King of Thorns

44

Four years earlier

I went to see my grandmother in her chambers. Uncle Robert had warned me that she wore her years less well than Grandfather.

“She’s not the woman she was,” he told me. “But she has her moments.”

I nodded and turned to go. He caught my shoulder. “Be gentle with my mother,” he said.

Even now they thought me a monster. Once I’d sought to build a legend, to set fear among those who might stand against me. Now I dragged those stories behind me into my mother’s home.

The maid showed me in and steered me to a comfortable chair opposite the one Grandmother occupied.

Of all of them, my grandmother had the most of Mother in her. Something in the lines of her cheekbones and the shape of her skull. She sat hunched with a blanket over her knees despite the heat of the day. She looked smaller than I remembered, and not just because I was no longer a child. It seemed she had closed on herself after her daughter’s death, as if to present a smaller target to a world grown hostile.

“I remember you as a little boy-the man before me I don’t know at all,” she said. Her eyes moved across me, seeking something familiar.

“When I see my reflection I feel the same thing myself, Grandmother.” And the box at my hip, in a velvet pocket now, felt too heavy to carry. I don’t know me at all.

We sat in silence for a long minute.

“I tried to save her.” I would have said more but words wouldn’t come.

“I know, Jorg.”

The distance between us fell away then, and we spoke of years past, of times when we were both happier, and I had my window onto the world that I’d forgotten, and it was good.

And by and by when I sat beside her feet, knees drawn to my chest, hand clasping wrist before them, that old woman sang the songs my mother had played long ago, as she had played them in the music room of the Tall Castle on the black keys and the white. Grandmother put words to music I remembered but couldn’t hear, and we sat as the shadows lengthened and the sun fell from the sky.

Later, when comfortable silence had stretched into something that convinced me she had fallen asleep, I stood up to go. I reached the door without creak or scrape, but as my hand touched the handle Grandmother spoke behind me.

“Tell me about William.”

I turned and found her watching me with sharper eyes than before, as if a chance wind had stirred the curtains of age and showed her as she once was, strong and attentive, if only for a moment.

“He died.” It was all I could find to say.

“William was an exceptional child.” She pursed wizened lips and watched me, waiting.

“They killed him.”

“I met you both, you’re probably too young to recall.” She looked away to the hearth as if staring at the memory of flames. “William. There was something fierce in that one. You have a touch of it too, Jorg. Same mix of hard and clever. I held him and I knew that if he let himself love me or anyone else, he wouldn’t ever give it up. And if someone crossed him, that he would be…unforgiving. Maybe you were both bound to be a bit like that. Maybe that’s what happens when two people so strong, and yet so utterly different from each other, make children.”

“When they broke him…” The lightning had shown him to me in three quick flashes as they carried him. One frozen moment had him staring at the thorns, into the heart of the briar. Looking at me. No fear in him. The second and he was scooped up by his legs. The third, dashed against that milestone, scarlet shards of skull among blond curls. “My little emperor” Mother used to call him. The blond of that line in a court filled with Steward-dark Ancraths.

“Broke who, dear?”

“William,” I said, but the years had settled on her again and she saw me through too many days.

“You’re not him,” she said. “I knew a boy like you once, but you’re not him.”

“Yes, Grandmother.” I went and kissed her brow then and walked away. She smelled of Mother, the same perfume, and something in her scent stung my eyes so I could hardly find the door in the gloom.

They gave me a chamber in the east tower, overlooking the sea. The moon described each wave in glimmers and I sat listening to the sigh of the waters long into the night.

I thought again of the music my mother played, and that I remembered in images, and never heard. I saw her hands move across the keys as always, the shadow of her arms, the sway of her shoulders. And for the first time in all the years since we climbed into that carriage, the faintest strain of those silent notes reached me. Fainter and more elusive than the sword-song, but more vital, more important.

Two days passed before the Earl Hansa summoned me to his throne-room, a chamber built against the hind wall of the castle where a great circle of Builder-glass offers the Middle Sea to gaze upon in all its ever-changing shades. I faced the old man, my back to the distant waves, the setting sun edging each with crimson, and with the faint crash of their breaking ready to underwrite any silence.

“We stand in your debt, Jorg,” my grandfather said.

