Mark Lawrence - King of Thorns

“I’m going to be shot?”

“You will live happy if you don’t break the arrow.” She picked up the flask and stared one eye into the other. She shivered. “Open your gates.” In her other hand the Wunjo rune stone, as if she hadn’t put it into the bag. Joy. She turned it over, blank side up. “Or don’t.”

“What about Ferrakind?” I asked. I wasn’t interested in arrows.

“Him!” She spat a dark mess into her furs. “Don’t go there. Even you should know that, Jorg, with your dark heart and empty head. Don’t go anywhere near that man. He burns.”

“How many stones do you have in that bag, old woman?” I asked. “Twenty? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-four,” she said, and laid her claw on the bag, still bleeding.

“That’s not so many words to tell the story of a man’s life,” I said.

“Men’s lives are simple things,” she said.

I felt her hands on me, even though one lay on the bag and the other held the flask. I felt them pinching, poking, reaching in to pick through my memories. “Don’t,” I said. I let the necromancy rise in me, acid at the back of my throat. The dead things above us twisted, a dry paw twitched, the black twist of a man’s entrails crackled as it flexed, snake-like.

“As you please.” Again that pink tongue flicking over her lips, and she stopped.

“Why did you come here, Ekatri?” I asked. I surprised myself by finding her name. People’s names escape me. Probably because I don’t care about them.

Her eye found mine, as if seeing me for the first time. “When I was young, young enough for you to want me, Jorg of Ancrath, oh yes; when I was young the runes were cast for me. Twenty-four words are not enough to tell all of a woman’s story, especially when one of them is wasted on a boy she would have to grow old waiting for. I called you here because I was told to long ago, even before your grandmothers quickened.”

She spat again, finding the floor-hides this time.

“I don’t like you, boy,” she said. “You’re too…prickly. You use that charm of yours like a blade, but charming doesn’t work on old witches. We see through to the core, and the core of you is rotten. If there’s anything decent left in there, then it’s buried deeper than I care to look and probably doomed. But I came because the runes were cast for me, and they said I should do the same for you.”

“Fine words from a hag that smells as though she died ten years back and just hasn’t had the decency to stop wittering,” I said. I didn’t like the way she looked at me, with either eye, and insulting her didn’t make me feel better. It made me feel fourteen. I tried to remember that I called myself a king and stopped my fingers wandering over the dagger at my hip. “So why would your runes send you to annoy me if there’s no chance for me then, old woman? If I’m a lost cause?”

She shrugged, a shifting of her rags. “There’s hope for everyone. A slim hope. A fool’s hope. Even a gut-shot man has a fool’s hope.”

I almost spat at that, but royal spit might actually have improved the place. Besides, witches can work all manner of mischief with a glob of your phlegm and a strand of your hair. Instead I stood and offered the smallest of bows. “Breakfast awaits me, if I can find my appetite again.”

“Play with fire and you’ll get burned,” she said, almost a whisper.

“You make a living out of platitudes?” I asked.

“Don’t stand before the arrow,” she said.

“Capital advice.” I backed toward the exit.

“The Prince of Arrow will take the throne,” she said through tight-pressed lips, as if it hurt to speak plainly. “The wise have known it since before your father’s father was born. Skilfar told me as much when she cast my runes.”

“I was never one for fortune-telling.” I reached the flap and pushed it aside.

“Why don’t you stay?” She patted the hides beside her, tongue flicking over dry lips. “You might enjoy it.” And for a heartbeat Katherine sat there in the sapphire satin of the dress she wore in her chamber that night. When I hit her.

I ran at that. I pelted through the rain chased by Ekatri’s laughter, my courage sprinting ahead of me. And my appetite did not return for breakfast.

While others ate I sat in the shadows by a cold hearth and rocked back upon my chair. Makin came across, his fist full of cold mutton on the bone, grey and greasy. “Find anything interesting?” he asked.

I didn’t answer but opened my hand. Thurisaz, the thorns. It’s no great feat to steal from a one-eyed woman. The stone ate the shadow and gave back nothing, the single rune slashed black across it. The thorns. My past and future resting on my palm.

Four years earlier

Makin works a kind of magic with people. If he spends even half an hour in their company they will like him. He doesn’t need to do anything in particular. There don’t appear to be any tricks involved and he doesn’t seem to try. Whatever he does is different each time but the result is the same. He’s a killer, a hard man, and in bad company he will do bad things, but in half of one hour you will want him to be your friend.

“Good morning, Duke Maladon,” I said as his axemen showed me into the great hall.

I squeezed the rain from my hair. Makin sat in a chair a step below the Duke’s dais. He’d just passed a flagon up to Maladon, and sipped small beer from his own as I approached. You could believe they had sat like this every morning for ten years.

“King Jorg,” the Duke said. To his credit he didn’t hesitate to call me king though I stood dripping in my road-rags.

The hall lay in shadow, despite the grey morning fingering its way through high windows and the lamps still burning on every other pillar. On his throne Alaric Maladon cut an impressive figure. He could have been drawn from the legends out of dawn-time.

“I hope Makin hasn’t been boring you with his tales. He is given to some outrageous lies,” I said.

“So you didn’t push your father’s Watch-master over a waterfall?” the Duke asked.

“I may-”

“Or behead a necromancer and eat his heart?”

Makin wiped foam from his moustache and watched one of the hounds gnaw a bone. All the Brothers seemed to be hard at work on facial hair. I think the Danes made them feel inadequate.

“Not everything he says is a lie. But watch him,” I said.

“So did Ekatri have warm words for you?” the Duke asked. No dancing around the issue with these northmen.

“Isn’t that supposed to be between me and her? Isn’t it bad luck to tell?”

Alaric shrugged. “How would we know if she was any use if nobody ever told what she said?”

“I think she passed on a hundred-year-old message telling me to lie down and let the Prince of Arrow have his way with my arse.”

Makin snorted into his beer at that and some of the northmen grinned, though it’s hard to tell behind a serious beard.

“I’ve heard something similar,” Alaric said. “A soothsayer from the fjords, ice in his veins and a way with the reading of warm entrails. Told me the old gods and the white Christ all agreed. The time for a new emperor has come and he will spring from the seed of the old. The whisper among the Hundred is that these signs point to Arrow.”

“The Prince of Arrow can kiss my axe,” Sindri said. I’d not seen him in the shadows behind his father’s guards.

“You’ve not met him, son,” Alaric said. “I’m told he makes an impression.”

“So how will your doors stand, Duke of Maladon, if the Prince comes north?” I asked.

The Duke grinned. “I like you, boy.”

I let the “boy” slide.

“I’ve always thought that the blood of empire pooled in the north,” Alaric said. “I always thought that a Dane-man should take the empire throne, by axe and fire, and that I might be the man to do it.” He took a long draft from his flagon and raised a bushy brow at me. “How would your gates stand if the Prince came calling one fine morning?”