King of Thorns

by Mark Lawrence

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON

  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.

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF KATHERINE AP SCORRON

  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.”

  I understood the bl
ood. “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!”

  Miana didn’t have to shout it at me. I could hear them through the windows, the deep resonances of the scorpions as they fired their spears, the screams, the crash of swords, the strum of bowstrings from the men on my walls, firing down into their own castle now. And the drums! The furious pounding of Uncle Renar’s battle-drums. A beat so loud and fierce that it picks up even the meekest of men and makes them part of the beast. They drum courage into you.

  Uncle should have played them that day I came a-calling.

  None of it mattered. Sageous’s poison dreams bubbled through me, but all their work only played variations around a nightmare of my own making. I killed my brother. After years defined only by the quest for revenge—years consumed by the need to reach William’s murderer—I took the life of my brother, a baby who could barely fill my hands.

  “Jorg!”

  I ignored her. I held my hands before my face, remembered the feel of him, remembered the realization that he was dead. Degran. My brother.

  Tutor Lundist showed me a drawing once. An old woman’s face. Look again, he said, it’s a young girl. And it was. Just a trick of the mind. Nothing had changed, not one line of the drawing, and yet everything was different. The box gave me Degran back and he had spoken to me across the years. Look again, he had said to me. Look at your life—now look again. And suddenly nothing mattered.

  She slapped me, the little bitch slapped me, and for a second that mattered. She’d put her whole body into it. But the anger died quicker than it came.

  Then a siege rock hit the window to our right. Fragments of stone flew across the room, smashing on the far wall. Dust rose around us.

  “I’m not going to die here,” Miana said.

  She had her hand in my hair. She turned my head to the window and its torn bars. Part of the wall below the window had fallen away and we could see the courtyard, where the peasants had gathered to cheer us that morning. A wedge of Arrow’s men, marked by their scarlet cloaks, had driven in through the ruins of the portcullis that Gorgoth had once held open for me. My soldiers, half of them goatherds with the swords I’d given them, hemmed the enemy in. I saw
the blue of Lord Jost’s small contingent and the gleam of their plate armour. The odds were against the intruders, but the weight of numbers behind drove them forward as they died. The Prince of Arrow poured his men into the killing field, my archers and troops reducing them but not stopping them. And under it all, pulsing through it, the throb of the battle drums.

  “Do something!” Miana shouted.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Everyone dies.” My past, my ghosts, danced around me, the dead, the betrayed. I considered diving through the shattered wall into the foe over the heads of my men. Could I make such a leap? With a run maybe. A short run, and a long drop into eternity.

  She slapped me again. “Give me the ruby.”

  I fished out the bag and put it in her hand. “You deserved a better husband.”

  Miana gave me a look of contempt. “I deserved a stronger one. There’s no victory without sacrifice. My mother taught me that. You have to raise the stakes and raise them again.”

  “She was a warrior?” I shook my head hard. Dreams showered from me. The dead held me with cold hands, tearing my insides.

  “A card player,” Miana said.

  Miana went to the fireplace and picked up one of the two fire screens, an exotic tapestry in an ebony frame. She beat it into splinters against the wall and repeated the process with the second one. Outside the wedge of scarlet developed into a semi-circle around the broken gates. Beyond the walls a blood-red sea would be surging forward.

  Miana picked the two heavy stone bases from the wreckage of the fire screens and placed the ruby between them. She tried to tear strips from the tapestries, and finding them too resistant she tore lengths from the hem of her wedding dress.

  Despite the emptiness pulsing inside me, a tickle of curiosity scratched at the back of my mind.