Published at 29th of December 2023 9:49 am

Chapter 45: Wedding day

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The crash of a rock against the keep wall drowned me out. A shield fell off its hook and clattered to the floor, dust sifted down from above.

“The gate will not hold,” I said again.

“Then we will fight them in the courtyard,” Sir Hebbron said.

I chose not to mention that he had surrendered to me in the same courtyard four years earlier, with just Gog and Gorgoth at my back rather than the Prince of Arrow’s fourteen thousand men.

If Coddin were present he would have spoken of surrender himself. Not out of fear but compassion. Perhaps he might say that when we fell back to the keep he would call out for terms, so that the common folk sheltering at the Haunt might be spared.

But Coddin wasn’t present.

The dead child watched me from a shadowed corner, older and more sad with each passing year. At the corner of my vision he seemed to speak, but if I looked his way he said nothing, blue lips pressed tight. What man can hope for victory when his doom watches from every shadow? He was nothing but mine, this ghost, no trick of Chella’s, no sending of the Dead King, just a sad and silent reminder of a crime even Luntar’s little box couldn’t keep entirely secret.

Another crash and I looked away from the corner, shaking off the moment.

The knights and captains watched me, the light from high windows gleaming on their armour. These men were built for war. I considered how many of them I would sacrifice to stop the Prince of Arrow. How many I would sacrifice just to wound Arrow, just to put a bigger hole in his army.

The answer turned out to be all of them.

“When they come we will fight them in the courtyard. And through the doors of the keep, and up each stair, and to this very room if need be.” My cheek throbbed where I’d sliced it, aching at each word. I ran my fingers across the line of black and clotted blood.

“Sir Makin, Sir Kent, I want you leading the defence at the gate. I want everyone in this room out there.”

They started for the door. Kent stopped.

“Sir Kent?” he said.

“Don’t let it go to your head,” I said. “And don’t expect a ceremony.”

Kent made a slow shake of his head. I could see his eyes shine. I hadn’t thought it would mean much to him.

“Take the scorpions from the walls and set them in the yard. Put them front and centre. You’ll get one shot and then they’ll just be a barricade,” I said. “And, Makin, get some armour on.”

The Haunt had five scorpions, giant crossbows on wheels that could send a spear four hundred yards. Line enough men in front of them and you might get something like the chunks of meat on skewers served at table in Castle Morrow.

“Not you, Miana. Stay,” I said as she made to follow the knights. “And Lord Jost!” I added. “I am depending on your help. Everything is in place.”

Lord Jost set his conical helm on his head and flicked the chainmail veil out over the back of his neck. He looked from me to Miana. “Our alliance requires that the union be sealed, King Jorg.”

I threw my hands up. “Christ bleeding! You saw us married. It’s the middle of the day and we’re fighting a pitched battle.”

“Even so.” No room for negotiation on that pinched face. He turned to follow Sir Makin. “Your grandfather knows the blood of both your parents runs in you, sire. I cannot act until the alliance is complete.”

And that left me on my throne in an echoingly empty room with Miana in her wedding whites and two guards at the door watching their feet.

“Crap.” I jumped up and took her hand. Leading her to the door. It felt like taking a child for a walk.

I brushed past the guards and hurried to the east tower staircase. Miana had to hitch her skirts and half run to keep up as I took the steps two and three at a time.

A hefty kick sent my chamber doors slamming open. “Out!” I shouted and several maids ran past me, clutching cloths and brushes. I think they had been hiding rather than cleaning.

“Lord Jost requires that I remove your virginity from you,” I said to Miana. “Or the House Morrow can’t support me.” I hadn’t meant to be quite so blunt but I felt angry, awkward even.

Miana bit her lip. She looked frightened but determined. She reached for the dress ties at her side.

“Stop,” I said. I’ve never liked being pushed. Not in any direction. Miana looked well enough, and twelve isn’t so young. I was killing at twelve. But some women bloom early and some late. She may have had the mind of a she-pirate but she looked like a child.

“You don’t want me?” She faltered. Now she added hurt and angry to frightened and determined.

I’ve observed on the road that it’s old men who like young girls. Brother Row and Brother Liar would chase the young ones. Younger than Miana. Brother Sim and I had always admired experience. The fuller form. So, no, I didn’t want her. And being told to have something you don’t want, rather like being told to eat spiced squid when what you want is beef and potatoes, will kill your appetite. Any kind of appetite.

