King of Thorns

8

Four years earlier

I woke in a darkened room. A fly buzzed. Someone somewhere was being sick. Light filtered in where the daub cracked from the wattle. More light through the shutters, warped in their frame. A peasant hut. The retching stopped, replaced by muted sobs. A child.

I sat up. A thin blanket slipped from me. Straw prickled. The ache in my head had gone. My tooth hurt like a bastard but it was nothing compared to how my head had been. I felt around for my sword and couldn’t find it.

There’s something magical about a departed headache. It’s a shame the joy fades and you can’t appreciate not having one every moment of your life. That hadn’t been a regular headache of course. Old Jorgy got himself a bruised brain. I’d seen it before. When Brother Gains fell off his horse one time and hit his head he went crazier than Maical for the best part of two days. “Did I fall off my horse?” He must have asked that a thousand times in a row. Crying one moment. Laughing the next. We’re brittle things, us men.

I found my feet, still a little shaky. The door opened and the light came dazzling around the dark shape of a woman. “I brought you soup,” she said.

I took it and sat again. “Smells good.” It did. My stomach growled.

“Your friend, Makin, he brought a couple of rabbits for the pot,” she said. “We hadn’t had meat since the pigs got took.”

I raised the bowl to my lips: no spoons here. She left as I started slurping, burning my mouth and not caring too much. For a long time I just sipped and watched the dust dance where fingers of light reached in through the shutters. I munched on lumps of rabbit, chewed on the gristle, swallowed the fat. It’s good to eat with an empty mind.

At last I got to my feet again, steadier now. I patted myself down. My old dagger was on my hip and there was a lump in my belt pouch which turned out to be Makin’s clove-spice. One more glance around for my sword and I went to the door. The day seemed a little too bright, the wind chill and sharp with the stink of old burning. I stretched and blinked. Apart from the hut I’d come from, a stall for animals by the look of it, the place lay in ruins. Two houses with tumbled walls and blackened spars, some broken fences, animal pens that looked to have been ridden through with heavy horse. I saw the woman crouched in the shell of the closer house, her back to me.

The sudden need for a piss bit hard. I went against the hut, a long hot acid flow never seeming to end. “Jesu! Have I slept for a week?”

A wise man once said, “Don’t shit where you eat.” Aristotle perhaps. On the road that’s a rule to live by. Find your relief where you will. Move on each day and leave the shit, all manner of shit, behind you. In the castle I have a garderobe. Which, let’s face it, is a hole in the wall to crap through. In a castle you shit where you eat and you have to think a bit harder about what kind of shit is worth stirring up. That’s what I’ve learned in three months of being king.

Finished at last. Had to be a week’s worth.

I felt better. Good. A yawn cracked my face. The land lay flat to the north, the Matteracks a jagged line to the south. We’d left the Highlands or near as dammit. I stretched and ambled over to the woman. “Did my men do this?” I frowned and glanced around again. “Where in hell are they anyhow?”

She turned, face worn, haunted around the eyes. “Soldiers from Ancrath did it.” A child hung in her arms, limp and grey, a girl, six years, maybe seven.

“Ancrath?” I arched a brow. My eyes kept returning to the girl. “We’re close to the border?”

“Five miles,” she said. “They told us we couldn’t live here. The land was annexed. They started to fire the buildings.”

Annexed. That rang a small bell at the back of my mind. Some dispute about the border. The oldest maps had it that Lord Nossar’s estate reached out this far.

I could smell the vomit now, sour on the morning air. The girl had a blood-black smear of it in her hair.

“They killed your man?” I asked. I surprised myself. I don’t care enough about such things to waste words on them. I blamed the bang on the head.

“They killed our boy,” she said, staring past the black timbers, past me, past the sky. “Davie came out screaming and choking, blind with the smoke. Got too close to a soldier. Just a quick swing, like he was cutting down bindweed, and my boy was open. His guts…” She blinked and looked down at the girl. “He kept screaming. He wouldn’t stop. Another soldier put an arrow through his neck.”

“And your man?” I hadn’t asked about her boy. I hadn’t wanted that story. And the girl kept watching me, without interest, without hope.

“I don’t know.” She had a grey voice. The way it goes when emotions have burned out. “He didn’t go to Davie, didn’t hold him, too scared the soldiers would cut him down too.” The girl coughed, a wet sound. “Now he cries all the time or stares at the ground.”

“And the child?” I cursed my empty head. I had only to think a question today and it came spilling out of me.

“Sick,” she said. “In her stomach. But I think it’s in her blood too. I think it’s the waste.” She pulled the girl to her. “Does it hurt, Janey?”

“Yes.” A dry whisper.

“A little or a lot?”

“A lot.” Still a whisper.

Why ask such questions if there’s nothing to be done? “He did right,” I said. “Your man. Sometimes you need to hold back. Bide your time.” The thorns had held me back when it mattered, made the decision for me. “He did right.” The words that rang so true before I fell off my horse seemed empty beside the shell of their home. A blow to the skull can knock a deal of sense out of a man.

I saw horsemen across the meadow. Two men, three horses. Makin and Rike rode up, keeping an easy pace.

“Good to have you on your feet, Jorg.” Makin gave me his grin. Rike just scowled. “Mistress Sara and Master Marten have been looking after you I see.” And that was Makin for you, always with the making friends, remembering names, jollying along.

“Sara is it?” I said. I supposed these were my people after all. “And little Janey.” For a moment I saw a different Jane, crushed and broken under rocks, the light dying out of her. That Jane once told me I needed better reasons. Better reasons if I wanted to win, but maybe just better reasons for everything.

“Take her inside,” I said. “It’s too cold here.” A vague guilt crept over me, for pissing on one of the only four walls they had left.

