King of Thorns

47

Wedding day

I laid Miana on my bed and left her there. She had proved tougher than expected so far and it looked as if she’d just been knocked out. Habit put the lidless box back in my hip pocket.

Although I couldn’t see the fires in the courtyard, I could feel them. When I woke the Builders’ Sun beneath Mount Honas its power had ignited Gog’s talent. It seemed that releasing the ruby’s fire-magic in one blast had woken in me what echoes of Gog and his skills had lodged in my flesh when he died beneath Halradra. I pushed back against the feeling. I remembered Ferrakind. I would not become such a thing.

The Haunt’s keep has four towers, my bedchamber being at the top of the eastmost one. I went to the roof. A young guardsman sat hunched on the top steps just below the trapdoor. A new recruit by the look of him, his chainmail shirt too big for his slight frame.

“Waiting here in case giant birds land on my roof and try to force an entry?” I asked.

“Your Majesty!” He leapt to his feet. If he weren’t so short he’d have brained himself on the trapdoor. He looked terrified.

“You can escort me up,” I said. He would have plenty of time to die on my behalf later on. No point chasing him down the stairs myself. “Rodrick is it?” I had no idea what the coward’s name was but “Rodrick” was popular in the Highlands.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” A relieved grin spread over his face.

He unbolted the door and heaved it open. I let him walk out first. Nobody shot him, so I followed.

From the tower battlements I could see the Prince’s army on the slopes, in even more disarray than my own troops. It would be an hour and more before his captains imposed order, the units reformed and merged, before the dead were heaped, the injured carted to the rear. A haze of smoke hung across the remains of the shantytown that had stood before the Haunt’s walls. The brisk wind could do little to shift it.

Despite the fires in the courtyard below, it felt cold on the tower. The wind had teeth up there and carried the edged threat of winter. I crept to the east wall and looked out toward the ridge where the Prince had the bulk of his archers positioned. They seemed to be in some confusion. Trolls had emerged from several still-undiscovered exits and were busy parting the lightly-armoured bowmen from their heads again.

I ducked down. I’d had my head up for two heartbeats. It took an arrow three beats to fly from the ridge to the keep. And sure enough, several shafts hissed overhead. They all missed Rodrick, who hadn’t had the wit to get behind cover. I knocked him flat. “Stay there.”

I took the Builders’ view-ring from inside my breastplate and held it to one eye. Making the image zoom in to one area still made me feel as if I were falling, plunging from unimaginable heights. I knew it must be a matter of moving lenses, as Lundist had shown me in my father’s observatory, but it felt as if I rode the back of an angel falling from heaven.

“Jorg! Jorg!” Makin’s voice from down below. He sounded worried.

“We’re up here,” I called.

A moment later Makin’s head poked into view. At least I assumed it was him in the helmet.

“You didn’t burn up then,” I said.

“Damn near! I couldn’t find Kent. I think he’s gone.”

“Watch this.” I waved him over to my side. “It should be good. But don’t stick your head up too high.”

I took Makin’s shield from him and held it over my head for extra cover. We peered over the battlements. The battlefield had fallen almost silent after the explosion, still with the screaming of course, but without the crash of weapons, the war-cries, the twangs and thuds of siege machinery. The drums were voiceless too-Uncle’s six great battle-drums, brass and ebony, wider than barrels, ox-skinned, now burned-out and smouldering among the corpses in the yard. Beneath it all though I could hear a new drumming, a faint thunder. Makin cocked his head. He could hear it too. It sounded almost like another avalanche.

“That’s cavalry! Arrow’s brung up his cavalry, Jorg.” Makin started to crawl for the wall overlooking the Haunt’s ruined front.

I pulled him back. “There’s only one place for miles a horse can charge, Sir Makin.”

And they came, in a rushing stream of blue and violet cloaks, silver mail, thundering past Marten’s hidden troops, the foremost with their lances lowered for the kill.

“What?” Makin almost stood up.

“I once told Sim about Hannibal taking elephants across the Aups. Well, my uncle has brought heavy horses across the Matteracks in the jaws of winter.”

“How?”

I made quick circles with my hand, as if trying to spin the cogs of Makin’s mind a little faster.

“The Blue Moon Pass!” Makin grinned, showing more teeth than a man should have.

“Even so,” I said. “I emptied it out for him. And Lord Jost must have signalled that the marriage was sealed…and here they are.”