“I don’t want you right now,” I said. It sounded more politic than calling her spiced squid.

I put my hand to the back of my left thigh. It was throbbing like a bastard after the run up the stairs. I’d opened a wound I didn’t remember taking. I think perhaps I did it falling into the cave just before the avalanche. Six thousand men dead for a morning’s work, and I come away with a self-inflicted wound in the arse. My fingers came back bloody.

Four quick steps took me to the bed. I threw back the covers. Miana flinched like I’d hit her. I wiped my hand over the clean linen; squeezed my leg wound again and repeated the process.

“There,” I said. “Does that look like enough?”

Miana stared. “I never—”

“It will have to do. It looks like enough to me. Damned if I’m bleeding more than that.”

I ripped the sheet from the bed and thrust it out through the window bars, noting two spent arrows on the floor that must have looped in from the ridge earlier in the day. I tied the sheet to one of the bars and let the wind flutter it out so all the world could see I’d made a woman of Miana.

“Speak a word of this to anyone and Lord Jost will insist we do it on the high table in the feast hall with everyone watching,” I said.

She nodded.

“Where are you going?” she asked as I made for the door.

“Down.”

“Fine,” she said. She sat on the bed with a slight bounce. Her feet didn’t touch the floor.

I set my hand to the doorhandle.

“But they’ll sing songs about Quick Jorg for years to come. Fast with one sword, faster with the other,” she said.

I took my hand off the doorhandle, turned, and walked back to the bed. Defeated.

“What would you like to talk about?” I asked, sitting beside her.

“I’ve met Orrin of Arrow and his brother Egan too,” she said.

“So have I.” Remembering how that swordfight ended still gave me a headache. “And where did you meet them?”

“They came to court in my father’s castle in Wennith, on one of their grand tours of the empire. Orrin had his new wife with him.” She watched me for a reaction. Someone had been talking to her.

“Katherine.” I reacted anyway. It wasn’t as if being married to a child would end my fascination with women, this one in particular. “And what did you think of the Prince?” I wanted to ask about Katherine, not Orrin and his brother, but I bit down on the urge, not to save Miana’s feelings but in disgust at the weakness even mention of Katherine put in me.

“Orrin of Arrow struck me as the finest man I’d ever met,” Miana said. Clearly she had no compunction to save my feelings either! “His brother Egan, too full of himself, I felt. Father said as much. The wrong mix of weak and dangerous. Orrin though, I thought he would make a fine emperor and unite the Hundred in peace. Didn’t you ever consider just swearing to him when the time came?”

I met her gaze, shrewd dark eyes that had no place in a child’s face. The truth was that I’d thought many times what I would do if Orrin of Arrow came back to the Haunt, regardless of whether he brought an army with him or not. I didn’t doubt not one person would find me better suited to the emperor’s throne than Orrin, and yet without my say so thousands had been prepared to bleed to stop him. To get somewhere in life you have to walk over bodies, and I’d paved my way with corpses and more corpses. Gelleth burned for my ambition. It still does.

“I considered it.”

Miana started, surprised when I spoke. She had thought I wasn’t going to answer.

“There might have been a time I could have served as steward to Orrin’s emperor, might have let my goatherds and his farmers go about their lives in peace. But things change, events carry us with them, even when you think you’re the one leading, calling out commands. Brothers die. Choices are taken away from us.”

“Katherine is very beautiful,” Miana said, lowering her gaze for once.

Screams from outside, the hiss of arrows, a distant roar. “Have we been at this long enough?” I hadn’t asked about Katherine and I had a battle to fight. I made to stand from the bed but Miana put her hand to my thigh, half-nervous, half-bold.

She reached for her dress again, and I thought that there might have been more determination than fear in her, but she wasn’t unlacing. She pulled out a black velvet bag, dangling from its drawstring. Big enough to hold an eyeball.

“My dowry,” she said.

“I hoped for something bigger.” I smiled and took it.

“Isn’t that my line?”

I laughed out loud at that. “Somebody poured an evil old woman into a little girl’s body and sent it to me with the world’s smallest dowry.”

