King of Thorns (51 page)

And I set Degran back down among his covers. The nurse has put a woolly sheep there with stubby legs and button eyes. Sleep brother, sleep well.

He rolls limp from my hands, white where my fingers have touched
him. I don’t understand. Ice forms across me, a sick hollowness fills me until I am nothing but a brittle shell. I prod him.

“Wake up.”

I shake the covers under him. Shake the cot. “WAKE UP.”

He flops, limp, with the white prints of my hands on his soft flesh like accusations.

“Wake up!” I scream it but not even the nurse wakes.

Sageous is there, in the corner of the room, all aglow. “Necromancy, Jorg. How many edges does that sword have?”

“I didn’t kill him. He was mine to kill and I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did.” Sageous’s voice is calm where mine is shrill.

“I didn’t want this!” I shout.

“The necromancy listens to your heart, Jorg. It listens to what you can’t say. Does what the secret core of you wants and needs. It isn’t fooled by posturing. You have the death of small things in your fingers. A small thing died.”

“Take it back.” I’m begging. “Bring him back.”

“Me?” Sageous asks. “I’m not even here, Jorg. I can’t do much more than keep that fat slattern asleep. Besides, I wanted you to do it. Why do you think I brought you here in the first place?”

“Brought me?” I can’t look at him, or Degran. Or even the shadows, in case Mother and William are watching me from the corner.

“With dreams of Katherine, to bring you to the castle, and dreams of William to lure you inside. Really, Jorg, I thought a clever child like you would have understood how I work by now. It’s not the killing dreams that are my best weapons—the most subtle tools have the most profound effect. A nudge here, a nudge there.”

“No.” As if shaking my head will make it a lie.

“I bleed for you, Jorg,” he says, all compassion and mild eyes. “I love you, but you have to be broken, it’s the only way. You should have died, and now only breaking you will restore equilibrium, only that will allow matters to take their course as they should.”

“Matters?”

“The Prince of Arrow will unite us. The empire will prosper. Thousands upon thousands that would have died will live. Science will return to us in the peace. And I will guide the emperor’s hand so that all might be well. Isn’t that worth more than you, Jorg? Isn’t that worth the life of a single baby?”

I scream and hurl myself at him, as if anger might wash away grief, but what I’ve done has put a crack right through me and into that crack Sageous pours madness, a torrent of it. I stagger blind and howling.

I see nothing more. Nothing until this moment finds me staring into an empty and lidless box.

So much madness and regret poured into me that it left no room for memory, nothing for the box. What instincts, luck, or guidance led me from the castle without discovery, or how many more corpses I left in my wake, I can’t say.

“Jorg?”

I turned and looked at Miana. My cheeks wet with tears. Sageous’s magics crawled under my skin, but it wasn’t his spells that emptied me.
I killed my brother.

His ghost lay on the bed, stretched behind Miana. Not the soft babe, but the little boy of four he would have been. For the first time ever he smiled at me, as if we were friends, as if he were pleased to see me. He faded as I watched and I knew he wouldn’t return, wouldn’t grow, wouldn’t heal.

Someone hammered on the door. “Sire, the gate has given!”

I backed against the wall and slid to the floor. “I killed him.”

“Jorg?” Miana looked concerned. “The enemy are within our gates.”

“I killed my brother, Miana,” I said. “Let them come.”

F
ROM THE
J
OURNAL OF
K
ATHERINE
A
P
S
CORRON

March 28th, Year 99 Interregnum

Tall Castle. Chapel.

Degran is dead. My sister’s boy is dead. I can’t write of it.

March 29th, Year 99 Interregnum

Jorg did this. He left a trail of corpses to and from Degran’s door.

I will see him die for it.

There is such anger in me. I cannot unlock my teeth. If Friar Glen were not dead. If Sageous were not absent. Neither of them would live to see the morning.

March 31st, Year 99 Interregnum

We put him in the ground today. In the tomb where Olidan’s family lie. A small white marble casket for him. Little Degran. It looks too small for any child to fit in. It makes me cry to think of him in there, alone. Maery Coddin sang the Last Song for him, my nephew. She has a high, pure voice that echoed in the tomb and it made me cry. My sister’s ladies placed white flowers on the tomb, Celadine lilies, one each, weeping.

Father Eldar had to come up from Our Lady in Crath City to say the words, for we have no holy men in the castle. Jorg has stolen or killed them all.
And when Father Eldar was done, when he’d read the passages, spoken of the Valley of Death and Fearing No Evil, we all walked away. Sareth didn’t walk. Sir Reilly had to carry her, screaming. I understood. If it were my baby, I couldn’t leave them. Dear God, I can just poison them from my belly, let them fall in blood and slime, but if I had held my child, seen his eyes, touched his lips…it would take more than Sir Reilly to drag me from him.

