39.

"He's not dead yet?" A woman's voice, Teuton accent with a creak of age in it.

"No." A younger woman, familiar, also Teuton.

"It's not natural to linger so long," the older woman said. "And so white. He looks dead to me."

"There was a lot of blood. I didn't know men had so much blood in them."

Katherine! Her face came to me in my darkness. Green eyes, and the sculpted angles of her cheekbones.

"White and cold," she said, her fingers on my wrist. "But there's mist on the mirror when I hold it to his lips."

"Put a pillow over his face and be done with it, I say." I imagined my hands around the crone's neck. That brought a hint of warmth.

"I did want to see him die," Katherine said. "After what he did to Galen. I would have watched him die on the steps of the throne, with all that blood running down, one step after the next, and been glad."

"The King should have slit his throat. Finished the job there and then." The old woman again. She had a servant's tone about her. Voicing her opinion in the security of a private place, opinions held back too long and grown bitter in the silence.

"It's a cruel man who will take a knife to his only son, Hanna."

"Not his only son. Sareth carries your nephew. The child will be born to his due inheritance now."

"Will they keep him here, do you think?" Katherine said. "Will they lay him in his mother's casket, beside his brother?"

"Lay the whelps with the b.i.t.c.h and seal the room, I say."

"Hanna!" I heard Katherine move away from me.

They'd taken me to my mother's tomb, a small chamber in the vaults. The last time I'd visited the dust had lain thick, unmarked by footprints.

"She was a queen, Hanna," Katherine said. I heard her brush at something. "You can see the strength in her."

Mother's likeness had been carved into her coffer's marble lid, as if she lay there at rest, her hands together in devotion.

"Sareth is prettier," Hanna said.

Katherine returned to my side. "Strength makes a queen." I felt her fingers on my forehead.

Four years ago. Four years ago I'd touched that marble cheek, and vowed never to return. That was my last tear. I wondered if Katherine had touched her face, wondered if she'd stroked the same stone.

"Let me end this, my princess. It would be a kindness to the boy. They'll lay him with his mother and the little prince." Hanna honeyed her voice. She set her hand to my throat, fingers coa.r.s.e like sharkskin.

"No."

"You said yourself that you wanted to see him die," Hanna said. She had strength in that old hand. She'd throttled a chicken or three in her time, had Hanna. Maybe a baby once or twice. The pressure built, slow but sure.

"On the steps I did, while his blood was hot," Katherine said. "But I've watched him cling to life for so long, with such a slight hold, it's become a habit. Let him fall when he's ready. It's not a wound that can be survived. Let him choose his own time."

The pressure built a little more.

"Hanna!"

The hand withdrew.

40.

We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.

The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are G.o.ds, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man's control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.

I learned these lessons in my tenth year, although little of them stayed with me. It took Corion only moments to teach me, the heart beats in which my will guttered like a candle flame in the wind, and then blew out utterly I lay with the Nuban, boneless on the stairs. Only my eyes would move, and they followed the old man. He could have looked kindly in a different light. He had something of Tutor Lundist about him, though more gaunt, more hungry. The horror wasn't in his face, or even his eyes, just in the knowing that these were mere skins, stretched taut across all the emptiness in the world.

The sight of him, an old man in a dirty robe, put the kind of fear into me that shame erases from our memories. The fear the rabbit has when the eagle strikes. The kind of fright that makes a nothing of you. The kind of fear that'd make you sacrifice mother, brother, everything and anything you've ever loved, just for the chance to run.

Corion shuffled closer, and stooped to take my wrist. In one instant the touch silenced the raw terror that had so unmanned me. As completely as if he'd turned the spigot on a wine-barrel, the flow stopped. Without a word he hauled me into his room. I felt the flagstones sc.r.a.pe my cheek.

The chamber held nothing, save for the Nuban's crossbow, propped against the far wall. I imagined Corion closeted here in his empty chamber, a place to leave his old flesh whilst he stared into eternity.

"So, Sageous's hunter finally tracked down something with more bite than him, eh?"

I tried to speak, but my lips didn't as much as twitch. He knew about the dream-witch and his hunter. He'd called me the Thorn Prince. What else did he know?

"I know it all, child. The things you know, the secrets you hold. Even the secrets you've forgotten."

He could read my mind!

"Like an open scroll." Corion nodded. He turned my head with his boot, so that I could see the Nuban's bow once more.

"You intrigue me, Honorous Jorg Ancrath," he said. He moved to stand beside the bow. "You're wondering why a man with such power isn't emperor over all the lands."

I was too.

"It has to be one of the Hundred. Nations won't follow monsters like me. They'll follow a lineage, divine right, the sp.a.w.n of kings. So we who have taken our power from the places where others fear to reach . . . we play the game of thrones with pieces like Count Renar, pieces like your father. Pieces like you, perhaps."

He reached out to touch the bow. The air around it shimmered as if the mouth of a furnace had opened.

