“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.”

I understood the blood. “At least Egan offered a quick ending.”

Orrin bowed his head. “Xanthos didn’t linger.”

Sir Talbar glanced at Orrin then looked away and said no more.

I walked with little Jesseth later on, letting her babble as we followed the edge of the glade. Axe blows rang out from somewhere among the trees. Egan had split a mountain of logs and the cooks already had ten times the firewood they needed. Now he was felling trees. He came out from a stand of elm an hour later close by where Jesseth and I were playing board-checks. The blood had gone from his arms and sweat ran down a body as muscled and lithe as Xanthos’s. He barely nodded our way and strode past, axe on his shoulder.

“I don’t like him,” Jesseth whispered.

“Why not?” I asked, bending in with a conspiratorial smile.

“He killed his horse.” Jesseth nodded as if to prove it no lie.

“But that was a kindness.”

“Mother says he cut its head off with his sword because the deer got away.”

July 25th, Year 99 Interregnum

Yotrin Castle. Library.

I’ve found certain scrolls in Orrin’s library that speak of dreams in terms of tides and currents. There’s a woman in the village of Hannam who tells fortunes for her living, but she has more to say than that, to the right person. In a small room at the top of her house she has spoken to me of sailing on the seas of dream.

August 18th, Year 99 Interregnum

Yotrin Castle. Royal bedchamber.

Orrin has left to command his armies in the west. I will miss him. I will make good use of the rest though. It seems we’ve spent a month in the bedchamber. If it takes more than that to make a baby then I’ll be worn out by winter and an old lady by spring.

FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON

July 18th, Year 100 Interregnum

Castle Yotrin. Library.

Orrin is a good man, probably a great man. All the oracles say he will be emperor and wear the all-crown. But even great men need to be disobeyed now and again.

When Orrin is here he spends at least half of his days in this library. The knights and captains who hunt him down walk into the reading hall furtively, out of place, eyeing the walls with suspicion as if the knowledge might just leak out of all those books and infect them. They find us, Orrin in one corner, me in another, and he’ll look at them over the top of one of those great and worthy leather-bound tomes of his. “General So-and-so,” he’ll say. He lets the kingdoms he’s taken keep a general each. He says it’s important to let the people have their pride and their heroes. “General So-and-so,” he’ll say. And General So-and-so will shuffle from foot to foot, awkward among so many written words, and not expecting the future emperor to look so scholarly, as if he should be wearing reading lenses.

Orrin reads the great books. The classics from before the Builders’ time, stretching back to the Greeks and Homer. It’s not that he chooses the biggest and most impressive books for show, but that’s what he always ends up with. He likes to read philosophy, military history, the lives of great men, and natural history. He’s always showing me plates of strange animals. At least when he’s here he is. Creatures that you’d think the author just made up on a hot afternoon. But he says the pictures were captured not painted, as if an image were frozen in a mirror, and these things are real. Some of them he’s seen. He shows me a plate of a whale and puts his fingernail beside its mouth to give the size of a horse next to it. He says he saw the back of one from a ship off the coast of Afrique. Says it rolled through the water, an endless grey sheen of whaleback, broad enough for a carriage and longer than our dining hall.

I read the small forgotten books. The ones found behind the rows on the shelves. In locked chests. In pieces to be assembled. They look old. Some are—a hundred years, three hundred, maybe five, but Orrin’s are more ancient. Mine though, they look older, as if what is written in them takes its toll, even on parchment and leather. Mine were set down after the Burning, after the Builders ignited their many suns.

The ancient books tell a clear story. Euclid gives us shape and form. Mathematics and science progress in an ordered fashion. Reason prevails. The newer stories are confusion. Conflicting ideas and ideologies. New mythologies, new magics offered with serious intent but in a hundred variants, each wrapped in its own superstition and nonsense, but with a core of truth. The world changed. Somewhere along the line of years it changed and what was not possible became possible. Unreason shaded into truth. To assemble it all into some pure architecture, some new science that delivers control in this present chaos, would be a work of lifetimes. But I am making a start. I find it more to my liking than sewing.

Orrin says I should leave it alone. That such knowledge corrupts and if he must make use of it then it will be through others, as Olidan used Sageous, as Renar used Corion. I tell him he mistakes the puppet and the puppeteer. He smiles and says maybe, but if the time comes he will be pulling the strings, not pulled by them. Orrin tells me he is sure I could draw from the same well as Sageous, but such waters would make me bitter and he likes me sweet.

I love Orrin, I know I do. But sometimes it’s easier to love someone who has flaws you can forgive in return for their forgiving yours.

In the red ruin of battle Brother Kent oft looks to have stepped from hell. Though in another life he would have tilled his fields and died abed, mourned by grandchildren, in combat Red Kent possesses a clarity that terrifies and lays waste. In all else he is a man confused by his own contradictions—a killer’s instincts married to a farmer’s soul. Not tall, not broad, but packed solid and quick, wide cheekbones, dark eyes flat with murder, bitten lips, scarred hands, thick-fingered, loyalty and the need to be loyal written through him.

46

Wedding day

“Jorg! The Prince’s men are through the gates!”