The thorns taught me the game. They let me understand what all those grim and serious men who’ve fought the Hundred War have yet to learn. You can only win the game when you understand that it is a game. Let a man play chess, and tell him that every pawn is his friend. Let him think both bishops holy. Let him remember happy days in the shadows of his castles. Let him love his queen. Watch him lose them all.

“What have you got for me, dead thing?” I asked.

It’s a game. I will play my pieces.

I felt him cold inside me. I saw his death. I saw his despair. And his hunger. And I gave it back. I’d expected more, but he was only dead.

I showed him the empty time where my memory won’t go. I let him look there.

He ran from me then. He ran, and I chased him. But only to the edge of the marsh. Because it’s a game. And I’m going to win.

5

Four years earlier

For the longest time I studied revenge to the exclusion of all else. I built my first torture chamber in the dark vaults of imagination. Lying on bloody sheets in the Healing Hall I discovered doors within my mind that I’d not found before, doors that even a child of nine knows should not be opened. Doors that never close again.

I threw them wide.

Sir Reilly found me, hanging within the hook-briar, not ten yards from the smoking ruin of the carriage. They almost missed me. I saw them reach the bodies on the road. I watched them through the briar, silver glimpses of Sir Reilly’s armour, and flashes of red from the tabards of Ancrath foot soldiers.

Mother was easy to find, in her silks.

“Sweet Jesu! It’s the Queen!” Sir Reilly had them turn her over. “Gently! Show some respect—” He broke off with a gasp. The Count’s men hadn’t left her pretty.

“Sir! Big Jan’s over here, Grem and Jassar too.” I saw them heave Jan over, then turn to the other guardsmen.

“They’d better be dead!” Sir Reilly spat. “Look for the princes!”

I didn’t see them find Will, but I knew they had by the silence that spread across the men. I let my chin fall back to my chest and watched the dark patterning of blood on the dry leaves around my feet.

“Ah, hell . . .” One of the men spoke at last.

“Get him on a horse. Easy with him,” Sir Reilly said. A crack ran through his voice. “And find the heir!” With more vigour, but no hope.

I tried to call to them, but the strength had run from me, I couldn’t even lift my head.

“He’s not here, Sir Reilly.”

“They’ve taken him as a hostage,” Sir Reilly said.

He had part of it right, something held me against my will.

“Set him by the Queen.”

“Gentle! Gentle with him . . .”

“Secure them,” Sir Reilly said. “We ride hard for the Tall Castle.”

Part of me wanted to let them go. I felt no pain any more, just a dull ache, and even that was fading. A peace folded me with the promise of forgetting.

“Sir!” A shout went up from one of the men.

I heard the clank of armour as Sir Reilly strode across to see.

“Piece of a shield?” he asked.

“Found it in the mud, the carriage wheel must have pushed it under.” The soldier paused. I heard scraping. “Looks like a black wing to me . . .”

“A crow. A crow on a red field. It’s Count Renar’s colours,” Reilly said.

Count Renar? I had a name. A black crow on a red field. The insignia flashed across my eyes, seared deep by the lightning of last night’s storm. A fire lit within me, and the pain from a hundred hooks burned in every limb. A groan escaped me. My lips parted, dry skin tearing.

And Reilly found me.

“There’s something here!” I heard him curse as the hook-briar found every chink in his armour. “Quickly now! Pull this stuff apart.”

“Dead.” I heard the whisper from behind Sir Reilly as he cut me free.

“He’s so white.”

I guess the briar near bled me dry.

So they fetched a cart and took me back. I didn’t sleep. I watched the sky turn black, and I thought.

In the Healing Hall Friar Glen and his helper, Inch, dug the hooks from my flesh. My tutor, Lundist, arrived while they had me on the table with their knives out. He had a book with him, the size of a Teuton shield, and three times as heavy by the look of it. Lundist had more strength in that wizened old stick of a body than anyone guessed.

“Those are fire-cleaned knives I hope, Friar?” Lundist carried the accent of his homelands in the Utter East, and a tendency to leave half of a word unspoken, as if an intelligent listener should be able to fill in the blanks.

“It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh, Tutor,” Friar Glen said. He spared Lundist a disapproving glance, and returned to his digging.

“Even so, clean the knives, Friar. Holy office will prove scant protection from the King’s ire if the Prince dies in your halls.” Lundist set his book down on the table beside me, rattling a tray of vials at the far end. He lifted the cover and turned to a marked page.

“ ‘The thorns of the hook-briar are like to find the bone.’” He traced a wrinkled yellow finger down the lines. “‘The points can break off and sour the wound.’”

Friar Glen gave a sharp jab at that, which made me cry out. He set his knife down and turned to face Lundist. I could see only the friar’s back, the brown cloth straining over his shoulders, dark with sweat over his spine.

“Tutor Lundist,” he said. “A man in your profession is wont to think all things may be learned from the pages of a book, or the right scroll. Learning has its place, sirrah, but do not think to lecture me on healing on the basis of an evening spent with an old tome!”

Well, Friar Glen won that argument. The sergeant-at-arms had to “help” Tutor Lundist from the hall.

I guess even at nine I had a serious lack of spiritual purity, for my wounds soured within two days, and for nine weeks I lay in fever, chasing dark dreams along death’s borderlands.

They tell me I raged and howled. That I raved as the pus oozed from slices where the briar had held me. I remember the stink of corruption. It had a kind of sweetness to it, a sweetness that’d make you want to hurl.

Inch, the friar’s aide, grew tired of holding me down, though he had the arms of a lumberjack. In the end they tied me to my bed.

I learned from Tutor Lundist that the friar would not attend me after the first week. Friar Glen said a devil was in me. How else could a child speak such horror?

In the fourth week I slipped the bonds that held me to my pallet, and set a fire in the hall. I have no memory of the escape, or my capture in the woods. When they cleared the ruin, they found the remains of Inch, with the poker from the hearth lodged in his chest.

Many times I stood at the Door. I had seen my mother and brother thrown through that doorway, torn and broken, and in dreams my feet would take me to stand there, time and again. I lacked the courage to follow them, held on the barbs and hooks of cowardice.

Sometimes I saw the dead-lands across a black river, sometimes across a chasm spanned by a narrow bridge of stone. Once I saw the Door in the guise of the portals to my father’s throne-room, but edged with frost and weeping pus from every join. I had but to set my hand upon the handle . . .