"Yes. I rather like that idea. Let Sageous have King Olidan, let him work to bend your father to his will, and I will have the firstborn son."

The fear had sunk low enough to let my anger rise. I pictured the old man dying on a blade, my hand on the hilt.

"Let the wilds temper you, and if you weather it, in time the prodigal will return, a viper to his father's bosom. p.a.w.n takes king." He mimed the chess-board gesture. "You might become something, Briar Prince. A piece to win the game."

Corion took the bow as if it weighed nothing. Raising it to his lips, he whispered a word, too soft for hearing. Five paces took him to the door and he set the bow on the steps by the Nuban's head. "A black knight to guard my p.a.w.n."

"And you, boy. You will forget the Count of Renar."

Like h.e.l.l I will.

"Turn your vengeance anywhere you choose, share it with the world, spill some blood; but never return to these lands. Set no foot upon these paths. Your mind will not wander here."

I could only watch him. He came closer. He knelt beside me, took my collar, and drew my face to his. I met his blank eyes. I could feel the horror rising, a flood that would carry me away. And worse, I felt his fingers cold inside my skull, erasing memories, turning aside purpose.

"Forget Renar. Take your vengeance to the world."

Renar will die. "By . . . my . . . hand . . ." Somehow my lips spoke the words.

But already he'd taken the conviction from me. I could no longer say how I'd reached the tower, or even name him.

The old man smiled. He bent to whisper in my ear. I remember his breath on my neck, and the smell of rot.

Then I heard his words and all reason left me.

Worms writhed behind my eyes. Nothing remained of him in my thoughts, just a hole where I couldn't look. Renar became a name without weight, and my hatred a gift for anyone and everyone.

I fell, through darkness, deafened by my own howling. Unknown hands locked around my throat, and in the darkness my own hands found a neck to throttle. The grip tightened, and tightened again. The screams died to a hiss, a rattle, and then silence. I squeezed. My hands became iron hooks. If I could have squeezed harder, my finger-bones would have snapped like dry twigs.

I fell through darkness, through silence, only the hands on my throat, and the throat in my hands, and the hunger for air, my heart beating sledgehammer blows.

I fell through years. I've been falling through my life . . .

I hit the ground. Hard. My eyes opened. I lay on a stone floor. A purple face stared at me, eyes distended, tongue protruding. Daylight streamed in from a high window. My heart hammered at my breastbone, wanting out. Everything hurt. I saw hands on the neck below that face. My hands. With great effort I unlocked them. The white fingers had little inclination to obey.

Still the pain swelled in me. I needed something, but couldn't name it. My vision pulsed red, dimming from one moment to the next. I touched a stiff-fingered hand to my neck and found hands there.

I didn't recognize the face. A woman?

The world grew distant, the pain less.

Renar . . . The name rose through me, and with it a whisper of strength. The hands that prised the strangler's fingers from my neck didn't feel like mine. Renar! My first breath whistled into me, as if sucked through a reed.

Air! I needed air.

I choked, heaved but nothing came, hauled in breaths through a throat grown too narrow for the task.

Renar.

The purple face belonged to a woman with grey hair. I didn't understand.

Renar. And Corion.

Oh Jesu! I remembered. I remembered the horror, but it burned pale against the cold fury that ate me now.

"Corion." For the first time in the four years since that night in the tower, I spoke his name. I remembered. I recalled what had been taken, and for the first time in forever, I felt whole.

I found the strength to lift myself up on my arms.

I was in a chamber in a castle. Beside a bed . . . I'd fallen out of bed. Whilst an old woman tried to throttle me.

The door shook. Somebody rattled at the latch. "Hanna! Hanna!" A woman's voice.

Somehow I stood before the door opened.

"Katherine." My voice escaped a bruised throat as a squeak.

There she was. Beautiful in disarray. Mouth half open, green eyes wide.

"Katherine." I could only get her name out as a whisper, but I wanted to shout, I wanted to scream so many things at once.

I understood. I understood the game. I understood the players. I knew what had to be done.

"Murderer!" she said. She took a knife from her sash, a sharp bodkin long enough to run a man through. "Your father knew best."

I tried to tell her, but no words would come now. I tried to raise my arms, but I had no strength.

"I'll finish what he started," she said.

And all I could do was marvel at the beauty of her.

41.

In a duel, man to man, sword against sword, it can be a lack of skill that gets you killed. Often as not, though, it'll be a matter of luck, or if it goes on too long, then it'll be the man who tires first that tends to die.

In the end it's about staying power. They should put that on headstones, "Got tired." Maybe not tired of life, but at least too tired to hold on to it.

In a real fight, and most fights are real, not the artifice of a formal duel, it's fatigue that's the big killer. A sword is a heavy chunk of iron. You swing that around for a few minutes and your arms start to get ideas of their own about what they can and can't do. Even when your life depends on it.

I've known times when to lift my sword was the equal of any labour of Hercules, but never before I faced Katherine's knife had I felt so drained.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d!"

The fire in her eyes looked fierce enough to burn until the deed was done.