King of Thorns

9

Four years earlier

The Highlands has lowland, though precious little of it and what there is lies stony and grows yet more stones when farmed. In my three months as king I had stuck to the mountains. Only now, when the road led me north to Heimrift, did I discover the fringes of my kingdom where it brushed against Ancrath and the Ken Marshes.

We rode from the ruined farm, from the peasants, Marten and Sara, whose names had stayed with me this once, and from their dead girl, Janey, whose breath stopped one night on the edge of spring before we’d gone twenty miles down the trail. We kept to the border lands where road-brothers are wont to travel and opportunity abounds. The farther into a kingdom a bandit-troop can venture without serious resistance is a measure of that kingdom’s softness. Thurtan was always soft around the edges, the Ken Marshes softer still. Ancrath, we would say, was hard. Hard enough to break your teeth on.

“Why have we stopped?” Makin wanted to know.

The road forked. An unmarked junction, a dirt road scored through dreary hills where Ancrath met the Marshes met the Highlands. The wind rippled through the long grass. Any place three nations touch will grow well given half a chance. Blood makes for rich soil.

“There’s two choices. Take the one that’s not Ancrath,” he said.

I closed my eyes. “Do you hear that, Makin?”

“What?”

“Listen,” I said.

“To what?” He cocked his head. “Birds?”

“Harder.”

“Mosquitoes?” Makin asked, a frown on him now.

“Gog hears it,” I said. “Don’t you, lad?”

I felt him move behind me. “A bell?”

“The bell at Jessop where the marsh-tide brings the dead. It’s got a voice so deep it just crawls over the bogs, mile after mile,” I said.

That bell had called me back home once before. That bell had let me know I had a new brother lurking in a stranger’s belly, being put together piece by piece by piece beneath dresses fit for a queen. Under silk and lace. And now it reminded me of the Prince of Arrow’s words. Words his sword nearly knocked clean out of my head. That my little brother had come out to play, and the cradle toys my father first gave him were the rights to my inheritance.

“We’ll go this way,” I said, and turned along the harder path.

“The Heimrift is that way,” Makin said. He pointed to be clear. “I’m not arguing. I just don’t want anyone saying I didn’t mention it, you know, when we’re all lying on the ground bleeding to death.”

He was arguing as it happened, but he had a case and I didn’t stop him.

We rode for an hour or so, leaving the sourness of the boglands behind us. Spring races through Ancrath before it starts to struggle up the slopes into the Highlands. We came to woodlands, with leaves unfurling on every branch, as if one blow of spring’s green hammer had set them exploding from the bud. I took the Brothers from the road and we followed trails into the woods. If you don’t want to meet anyone, take the forest path, especially in Ancrath since I stole Father’s Forest Watch from him.

Spring warmth, the luminous green of new leaves, the song of thrush and lark, the richness of the forest breathed in and slowly out…Ancrath has charms unknown in the Renar Highlands, but I’d started to appreciate the wildness in my new kingdom, the raw rock, unobtainable peaks, even the endless wind scouring east to west.

Grumlow leaned over and snagged something from Young Sim’s hair. “Woodtick.” He cracked it between his nails. Even Eden had a snake problem.

The head-cart started to snag on bushes and dead-fall as the trails grew narrow. Rike’s cursing came more frequent and more dire, prompted by repeated slaps in the face from branch after branch.

“Shouldn’t ride so high, Little Rikey,” I told him.

Makin came up, behind him Kent and Row, chuckling over some joke he’d left them with. “We’ll be walking soon then?” He ducked under low-hanging greenery.

I pulled up at a stream crossed by a small clapper bridge that must have been old when Christ first learned to walk. I remembered the bridge, possibly the farthest I’d ever ventured alone before I left the Tall Castle for good. “We’ll leave the horses here,” I said. “You can watch them, Grumlow, you being the man with the sharp eyes today.”

And that wasn’t all that was sharp about Grumlow. That moustache might make him look stupid but he had a clever way with daggers, and a clever number of them stashed about his person.

