King of Thorns be-2

by Mark Lawrence

  Open it and my work is undone.

  I turned the box, letting the thorn pattern catch the light. Damn Luntar and damn the dead child too. When I faced Arrow’s legions for the last time I would do it whole.

  Open it and you’re finished.

  My hands didn’t shake on the metal. For that I was grateful. I opened it wide, and with a quick motion twisted the lid off, flicking it out past the crimson flutter of the sheet.

  Never open the box.

  Friar Glen’s chamber once again, lit by the heathen’s glow. The need to kill him fills my hands immediately.

  “There was blood and muck,” Sageous says. He smiles. “Saraem Wic’s poisons will do that. But there was no child. I doubt there ever will be now. That old witch’s poisons are not gentle. They scrape a womb bare.”

  I find the blade and I’m moving toward him. I try to run but it’s like wading through deep snow.

  “Silly boy. You think I’m really here?” He makes no move to escape.

  I try to reach him, but I’m floundering.

  “I’m not even in this city,” he says.

  Peace enfolds me. A honeyed dream of sunlight, fields of corn, children playing.

  I wade through it, though each step feels like betrayal, like the murder of friends.

  “You think I’m like you, Jorg.” He shakes his head and shadows run. “Thirst for revenge has dragged you across kingdoms, and you think me driven by your crude imperatives. I’m not here to punish you. I don’t hate you. I love all men equally. But you have to be broken. You should have died with your mother.” Sageous’s fingers stray to the lettering on his throat. “It was written.”

  And as I reach him he is gone.

  I stumble into the corridor. Empty. I close the door, using my metal strip to drop the latch. Friar Glen will have to pray for help. I don’t have time for him now and even through the layers of Sageous’s lies and dreams I hold the suspicion that he is guilty of something.

  Katherine didn’t bring me to the Tall Castle, and certainly neither did Friar Glen. I didn’t turn right where the road forked from the Ken Marshes just to visit my dog’s grave. I came to see family. And now I need to be quick about it. Who knows what dreams Sageous might send this way?

  Sim taught me about moving quietly. It’s not so much about noise. The art is to be always on the move, heading somewhere with purpose. Any hesitation invites a challenge. On the flip side, if there can be no possible reason for your presence, then utter stillness can hide you, even in plain sight. The eye may see you but if you are stone, the mind may discount you.

  “You there. Hold fast.”

  Eventually all tricks will fail and someone will challenge you. Even at this point they will find it hard to believe you’re an intruder. The minds of guards are especially dull, blunted by a career of tedium.

  “Your pardon?” I cup a hand to my ear.

  If you are challenged, pretend not to hear. Move closer, lean in. Be quick as you set your hand over their mouth, palm flat to lips so there’s no edge to bite. Press them back against a wall if there is one. Stab in the heart. Don’t miss. Hold their eyes with yours. It gives them something to think about besides making a noise, and nobody wants to die alone in any case. Let the wall help them to the ground. Leave them in shadow.

  I leave the dead man behind me. A second dies at the end of the next hall.

  “You!” This one rounds a corner with sword in hand. Almost knocking me down.

  Sharp hands. That’s what Grumlow said to me. Sharp hands. It’s his tutorial in knife-work. A sword’s all about the swinging, the thrust, the momentum, timing your move against that of your foe-a man with a knife is a man with sharp hands, nothing more. A knife-fight is a scary thing. That’s why men jab and feint, posture, run. Grumlow says the only thing to do is go in fast, go in first, kill him quick.

  I go in fast. His sword falls on the long rug and doesn’t clatter.

  Around the corner is the door I’m seeking. Locked. I take the key from the guard’s belt. The door opens on oiled hinges. Silent. The hinges never squeak on a nursery door. Babies fight sleep hard enough as it is.

  The wet-nurse is snoring in a bed by the window. A lantern glows on the sill, its wick trimmed low. The shadows of the cot bars reach for me.

  I should kill the nurse, but it looks like Old Mary who chased after Will and me in the long ago. I should kill her, but I let her sleep. She would be ill-advised to wake.