April 2nd, Year 99 Interregnum

I’ve gone back through this journal and followed the track of my dreams through its pages. At least the ones I wrote about, but I seem to have written about a lot of them, as if they were troubling me. I’ve no memory of them. Maybe they left me while I scratched them down.

I don’t want to turn the page back either. It feels as if another’s hand is on mine, holding it down. But I won’t be kept back.

I can see now—how the heathen played me, steered me like a horse with light flicks of a whip, just a turn here and there to set the path across a whole map. I don’t believe this magic is beyond me. I can’t accept that a thing like Sageous should be allowed such power and that I should not.

I can’t rule a kingdom like Jorg or Orrin. No soldiers will follow my orders and fight and die on foreign soils at my say so. These things are forbidden me. Because of my sex. Because I can’t grow a beard. Because my arm is not so strong. But generals do not need a strong arm. Kings don’t need a beard.

I may never rule or command, but I can build a kingdom in my mind. And armies. And if I study what the heathen did to me. If I take it apart piece by piece. I can make my own weapons.

April 8th, Year 99 Interregnum

Orrin of Arrow called upon my brother-in-law today. I said that I would marry him. Though first he had to promise to take me far from this castle,
from this place that stinks of the murderer Jorg Ancrath, and never to bring me back.

Orrin says he will be emperor and I believe him. Jorg of Ancrath will try to stop him, and on that day I’ll see him pay for his crime. Until that time I will work on unpicking the heathen’s methods and learning them for myself. It’s fear that keeps such power from the common man, nothing more. I don’t believe that creature Sageous capable of something I’m not, I won’t believe it. Fear keeps us weak, fear of what we don’t know, and fear of what we do know. We know what the church will do to witches. The Pope in Roma and all her priests can go hang though. I’ve seen what happens to holy men in such times. Here’s a power a woman can gather into her hands as well as any man, and the time will come when Jorg will find out how it feels to shatter with his dreams.

F
ROM THE
J
OURNAL OF
K
ATHERINE
A
P
S
CORRON

June 1st, Year 99 Interregnum

Arrow. Castle Yotrin.

We are married. I am happy.

July 23rd, Year 99 Interregnum

Arrow. New Forest.

We’ve ridden out from Castle Yotrin to the New Forest. They call it that because some great great grandsire of Orrin’s had it planted just after pushing the Brettans back into the sea. It’s my first real chance to see Arrow though mostly we’re going to be seeing trees. Egan practically demanded Orrin go hunting with him and Orrin wanted me to come. I don’t think Egan did. Egan said Orrin had promised a private hunt, no courtiers, no fuss. Orrin said the richer he got the fewer luxuries like that he could afford but promised to keep the hunting party small.

Arrow is a lovely country. It might lack Scorron’s mountains and grandeur but the woodland is gorgeous, oak and elm, beech and birch, where Scorron has pines, pines, and more pine. And the woods are so light and airy with room to ride between the trees, not the dense dark valley-forests of home.

We’ve made camp in a clearing, the servants are setting up pavilions and cooking fires. Orrin invited Lord Jackart and Sir Talbar along, and Lady Jarkart too, and her daughter Jesseth. I think Lady Jarkart is supposed to keep me happy while
the men kill things in the woods. She’s kind but rather dull and she seems to think she needs to shout in order for me to understand her accent. I have no problem hearing her, I only wish she would just pause for breath and let one word finish before starting the next. Little Jesseth is a darling girl, seven years, always sprinting into the undergrowth and having to be retrieved by Gennin, the Jarkarts’ man.

I’d like girls, two of them, blonde like Orrin.

Orrin came back with Egan riding double behind him, Jackart and Talbar flanking. I stood to ask after the deer but thought better of it, all of them grim-faced save Egan who looked ready for murder. Little Jesseth didn’t know any better though and ran in shouting to her father, did he bring her a doe or a buck? Lord Jackart practically fell out his saddle and scooped her up before Egan jumped down. The way Egan stared after the man I thought Jackart might burst into flame. And then I saw the blood, dark and sticky on Egan’s hands, like black gloves, and drying splatters up his forearms.

“I’ll cut some wood.” That’s all Egan said and he stalked off shouting for an axe.

Lord Jackart carried his daughter to their pavilion, Lady Jackart hurrying on behind. Dull she might be but sharp enough to know when to lie low.

“Egan ran Xanthos into a stand of hook-briar,” Orrin told me. He spread his hands. “I didn’t see it either.”

“But you told him to go slow—said to watch for it.” Sir Talbar rubbed at his whiskers and shook his head.

“It’s not in Egan to give up the chase, Talbar. That stag must have been an eighteen pointer.” Orrin has a way of showing a man’s weakness as strength. Perhaps it’s the goodness in him. In any case it makes men follow him, love him. He may work the same magic on me too—I don’t know.

“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.”