Prince of Thorns

Asleep? They were playing with me, Father and this pet magician of his.

“This game,” I said. “I expect it will provide amusement to somebody, but, if you . . . worry me . . . one more time, I will kill you. Think on it. You’re a piece in somebody else’s game, and all you’ll earn from it is a sword through the stomach, unless you redeem yourself in the next twenty seconds.”

It was a defeat, resorting to crude threats in a game of subtlety, but sometimes one must sacrifice a battle to win the war.

“Prince, I . . . Sageous is waiting for you . . .” I could see I’d turned his smug superiority into terror. I’d stepped outside the rules of play. I squeezed his throat a little. “Why would I want to speak to this . . . Sageous? What’s he to me?”

“He—he holds the King’s favour. Pl-please, Prince Jorg.”

He got the words out past my fingers. It takes no great strength to throttle a man if you know where to grip.

I let him go and he fell, gasping. “In the library you say? What’s your name, man?”

“Yes, my prince, in the library.” He rubbed at his neck. “Robart. My name is Robart Hool.”

I strode out across the Hall of Spears, angling for the leathered door to the library. I paused before it, turning back to Robart. “There are turning points, Robart. Forks in the path we follow through our lives. Times that we look back to and say, ‘If only.’ This is one of those times. It’s not often we get them pointed out to us. At this point you’ll either decide to hate me, or to serve me. Consider the choice carefully.” I threw the library door open. It slammed back into the wall and I walked through.

In my mind the library walls stretched to the very heavens, thick with books, pregnant with the written word. I learned to read at three years of age. I was talking with Socrates at seven, learning form and thing from Aristotle. For the longest time I had lived in this library. Memory dwarfed reality: the place looked small now, small and dusty.

“I’ve burned more books than this!” I said.

Sageous stepped out from the aisle given over to ancient philosophy. He was younger than I expected, forty at the most, wearing just a white cloth, like the Roman togara. His skin held the dusky hue of the middle-lands, maybe Indus or Persia, but I could see it only in the rare spots the tattooist’s needle hadn’t found. He wore the text of a small book on his living hide, cut there in the flowing script of the mathmagicians. His eyes—well, I know we’re supposed to cower beneath the gaze of potent men, but his eyes were mild. They reminded me of the cows on the Castle Road, brown and placid. His scrutiny was the thing that cut. Somehow those mild eyes dug in. Perhaps the script beneath them bore the power. All I can say is that, for a time uncounted, I could see nothing but the heathen’s eyes, hear nothing but his breath, stir no muscle but my heart.

He let me go, like a fish thrown back into the river, too small for the pot. We stood face to face, inches apart, and I’d no memory of closing the gap. But I’d come to him. We stood among the books. Among the wise words of ten thousand years. Plato to my left, copied, copied, and copied again. The “moderns” to my right, Russell, Popper, Xiang, and the rest. A small voice inside me, deep inside, called for blood. But the heathen had taken the fire from me.

“Father must depend upon you, Sageous,” I said. I twisted my fingers, wanting to want my sword. “To have a pagan at court must vex the priests. If the pope dared leave Roma these days, she’d be here to curse your soul to eternal hellfire!” I had nothing but dogma with which to beat him.

Sageous smiled, a friendly smile, like I’d just run an errand for him. “Prince Jorg, welcome home.” He had no real accent, but he ran his words out fluid and musical, like a Saracen or a Moor.

He stood no taller than me, in fact I probably had an inch on him. He was lean too, so I could have taken him to the floor there and then, and choked the life out of him. One murderous thought bubbled up after another, and leaked away.

“There’s a lot of your father in you,” he said.

“Have you got him tamed too?” I asked.

“One doesn’t tame a man like Olidan Ancrath.” His friendly smile took an edge of amusement. I wanted to know the joke. He could manage me but not my father? Or he could manipulate the King and chose to cover the fact with a smirk?

I imagined the heathen’s tattooed head shorn from his shoulders, his smile frozen and blood pumping from the stump of his neck. In that instant I reached for my sword and threw all my will behind the action. The pommel felt cold beneath my touch. I curled my fingers around the hilt, but before I could squeeze them tight, my hand fell away like a dead thing.

Sageous raised a brow at that. He’d had them shaved like his head, and drawn back in. He took a step backward.

“You’re an interesting young man, Prince Jorg.” His eyes hardened. Mild one moment, and in the next, dead as flint. “We shall have to find out what makes you tick, yes? I’ll have Robart escort you to your chamber, you must be tired.” All the time he spoke, the fingers of his right hand traced words in the flowing script across his left arm, brushing over one symbol jumping higher to a black crescent moon, underlining a phrase, underlining it again. I did feel tired. I felt lead in every limb, pulling me down.

“Robart!” he called out loud enough for the corridor.

He looked back to me, mild again. “I expect you’ll have dreams, Prince, after so long away.” His fingers moved over new lines, left hand, right arm. He traced words blacker than night across the veins in his wrist. “Dreams tell a man who he is.”

I struggled to keep my eyes open. On Sageous’s neck, just to the left of his Adam’s apple, amid all the tight-packed scrawl, was a letter, bigger than the rest, curled and recurled so it looked like a flower.

Touch the flower, I thought. Touch the pretty flower. And as if by magic, my treacherous hand moved. It took him by surprise, my fingers at his throat. I heard the door open behind me.

He’s skinny, I thought. So skinny. I wonder if I could close my hand around his neck. I admitted no hint of violence, just curiosity. And there it was, my hand around his neck. I heard Robart’s sudden intake of breath. Sageous stood frozen, his mouth half open, as if he couldn’t believe it.

I could barely stand, I could hardly keep the yawning from my voice, but I held his eye and let him think that the pressure I put on him was a threat, and not to keep me from falling.

“My dreams are my own, heathen,” I said. “Pray you’re not in them.”

I turned then, before I fell, and strode past Robart. He caught up in the Hall of Spears.

“I’ve never seen anyone lay hand on Sageous, my prince.”

My prince. That was better. There was admiration in his voice, maybe genuine, maybe not, I was too tired to care.

“He’s a dangerous man, his enemies die in their sleep. That or they’re broken. Lord Jale left the court two days after disagreeing with the pagan in front of your father. They say he can’t feed himself now, and spends his days singing an old nursery rhyme over and over.”

I reached the West Stair, Robart prattling beside me. He broke off all of a sudden. “Your chamber is off the Red Corridor, my prince.” He stopped and studied his boots. “The Princess has your former chamber.”