to be the man he was six years ago, but then who among us is?

A lord of middling years in brown suede and gold chains had been trying to catch my eye at the foot of the dais, and now moved on through coughing to raising his hand.

‘Yes, Lord …?’

‘Antas of Andaluth.’ His realm bordered Orlanth to the south. ‘I have matters to discuss, King Jorg. The rights to the River Parl …’

‘Would that secure your support, Lord Antas?’

‘Well, I hesitate to put it so bluntly …’

‘The rights to the Cathun River purchased absolution for the death of my mother, and of my brother William. Did you know that, Lord Antas?’

‘Why, no …’

‘Do you not think some things are beyond purchase, Antas? Vote for me if you believe the empire needs me on the throne. The fate of a hundred nations shouldn’t tip on river rights, horse trading, and back scratching.’

He frowned at that. Red Kent stood behind him and just a little to the left. I guessed that Antas’s support had never been going to be mine however many rivers we agreed over.

‘Lights out,’ I said, and the throne room plunged into darkness.

I made a slow count to ten beneath the uproar. ‘Lights on!’

Antas sprawled at the base of the dais, neck broken. Kent had already moved on.

I stood up from the throne and the lights shone more brightly so I felt their heat upon me. It had to be now.

‘Men of empire!’ I raised my voice to reach the edges of the great hall, so even the Silent Sister, the Queen of the Red and Katherine could hear beyond the Gilden Gate.

All of them stopped to watch me, even with the murdered lying at their feet.

‘Men of empire. A better man than I would have won your support with the goodness of his deeds, the clarity of his vision, the truth of his words. But that better man is not here. That better man would fail before the dark tide that rushes toward us. Orrin of Arrow was the better man and yet he didn’t survive even to ask your support.

‘Dark times call for dark choices. Choose me.’

I walked the perimeter of the dais in measured steps, staring out across the shadowed heads of state. ‘There is an enemy at our gates. Even now. As we spend our words here, the Lord Commander spends the blood of better men to hold his city. This holy city at the heart of our broken empire. This holy city is the heart of our empire. And if you men, you servants of that empire, do not remake the ancient pact, if you do not set upon this throne a single man to carry the responsibility for all our peoples, then that heart will be cut out.

‘You can feel it, can you not, my lords? It doesn’t take the taint that the Gilden Gate keeps out for you to sense what approaches. It has festered in your kingdoms. The dead rising, the old laws being undone, magics spilling and spreading like contagion. Certainty has left us: the days smell of wrong.

‘Do this now. Do it as one. For the man upon this throne will have to face what comes. And if there is no emperor there will be no one to stand against the tide. And tell me, in your heart of hearts, do you truly want to be that man?’

‘Melodrama! How can you listen to this?’ Czar Moljon, perhaps emboldened by his pain. ‘Besides, no vote will be cast for two days yet.’

‘Taproot.’ I waved him forward.

‘The Congression must vote on its final day in a private ballot, but any candidate may force an early and open vote at any time, on the understanding that failure to win such a vote disbars them from future office.’ Taproot’s hands made as to close a weighty tome, though he spoke from memory.

‘Vote!’ I said and the lights came up.

‘The vote of Morrow for my grandson.’ My grandfather’s voice rang out clear.

‘And the holdings of Alba.’ My uncle beside him.

The women at the Gilden Gate drew away, a hurried motion.

‘I stand with Jorg of Renar.’ Ibn Fayed raised his fist and the four Moorish warriors beside him followed his motion.

‘Wennith for Jorg.’ Miana’s father.

‘And the north!’ Sindri, somewhere behind me. ‘Maladon, Charland, Hagenfast.’

‘We stand with the burned king.’ White-haired twins, jarls from the ice-wastes in black furs and steel.

Gilden Guard appeared at the gate, a crowd of them. They advanced, and as each man passed through he collapsed, boneless. The clatter made the Hundred turn.

Perhaps half a dozen guards lay motionless on our side of the gate having made it no more than a yard or so within. Scores more stood almost as still, filling the antechamber beyond.

We all felt him approach. How could you not?

‘Conaught for Jorg.’