I thought about leaving Gog and Gorgoth. Especially Gorgoth, for he wasn’t one to be taken places unobserved. When I first brought him into the Haunt, after sitting my arse on the throne for a day or two, he caused quite a stir. Even lame, from the arrows he’d taken for me holding open that gate, he looked like a monster to reckon with. I had Coddin bring him up through the west-yard on a market day. You’d have thought someone dropped a hornets’ nest for all the commotion. One old biddy screamed, clutched her chest, and fell over. That made me laugh. And when they told me she never did get back up…well that seemed funny too at the time. Maybe I’m getting too old, for it doesn’t strike me quite so merrily any more. Let truth be told though, she did fall funny.

In the end I took them both. Gorgoth is the kind you need in a tough spot, and Gog, well he makes lighting the campfire less of a chore.

Making your way through the greenwood without people seeing you isn’t too hard if you know your way and don’t count charcoal burners as people. They’re a lonely breed and not wont to gossip. So Rike didn’t have to kill them.

And so we sliced into Ancrath easily enough, tramping along the deer paths. Even hard kingdoms have their fault lines.

“It shouldn’t be this easy,” Makin said. “It wasn’t in my day. Damned if Coddin and his fellows would have let bandits wander so carelessly.” He shook his head, though it seemed an odd thing to complain about.

“Your father’s army has grown weak?” Gorgoth asked, demolishing the undergrowth as he walked.

I shrugged. “Half his forces are out in the marsh or barracked in the bog towns. Dead things keep hauling themselves out of the muck these days. There’s others having similar problems. I had a merchant at court telling me the Drowned Isles have fallen to the Dead King. All of them. Given over to corpse men, marsh ghouls, necromancers, lich-kin.”

Makin just crossed his chest and picked up the pace.

We travelled light, locating good shelter in the woods, and good eating. Young Sim had a way with the finding of rabbits, and I could knock the odd squirrel or wood-pigeon off its branch with a handy stone. Animals in spring are easy, too full of the new warmth, too taken with new possibilities, and not enough of watching for rocks winging their way out of the shadows.

Ancrath casts a spell on you, and nowhere more so than in the greenwood where the day trickles like honey and the sun falls golden amid pools of shade. We walked in single file with the song of the thrush and sparrow, and the scent of may and wild onions. The day set me dreaming as I walked and my nose led me back through the years to memories of William. There was a night when my brother lay sick, when my mother wept, and the table-knights would not turn their stern faces to me. I remembered the prayers I had whispered in the dark chapel when all the holy men were in their beds, the promises I made. No threats back then. I barely even bargained with the Almighty in those days. And when I crept back to our chambers I climbed in beside William and held his head. The friar had given him bitter potions and cut his leg to release the bad blood. My mother had set an ointment of honey and onion on his chest. That at least seemed to ease his breathing a little. We lay with the night sounds, William’s dry wheeze, our hound Justice snoring by the doors, the click of the maid’s needles in the hall, and the cry of bats, almost too high for hearing as they swung around the Tall Castle in the moonless dark.

“A penny for them,” Makin said.

I snapped my head up with a start, almost tripping. “My thoughts are worth less than that today.” I had been a foolish child.

Sometimes I wished I could cut away old memories and let the wind take them. If a sharp knife could pare away the weakness of those days, I would slice until nothing but the hard lessons remained.

We made our way without problem until we ran out of forest. The land around the Tall Castle is clear of trees and set to farming, to feed the king, and so that he may see his enemies advance.

I leaned against the trunk of a massive copper beech, one of the last great trees before the woods gave over to a two-acre field of ploughed earth peeping with green that might have been anything from carrots to kale for all I knew. More fields to the left and right, more beyond. A lone scarecrow watched us.

“I’ll go on alone,” I said. I started to unbuckle my breastplate.

“Go where?” Makin asked. “You can’t get in there, Jorg. Nobody could. And what for? What are you possibly going to achieve?”

“A man’s got a right to call in on his family now and again, Brother Makin,” I said.