The cavalry of the House Morrow sliced through the ranks of foot-soldiers sent up to hunt out Gorgoth’s trolls. It helped that most of Arrow’s troops had their backs to the Runyard, since they’d found rather more trolls than they had wanted to. In fact the trolls were making an impressive hole in Arrow’s ranks all by themselves. They moved like wild dogs on the attack, hurling themselves into knots of men and leaving scattered limbs in their wake. Whoever bred them for war had surpassed themselves.

Riding onto the archers’ ridge required that the cavalry slow, but they could traverse the whole length five and eight abreast at the canter, killing as they went. The archers were no match for armoured knights. Most broke and ran, tumbling back down the mountainside.

There were perhaps five hundred of my grandfather’s cavalry. Gorgoth withdrew his trolls as agreed and left the men to fight each other. I couldn’t tell what losses the trolls had suffered but they were not insignificant and I knew that Gorgoth would not permit them to rejoin the battle. He had wanted a homeland for his new-found subjects and they had paid the price I asked of them.

“Incredible!” Makin shouted. He kept shaking his head.

“It’s not enough,” I said.

The charge left bloody slaughter trampled into the grit, hundreds upon hundreds died before the momentum broke. And even without the cohesion of the charge, the knights wrought havoc, striking down with axe and sword at the heads of running bowmen. But you can’t run five hundred men into four thousand and not expect to pay. The knights were wheeling now, finding their way down the back slope of the ridge and turning toward the Runyard again. Perhaps half of them survived.

“They were magnificent!” Makin surged to his feet. “Weren’t you looking?”

“They were magnificent. And when they join us, we will have a little over seven hundred men in this broken castle. Depending on how many of the troops routed in that charge can be rallied and reformed, the Prince of Arrow will have somewhere between five and seven thousand men.”

I went to look out over the Prince’s main army. On the battlefield losses of the sort I’d inflicted would have set any army running long ago. But I’d been cutting away whole chunks of Arrow’s force, one at a time, separating them, drawing them away, destroying them. I had whittled at his numbers, carved them to the bone, but I hadn’t thinned his ranks in the way that erodes an army’s morale. Not until Miana’s explosion had the main bulk of Arrow’s troops even felt the battle.

Now the explosion; that could have set them running, but it didn’t, and that just told me the Prince’s men were every bit as loyal and well trained as reported.

A glance toward the Runyard told me the Horse Coast knights were beginning to enter the sally port. A small number of men remained to lead the horses back up into the mountain passes. Marten and his troops would bring up the rear.

“Let’s go meet them,” I said. “By the way, this is Guardsman Rodrick. Guardsman Rodrick, Lord Makin of Ken.”

“Lord now is it?” Makin grinned. “And what would I be wanting with the Ken Marshes, not that they’re yours to give?”

I led the way down. “Well, if we don’t win, it won’t matter that your elevation is a hollow gesture. And if we do win-well the Prince of Arrow has taken a lot of land recently so I’ll have plenty to hand out.”

“And I get the squishy bit?” Makin said behind me.

“Come meet my uncle,” I said. “He’s got lots of good recipes for frog.”

I looked into my chamber as we passed. Miana sat on my bed, rubbing her head slowly with both hands as if she were afraid it might fall off.

“Lord Robert has arrived,” I said. “Stay here. Guardsman Rodrick will protect you. He’s one of my best.” I turned to the guard. “Keep her here, Rodrick. Unless she comes up with a plan to destroy the remainder of the enemy. In which case you’re to let her do it.”

Makin and I carried on down. I caught hold of one of my knights, nursing a wounded shoulder and burned whiskers. “You! Hekom is it? Go to the cellar beneath the armoury. The one with the fecking big barrels. You’ll find our southern allies coming out of one of them. Send Lord Robert, and any captains he wants to bring, up to the throne-room.”

Hekom-if it was Hekom-looked confused, but nodded and absented himself, so we headed for the throne-room. I caught hold of another man as we pushed past the wounded in the corridors. “Have my armour brought up to the throne-room. The good stuff. Quick about it.”

Uncle Robert arrived with two of his captains as three pageboys set about strapping me into my armour. Several of my own captains preceded him, Watch-master Hobbs among them.

“There are rather more of the enemy than I was led to believe, Nephew!” Uncle Robert didn’t wait on formality. In fact he only just waited to get through the doors.

“There are many thousands fewer than there were this morning,” I said.

“And your castle appears to be broken,” Uncle Robert said.