  I drag the guard into the room and close the door. For a long moment I pause, picturing my escape routes. There is a second exit from the room, leading to the nurses’ quarters. As long as I have two ways to run I feel safe enough. There are passages that lead from the castle. Secret tunnels that lead to hidden doors in the High City. I couldn’t open those doors from the outside, but I can leave by them.

  I take a deep slow breath. White musk-his mother’s scent. Another. I step to the cot and look upon my brother. Degran they call him. He’s so small. I hadn’t thought he would be so tiny. I reach in and lift him, sleeping. He barely fills my hands. He gives a gentle sigh.

  The assassin’s work is dirty work.

  I vowed to take the empire throne, to take the hardest path, to win the Hundred War whatever the cost. And here in two hands I hold a key to the Gilden Gate. The son of the woman who replaced my mother. The son my father set me aside for. The son on whom he has settled my inheritance.

  “I came to kill you, Degran.” I whisper it.

  He is soft and warm, his head big, his hands tiny, his hair so very fine. My brother.

  The lamp glow catches the white scars along my arms as I hold him up. I feel the briar’s hooks in me.

  I should twist his neck and be gone. In the game of empire this is not a rare move, not even unusual. Fratricide. So common there is a word for it. Oft times carried out in person.

  So why do my hands shake so?

  Do it and be done.

  You are weak, Jorg. Even my father tells me to do it. Weak.

  I feel the hooks so deep, finding the bone as I struggled to save William. The blood runs down me. I can feel it. Streaming down my cheeks, blinding me. The thorns hold me.

  DO IT.

  No.

  I will burn the world if it defies me, carry ruin to every corner, but I will not kill my brother. Not again. I came here to make that choice. To show that I could have chosen to. To weigh the decision in my hands.

  And I set Degran back down among his covers. The nurse has put a woolly sheep there with stubby legs and button eyes. Sleep brother, sleep well.

  He rolls limp from my hands, white where my fingers have touched him. I don’t understand. Ice forms across me, a sick hollowness fills me until I am nothing but a brittle shell. I prod him.

  “Wake up.”

  I shake the covers under him. Shake the cot. “WAKE UP.”

  He flops, limp, with the white prints of my hands on his soft flesh like accusations.

  “Wake up!” I scream it but not even the nurse wakes.

  Sageous is there, in the corner of the room, all aglow. “Necromancy, Jorg. How many edges does that sword have?”

  “I didn’t kill him. He was mine to kill and I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did.” Sageous’s voice is calm where mine is shrill.

  “I didn’t want this!” I shout.

  “The necromancy listens to your heart, Jorg. It listens to what you can’t say. Does what the secret core of you wants and needs. It isn’t fooled by posturing. You have the death of small things in your fingers. A small thing died.”

  “Take it back.” I’m begging. “Bring him back.”

  “Me?” Sageous asks. “I’m not even here, Jorg. I can’t do much more than keep that fat slattern asleep. Besides, I wanted you to do it. Why do you think I brought you here in the first place?”

  “Brought me?” I can’t look at him, or Degran. Or even the shadows, in case Mother and William are watching me from the corner.

  “
With dreams of Katherine, to bring you to the castle, and dreams of William to lure you inside. Really, Jorg, I thought a clever child like you would have understood how I work by now. It’s not the killing dreams that are my best weapons-the most subtle tools have the most profound effect. A nudge here, a nudge there.”

  “No.” As if shaking my head will make it a lie.

  “I bleed for you, Jorg,” he says, all compassion and mild eyes. “I love you, but you have to be broken, it’s the only way. You should have died, and now only breaking you will restore equilibrium, only that will allow matters to take their course as they should.”

  “Matters?”

  “The Prince of Arrow will unite us. The empire will prosper. Thousands upon thousands that would have died will live. Science will return to us in the peace. And I will guide the emperor’s hand so that all might be well. Isn’t that worth more than you, Jorg? Isn’t that worth the life of a single baby?”

  I scream and hurl myself at him, as if anger might wash away grief, but what I’ve done has put a crack right through me and into that crack Sageous pours madness, a torrent of it. I stagger blind and howling.

  I see nothing more. Nothing until this moment finds me staring into an empty and lidless box.