I stripped the vambraces from my forearms, my breastplate, and finally the gorget. I like to have iron around my neck, kept it from a slitting once or twice, but armour wouldn’t save me where I was aimed.

I took the scabbard off my belt. “Kent, look after this for me.” His eyes widened, almost as if he didn’t know that’s how a leader binds his men, with trust.

“A sword like this…Sir Makin-”

“I gave it to you.” I cut him off.

“You need a sword, Jorg,” Maical said, confusion in his eyes. Behind him Sim watched me without comment, unwrapping his harp. He at least knew enough to settle down for a wait.

I magicked my old knife into my hand, a trick I learned off Grumlow. “This will do for what I have in mind, Brother Maical.”

“Give me two days,” I said. “If I’m not back by then, send Rike to take the castle by storm.”

And with a bow I left them to watch the carrots grow. Or the kale.

I made my way along the margins of the forest toward the Roma Road. They say you can put foot on that road and never leave it till you reach the pope’s front door. I planned to walk the other way.

There’s a cemetery near the Roma Road, mostly eaten by the forest, mostly forgotten. I hunted through it as a child, crumbled mausoleums choked with ivy, smothered with moss, cracked by trees. The cemetery covers acre upon hidden acre, a lost necropolis. Perechaise they call it in dusty books. The legends mean nothing to me, Beloved, 1845. Dearly departed, 1710. My heart lies here, 1908. Barely legible. So long ago even their calendar loses meaning.

The stones are set with a clear resin, harder than glass, which wards them in a skin no thicker than a hair. It took years before I noticed it. The weathering they’d suffered happened in the distant long ago. Now not even a hammer blow will mar them. The Builders held these old markers precious and kept them from the centuries.

I found my way through toppled gravestones close to the road where some of it is kept clear. Much has been robbed out. There’s a peasant’s cottage, a little to the west, entirely built from headstones, weathered granite markers with time-blurred legends remembering the dead for illiterate field-men. A house built of stories, to shelter a man who cannot read.

I found her by the road’s edge, hair pink with fallen blossom. The cycle of seasons has worn the definition from her features. But the beauty remains, the sharpness of her cheekbones, the grace in long limbs, the gentle swell of a child’s breast, a freckling of lichen. She needs no deep-carved runes to spell out her life. Here I buried my child. A message for which reading is not required. She died in the winter of a lost year, the daughter of a wealthy man who would have given all his wealth, and more, to buy her into spring.

I saw her first in autumn, long ago, when the leaves fell so thick they hid the stone dog she chases. Whilst I watched her other travellers hurried past on the road, clenched against the sharp-fingered wind. Some paused to wonder what she chased, hugging themselves, squinting into the rain. They moved on. I stayed. Maybe they wondered what they were chasing.

She’s after her dog. A little terrier, remembered in stone, lost that autumn in a drift of wet ochre. A centuries-old chase that has seen the death of everyone who cared, the end of every soul that knew the terrier’s name. A chase that saw the stilling of each hand to touch this child, the loss of every life that shared her world.

I came again with the snows on the first day of winter, to see my statue girl. My first love maybe. I watched and the snow fell, tiny crystals, the kind so perfect they almost chime against the ground. The light failed early and a wildness infected the wind, swirling the snow into rivulets of milk across the Roma Road, ice hissing over stone. A frost came and etched silver tracery across her dress, with only me to see.

The seasons turn, and here I am again, and still she waits for spring.

They buried high lords and high ladies here. Poets and bards. Now it’s a place for servant corpses. Close enough to the Tall Castle for sentimental ladies to visit their wet-nurses, far enough away to be seemly. They bury old servants, sometimes even faithful dogs, around my girl who waits for spring. Soft-hearted ladies from court come with their perfumed toys that have ceased to yap. And one time a boy of six, soaked and half-frozen, dragging something that might once have been a wolf.

“Hello, Jorg.”

I turned and between the old graves walked Katherine, the sun making magic of her hair.