King of Thorns (47 page)

I tried to stab Jorg but it was like a dream. I both knew and did not know what my hand was doing. I didn’t want to hear his pain or see him bleed. I don’t recall picking up the knife to take with me. I told myself to stop. But I didn’t stop.

And now. If I had Friar Glen here. I would want to hear his pain and see him bleed. I would not tell myself to stop. But I would stop. Because for the first time in a long while my head feels clear, my thoughts are all my own, and I am not a killer.

March 27th, Year 99 Interregnum

Rennat Forest. Before noon. A high wind in the trees.

Sir Makin has been pacing. He doesn’t say it but he’s worried about Jorg. We saw a patrol ride by earlier, between the fields. They’ll be looking for me. Sir Makin says the more of them looking for me, the fewer for Jorg to worry about in the castle.

The big one. The huge one, really. Rike. He’s been saying they should go. That Jorg is captured or dead. Kent says Jorg helped them all escape the dungeons and if he’s stuck there in those same dungeons himself, they should go free him. Even Sir Makin says that’s madness.

The night was cold and noisy. They gave me their cloaks, but I’d rather be cold than under those stinking, crawling things. Everything moves in the forest at night, creaking, or croaking, or rustling in dead leaves. I was glad to see the dawn. When I woke up, the boy, Sim, was standing against the tree beside me, watching.

Breakfast was stale bread and bits of smoked meat. I didn’t like to ask what animal it came from. I ate it. My stomach was grumbling and I’m sure they could hear.

Jorg has come back. His men are more scared now than when they thought he was lost. He’s a wild thing, his hair torn and spiky with blood, he won’t look at
anything, his eyes keep sliding, he can hardly stand. He’s got blood on his hands, past his elbows, his nails are torn, two of them missing.

Makin told him to sleep and Jorg just made this terrible sound. I think it might have been laughing. He says he won’t sleep again. Ever. And I believe him.

Jorg keeps moving, fending off trees with his hands, colliding with whatever’s in his way. He says he’s been poisoned.

“I can’t clean them,” he said. And he showed me his hands. It looks as though he’s rubbed the skin off.

I asked him what was wrong and he said, “I’m cracked through and filled with poison.”

He scares his men and he scares me too. Of all of us I am the one his eyes avoid the most. His eyes are red with crying but he doesn’t cry now, just a kind of dry hacking sob.

My great aunt got a madness in her. Great Aunt Lucin. She must have been sixty, a small woman, plump, we all loved her. And one day she threw boiling water over her handmaid. She threw the water and then went wild, spouting nursery rhymes and biting herself. Father’s surgeon sent her to Thar. He said there was an alchemist there whose potions might cure her. And failing the potions, he had other methods. The surgeon said that this man, Luntar, could take out pieces of a person’s mind until what remained was healthy.

My great aunt Lucin came back in a carriage two months later. She smiled and sang and could talk about the weather. She wasn’t my great aunt Lucin any more but she seemed nice enough, and she didn’t scald any more maids.

I don’t want that for Jorg.

Jorg has told his men to kill me, and some of them seem ready to do it. Rike looks keen. But Sir Makin has said Jorg doesn’t know his mind and they are to leave me alone.

Jorg is saying he needs to kill Sareth too. He says it’s a kindness. He’s insistent. Kent and Makin had to wrestle him to the floor to stop him running back to the castle to do it. Now he’s lying in the dirt watching me. He keeps telling me what they do to men in his father’s dungeons. It can’t be true, any of it. It makes me sick to hear. I can taste vomit at the back of my throat.

Jorg soiled himself. Half the time he seems to see something other than the forest about us. He watches nothing, stares with great intent, then screams, or laughs without warning.

He’s been talking about our baby. I still call it ours. It feels better than saying it was Friar Glen who violated me. He’s been saying he killed it, even though it’s me that carries that sin, me that will burn for it. He says he killed the baby with his own hands. And now he’s crying. He still has tears then. He’s bawling, snot and forest dirt stuck to his face.

“I held him, Katherine, a soft baby. So small. Innocent. My hands remember his shape.”

I can’t hear him speak of this.

I have told Sir Makin about Luntar and how to reach Thar.

This is what Jorg said when they dragged him away and tied him to his horse:

“We’re not memories, Katherine, we’re dreams. All of us. Each part of us a dream, a nightmare of blood and vomit and boredom and fear. And when we wake up—we die.”

When they led his horse off, he shouted at me, but it seemed more lucid than what he said before.

“Sageous has poisoned us both, Katherine. With dreams. He puts his hands into our heads and pulls the strings that make us dance, and we dance. None of it was true. None of it.”

I walked across the fields to the Roma Road and followed it toward the Tall Castle until soldiers found me and escorted me back. I’ll say back. I won’t say home.

As I walked, Jorg’s words ran through my head, again and again, as if some of his madness had got inside me. I kept thinking of the dreams I’ve been having. It seems to me I’ve heard Sageous called the dream-witch before, but somehow that fact faded away, became unimportant. It wasn’t that I forgot it, but I stopped seeing it. Just as I stopped seeing that knife I took to stab Jorg with.

I’m seeing it now.

The heathen has been in my head. I know it. He’s been writing stories there, on the inside of my skull, on the backs of my eyes, like he’s written on his skin. I will need to think on this. To unravel it. Tonight I am going to dream myself a fortress and sleep within its walls. And woe betide anyone that comes looking for me there.

The soldiers brought me in through the Roma Gate into the Low City, across the Bridge of Change, the river running red with sunrise. I knew something awful had happened. All of Crath City held quiet as if some terrible secret were spreading through the alleys like poison in veins. Shutters—opened for the dawn—closed as we passed.

