King of Thorns

4

Four years earlier

I took my uncle’s throne in my fourteenth year and found it to my liking. I had a castle, and staff of serving maids, to explore, a court of nobles to suppress, or at least what counted as nobles in the Highlands, and a treasury to ransack. For the first three months I confined myself to these activities.

I woke soaked with sweat. I normally wake suddenly with a clear head, but I felt as though I were drowning.

“Too hot…”

I rolled and fell from the bed, landing heavy.

Smoke.

Shouting in the distance.

I uncovered the bed-lamp and turned up the wick. The smoke came from the doors, not seeping under or between but lifting from every inch of the charred wood and rising like a rippled curtain.

“Shit-” Burning to death has always been a worry of mine. Call it a personal foible. Some people are scared of spiders. I’m scared of immolation. Also spiders.

“Gog!” I bellowed.

He’d been out there in the antechamber when I retired. I moved toward the doors, coming at them from the side. An awful heat came off them. I could leave by the doorway or try to fit myself through the bars on any of three windows before negotiating the ninety-foot drop.

I took an axe from the wall display and stood with my back to the stone, next to the doors. My lungs hurt and I couldn’t see straight. Swinging the axe felt like swinging a full-grown man. The blade bit and the doors exploded. Orange-white fire roared into the room, furnace-hot, in a thick tongue forking time and again. And, almost as suddenly, it died away like a cough ending, leaving nothing but scorched floor and a burning bed.

The antechamber felt hotter than my bedchamber, char-black from floor to ceiling, with a huge glowing coal at its centre. I staggered back toward my bed. The heat took the water from my eyes and for a moment my vision cleared. The coal was Gog, curled like a new-born, pulsing with flame.

Something vast broke from the doorway leading to the guards’ room beyond. Gorgoth! He scooped the boy up in one three-fingered hand and slapped him with the other. Gog woke with a sharp cry and the fire went out of him in an instant, leaving nothing but a limp child, skin stippled red and black, and the stink of burned meat.

Without words I stumbled past them and let my guards help me away.

They practically had to drag me to the throne-room before I found my strength. “Water,” I managed. And when I’d drunk and used my knife to trim away the burned ends of my hair, I coughed out, “Bring the monsters.”

Makin clattered into the hall still pulling on a gauntlet. “Again?” he asked. “Another fire?”

“Bad this time. An inferno,” I said. “At least I won’t have to look at my uncle’s furniture any more.”

“You can’t let him sleep in the castle,” Makin said.

“I know that,” I said. “Now.”

“Put a quick end to it, Jorg.” Makin pulled the gauntlet off. We weren’t under attack after all.

“You can’t let him go.” Coddin arrived, dark circles under his eyes. “He’s too dangerous. Someone will use him.”

And there it hung. Gog had to die.

Three clashes on the main doors and they swung open. Gorgoth entered the throne-room with Gog, flanked by four of my table-knights, who looked like children beside him. Seen in amongst men the leucrota looked every bit as monstrous as the day I found them under Mount Honas. Gorgoth’s cat-eyes slitted despite the gloom, blood-red hide almost black, as if infected with the night.

“What are you, Gog, eight years now? And busy trying to burn down my castle.” I felt Gorgoth’s eyes upon me. The great spars of his ribcage flexed back and forth with each breath.

“The big one will fight,” Coddin murmured at my shoulder. “He will be hard to put down.”

“Eight years,” Gog repeated. He didn’t know but he liked to agree with me. His voice had been high and sweet when we met beneath Mount Honas. Now it came raw and carried the crackle of flame behind it as if he might start breathing the stuff out like a damned dragon.

“I will take him away,” Gorgoth said, almost too deep to hear. “Far.”

Play your pieces, Jorg. A silence stretched out.

I wouldn’t be sitting in this throne if Gorgoth hadn’t held the gate. Or sitting here if Gog hadn’t burned the Count’s men. The skin on my face still clung tight, my lungs still hurt, and the stink of burnt hair still filled my nostrils.