Actually it was my uncle who stood, at the right hand of Grandfather’s throne, whilst the old man sat ensconced in his whalebone seat.

“We’re family,” I said.

“And what is it your family can do for you?” Earl Hansa may have been my mother’s father but he was shrewd enough to know young men don’t cross half a continent just to visit old relatives.

“Perhaps we can do things for each other. In troubled times being able to call on military help can make the difference between life and death. It may be that this Ibn Fayed becomes more of a threat and the day comes when the men of the Highlands stand side to side with the House Morrow to oppose him. It may be that my own position is threatened and my grandfather’s troops or horse could be of aid.”

“Are you threatened now?” Grandfather asked.

“No,” I said. “I’m not here in desperation, begging. I’m looking for a strategic alliance. Something to span years.”

“Our lands are very far apart,” he said.

“That may not always be so.” I allowed myself a smile. I had plans for growth.

“It seems strange that you come so far when your father’s armies stand mere days from your gates.” The Earl ran his tongue over his teeth as if he tasted something rotten.

“My father is an enemy I will face in the field of battle in due course,” I said.

The Earl slapped his thigh. “Now that’s the kind of alliance I could get behind!” He watched me for a moment, the laughter leaving him. “You are your father’s son, Jorg. I won’t lie. It’s hard to trust you. It’s hard for me to speak of sending my people to fight and die on foreign soil for Olidan’s boy.”

“It would pain him to hear you call me that,” I said.

Lord Robert leaned in and whispered in his father’s ear.

“If you would bind your fate with mine, Jorg, then we need stronger bonds. Lady Agath is dear to your grandmother and me. Her son rules in Wennith, and he has two daughters. Small girls now, but they’ll be ready for marrying soon enough. On the day you wed one of them, my soldiers will be ready to fight in your cause.” The Earl settled back in his throne with a grin.

“What say you, Jorg?” Uncle Robert asked, also smiling.

I spread my hands. “I do?”

Robert nodded to a knight at the door who drew it open and spoke to a servant beyond. The jaws of the trap closed around me. Birds had flown in the two days since Qalasadi fled. Replies returned, carriages had set out.

“Kalam Dean, Lord of Wennith, third of the name!” the herald called out, sweating in his silks. “And the Lady Miana.”

A stout man, short with thin grey hair, marched in. Near as old as Grandfather, he wore a plain white robe and might have passed as a simple monk but for the heavy-linked chain of gold looped about his neck and down across his chest. A ruby bigger than a pigeon’s egg hung from the chain. Lady Miana trailed in his wake, a child of eight years, bundled into crinoline and crushed velvet, wide-eyed, red-faced in the heat, a rag doll clutched tight in both hands.

The Lord of Wennith strode right up to me without preamble, craning his neck to look me up and down as if examining a suspect horse. I resisted the urge to show him my teeth. Plump and grey and old he might have been but he had a look about him that said he knew his business, he knew men well enough and the notion of putting his child in my marriage bed pleased him as little as it did me. He leaned in close to share some confidence or threat not meant for any ears but mine. As he moved forward the ruby swung out on its chain, catching the dying rays of the sun. It seemed to hold them, burning at its heart and that light woke something in my blood. Heat rose through me as I fought to keep my hands from reaching for the gem.

“Listen well, Ancrath,” Kalam Dean of Wennith said, and the ruby swung back against his chest ending further conversation. He gave a cry of pain and jerked away, a charred patch smouldering on his robes beneath the stone.

While guards hastened to Wennith’s side and Grandfather called for servants, the child approached me. “King Jorg?” she said.

“Lady Miana?” I went down on one knee to be level with her, turning my face so as not to scare her with my burns. “And how is your dolly called?” I’d little enough experience with children but it seemed a safe enough opening. She looked down in surprise as if she hadn’t known the toy was there.

“Oh,” she said. “That’s not mine. I’m near grown. It’s Lolly’s, my sister’s.” The shape of her mouth told the lie: it tasted sour to her. Her first words to me and already I’d made a liar of her. If we ever wed it would be the least of my crimes. I would be the ruination of her life, this little girl with her rag doll. If she had any sense she would run. If I had any decency I would make her. But instead I would lie to her father, smile, be for the moment whatever man he needed me to be, and all for the promise of heavy horse, of five hundred riders on the Horse Coast’s finest steeds.