Up in the Tall Castle the dull tone of a bell rang out over and over. The iron bell on the roof tower. I’ve been up to see it, but it’s never rung. I knew it had to be that one though—no other bell could make such a harsh, flat toll. And in answer a single deep voice from Our Lady.

I asked the soldiers but they would say nothing, wouldn’t even guess. I didn’t recognize the men, only their colours, not castle guards but army units drafted in for the search.

“Has he killed his father?” I asked them. “Has he killed him?”

“We’ve been hunting for you all night, my lady. We’ve heard nothing from the castle.” The sergeant bowed his head and pulled off his helm. He was older than I had imagined, tired, swaying in his saddle. “Best let the news wait to tell itself.”

A cold certainty gripped me. Jorg had killed Sareth. Throttled her for taking his mother’s place at Olidan’s side. I knew they would take me to her body, cold and white, stretched out in the tomb vaults where the Ancraths lie. I bit my lips and said nothing, only let the horses walk away the distance that kept me from knowing.

We came through the Triple Gate, clattering, hooves on stone, grooms on hand to take the reins and help me dismount as if I were some old woman. The iron bell tolled all the while, a noise to make your head ache and jaws clench.

In the courtyard someone had lit a myrrh stick, a thick wand of it smoking
in a torch sconce by the windlass. If sorrow had a scent it would be this. We burn them in Scorron too, for the dead.

From the window arch high above the chapel balcony, between the pulses of the bell, I heard keening. A woman’s voice. My sister had never made such cries before, but still I knew her, and the fear that had sunk its teeth into me back at the Roma Gate now twisted cold in my gut. The sounds of hurt, as raw and open as any wound, could not be for Olidan.

I went to see my grandmother in her chambers. Uncle Robert had warned me that she wore her years less well than Grandfather.

“She’s not the woman she was,” he told me. “But she has her moments.”

I nodded and turned to go. He caught my shoulder. “Be gentle with my mother,” he said.

Even now they thought me a monster. Once I’d sought to build a legend, to set fear among those who might stand against me. Now I dragged those stories behind me into my mother’s home.

The maid showed me in and steered me to a comfortable chair opposite the one Grandmother occupied.

Of all of them, my grandmother had the most of Mother in her. Something in the lines of her cheekbones and the shape of her skull. She sat hunched with a blanket over her knees despite the heat of the day. She looked smaller than I remembered, and not just because I was no longer a child. It seemed she had closed on herself after her daughter’s death, as if to present a smaller target to a world grown hostile.

“I remember you as a little boy—the man before me I don’t know at all,” she said. Her eyes moved across me, seeking something familiar.

“When I see my reflection I feel the same thing myself, Grandmother.” And the box at my hip, in a velvet pocket now, felt too heavy to carry.
I don’t know me at all.

We sat in silence for a long minute.

“I tried to save her.” I would have said more but words wouldn’t come.

“I know, Jorg.”

The distance between us fell away then, and we spoke of years past, of times when we were both happier, and I had my window onto the world that I’d forgotten, and it was good.

And by and by when I sat beside her feet, knees drawn to my chest, hand clasping wrist before them, that old woman sang the songs my mother had played long ago, as she had played them in the music room of the Tall Castle on the black keys and the white. Grandmother put words to music I remembered but couldn’t hear, and we sat as the shadows lengthened and the sun fell from the sky.

Later, when comfortable silence had stretched into something that convinced me she had fallen asleep, I stood up to go. I reached the door without creak or scrape, but as my hand touched the handle Grandmother spoke behind me.

“Tell me about William.”

I turned and found her watching me with sharper eyes than before, as if a chance wind had stirred the curtains of age and showed her as she once was, strong and attentive, if only for a moment.

“He died.” It was all I could find to say.

“William was an exceptional child.” She pursed wizened lips and watched me, waiting.

“They killed him.”

“I met you both, you’re probably too young to recall.” She looked away to the hearth as if staring at the memory of flames. “William. There was something fierce in that one. You have a touch of it too, Jorg. Same mix of hard and clever. I held him and I knew that if he let himself love me or anyone else, he wouldn’t ever give it up. And if someone crossed him, that he would be…unforgiving. Maybe you were both bound to be a bit like that. Maybe that’s what happens when two people so strong, and yet so utterly different from each other, make children.”

“When they broke him…” The lightning had shown him to me in three quick flashes as they carried him. One frozen moment had him staring at the thorns, into the heart of the briar. Looking at me. No fear in him. The second and he was scooped up by his legs. The third, dashed against that milestone, scarlet shards of skull among blond curls. “My little emperor” Mother used to call him. The blond of that line in a court filled with Steward-dark Ancraths.

“Broke who, dear?”

“William,” I said, but the years had settled on her again and she saw me through too many days.

“You’re not him,” she said. “I knew a boy like you once, but you’re not him.”

“Yes, Grandmother.” I went and kissed her brow then and walked away. She smelled of Mother, the same perfume, and something in her scent stung my eyes so I could hardly find the door in the gloom.

They gave me a chamber in the east tower, overlooking the sea. The moon described each wave in glimmers and I sat listening to the sigh of the waters long into the night.

I thought again of the music my mother played, and that I remembered in images, and never heard. I saw her hands move across the keys as always, the shadow of her arms, the sway of her shoulders. And for the first time in all the years since we climbed into that carriage, the
faintest strain of those silent notes reached me. Fainter and more elusive than the sword-song, but more vital, more important.