  So much madness and regret poured into me that it left no room for memory, nothing for the box. What instincts, luck, or guidance led me from the castle without discovery, or how many more corpses I left in my wake, I can’t say.

  “Jorg?”

  I turned and looked at Miana. My cheeks wet with tears. Sageous’s magics crawled under my skin, but it wasn’t his spells that emptied me. I killed my brother.

  His ghost lay on the bed, stretched behind Miana. Not the soft babe, but the little boy of four he would have been. For the first time ever he smiled at me, as if we were friends, as if he were pleased to see me. He faded as I watched and I knew he wouldn’t return, wouldn’t grow, wouldn’t heal.

  Someone hammered on the door. “Sire, the gate has given!”

  I backed against the wall and slid to the floor. “I killed him.”

  “Jorg?” Miana looked concerned. “The enemy are within our gates.”

  “I killed my brother, Miana,” I said. “Let them come.”

  Lawrence, Mark

  King of Thorns

  From The Journal Of Katherine Aps corron

  March 28th, Year 99 Interregnum

  Tall Castle. Chapel.

  Degran is dead. My sister’s boy is dead. I can’t write of it.

  March 29th, Year 99 Interregnum

  Jorg did this. He left a trail of corpses to and from Degran’s door.

  I will see him die for it.

  There is such anger in me. I cannot unlock my teeth. If Friar Glen were not dead. If Sageous were not absent. Neither of them would live to see the morning.

  March 31st, Year 99 Interregnum

  We put him in the ground today. In the tomb where Olidan’s family lie. A small white marble casket for him. Little Degran. It looks too small for any child to fit in. It makes me cry to think of him in there, alone. Maery Coddin sang the Last Song for him, my nephew. She has a high, pure voice that echoed in the tomb and it made me cry. My sister’s ladies placed white flowers on the tomb, Celadine lilies, one each, weeping.

  Father Eldar had to come up from Our Lady in Crath City to say the words, for we have no holy men in the castle. Jorg has stolen or killed them all. And when Father Eldar was done, when he’d read the passages, spoken of the Valley of Death and Fearing No Evil, we all walked away. Sareth didn’t walk. Sir Reilly had to carry her, screaming. I understood. If it were my baby, I couldn’t leave them. Dear God, I can just poison them from my belly, let them fall in blood and slime, but if I had held my child, seen his eyes, touched his lips…it would take more than Sir Reilly to drag me from him.

  April 2nd, Year 99 Interregnum

  I’ve gone back through this journal and followed the track of my dreams through its pages. At least the ones I wrote about, but I seem to have written about a lot of them, as if they were troubling me. I’ve no memory of them. Maybe they left me while I scratched them down.

  I don’t want to turn the page back either. It feels as if another’s hand is on mine, holding it down. But I won’t be kept back.

  I can see now-how the heathen played me, steered me like a horse with light flicks of a whip, just a turn here and there to set the path across a whole map. I don’t believe this magic is beyond me. I can’t accept that a thing like Sageous should be allowed such power and that I should not.

  I can’t rule a kingdom like Jorg or Orrin. No soldiers will follow my orders and fight and die on foreign soils at my say so. These things are forbidden me. Because of my sex. Because I can’t grow a beard. Because my arm is not so strong. But generals do not need a strong arm. Kings don’t need a beard.

  I may never rule or command, but I can build a kingdom in my mind. And armies. And if I study what the heathen did to me. If I take it apart piece by piece. I can make my own weapons.

  April 8th, Year 99 Interregnum

  Orrin of Arrow called upon my brother-in-law today. I said that I would marry him. Though first he had to promise to take me far from this castle, from this place that stinks of the murderer Jorg Ancrath, and never to bring me back.

  Orrin says he will be emperor and I believe him. Jorg of Ancrath will try to stop him, and on that day I’ll see him pay for his crime. Until that time I will work on unpicking the heathen’s methods and learning them for myself. It’s fear that keeps such power from the common man, nothing more. I don’t believe that creature Sageous capable of something I’m not, I won’t believe it. Fear keeps us weak, fear of what we don’t know, and fear of what we do know. We know what the church will do to witches. The Pope in Roma and all her priests can go hang though. I’ve seen what happens to holy men in such times. Here’s a power a woman can gather into her hands as well as any man, and the time will come when Jorg will find out how it feels to shatter with his dreams.