“You can blame your god-daughter for that. But it was a dowry well spent,” I said.

“Good Lord!” Robert took off his helm. “The ruby did that?” He shook his head. “They told us to be careful with it. I didn’t realize the danger though!”

“Rubies are hard to break,” I said. “It’s not the sort of thing that you’re likely to do by accident.”

He pursed his lips at that. “So, Nephew, I’ve come for you. Where do we stand?”

I still liked him. It had been four years since I saw him last but it felt like little more than a lull in the conversation. And he had come for me, just as a skinny boy had dreamed before he ran betrayed from the Tall Castle. Uncle Robert had come, with the cavalry behind him. That drained some poison from the wound.

“We stand about knee-deep, Uncle,” I said.

“It looked more like chest-deep from where we entered those caves.” He sagged slightly, the exertions of the fight catching up with him. Smears of blood crossed the brightness of his breastplate, a deep dent caught the light from odd angles, and the left side of his face had started to darken into a single impressive bruise.

I shrugged. “Either way we’ve got shitty boots and the situation stinks. He has thousands to our hundreds. He can besiege us in this keep from the ruins of my own walls. There is no question that he could wear us down within months, possibly weeks.”

“If the situation is lost. If it were always lost. Why did I spend the lives of two hundred knights out there? Why did we even beat a path through the mountains in the first place?” His brows drew close, furrowing his forehead, a dangerous light in his eyes. I knew the look.

“Because he doesn’t want to wait months, or even weeks,” I said.

Makin stepped up from behind the throne. “The Prince has been attacking as if he intends to crush us in a day.”

“He needs to now,” I said. “He wanted a quick victory before, but now he needs one. He didn’t want to wait the winter out here. He had a huge army to feed, a timetable to keep to, other powers to consider, newly acquired lands to police. Being a prisoner of the Highland winter was never his plan. But now, he needs to win today, tomorrow at the latest. In a day or two his army will start to understand the scale of their losses, his captains will start to mutter, his troops will leak away, and the stories they tell elsewhere will lend Arrow’s enemies courage. If he takes us today, then the stories will run a different course. The talk will be of how he crushed Jorg of Ancrath who levelled Gelleth, who humbled Count Renar. Yes, the losses were high-but he did it in a day! In a day!”

“And how does all this help us?” Uncle Robert asked.

“I don’t think he can take us in a day. And neither does he,” I said.

“Even so, we will still all die, no? It might ruin the Prince’s plans, but that’s cold comfort from where I’m standing.” Uncle Robert glanced at his captains, tall men burned dark by the southern sun. They said nothing.

“It helps because it will make him accept my offer,” I said.

“Offer? You told Coddin no terms!” Makin stepped off the dais to take a good look at me, as if I might not be Jorg at all.

“No terms!” The echo came from Miana, helped in by young Rodrick. She looked pale but otherwise unhurt.

“I’m not offering terms,” I said. “I’m offering him a duel.”

From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron

August 27th, Year 101 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Red Room.

Orrin is campaigning again. The bigger his domain grows, the less I see of him. He took Conaught in the spring with just three thousand men. Now he’s marching an army toward Normardy with nine thousand. He even talks of taking the lands of Orlanth into his protection, though there are other realms to consider first.

He never speaks with desire, as if he wants those places for himself, to have them bow and scrape before his throne, or to fill his war-chests. He talks of what he can do for the peoples of those lands, of what they will gain, of how their freedoms will increase, their prosperity, their prospects. It would sound false from any other man. But Orrin believes it, and he can do it. In Conaught they already worship him as one of their old heroes reborn.

To me he speaks with desire. Since the day we were married he has made me feel treasured. Happy. And I know I make him happy too. Though there is always that touch of disappointment, expertly hidden. If I had not spent so very many days delving into the stuff of men’s dreams I wouldn’t see it. But I do see it and I’m cut by the knife I have forged and sharpened. Orrin wants a child. I do too. But it has been two years.

Sareth says in her letters that sometimes it can take two years, sometimes four. She herself has born no child in the years since Degran, but for little Merrith who sickened and died so quickly. I think grief made Sareth barren. Jilli and Keriam also say it can take two years, just as Sareth said. They say we’re young-it will come soon. For the first year they believed it.

March 28th, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. West Gardens.

Egan is back in the palace. I say “back” but he has never been here before. Orrin had the palace built after the Duchy of Belpan surrendered to him, and Egan so rarely returns from campaigns that this is the first time he has laid eyes upon it.