Sara stood and carried the girl indoors.

“So you left me for dead then, Makin?” I asked. “Where are the others?”

“Camped a mile down the road.” He nodded north. “Watching for any more raiding parties.”

Odd to think of jolly old Nossar standing behind the raids. It put a sour edge on sweet memories. I remembered him in his feasting hall, with the faded maps stretched out across the table, how he pored over them. Nossar in his oak chair in the fort of Elm, grey beard and warm eyes. We played in that hall, Will and I, when we were no bigger than the child Sara carried past me. Nossar and his lines on the map. Gruff talk of “his boys” giving Renar’s boys a hiding.

“Are you ready to ride?” Makin asked.

“Soon.” I went to my horse. “Brath” the stablemaster called him and I’d not seen fit to change the name. Sturdy enough but not a patch on Gerrod who fell under that mountain I pushed over in Gelleth. I fished a few necessaries from my saddlebags and followed Sara.

The light had blinded me on the way out. The gloom left me blind on the way in. The stall stank. I hadn’t noticed it when I woke but it hit me now. Old vomit, sweat, animal dung. I believed the Prince of Arrow when he said he would protect the people, give them peace. I believed Jane when she said I needed better reasons for the things I made fate give me. I believed it all. Everything except that it meant anything to me.

I crouched by the woman. Already I had to reach for her name. “The new king didn’t protect you then?”

“There’s a king?” she said without interest, wanting me gone.

“Hello, Janey,” I said, turning the charm onto the girl instead. “Did you see I brought the biggest, ugliest man in the world to show you?”

Half a smile twitched on her lips.

“So what do you want, little Janey?” I asked. I didn’t know what I was doing here, crouched in the stink with the peasants. Maybe I just wanted to beat the Prince of Arrow at something. Or maybe it was just the echoes of that knock on the head. Perhaps Maical was knocked on the head as a baby and that knock had been echoing through his whole life.

“I want Davie.” She kept unnaturally still. Only her mouth moved. And her eyes.

“What do you want to be? To do?” I thought of my childhood. I wanted to be death on wings. I wanted to break the world open until it gave me what was mine.

“A princess,” Janey said. She paused. “Or a mermaid.”

“I tell her stories, sir,” the mother said, half-fearful even now, ruined and on the edge of despair. I wondered what she thought I might take from her. “My grandmother read,” she said. “And my family keeps the tales.” She stroked Janey’s hair. “I speak them when she’s hurting. To keep her mind from it. Fill her head with nonsense. She don’t rightly know what a mermaid is even.”

I bit my tongue then. Three impossible requests in as many moments. I’d followed them in thinking to be the king. Thinking of my crown and throne, my armies, gold and walls.

She wants her brother, she wants to be a princess, she wants to be a mermaid. And the waste will take her, screaming from her mother’s arms, to a cold slot in the ground. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t do a thing about it.

I touched her then, Janey, just a light touch on the forehead. She had enough death in her already and didn’t need me adding to it. But I touched her, with my fingers, just to feel it pulsing under the skin, eating at the marrow of her bones. The sickness in her called out to the necromancy lying in me, making a link. I could feel her heartbeat flutter under mine.

“Ready to ride, Jorg?”

“Yes.” I swung up into Brath’s saddle.

We set off at slow walk.

“Any of that spice left, Brother Jorg?” Makin asked.

“I must have swallowed it all for the pain,” I said, patting my belt pouch.

Makin rolled his eyes. He glanced back at the ruined farmstead. “Christ bleeding. There was enough-”

The faint sound of cymbals cut him off. The clash of cymbals, the whirr of cogs, stamping, and a child laughing.

“Leave anything else behind, Jorg?” he asked.

“Red Kent was right,” I said. “It was cursed. Evil. Better the hurt fall on the peasants, neh?”

On the plains the winds can make your eyes sting.

Rike pulled on his reins and started back.

“Don’t,” I said.

And he didn’t.

Sleep came hard that night. Perhaps soft months in the Haunt had left me wanting the comfort of a bed. Sleep came hard and the dreams came harder, dragging me under.

I lay in a dark room, a dark room sour with the stink of vomit and animals, and saw nothing but the glitter of her eyes, child’s eyes. Heard only the tick tick tick of the watch on my wrist and the rasp rasp rasp of her breath, hot and dry and quick.

I lay for the longest time with the tick and the rasp and the glitter of her eyes.

We lay and a warm river carried us, thick with the scent of cloves.

Tick, breath, tick, breath, tick, breath.

And then I woke, sudden and with a gasp.

“What?” someone murmured. Perhaps Kent in his blankets.

“Nothing,” I said. The dream still tangled me. “I thought my watch stopped.”

But it wasn’t the watch.

In the grey dawn Makin rose beside me cracking his face with a yawn, spitting, and rubbing his back. “Jesu but I’m sore.” He cast a bleary glance my way. “Nothing a pinch of clove-spice wouldn’t fix.”

“The child died last night,” I told him. “Easy rather than hard.”

Makin pursed those thick lips of his and said no more about it. Perhaps thinking of his own child lost back among the years. He didn’t even ask how I knew.

The years never seem to weigh on Brother Maical, as if his inability to count their passing protects him from their passage. He watches the world through calm grey eyes, broad-chested, thick-limbed. Brother Grumlow cuts Maical’s hair close, with a tail at the rear, and shaves his beard leaving him clean-cheeked and sharp. And if no one told you that his thoughts rattle in an empty head, you might think Brother Maical as capable a rogue as rides among the Brothers. In battle though his hands grow clever, and you’d think him whole, until the din fades, the dying fall, and Maical wanders the field weeping.