‘Kennick for Jorg.’

My advisors cast their allotted votes, from Arrow to Orlanth. Others followed, a sense of urgency on them now, as if we each heard his footsteps beneath the announcing.

And there he stood, framed in the Gilden Gate, a creature that wore Kai Summerson’s skin and bones. I hoped Katherine had run and run fast.

‘Hello.’ He smiled. Both the word and the smile unnatural things, dragged from somewhere a man would never want to look.

The Dead King approached the Gilden Gate, hands raised, palms out. It seemed he encountered a sheet of glass, for he stopped, fingers flat against the obstruction. He craned Kai’s neck to one side, peering at us all as though we were rats in a trap.

‘A clever gate,’ he said. ‘But it’s only made of wood.’

He stepped back and his dead guards approached with poleaxes to destroy the frame of the gate within the arch.

‘Red March for Jorg.’ A stout grey woman bearing the vote for the Queen of Red’s hereditary seat.

‘The Thurtans for Jorg.’ The man buried in a horsehair robe, an iron crown on his brow.

And more, and still more.

‘How do we stand, Taproot?’ I asked.

‘Thirty-seven out of the forty required.’

Pieces of the Gilden Gate fell splintered to the ground. The Dead King’s presence reached in and men fell to their knees in despair. Even now more than half the votes held back, bound by years of prejudice and wrangling, Congression was a marketplace, to actually put an emperor on the throne, to end their own supremacy in those hundred kingdoms … many would rather die. But there are good deaths and there are bad deaths. The Dead King offered only the worse kind.

‘Attar for Jorg.’

‘Conquence for Jorg.’ Hemmet’s brother, giving away the Lord Commander’s supremacy in Vyene.

The remains of the gate fell in.

‘Scorron for Jorg.’ A stern old man, watching me with dislike.

I returned to the throne.

‘Men of empire does Congression find me worthy?’

The ‘aye’ that rang around the hall held more of desperation than enthusiasm, but it was sufficient. I sat emperor in Vyene, Lord of the Hundred — the Broken Empire remade.

Taproot came to my side, bowing close as the Dead King entered through the Gilden Arch, his troops behind him.

‘Well done,’ I said to Taproot. ‘I didn’t think we were anywhere near thirty-seven when I asked.’

‘Numbers never lie, my emperor.’ Taproot shook his head. ‘Only men.’

The Hundred fell back before the Dead King, no man prepared to hold his ground.

‘It does seem to have been a hollow victory, my emperor. Was it so important that you be confirmed to the throne before we all die?’

‘We’ll find out, shall we?’ I stood once more, glad to be out of that seat. ‘I don’t suppose you can seal the arch, Fexler?’

No response, just the continued flow of dead men into the throne room. The archway had always had the look of a later addition, something cut by masons with more poetry in their fingers.

The Dead King approached the dais, somehow a dark figure despite the sky-blue of Summerson’s cloak. Behind him a golden wedge of the emperor’s guard. My guard — Chella in their midst. And I stood my ground, upon the dais, before the throne, with the Hundred aligned behind me in their own wedge. Gorgoth joined me on the dais at my left shoulder, Makin at my right, Kent behind him, Marten behind Gorgoth, not a weapon between them. Sindri mounted the first step, Uncle Robert taking the same place on the far side. The guard who had watched over our Congression, a dozen men in total, stood with the Hundred, all save one who’d contrived to break his neck in the confusion and donate his sword to Rike.

I spared a glance for the men at my shoulders. I’d called them brothers on the road many a time, stood with them in the face of danger, shared meat and mead. A brotherhood of the road, sure enough, but a mean thing, men to die with rather than for. But in this place, before this enemy, who brought with him the certainty and song of death, who breathed a fear far worse than any I had felt upon the lichway when the ghosts came many years before, in this place it seemed that the men who stood with me were true brothers.

‘Hello Jorg.’ The Dead King looked up at me from the base of the dais.

His regard remained the same no matter whose eyes he watched me from. Somehow familiar, overburdened with accusation, a cold inspection that woke in me every sorrow I had known.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked.