  From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron

  June 1st, Year 99 Interregnum

  Arrow. Castle Yotrin.

  We are married. I am happy.

  July 23rd, Year 99 Interregnum

  Arrow. New Forest.

  We’ve ridden out from Castle Yotrin to the New Forest. They call it that because some great great grandsire of Orrin’s had it planted just after pushing the Brettans back into the sea. It’s my first real chance to see Arrow though mostly we’re going to be seeing trees. Egan practically demanded Orrin go hunting with him and Orrin wanted me to come. I don’t think Egan did. Egan said Orrin had promised a private hunt, no courtiers, no fuss. Orrin said the richer he got the fewer luxuries like that he could afford but promised to keep the hunting party small.

  Arrow is a lovely country. It might lack Scorron’s mountains and grandeur but the woodland is gorgeous, oak and elm, beech and birch, where Scorron has pines, pines, and more pine. And the woods are so light and airy with room to ride between the trees, not the dense dark valley-forests of home.

  We’ve made camp in a clearing, the servants are setting up pavilions and cooking fires. Orrin invited Lord Jackart and Sir Talbar along, and Lady Jarkart too, and her daughter Jesseth. I think Lady Jarkart is supposed to keep me happy while the men kill things in the woods. She’s kind but rather dull and she seems to think she needs to shout in order for me to understand her accent. I have no problem hearing her, I only wish she would just pause for breath and let one word finish before starting the next. Little Jesseth is a darling girl, seven years, always sprinting into the undergrowth and having to be retrieved by Gennin, the Jarkarts’ man.

  I’d like girls, two of them, blonde like Orrin.

  Orrin came back with Egan riding double behind him, Jackart and Talbar flanking. I stood to ask after the deer but thought better of it, all of them grim-faced save Egan who looked ready for murder. Little Jesseth didn’t know any better though and ran in shouting t
o her father, did he bring her a doe or a buck? Lord Jackart practically fell out his saddle and scooped her up before Egan jumped down. The way Egan stared after the man I thought Jackart might burst into flame. And then I saw the blood, dark and sticky on Egan’s hands, like black gloves, and drying splatters up his forearms.

  “I’ll cut some wood.” That’s all Egan said and he stalked off shouting for an axe.

  Lord Jackart carried his daughter to their pavilion, Lady Jackart hurrying on behind. Dull she might be but sharp enough to know when to lie low.

  “Egan ran Xanthos into a stand of hook-briar,” Orrin told me. He spread his hands. “I didn’t see it either.”

  “But you told him to go slow-said to watch for it.” Sir Talbar rubbed at his whiskers and shook his head.

  “It’s not in Egan to give up the chase, Talbar. That stag must have been an eighteen pointer.” Orrin has a way of showing a man’s weakness as strength. Perhaps it’s the goodness in him. In any case it makes men follow him, love him. He may work the same magic on me too-I don’t know.

  “Poor Xanthos.” The stallion had been a marvellous beast, named for Achilles’ horse, black like rock-oil with muscle rippling under a slick hide. I had been wanting to ride him myself but Egan is so hard to talk to, he manages to make me feel as though I’ve angered him with each word. “We don’t have so many horses in Scorron but I’ve never heard of one killed by a briar.” Then I understood, or thought I did. “Did he break his leg? Poor Xanthos.”

  Orrin shook his head, Sir Talbar spat.

  “Hook briar is foul stuff,” Orrin said. “It was a miracle he didn’t break a leg, but he got torn up along his flanks.”

  “The horsemaster…the chirurgeon could have sewn him up?” I couldn’t see that such wounds would be fatal.

  Orrin shook his head again. “I’ve seen it before, and the surgeon Mastricoles speaks of it in his masterwork, even the footnotes of Hentis’s Franco Botany say so. The thorns of the hook briar are barbed, what they leave in the wound sours, the blood is poisoned, the animal dies. Even men can die. Sir Talbar’s uncle caught two thorns in the palm of his hand. The wound was cut and cleaned and packed with salve and still it went black with rot. He lost the hand, then the arm, then the rest of his days.”