I tipped the bag’s contents into my hand. A single ruby, the size of an eye, cut by an expert, and with a red star burning at its heart. “Nice,” I said. It felt hot in my hand. It made my face burn where the fire had scarred me.

“It’s a work of magic,” Miana said. “A fire-mage has stored the heat of a thousand hearths in there. It can light torches, boil water, heat a bath, make light. It can even make a spot of heat sufficient to join two pieces of iron. I can show you—”

She reached for the gem but I closed my hand around it. “Now I know why fire-sworn like rubies,” I said.

“Be gentle,” Miana said. “It would be…unwise to break it.”

In the moment that my fingers met around the gem a pulse of heat ran through me, like a shock, burning up my arm. For an instant I saw nothing but the inferno and it seemed I felt Gog’s sharp hands on my sides, as if he sat behind me on Brath once more as he had for so many days in that spring long ago. I heard his high voice, almost, like Mother’s music, trying to reach me from too far away. Something lit at my core, and the flow of fire reversed, raging unseen down my arm into the gem. A sharp splintering noise sounded from the ruby and I released it with a cry. Miana caught it: quick hands this one. I expected her to scream and drop the gem, but it lay cool in her palm. She placed it on the bed.

I stood. “It’s a worthy dowry, Miana. You will be a good queen for the Highlands.”

“And for you?” she said.

I walked to the window. The ridge where the Prince’s archers had arrayed themselves was still in confusion. The trolls would have retreated to their cave defences, but no man wants to be lining up a shot whilst worrying that a black hand is going to twist his head off any second.

“And for you?” she repeated.

“That’s hard to say.” I took the copper box from my hip pouch. I had sat before this window the previous night and watched the box. A goblet, the box, a knife. Drink to forget, open to remember, or slice to end. “It’s hard to answer you if I don’t know who I am.”

I held the box before my eyes. “Secrets. I filled you with secrets, and there’s one last secret left, blacker than the rest.” Some truths should perhaps be left unsaid. Some doors unopened. An angel once told me to let go of the ills I held too close, to let go of the flaws that shaped me. What remained of me might have been forgiven, might have followed her into heaven. I told her no.

The rockslide, avalanche, the trolls, none of them mattered. Arrow’s army would still crush us. To fight so hard and not even come close to victory. That had a bitter taste.

I’d faced death before with odds as slim but never as a broken man, some piece of me locked away in a little box. Luntar in his burning desert had done what the angel couldn’t. He’d taken me from me, and left a compromise to walk about in Jorg Ancrath’s shoes.

Do not open that box.

The dead boy watched me from the corner of the room as if he had always stood there, waiting silent day after silent day for this moment, to meet my eyes. He stood pale but without wounds, unmarked save for handprints fish-belly white on his skin, like the scars Chella’s dead things left on Gog’s little brother long ago.

Open it and my work is undone.

I turned the box, letting the thorn pattern catch the light. Damn Luntar and damn the dead child too. When I faced Arrow’s legions for the last time I would do it whole.

Open it and you’re finished.

My hands didn’t shake on the metal. For that I was grateful. I opened it wide, and with a quick motion twisted the lid off, flicking it out past the crimson flutter of the sheet.

Never open the box.

Friar Glen’s chamber once again, lit by the heathen’s glow. The need to kill him fills my hands immediately.

“There was blood and muck,” Sageous says. He smiles. “Saraem Wic’s poisons will do that. But there was no child. I doubt there ever will be now. That old witch’s poisons are not gentle. They scrape a womb bare.”

I find the blade and I’m moving toward him. I try to run but it’s like wading through deep snow.

“Silly boy. You think I’m really here?” He makes no move to escape.

I try to reach him, but I’m floundering.

“I’m not even in this city,” he says.

Peace enfolds me. A honeyed dream of sunlight, fields of corn, children playing.

I wade through it, though each step feels like betrayal, like the murder of friends.

“You think I’m like you, Jorg.” He shakes his head and shadows run. “Thirst for revenge has dragged you across kingdoms, and you think me driven by your crude imperatives. I’m not here to punish you. I don’t hate you. I love all men equally. But you have to be broken. You should have died with your mother.” Sageous’s fingers stray to the lettering on his throat. “It was written.”