‘The same reason as you.’ He never looked away. ‘Because others said that I may not.’

‘I say that you may not,’ I told him.

‘Will you stop me? Brother Jorg?’ His tone light but with the most bitter undercurrent, as if the ‘brother’ burned his tongue.

‘Yes.’ Just the nearness of him took the strength from my arms. He carried death, bled it from every pore, his existence an insult to all things living.

‘And how will you do that, Jorg?’ He climbed the first step of the dais.

I swung at him by way of an answer, iron-wood blurring through the air. Stick met flesh with a wet thump. The Dead King closed Kai’s hand about it, twisted the rod from my hand and smashed it into splinters on the edge of the second step.

‘How will you stop me, Brother?’ He climbed the second step. ‘You’ve no power. Nothing. An empty vessel. What little magic you ever held has long gone.’

We stood face to face, close enough to reach out for each other’s necks, though I knew how that would end.

‘And what magic do you bring, I wonder?’

For he carried something more complex than necromancy, more than horror and the crude animation of dead flesh. The despair, the longing, and the loss that threatened to drown us all, that made the kings of nations cower and pale, that wasn’t a weapon, not something made for us, but just an echo of what rang through him.

‘Only truth, Brother Jorg,’ he said.

And with those words the bitter play of my life rose around me, mother’s music wrapping it but played too loud, a jarring discord of sour notes. I saw the moments strung out across years, cruelty, cowardice, vicious pride, a failure at every turn to be the man I could have been, a path through days littered with the wreckage of lives I lacked the courage to protect or repair.

‘I’ve been a bad man?’ I struggled to keep the weakness from my voice. ‘The king of dead things has waded through blood to tell me I have fallen short of sainthood? I thought you came here for battle? Put a sword in my hand and dance with me? Do-’

‘You’ve been a coward, you failed at every turn to protect those you love.’ All his words fell like judgments, the weight of them crushing, though I sought to shrug them off with denial.

‘You came for the empire throne, so why this obsession with my failings? If you think me weak, if you want the throne … try to take it.’

‘I came for you, Brother Jorg,’ he said. ‘For your family.’

‘Try.’ The word burned my throat, forced past a snarl. The bond to your child can form in an instant or grow by stealth, hook by hook, until you could no more stand aside than let go your skin. In that moment I knew I loved my son. That my father’s strength had passed me by, and that I not only lacked the singularity of will to hold the empire throne but that I would die in the useless defence of a squalling infant too young to know I existed, rather than run to father more another day.

Without command, without battle cry, almost without sound the dead guard advanced, quick and open-handed, tearing the helms from their heads so that we could see the hunger in them.

Of the men at my shoulder only Gorgoth dropped back, retreating from the dais. If pressed to pick the man to run it would have been Makin or Kent. They had seen the quick dead in the Cantanlona Marsh and knew the horror of them, the awful strength, the way they fought on though cut almost to offal.

‘Run,’ the Dead King said. ‘I’ll let you go. Just leave the child to me. Leave this little Wennith whore of yours.’

The dead surged and Makin, Kent and Marten went to meet them passing to either side of the Dead King and me. Just moments left to us and I held nothing. Lights and doors. Empty hands. A few guards, finding their courage, sallied from the side entrances to attack their dead comrades. The first of the living fell to the dead with dismaying swiftness.

Something exploded from the floor around the dais. Somethings. In half a dozen places the flagstones shattered into sharp chunks and red blurs tore through the remains while they still hung in the air. It took long moments even to focus on the creatures as they ripped into the Dead King’s troops. Trolls, but red of hide, akin to Gorgoth rather than their cousins beneath Halradra, and of larger build. The first of them picked up an armoured man and threw him over the heads of the legion behind to strike the wall above the Gilden Arch. Claws scythed through the next man’s neck, mail links sheared away. Descendants of the emperor’s bodyguard, defending the throne. Six of them, terrible but too few.

I saw Kent snatch the sword of a fallen man just before another bore him to the ground. The dead swept round us, making the dais an island, cutting into the Hundred behind us.

‘Run!’ the Dead King said again. ‘They’ll let you go.’