A friar from the Morrow chapel helped Lord Wennith from the throne-room with the aid of a guardsman. Miana trailed after them. She paused and turned. “Remember me,” she said.

“Oh, I will.” I nodded, still kneeling. A proud day like this would stay with me forever if I let it. I gave her my smile. “I won’t let your memory go, Miana. I’ve somewhere to keep it in, nice and safe.”

On the next day Kalam Dean and I finished our negotiations. He didn’t bring his ruby to the discussion but promised it as Miana’s dowry. And on that very same evening I found out how to squeeze an unwanted memory from my mind and set it into Luntar’s copper box. All I kept of Miana was her name, the fact I was to marry her, and that half a thousand cavalry would one day come in answer to my call.

The remaining time I spent at Castle Morrow, and my journey back to the Highlands, are tales best kept for another day. Before I left though, in fact on the day after my engagement, I took myself back to the room beneath the wine-cellar, this time with permission.

My uncle called it the “grouch chamber.” The machine appeared to have only three tasks. Firstly, to keep alive a number of glow-bulbs dotted around the oldest parts of the castle. Secondly, to suck seawater from beneath the cliffs and turn it into pure drinking water for the fountains around the courtyards. And finally, to allow the grouch, Fexler Brews, to enjoy a kind of half-life in which he generally poured scorn on the ignorance of the living, pitied our existence, and moaned about the things he left unfinished in his own.

“Go away.”

Fexler appeared the moment I entered the chamber and repeated his previous greeting.

“Make me,” I said again.

“Ah, the young man with the questions,” Fexler said. “I was a young man with questions once upon a time, you know.”

“No, you weren’t. You’re the echo of a man who was. You were never young-only new.”

“And what is your question?” he asked, scowling.

“Can you end your existence?” I asked.

“Not everyone seeks an end, boy.”

“You think I seek my end?”

“All young men are a little in love with death.”

“I would be more than in love with it if I’d spent a thousand years in a cellar.”

“It has been trying,” Fexler admitted.

“Are you even allowed to want to end yourself?” I asked.

“You’re obsessed with death, child.”

“You didn’t answer the question,” I said.

“I’m not allowed to answer the question.”

“Complicated!” I stepped back and sat on the bottom stairs. “So. What can you do for me?”

“I can give you three questions.”

“Like a genie,” I said.

“Yes, but they give wishes. Two left.”

“That was an observation, not a question!” I cried.

I chewed my lip. “Do you swear to give full and honest answers?”

“No. Two left.”

Dammit. “Tell me about guns,” I said.

“No. One left.”

“Point me at the single most useful and portable piece of Builder-magic in this chamber,” I said.

Fexler shrugged and then pointed to what looked to be one of the valves on the blackened machine. I moved to examine it. Not a valve, something else. A ring set in a depression.

“It’s hardly portable.”

“Twist it,” he said.

I cleaned the area with my sleeve. A silver ring about three inches across topped a stubby cylindrical projection. Shallow grooves around the edge offered some traction. I twisted it. It proved extremely stiff but with the bones in my hand creaking I managed to turn the ring.

Nothing happened.

I twisted again. Easier this time. Again. I spun it several times and the ring came loose in my hand.

“Pretty,” I said.

“Look through it,” Fexler suggested.

I held it to my eye. Nothing for a second, then an image over-wrote my vision, a blue circle swirled with white patterns, intricate, infinitely detailed. For some reason it put me in mind of Alaric’s snow-globe. “It’s wonderful,” I said. “What is it?”

“Your whole world. Seen from a little over twenty thousand miles above the ground.”

“That’s a ways to fall. What are all the white swirls?”

“Weather formations.”

“Weather?” It seemed incredible that I might be seeing clouds from above rather than below, and over such reaches that their whole cycle and design lay revealed. “Weather from when? From your day?”

“From today. From now.”

“This isn’t just a painting?”

“You’re seeing the world as it happens. Your world,” Fexler said.

I shifted my grip on the ring and I plunged, or felt that I did, racing down and to the left, like an eagle diving. A small curl at the end of one vast cloud swirl now filled my vision and I could see land far below, a sparkling thread wove across the greens and browns. I stumbled but managed to keep my feet.