He’s been wounded again. In the side this time, falling off a horse onto something sharp he says. Egan always seems to mend quickly though, as if he just won’t tolerate any kind of restraint, even if it’s his own body that tries to impose it.

I’ve been reading Roland of Thurtan’s On the Dreamlands and Below. I like to read it on the balcony that overlooks the herb gardens. The formal gardens are…well, too formal, and too large. I like to look over the herb gardens with their little pools, the sundial and the moondial that I had put there, and to breathe in the scents. Also, it’s not a book for reading indoors or in the dark. It only takes a paragraph or two of Roland of Thurtan before the walls seem to be closing in on you.

Egan practises with his sword in the grand square every day, in front of the statue of his father. There’s a sorcery in the way he moves. It reminds me of the dancers out of the Slav lands, those elfin creatures all grace and air, though he adds force to their grace. It’s not until he brings in men to spar with that you understand how fast he is. He makes them look silly. Even the best among the palace guard.

Something in him scares me though. The passion with which he pursues each victory. Watch him fight and you wonder if there would be anything he might not do in order to have what he wants.

April 15th, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Herb gardens.

Egan is still here. He recovered quickly, although they say it was a dire wound. He seemed eager to heal and be back doing what he loves-cutting a path through anyone who opposes Orrin. But now he idles around the palace. He even came into the library today-a place I’ve never seen him.

I both like and don’t like the way he looks at me. Some animal part of me relishes it. Every reasonable part of me is offended. Although I can find nothing to like in Egan that does not start with what my eyes give me of him, there is still a mystery there. When he watches me it is with an instinctive understanding of women that is denied to the wise. Denied to Orrin.

Orrin and Egan are on campaign again this summer. The days are long and hot and lonely though there must be a thousand souls in this palace of ours, at least fifty of them ladies of quality brought in just to keep me company.

I have learned to travel in dreams, keeping every part of me focused and lucid though I walk through the realms of possibility and of impossibility. Or sometimes fly, or swim, or gallop. The path of the world is a line, a single thread through the vastness of dream, and if I follow that line I can scry what is real rather than wallow in the randomness of strangers’ imaginations. I have sent messengers out to explore the places that I have visited in this manner, and confirmed the truth of my observations.

I dreamed of Jorg of Ancrath last night and in dreaming of him became tangled in the stuff of his own nightmares. The margins of his dreaming are set with briar so thick and sharp I woke expecting my nightclothes to be shredded and soaked with blood. And a storm rages over it all, so fierce it shook the sleep from me. It seemed almost as if he’d set barriers to keep intruders out. Or perhaps it was all my own imagination. I can hardly send out messengers to check.

This morning my head aches, the quill shakes in my hand, and I see the page through slitted eyes. They give fennel powder in Arrow rather than wormwood-it works no better. I would swap the pain behind my eyes for the cuts of that briar, but it seems to be the price I pay for pushing into the dreams of others.

May 22nd, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Grand Library.

Orrin writes me that he has employed Sageous as an advisor of sorts! The heathen had settled in the court of Duke Normardy after fleeing Olidan’s protection. Orrin writes that Sageous has proved useful in foreseeing the lie of the land ahead of their path and in interpreting certain troubled dreams he has suffered.

I have written back by fastest rider to beg Orrin to dismiss the heathen immediately. I would have written “hang” for “dismiss” but Orrin is too…even handed for that.

June 23rd, Year 102 Interregnum

I tried to visit Orrin’s dreams as I have done every night since I discovered the capacity for it. Tonight I could find no trace of him, just a space in the dreamscape where I sought him, just blankness and the memory of the spice, the coriander seed that the heathen seems to breathe.

In desperation I sought out Egan in his sleep but found no trace of him either. The others in Orrin’s retinue I haven’t enough familiarity with to find among the hundreds of thousands who shape the dream-stuff.

I’ve a new physician, a dirty little man from the Slav steppes, but his infusions calm my head. He’s older than old and what words he has of Empire Tongue are oddly shaped. Even so, Lord Malas makes good report of him and his medicines work.

June 26th, Year 102 Interregnum

I found Orrin dreaming! I couldn’t walk in his dream, a golden thing of many layers, but it seemed to me that he has fought off whatever attempts Sageous has made to control him. Maybe he was right about being the one to hold the strings. It troubles me though that I am kept out. Perhaps it is a barrier fashioned by the heathen, or a defence of Orrin’s own making, whether by conscious will or natural resistance to direction.