‘No.’

‘No? But isn’t that what you’re good at, Brother? Jorg? Aren’t you well-versed in leaving the child to die while you run off to hide? Perhaps you could find another bush to cower in?’

‘What- who are you?’ I stared into Kai Summerson’s eyes, trying to see past them.

‘You’ve left mother and son to die before, Jorg, slip away again. I won’t tell.’ Acid on every word as though I’d done him some deep and personal hurt.

Somehow I had my hands on his throat, though I knew he didn’t need to draw breath, though I knew he could snap my arms. ‘You know nothing of them, nothing!’ I spun him around and he offered no resistance.

Over his shoulder Gorgoth, up against the wall, some small figure behind him, something dark in one hand, clutched against his chest. Two of the six trolls fought around him, an extravagance of violence, impossible speed, strength, skill, against impossible odds. Limbs, guts, armour, flying in crimson arcs, and still the dead rushed on. Gorgoth bent over his tiny burden, shielding it from the dead with his own body, crouching lower, lower, lost in the melee. Miana’s white face now seen above his shoulder.

The Dead King smiled at me, a broken, ugly grin, my hands pale beneath his chin, the briar scars livid on wrist and forearm. The pain of those hooks burned again, and though a stone roof arched unbroken overhead it seemed that storm winds howled around me, that the rain lashed cold from black skies.

‘In the end,’ I said, ‘there’s no magic, only will.’

I struck at the Dead King, focusing upon him every piece of my desire to see his destruction. I have lived a life driven by desire, the desire for revenge, for glory, to have what is denied me, a simple directive, pure and edged like a weapon. And such desire, such concentrated wanting, is the foundation of all magic — so the Builder told me.

Through narrowed slits I saw the Dead King’s eyes grow wide, as if I really were choking him.

‘You failed against Corion, Luntar dipped into your mind at will, even Sageous played you.’ He coughed the words past my hands, still twisting that smile. ‘And you think you can stop me?’

I could have told him I was older now. I could have said that I hadn’t stood between those men and my son. But instead I answered, ‘Practised spells laid out in books work better than something laid out new. The runes and sigils used for centuries serve better than yesterday’s invention. They’re channels where men’s will has cut paths through what is real. I’ll beat you because a million stand behind me now. Because my desire to win now runs in the oldest channels.’ I told him because there’s a power in the telling of a truth, and because reason has a keen edge.

‘Belief? You’ve found God now?’ He laughed, untroubled by the seal around his throat. ‘The will of the faithful won’t serve you just because you killed the Pope, Jorg. It doesn’t quite work like that.’

‘People can believe in other things, dead man,’ I told him. Screaming all around us, red hands clawing, rich men dying.

‘There’s nothing-’

‘Empire,’ I said. ‘A million souls scattered across a vast and broken empire, praying for peace, praying for the day a new emperor will sit upon the throne. And it’s me.’

I struck again. Emperor in the heart of empire, unbroken. And the Dead King staggered, weakened, trapped in flesh.

‘I came for revenge,’ the Dead King said, though I’d no idea what revenge he spoke of. ‘To show you what I’d made of myself after you abandoned me. And look what I have wrought!’ Careless of my grip he spread his hands wide, to encompass the golden horde seething around us. ‘I brought you the kingdom of the dead. Let me join with you, Brother. Let me lead our armies, and I will take the empire out past all boundaries, in this world and in the next, and make it whole, entire, and ours. Set aside these friends, this unchosen wife-’ He glanced toward Miana.

I struck then with every fibre of my will. I struck with the strength of empire, with the strength of a million, in that holy place, the very heart of empire, where the might and majesty of emperors past and the faith of generations had scored the paths of my power into the fabric of reality. A wind howled around us, cold and swirling, Kai Summerson fighting for release, deep within his own body, for whilst the holy may fail in any moment, the damned may in any moment reach for redemption. The gale spoke and the Dead King fought back.