“I’m sorry about your bed, Brother Jorg,” Gog said. Gorgoth flicked his shoulder, one thick finger, enough to stagger him. “King Jorg,” Gog corrected.

I wouldn’t be sitting on the throne but for a lot of people, a stack of chances, some improbable, some stolen, but for the sacrifice of many men, some better, some worse. A man cannot take on new burdens of debt at every turn or he will buckle beneath the weight and be unable to move.

“You were ready to give this child to the necromancers, Gorgoth,” I said. “Him and his brother both.” I didn’t ask if he would die to protect Gog. That much was written in him.

“Things change,” Gorgoth said.

“Better they find a quick death, you said.” I stood. “The changes will come too fast in these ones. Too fast to be borne. The changes will turn them inside out, you said.”

“Let him take his chance,” Gorgoth said.

“I nearly died in my bed tonight.” I stepped down from the dais, Makin at my shoulder now. “The royal chambers are in ashes. And dying abed was never my plan. Unless t’were as emperor in my dotage beneath an over-energetic young concubine.”

“It cannot be helped.” Gorgoth’s hands closed into massive fists. “It’s in his dena.”

“His dinner?” My hand rested on the hilt of my sword. I remembered how Gog had fought to save his little brother. How pure that fury had been. I missed that purity in myself. Only yesterday every choice came easy. Black or white. Stab Gemt in the neck or don’t. And now? Shades of grey. A man can drown in shades of grey.

“His dena. The story of every man, written at his core, what he is, what he will be, written in a coil in the core of us all,” Gorgoth said.

I’d never heard the monster say so many words in a row. “I’ve opened up a lot of men, Gorgoth, and if anything is written there then it’s written red on red and smells bad.”

“The centre of a man isn’t found by your geometry, Highness.” He held me with those cat’s eyes. He’d never called me Highness before either. Probably the closest to begging he would ever come.

I stared at Gog, crouched now, looking from me to Gorgoth and back. I liked the boy. Plain and simple. Both of us with a dead brother that we couldn’t save, both of us with something burning in us, some elemental force of destruction wanting out every moment of every day.

“Sire,” Coddin said, knowing my mind for once. “These matters need not occupy the king. Take my chambers and we’ll speak again in the morning.”

Leave and we’ll do your dirty work for you. The message was clear enough. And Coddin didn’t want to do it. If he could read me I surely could read him. He didn’t want to slit his horse’s throat when a loose rock lamed it. But he did. And he would now. The game of kings was never a clean game.

Play your pieces.

“It can’t be helped, Jorg,” Makin set a hand to my shoulder, voice soft. “He’s too dangerous. There’s no knowing what he’ll become.”

Play your pieces. Win the game. Take the hardest line.

“Gog,” I said. He stood slowly, eyes on mine. “They’re telling me you’re too dangerous. That I can’t keep you. Or let you go. That you are a chance that can’t be taken. A weapon that can’t be wielded.” I turned, taking in the throne-room, the high vaults, dark windows, and faced Coddin, Makin, the knights of my table. “I woke a Builders’ Sun beneath Gelleth, and this child is too much for me?”

“Those were desperate times, Jorg,” Makin said, studying the floor.

“All times are desperate,” I said. “You think we’re safe here, on our mountainside? This castle might look big from the inside. From a mile off you can cover it with your thumb.”

I looked at Gorgoth. “Maybe I need a new geometry. Maybe we need to find this dena and see if the story can’t be rewritten.”

“The child’s power is out of control, Jorg,” Coddin said, a brave man to interject when I’m in full flow. The kind of man I needed. “It will only grow more wild.”

“I’m taking him to Heimrift,” I said. Gog is a weapon and I will forge him there.

“Heimrift?” Gorgoth relaxed his fists, knuckles cracking with loud retorts.

“A place of demons and fire,” Makin muttered.

“A volcano,” I said. “Four volcanoes actually. And a fire-mage. Or so my tutor told me. So let’s put the benefits of a royal education to the test, shall we? At least Gog will like it there. Everything burns.”