Mark Lawrence - King of Thorns

“You woke a fire of an old kind that hasn’t burned for a thousand years,” Ferrakind said.

“Ah, yes,” I said. “That.”

“You brought the sun to earth,” Ferrakind’s crackle softened as if awed by the memory of the Builders’ weapon. Shadows ran across him.

Gog reached us, the heat gone from him leaving new markings, bright flames caught in orange across his back, chest, arms.

“So can you change him? Can you take the fire out of him, or enough so he can live with it?” I asked. It still hurt to breathe and the steam from the meltwater made it hard to see. Somewhere above and behind us the heat from Gog and Ferrakind was meeting the ancient ice at Halradra’s core.

Ferrakind’s fire guttered and spurted, flowing over the cavern floor. I realized he was laughing.

“The Builders tried to break the barriers between thought and matter,” he said. “They made it easier to change the world with a desire. They thinned the walls between life and death, between fire and not-fire, whittled away at the difference between this and that, even here and there.”

It occurred to me that Ferrakind’s sanity had been one of the first things to be consumed in his own personal inferno. “Can you help the boy?” I asked, coughing.

“It’s written in him. His thoughts touch fire. Fire touches his mind. He is fire-sworn. We can’t change how we’re written.” Ferrakind stepped toward us, flames rising around him like wings readying for flight. “Give me the boy and you may leave.”

“I’ve come too far for ‘no,’” I said.

Fire isn’t patient. Fire does not negotiate. I should have known these things.

Ferrakind reached toward us and a column of white flame erupted from his hands. I had considered myself quick, but Gog moved quicker than I could think and caught the conflagration in his arms, his body shading from orange toward white-heat, but none of it reaching Gorgoth or me.

“Behind us!” I shouted. “Send it back.”

And Gog obeyed. The tunnel behind us filled with Ferrakind’s white fire as Gog caught it on one hand and threw it away from the other. I could see nothing of the fire-mage, just the white inferno boiling off him, and nothing of the tunnel, just a fierce tornado of white fire swirling away through it, up. We stood in a cocoon with furnace heat on every side and one small boy keeping our flesh from charring to the bone.

For an age we saw nothing but blinding heat, heard nothing but the roar of fire. And each moment that I thought it could last no longer, the fury built. Gog blazed, first the bright orange of iron ready for the hammer, then the white of the furnace fire, then a pure white like starshine. I could see the shadows of his bones, clearer by the heartbeat, as if fire were burning though him, taking substance from muscle, skin, and fat. Leaving him brittle and ashen.

And in an instant the fire and fury fell away revealing Ferrakind, white-hot and molten, with Gog crouched, pale as silvery ash, unmoving.

A torrent of meltwater rushed around us now, hip deep, white, and roaring, pouring into the main chamber through a tunnel mouth that lay dry and gritty when we first scrambled through it to escape the fire. The waters divided around Gog and again around Ferrakind as if unable to touch the essence of fire. Gorgoth and I kept close to Gog and the water hardly reached us.

Ferrakind laughed again, new pulses of flame rising from him. “You thought to quench me, Jorg of Ancrath?”

I shrugged. “It’s the traditional way. Fighting fire with fire doesn’t seem to have worked.” Already the flow around us had started to slacken.

“It would take an ocean!” Ferrakind said. He gathered fire into his hands and let it blaze white. “The child is done. Time to die, Jorg of Ancrath.”

If it were time then so be it. I had a faint hope, but it had only ever been that. At least it wouldn’t be a slow fire. I drew my sword. I always thought I would have a blade in hand when the time came.

I heard a roar, but not the roar of flame, somehow deeper and more distant.

It would take an ocean.

“How about a lake?” I asked and sighted along my sword at the burning mage.

“A lake?” Ferrakind paused.

The waters hit then, a black wall rushing down on the heels of the trickle around our feet. I dived at Gog, carrying him with me into the cathedral cavern, rolling to the side of the tunnel mouth. He broke as though he were made of glass. He shattered like a toy, into a thousand sharp and brilliant pieces. I felt the sudden flash of heat. Needles of fire pierced my cheek where I hit him, my jaw, my temple. I lay amongst the scintillating shards, Gog’s remains, paralysed by a whole world of pain, curled on the gritty cavern floor with a flood of biblical proportions blasting its way out of the tunnel just yards behind me.

In Halradra’s crater a thousand times a thousand tons of ice have lain for hundreds of years. But before that, in the distant long ago, waters flowed. How else would these tunnels be smooth, be strewn with grit and ancient mud, be scoured and potholed like the stone where rivers flow? With glacial slowness the ice has crept where underground streams carved hidden cathedrals and long galleries, and Halradra has slept, ice-choked and silent.

I couldn’t expect any fire to melt enough ice to drown a fire-mage, least of all for the fire-mage’s own fire to do the melting whilst he stood there patiently awaiting his own deluge. But I had a hope, a faint hope, that his fire and Gog’s together, might at least melt a passage through the ice, a passage where the tunnels led and where heat rises…a passage up.

In spring and summer Halradra’s crater is a remarkable blue. The blue of a yard of meltwater lying on top of fathoms of ice. A twenty-acre lake, just a yard deep, sitting on all that ice.

When a hole wide enough to swallow a wagon is melted through that ice you discover that a yard times twenty acres is a lot.

The icy water hit Ferrakind in a thick column faster than the swiftest of horses, and swept him away without pause.

With the mage gone and the sparkles dying from Gog’s fragments, darkness returned. I knew only pain and the roar of the waters. The knowledge that I would drown rather than burn held no interest. I only wanted it to be quick.

Somehow, in the darkness and the deluge, hands found me. Troll-stink mixed with the stench of my roasted flesh and I moved in their grasp. I cursed them, thinking only that the agony would last longer this way. I considered for a moment if they were still wondering whether I tasted good. Perhaps they liked their food part-cooked. I bit one at some point and I can say that trolls taste worse than they smell. I remember no more of it. I think they banged my head on a wall as they scrambled to escape the flood.

From The Journal Of Katherine Aps Corron

December 16th, Year 98 Interregnum

Ancrath. The Tall Castle. My bedchamber. Maery Coddin sewing in the corner chair. Rain rattling on the shutters.

“Madam, you send the winter running. We bask in the warmth of your smile.”

That’s what the Prince of Arrow said when I came down the stairway into the East Hall. “Madam,” not “Princess,” because that’s how they have it in the land of Arrow. Madam. Pompous maybe, but it made me smile, for I’d been serious before, thinking of Sageous and the writing on his face. And even though a dead poet probably wrote Orrin’s lines, it felt as though Orrin meant them and had spoken them just for me.

“Katherine, you look good.”

Egan said that, while his brother bowed. Night and day those two. Or maybe morning and twilight. Orrin as blond as a jarl and handsome as the princes painted in those books to delight little princesses before they learn that it isn’t kissing that turns frogs into princes, just the ownership of a castle and some acres. Egan with his hair short and blacker than soot, his skin still holding a stain from the summer sun, and his face that would be brutal, that would fit on a butcher or executioner, but for the fire behind it, the energy that sets the short hairs on your arms and neck on end.