My will met that of the Dead King, neither of us with the slightest give in us. The vast and sleeping mind of empire behind me, lost hopes, broken dreams, all pushing, all pressing. The deadlands behind him, the desolation of lives ended, the need, the thirst to return. Impossible pressures built, and built, and built again. I felt the wheel turn, the fabric of everything and everytime start to tear. And in that instant I knew who stood before me.

In that second Kai Summerson learned to fly. He took the Dead King’s feet from the ground and the wind scoured the empty inches beneath them. A small victory but one that held my enemy prone.

One hard, cold instant and I knew who hung in my grasp, and even then, with William weak before me, vulnerable, open, even knowing that I traced my father’s path almost to the letter … I stabbed him.

I let slip a hand from his throat, took Kai’s knife from his belt, and drove it deep into his heart, the metal grating across ribs.

A single disbelieving laugh burst crimson from his lips, and then he fell, as if the knife had cut all his strings.

I released him and he fell, arms flailing, blood flooding from his chest. He fell and it took an age. My own brother. William, who I had failed in the thorns. Who I failed now. Whose death had cracked my life. Thorns held me once more. I couldn’t catch him as he dropped. Kai’s corpse hit the floor with the sound of ending, William already gone from him, back into the deadlands from where he had watched me for so many years, from so many dead eyes.

Luntar’s paper fluttered from my sleeve. I picked it up as the dead guards toppled, in scores, then hundreds, all around the room.

‘You can save him.’ Four words. The future-sworn see less than they think. I had stabbed my brother.

‘I don’t understand.’ Makin shouldered a corpse off him, rivulets of dark blood across half his face in three parallel lines. He spoke into the speechless moment. ‘How did you kill him?’

‘I watched him die.’ I muttered the words. ‘I stayed hidden and let them kill him.’

Makin half-climbed, half-crawled, to me.

‘What?’ He set a hand to my wrist, stilling the tremble in the dripping dagger. I let the blade fall.

‘I didn’t kill him. He was already dead. He died eleven years ago.’

Marten came from behind, shoulder laid open to the bone, an ear missing. He took the paper from me, awkward in trembling fingers. ‘Save who?’

‘My brother, William. The Dead King. Always quicker, more clever, stronger-willed. And yet it never occurred to me that death wouldn’t be able to hold him.’

‘Death isn’t what it used to be.’ Perhaps the wisest words ever to come from Red Kent’s lips. He lay dying among the dead, among the foe he had laid low, so torn there could be only minutes left to him. Makin went to his side.

‘Miana!’ As I shouted it I knew a hint of the pain I would feel were she not to answer. Fewer than half the Hundred still survived, many fewer. I saw no sign of Sindri, of my grandfather or uncle. Ibn Fayed I saw. At least I saw his head.

‘Here.’ And I found her, almost pinned to the wall behind Gorgoth’s bulk. The red trolls lay broken in the carnage. Gorgoth unfolded, dripping and ripped. In one hand he held my son against his chest.

Something struck through me, seeing my child, there in that moment. Something sharper than edges. A certainty. The knowing that my father had failed to mould me in his image. I loved that baby, small and bloodied and ugly as he was. The denial had run from me. And with that knowing came another: the certainty that I could only ever hurt him. That the taint of my father would drip from my fingers unbidden and make another monster of my son.

I staggered back and fell into my throne. An autumn leaf swirled around my feet, brought in with the dead. A single maple leaf, scarlet with the season’s sin. A sign. In that moment I knew myself too full of poison to do anything but drop. The fall had come for me. With numb fingers I undid the straps on my breastplate.

‘Still …’ Marten shook his head and crouched beside Kai. ‘A child. A boy. What was he? Ten?’

‘Seven.’

‘A boy of seven. Lost in the deadlands. Fought his way out? Became king?’ With each question he shook his head. I could see the possibilities bubbling inside him.

You can save him. Luntar’s words. A man who saw the future.

‘I’ll bet he gave them hell.’ A grim smile tugged at me. I wondered if that same angel, the one that came to me past death’s doorstep, had visited little William. I wondered what short shrift he gave her. ‘I’ll bet he took the hardest path.’ Like the Conaught spear, William would have hauled himself deeper, aimed for the heart of darkness, found the lichkin. The rest lay beyond my imagining.

