Emperor of Thorns

Miana lay before the fireplace and the crackling logs on bedding from the inn rooms, skirts hitched around her hips in many layers. Pain had twisted her limbs. The firelight shone on skin stretched too tight across her womb. White against that red flesh, set over my hidden child, the print of a three-fingered hand.

‘Miana?’ I stepped close, slamming Gog back into his scabbard. ‘Miana?’ A cold touch flickered across my chest. Perhaps that same three-fingered hand, reaching in. I have no truck with poets and their flowered words but in that moment my heart truly froze, turning to a heavy and clenched wound to see her there – a physical pain that staggered me. A weakness the lichkin infected me with, no doubt.

‘Miana?’ The eyes she turned my way did not know me.

I swung around for the door, almost knocking Katherine down.

‘You’re leaving?’

‘Yes.’

‘She needs you.’ Anger. Disappointment. ‘Here.’

‘The lichkin is reaching for both her and my son,’ I said. ‘And wherever this lichkin is it is not here.’

I left her, left Miana, left the inn. I hastened past the pyre where skins bubbled and melted, fats running and steaming over the flagstones.

With the brothers at my heels I ran to the corner by the bakers’ kilns, to a step that offered a view west across bright waters toward the bare trees where my enemy waited. I paused, willing my limbs to stillness, letting heartbeats count out time – time for judgment and clarity to catch me up. Moments passed with nothing but the distant howling and the black reflection of branches reaching out toward Gottering.

‘Surfaces and reflections, Makin,’ I said. ‘Worlds divided by such thin barriers, unseen, unknowably deep.’

‘Your pardon, sire?’ Makin took sanctuary in formality rather than try to follow me.

Every fibre of me screamed for action. My wife lay marked and tormented, a stranger to me, a prison for my son. My son!

My father would tell me, ‘find a new wife’. Nail the pair, mother and babe, to the floor with one sword thrust and ride on. Let the lichkin choke on that. And I would do it too, if no better choice remained. I would do it. I told myself I would do it.

I held still, just a tremble in my fingers. ‘Consider the problem in hand, Lord Makin. The good bishop tells me there are at least seven lichkin, maybe more. And we know they’re striking across Attar for the first time. Maybe they’re attacking along other routes into Vyene? Spread thin? It seems that if there were many and they were confident of victory over soldiers rather than peasants, they would have come to us last night. That or they’re toying with us, cat to mouse.

‘Well I would rather find out about a new enemy by first encountering one on their own, so this is a chance not to miss, rather than a horror to run from,’ I said.

It wanted us to run. All this – all this was about fear. It wanted Miana bundled into a carriage and half a thousand guardsmen to gallop off along the road to Honth.

‘And if it’s the cat toying with the mouse?’ Makin asked.

I smiled. ‘What better chance will the mouse ever have to kill the cat?’

I drew Gog and the fire that burst out along the sword made pale all flame that had ever burned there before. I set off toward the black trees and the weakening screams of Gottering, wading through dark waters with the brothers treading in my wake. And I walked rather than ran, though a fire burned in me near as fierce as that on my blade, because surfaces divide known from unknown, and though I might walk where angels fear to tread, I try not to rush in like a fool.

25

Floodwater always has the same stink to it, of earth after rain but gone too far, tainted with rot. The coldness of it made me clutch at my breath, rising by inches as I waded on. My face blazed with the heat of the fire on Gog’s blade, reflecting in dark and hungry water. Some foolishness made me think of the River Sane’s gentle meander through Crath City, at the bend past the Bridge of Arts where stone pillars jut from the slow current to mark an area for swimming. Mother would take us there in the high summer heat when the Sane still remembered winter. As tiny boys we would edge in, inch by inch, squealing. That shriek and gasp as the river took our privates in icy hands – I felt it again and bit down the exclamation.

‘Brisk!’ Sir Makin said behind me. ‘Don’t think my balls will be coming back down for a month.’

‘Why are we even going?’ Rike from the back.

I glanced over my shoulder, at Gorgoth almost naked despite the cold, pushing a bow wave before him, Red Kent, his short sword and hatchet held out above the water, Makin with a grin, Rike with a sour sulk on him, Marten frowning, determined, the device on his shield the black spars of a burned house on a green field.

‘Why?’ Rike repeated.

‘Because it doesn’t want us to,’ I said, pressing on.

I made a mental note to change my ways. If, every time an enemy demands you sit down, instead you jump up, well that predictability becomes a ring through your nose by which you can be pulled when pushing fails.

‘Enjoy yourselves.’ Rike sounded further behind me.

I stopped and turned. Rike had never really taken to the business of me being king. I might have seven nations where men bent their knee to me in their thousands, through love or fear, mainly fear, but with Rike the only knee-bending took place when not to do so would get that knee broken.

‘Do we have to do this now, Brother Rike?’ I asked.

He sneered. ‘What are you gonna do? Cut my skin off and scoop out my eyes?’

Apparently the lichkin scared him more than I did.

‘Of course not.’ I shook my head, showing him the old smile. ‘I’m a king!’ I took a stride toward him. Lowering Gog’s point to the water so it sizzled, jumped, and spat, the steam rising between us. ‘I’ll have a professional do it. Somebody who really enjoys it. Kings don’t dirty their hands.’

Gorgoth let out a deep laugh at that. Makin joined him. In the end even Rike gave that ‘hur’ of his and we carried on. Jokes come hard when you’re past ball-deep in icy water and heading toward hell, but fortunately my audience wasn’t too discerning. Also I wasn’t joking.

Closer to the copse now, water around my waist, each step sinking into hidden softness. Three times I caught myself from falling, tripped by some submerged briar or fencepost. Makin went down once and came up cursing and spluttering.

The water seemed colder closer to the trees, plates of wafer-thin ice gliding in our wake, and a mist rising, tendrils reaching to mix with the frosting of our breath. The mists rose with us as the gradient led us from the flood among the outermost of the black and dripping trees.

I saw the first ghost only as a glimpse between trunks, a figure moving fast but not stirring the calf-deep water. Just a glimpse, ragged black hair, muddy, a child. The name Orscar floated through me, though I couldn’t place it. I turned to warn the brothers, sword still levelled at where the boy had been. And of course found only mist to meet me. Mist and an iron cross, a pendant hanging from a low branch, a blob of red enamel at the crossing point. For the blood of Christ.

‘I know this game of shades, dead-thing!’ I swung Gog in a slow circle, mists shrivelling back before the flames. ‘Bring my dead mother, William, the baby if you must. Bring the dead of Gelleth, bring Greyson’s ghost with his eyes gone, bring Lesha carrying her head. You’re playing the wrong hand against me. I’ve known worse.’