King of Thorns

49

Wedding day

The warrior rides a black stallion. Smoke shrouds the castle ruins behind him and the wind gives only glimpses of the corpse-choked gap between high and broken walls. That same wind streams long dark hair across his shoulders, like a pennant, and flutters the remnants of his cloak. To his left and right more riders emerge from the fog of war, warriors all, their armour dented, torn, smeared with soot and blood. A huge soldier in battered plate-mail carries the standard, Ancrath’s boar in black upon the red field of Renar. They come by ones and twos, slow in their motion as if the great distance from which they are seen has somehow robbed the urgency from their movement. Each hoof lands with the finality of tomb doors closing, no sound to accompany the action. Each bounce and jolt in the saddle takes an age.

Where the baked dirt flakes from the warrior’s plate armour the metal shows the rainbowed hues of oiled steel. Beside him an older, dark-haired knight, half a smile on thick-lips, black curls plastered to his forehead, an eagle’s head on his round shield, worked in red copper, fire-bronze, and silver, broadsword at his hip, black iron flail secured to his saddle. A second man in plate-mail on a white charger rides to their left, at home in his saddle as any sea-dog on a rolling deck. His armour is worked with the gothic engravings of the Horse Coast, his cloak blue in memory of the sea, on his jousting shield the white ship and black sun of the House Morrow.

A priest follows them, perched uneasy on a fractious mule. The wind throws wisps of grey hair across his scowl.

The man at the centre, at the arrowpoint of this emerging army, stares straight ahead. A wolf skull hangs from the pommel of his saddle. A wolf or a large hound. The man’s face is scarred, the left side rough and twisted, as if the sculptor had heard the work bell and left in mid-action, leaving his creation unfinished. Over one eye, fixed to the bossed rim and side of his helm by iron rivets, is a silver ring, big enough to rest against his eyebrow and cheekbone. If you knew the edge were ridged you might imagine you could see those ridges, but they are a prisoner of the distance between us, as is any message in that thousand-yard stare.

I got bored with watching myself and flipped the ring up so my view lay unobstructed.

They had found me naked, every item on me seemingly burned away, except for my sword on which flames still danced. That fire held to the blade for hours and even now from time to time I see reflections of flames in the steel. I’ve named my first sword. I call it Gog, though I think it holds only an echo of him, like that echo of Fexler Brews, a man who shot himself in a stasis chamber long ago with a Colt 45. The world turned, he said. And it left him behind.

I had opened my eyes as Makin wrapped me in his cloak. The wound on my chest was just pink edges and white seams-the fire burned every trace of the necromancer from me, and in the end, as it failed, that death quenched Gog. I felt the absence of both, like holes in the world. Gog is ended. I won’t see him again.

The fire has left me for it was always his, never mine, and the necromancy too. I may have clothes and armour now, but I am naked against the world once more, with nothing but the sharp wit, tongue, and blade of the Ancraths to see me through.

I think if they had not fought each other over me, Ferrakind and the Dead King, if either had his sole attention on me as I opened myself to their realms and let those places burst through me in such reckless abandon, I would have been claimed. Such powers can’t be mastered, not without cost, and that cost would seem to include losing all those reasons you wanted that strength for. And it is a sacrifice I would have paid in the moment, with the arms of thousands raised against me. In the end, my brothers, there is no price I will not pay to win this game of ours. No sacrifice too great that it will not be paid to stop another placing their will over mine.

We ride for Arrow. I feel they owe me a castle at the very least. A palace might be nice too. And all those dead soothsayers and seers of the future-we’re friends now. I am the Prince of Arrow. Ask Father Gomst. He was there, looking whilst God turned away. Egan adopted me into his family. And he’s dead now. Not at my hand, but trampled by his own men. So, I’m the Prince of Arrow, homeward bound, destined by right and vision to be the emperor and to sit upon that golden throne beyond the Gilden Gate.

We ride for Arrow, an avalanche that thunders from the Highlands. This world will bend to my dominion. The box is open, its memories free, old wickedness and sins loosed once more. I am not that boy, the wild boy on the edge of manhood who filled it. He stands in my past and soon the curvature of the earth will hide him as the years carry us apart. I am not that boy and his crimes don’t stain my hands. I’m riding for Arrow. I will delve shoulder-deep in gore if the need arises, so deep no river could scour me clean though they cut through mountains. My dreams are my own now, dark and pure. If you would know them, Brother, stand in my way.

I told Sageous my sins cried out for more, and I intend to give them company. I will burn and I will harrow and Orrin’s lands, Egan’s blood-stained inheritance, will be delivered into my hands. I will stand King of Arrow, of Normardy, of Conaught, of Belpan, of the Ken Marshes, of Orlanth, and of the Renar Highlands. I will take these lands and make a weapon of their peoples. In fire and in blood I will bend them to my will, because this is a game with no rules, and I will be victorious if it beggars hell.

I write this as we camp after a hard day’s riding. I make a crabbed hand across pages as white as gold can buy. Perhaps they were destined for more worthy thoughts, but I set mine here. Sageous wrote his words across his skin and it left him weak. My father keeps them to himself and it leaves him less than human. I write mine here, as if ink and paper can take the blame from me. The surgeons like to bleed a man, to let ill humours out, so that he may face the world anew. Perhaps they should just hand him a quill and let the poisons spill from him whilst he keeps his blood for its intended purpose.

Beside my pages are Katherine’s, scavenged from the ruination below Rigden Rock. I saw her burn. I saw her among the flames, her horse screaming. Or was that a dream in the darkness that followed? In any event the wind scattered her words across the dead and I followed them to the corpse of a baggage mule. I said once, these feelings are too fierce to last. They can only burn. Make us ash and char. And we burned, both of us-but still I want her. Though if she stood here now, she would only hate me and pride would edge my tongue to cut her in return.

Pride has ever been my weakness and my strength, but there are three things only of which I’m proud. The first-I climbed God’s finger to stand alone in that high place and find a new perspective. Second-I went to the mountain for Gog, even though I couldn’t save him from his fire, just as no one can save me from mine. Third-I fought the all-sword, Master Shimon with the sword-song all around, and we made a thing of beauty.

There will be pride to come, enough to drown in, but perhaps there will be no more things of which to be proud.

A time of terror comes. A dark time. The graves continue to open and the Dead King prepares to sail. But the world holds worse things than dead men. A dark time comes.

My time.

If it offends you.

Stop me.