Where Jorg kept me out with thorns and lightning, Orrin used a calm and simple refusal. I hope he has sent Sageous scampering back to Olidan Ancrath in the Tall Castle.

July 12th, Year 102 Interregnum

Arrow. Greenite Palace. Ballroom.

This palace has stood for almost two years and no one has danced in the ballroom. Orrin would host a ball to please me, have his lords and ladies descend upon the palace in their carriages. Hundreds would come in satin and lace. He would dance with the precision and grace that amazed his tutors, be attentive to my needs, compliment the musicians. And all the time I would know that behind his eyes grander thoughts were circulating, plans, philosophies, letters being written, and that when the last revellers had been taken home dead drunk across their carriage seats, Orrin would be found in the library scribbling notes in the margins of some weighty tome.

Egan has written to me from the celebrations after the capture of Orlanth’s last castle. I say it is Egan but I have never seen his hand before. It would surprise me if he has ever written a letter until now. Perhaps a scribe set it down for him, for the characters are formed with practised skill, but the voice is Egan’s. He wrote:

Katherine,

We have Orlanth from the western plains to the borders of the Ken Marshes. Orrin concerns himself with plans for Baron Kennick. He will play politic, offer terms, massage the old man’s ego. We should just roll through there without pause and leave it smoking in our wake.

Orrin has sent me to Castle Traliegh in Conaught, it stands in the middle of nowhere. After the excesses of East Haven he says he worries for me. He says I need rest.

I need rest like I need poison. What I require is to be tempered in the forge of war and to pitch exhausted into dreamless sleep each night.

Conaught is a haunted place. I dream such dreams here. I stare at the walls and fear the night. Even though I dream of you. They are not good dreams.

I don’t know what to do. Orrin will hear no wrong of his brother. I have seen it before. Somehow he always finds an angle from which Egan’s deeds can be viewed as excusable.

I’ve never done anything to encourage this passion, this obsession, in Egan. I favoured Orrin from the start. If I had wanted a savage I could have smiled on Jorg of Ancrath, and what a creature I would have been tied to then.

Orrin needs to send Egan away, to give him some castle on a disputed border, some war to occupy him. It can’t be that he needs his brother always at his side. One blade can’t turn a battle, surely, no matter how skilled.

July 18th, Year 102 Interregnum

I have searched for Egan in the dreamscape and he is still hidden from me. The messages I send go unreplied. I don’t even know if the riders are reaching Orrin’s army. Report has it that he is closing on the Renar Highlands. Part of me wonders if Sageous is Jorg Ancrath’s tool. Has he unleashed his father’s pet upon my husband?

October 28th, Year 102 Interregnum

I found Egan’s dreams but they were dark and closed to me. I sensed the heathen’s handiwork and worry at his plans. Has Orrin proved too difficult to steer? Egan would be easier, like a bull goaded this way and that by the fluttering of rags. It’s maddening to be closeted in this palace with all that matters unfolding three hundred miles away.

October 29th, Year 102 Interregnum

Still no word from Orrin or from Egan, but reports come in of tens of thousands on the move, men under arms, all converging on the Highlands, and of Jorg Ancrath skulking in his single castle with less than a twentieth part of that force.

And still I worry. For Orrin with his cleverness and strength and patience and wisdom. Even for Egan with his fire and his skill. Because I remember Jorg of Ancrath and the look in his eye, and the scars he carries, and the echoes of his deeds that still vibrate through the dreamscape. I remember him, and I would worry if Orrin had ten times the number and Jorg stood alone.

November 1st, Year 102 Interregnum

I made a dream, a thing of light and shadows, and set it dancing in the head of Marcus Gohal, captain of the palace guard. It made it easier for him to agree with me when I demanded that he assemble a suitable force to guard me on my journey to my husband’s side. It made him forget all thoughts of arguing. Instead he nodded, clicked his heels in the way the men of Arrow do, and gathered four hundred lancers to escort me south.

We set off early, before the dawn stole shadow from the sky, and we rode out at a gentle pace, the horses’ breath puffing in clouds before them, the leaves golden and crimson on the trees as the first light found them.

And I felt watched, as if someone on high were paying close attention.

Brother Gog I miss. There is no sound more annoying than the chatter of a child, and none more sad than the silence they leave when they are gone.