And as I reach him he is gone.

I stumble into the corridor. Empty. I close the door, using my metal strip to drop the latch. Friar Glen will have to pray for help. I don’t have time for him now and even through the layers of Sageous’s lies and dreams I hold the suspicion that he is guilty of something.

Katherine didn’t bring me to the Tall Castle, and certainly neither did Friar Glen. I didn’t turn right where the road forked from the Ken Marshes just to visit my dog’s grave. I came to see family. And now I need to be quick about it. Who knows what dreams Sageous might send this way?

Sim taught me about moving quietly. It’s not so much about noise. The art is to be always on the move, heading somewhere with purpose. Any hesitation invites a challenge. On the flip side, if there can be no possible reason for your presence, then utter stillness can hide you, even in plain sight. The eye may see you but if you are stone, the mind may discount you.

“You there. Hold fast.”

Eventually all tricks will fail and someone will challenge you. Even at this point they will find it hard to believe you’re an intruder. The minds of guards are especially dull, blunted by a career of tedium.

“Your pardon?” I cup a hand to my ear.

If you are challenged, pretend not to hear. Move closer, lean in. Be quick as you set your hand over their mouth, palm flat to lips so there’s no edge to bite. Press them back against a wall if there is one. Stab in the heart. Don’t miss. Hold their eyes with yours. It gives them something to think about besides making a noise, and nobody wants to die alone in any case. Let the wall help them to the ground. Leave them in shadow.

I leave the dead man behind me. A second dies at the end of the next hall.

“You!” This one rounds a corner with sword in hand. Almost knocking me down.

Sharp hands. That’s what Grumlow said to me. Sharp hands. It’s his tutorial in knife-work. A sword’s all about the swinging, the thrust, the momentum, timing your move against that of your foe—a man with a knife is a man with sharp hands, nothing more. A knife-fight is a scary thing. That’s why men jab and feint, posture, run. Grumlow says the only thing to do is go in fast, go in first, kill him quick.

I go in fast. His sword falls on the long rug and doesn’t clatter.

Around the corner is the door I’m seeking. Locked. I take the key from the guard’s belt. The door opens on oiled hinges. Silent. The hinges never squeak on a nursery door. Babies fight sleep hard enough as it is.

The wet-nurse is snoring in a bed by the window. A lantern glows on the sill, its wick trimmed low. The shadows of the cot bars reach for me.

I should kill the nurse, but it looks like Old Mary who chased after Will and me in the long ago. I should kill her, but I let her sleep. She would be ill-advised to wake.

I drag the guard into the room and close the door. For a long moment I pause, picturing my escape routes. There is a second exit from the room, leading to the nurses’ quarters. As long as I have two ways to run I feel safe enough. There are passages that lead from the castle. Secret tunnels that lead to hidden doors in the High City. I couldn’t open those doors from the outside, but I can leave by them.

I take a deep slow breath. White musk—his mother’s scent. Another. I step to the cot and look upon my brother. Degran they call him. He’s so small. I hadn’t thought he would be so tiny. I reach in and lift him, sleeping. He barely fills my hands. He gives a gentle sigh.

The assassin’s work is dirty work.

I vowed to take the empire throne, to take the hardest path, to win the Hundred War whatever the cost. And here in two hands I hold a key to the Gilden Gate. The son of the woman who replaced my mother. The son my father set me aside for. The son on whom he has settled my inheritance.

“I came to kill you, Degran.” I whisper it.

He is soft and warm, his head big, his hands tiny, his hair so very fine. My brother.

The lamp glow catches the white scars along my arms as I hold him up. I feel the briar’s hooks in me.

I should twist his neck and be gone. In the game of empire this is not a rare move, not even unusual. Fratricide. So common there is a word for it. Oft times carried out in person.

So why do my hands shake so?

Do it and be done.

You are weak, Jorg. Even my father tells me to do it. Weak.

I feel the hooks so deep, finding the bone as I struggled to save William. The blood runs down me. I can feel it. Streaming down my cheeks, blinding me. The thorns hold me.

DO IT.

No.

I will burn the world if it defies me, carry ruin to every corner, but I will not kill my brother. Not again. I came here to make that choice. To show that I could have chosen to. To weigh the decision in my hands.

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.”

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 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.

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