“I can see a river!” An old instinct bit in. Suspicion drew the ring and its visions from my eye. “Why?”

“Why?” he asked.

I spun the ring between finger and thumb. “Beware of ghosts bearing gifts, they say.”

“You’ll find that’s Greeks, but the principle is sound.” Fexler frowned. “You’re carrying something that interests me. And as it turns out you’re more than you seem. It’s not every day a battleground walks down my stairs.”

“Battleground?”

“You’re a nexus for two opposing forms of energy, young man-one dark, one light. I have technical terms for them, but dark and light serve well enough. Given a little more time they’ll tear you apart. Quite literally. It’s an exponential process, the end will be sudden and ‘violent.’”

“And you know this because?” My gaze returned to the ring.

“A lesson in life, Jorg. Whatever you look into can look back into you. The ring has scanned your brain in quite minute detail.”

My jaw clenched at that. The idea of being measured, being classified, did not appeal. “But that’s something unexpected you discovered, not what you were looking for?”

“You know what I was looking for.” Fexler smiled. “Perhaps you’d be good enough to set the ring to it for me?”

I pulled out my little box of memories. Today it seemed to tremble in my hand. The view-ring clunked against it as if both were lodestones drawn by mutual attraction. For a moment Fexler’s image pulsed more brightly.

“Interesting,” he said. “Crude but clever. Remarkable even.”

Box and ring fell apart-done with each other. Fexler fixed me with an intense stare.

“I can help you, boy. Fire and death have their hooks deep in you. Call it magic. It isn’t but this will go easier if we say it is. Your wounds anchor the enchantments, both of them trying to pull you into the domains from which they spring. Alone either one would draw you down in time, make something different of you, something no longer human. You understand me?”

I nodded. Ferrakind and the Dead King waited for me in separate hells.

Fexler’s gaze settled on the box, clenched tight in my hand. “All that saves you is that these forces are in opposition. Soon enough, though, that opposition will rip you open.”

He waited for me to speak, to beg or entreat his aid. I held my tongue and watched him.

“I can help,” he said.

“How?”

He flashed a nervous grin. “It’s done. I’ve bound both forces through that interesting little box of yours. It’s far stronger than you are. It may hold indefinitely. And while it holds the process should be halted; neither power should be able to get a better grip on you or able to pull you any further into their domain.”

“And what is it you want for this…gift?” I asked.

Fexler fended the question off with an irritable wave. “Just remember this, Jorg of Ancrath. Do not open that box. Open it and my work is undone. Open it and you’re finished.”

The box glinted as I turned it in my hand. “Pandora had one of these.”

I looked up for Fexler to share the joke, but he had gone. Several silent minutes passed, alone in the cellar, weighing box and ring in my hands. I had tickled far more than three answers from the ghost, but had a thousand more questions than when I started.

“Come back.” I sounded foolish.

The ghost did not return.

I put the ring in my pocket. Interesting or not it seemed odd that the grouch had favoured me above the others that visited him. Uncle Robert never mentioned a gift of any kind, nor any really meaningful answers to questions. Fexler wanted something from me. Something personal. That last nervous grin of his said it. He might be dead a thousand years, might be a Builder, or just the story of a Builder in a machine of cogs and magic, but before all that he was a man, and I knew men. He wanted something-something he couldn’t take but that he thought I could give.

I wondered, despite his mocking, if death held an allure for the ghost too. We aren’t meant to live forever, nor dwell in solitude. A life without change is no life. The spirit beneath Mount Honas agreed with me. Maybe the only way Fexler Brews had to tell me so was to offer me his gift. And to hope that I would help him. He wanted something, that much was sure. Everyone wants something.

I would have to think on it. The machine made Fexler. Grandfather would not thank me for destroying his source of fresh water, and neither would the men who would have to pump the fountains thereafter. Gone or not though, Fexler Brews and I were not finished with each other.

I spoke with my uncle on the night of that visit to Fexler’s cellar. We sat in the observatory tower with an earthenware jug of wine that looked old enough to have been excavated from a pharaoh’s tomb, and two silver goblets chased with rearing horses. A cool wind sighed through the arches and a bright dust of stars covered the black sky.

“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.