Kai sprawled, shattered and empty, William gone, the dead fallen, only Chella standing amid the gleam of their armour. My enemies defeated, and yet the sorrow remained, keener, more true, more clean, for I had always owned it. It echoed back to the thorns, the tone of a bell resounding through the years. We’re fashioned by our sorrows — not by joy — they are the undercurrent, the refrain. Joy is fleeting.

‘I let the thorns hold me, and a crack has run through all my days, deeper than the feelings it divides.’ The calligraphy of those scars lay writ across me still, white upon my flesh. ‘To everything there is a season.’ I spoke Ecclesiasticus. ‘A time to be born. A time to die.’

‘He will return: you can’t destroy him.’ Chella from the heaped corpses, her former troops. She sounded neither happy nor sad. More lost.

‘I don’t want to destroy him,’ I said. ‘He’s my brother. It was given to me to save him.’ I knew what to do. I had always known. I set a hand to the throne. ‘I hadn’t known how bitter-sweet this would taste.’ Across the hall my son cried in his mother’s arms, both of them beautiful. My brother would always return and my boy would never be safe, for our pain had become a wheel and the world lay broken. My brother, my son, my fault.

A tear made its slow passage across my cheek.

I stood somehow, though the strength had gone from me. And joined Makin, standing above him as he knelt with Kent. Marten at my shoulder. Rike came across, bloodied but whole, a gold chain decorated in diamonds and gore hanging from one fist, almost an afterthought.

‘I don’t want to destroy him,’ I said. ‘I want to save him. I should have saved him back when the thorns held me. Nothing has been right since then.’ Fear shook me, sudden, fierce, fear of what I had to do, fear that I hadn’t the courage.

‘No.’ Marten behind me. Marten would always be the first to understand. Marten who failed his son, who let his boy die. There are no rights and wrongs in such matters. Only wrongs. ‘Don’t.’ The word choked him.

‘Death isn’t-’ And Red Kent died amid the circle of his brothers who did love him each in our way. ‘Isn’t what it was,’ I finished for him.

Chella stepped closer. No one moved to stop her. ‘He’s gone where you can’t follow, Jorg.’

‘You can’t.’ Marten’s voice thick with knowing.

‘Even now they tell me “can’t”, Makin,’ I said, half in sadness, half in the joy of ending. The bitter and the sweet. ‘They tell me “no” and think there must be something I won’t sacrifice to get what I want.’ What I need.

Makin looked up at that, confused but understanding we none of us were speaking of Kent. He struggled to rise and that’s when I hit him. A man like Makin you have to catch off-balance. I struck him hard enough to break my hand, and did. He fell boneless, one arm flopping out almost to Chella’s feet.

‘What?’ Rike took his gaze from Brother Kent, amazed.

‘He would have tried to stop me. Tell him he’s to be steward. An order, not a choice.’ I cradled my hand, let the pain sharpen away sorrow. ‘He would have tried to stop me. Even with his little girl gone all these years, he wouldn’t understand. Not Makin.’

‘Fuck Makin. I don’t understand.’ Rike bristled, the sword in his fist still dripping.

Movement at the Gilden Arch. Katherine, a sword clutched across her, unsteady.

‘Rike, glorious Rike! I knew I kept you around for a reason, Brother.’ I pulled the breastplate from me and opened my arms. ‘Do it.’

‘What?’ He stared as though I were mad.

‘I need to follow him, Rike. I need to find my brother.’

‘I-’

‘Kill me. You’ve threatened it often enough. Now I’m asking.’

Rike just stared, eyes wide and bright. Behind him Katherine had started to run toward us, shouting, begging me to stop or urging me on — I couldn’t tell.

‘I’m your fecking emperor. I command you.’

‘I-’ And the big idiot looked at his sword as if it were a foreign thing. ‘No.’ And dropped it.

And that’s when Chella stabbed me. My brother’s knife, taken from his corpse, stuck near enough into the wound that father gave me. She went one better though, and twisted the blade. Our final kiss.

‘Go to hell, Jorg Ancrath.’ The last words I ever heard.