Emperor of Thorns

2

Several hundred horsemen throw up a lot of dust. We left the Matteracks in a shroud of our own making, the Gilden Guard stretched out across half a mile of winding mountain path. Their gleam didn’t survive long and we made a grey troop as we came to the plains.

Makin and I rode together along the convolutions of the track on which we once met the Prince of Arrow, headed for my gates. Makin looked older now, a little iron in the black, worry lines across his brow. On the road Makin had always seemed happy. Since we came to wealth and fortune and castles he had taken to worry.

‘Will you miss her?’ he asked. For an hour just the clip and clop of hooves on stony ground, and then from nowhere, ‘Will you miss her?’

‘I don’t know.’ I’d grown fond of my little queen. When she wanted to she could excite me, as most women could: my eye is not hard to please. But I didn’t burn for her, didn’t need to have her, to keep her in my sight. More than fondness, I liked her, respected her quick mind and ruthless undercurrents. But I didn’t love her, not the irrational foolish love that can overwhelm a man, wash him away and strand him on unknown shores.

‘You don’t know?’ he asked.

‘We’ll find out, won’t we?’ I said.

Makin shook his head.

‘You’re hardly the champion of true love, Lord Makin,’ I told him. In the six years since we came to the Haunt he had kept no woman with him, and if he had a mistress or even a favourite whore he had them well hidden.

He shrugged. ‘I lost myself on the road, Jorg. Those were black years for me. I’m not fit company for any woman I’d desire.’

‘What? And I am?’ I turned in the saddle to watch him.

‘You were young. A boy. Sin doesn’t stick to a child’s skin the way it clings to a man’s.’

My turn to shrug. He had seemed happier when murdering and robbing than he did thinking back on it in his vaulted halls. Perhaps he just needed something to worry about again, so he could stop worrying.

‘She’s a good woman, Jorg. And she’s going to make you a father soon. Have you thought about that?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It had slipped my mind.’ In truth though it surfaced in my thoughts in each waking hour, and many dreaming ones. I couldn’t find a way to grip the idea and it did indeed slip from me. I knew a squalling infant would soon appear, but what that would mean to me — what it was to be a father — I had no hold on. Coddin told me I would know how to feel. Instinct would tell me — something written in the blood. And perhaps it would come to me, like a sneeze arriving when pepper’s in the air, but until it did I had no way of imagining it.

‘Perhaps you’ll be a good father,’ Makin said.

‘No.’ Whether I somehow came to understand the process or not I would make a poor father. I had failed my brother and I would doubtless fail my son. Somehow the curse Olidan of Ancrath bestowed on me, and got most likely from his own sire, would infect any child of mine.

Makin pursed his lips but had the grace or the wisdom not to argue.

There’s not much of the Renar Highlands that lies flat enough to grow crops on, but close to the border with Ancrath the land stops leaping and diving long enough for farming and for a city, of sorts. Hodd Town, my capital. I could see the stain of it on the horizon.

‘We’ll camp here,’ I said.

Makin leaned in his saddle to tell Sir Riccard, and he raised my colours on his lance.

‘We could make Hodd Town,’ Makin said. ‘We’d be there an hour or so past sunset.’

‘Bad beds, grinning officials, and fleas.’ I swung out of Brath’s saddle. ‘I’d rather sleep in a tent.’

Gorgoth sat down. He let the guard work around him, tethering their horses, organizing their feed, setting up pavilions, each big enough for six men, with two ribbons streaming from the centre-point, the emperor’s black and gold. Keppen and Grumlow threw their saddlebags beside the leucrota and sat on them to play dice.

‘We should at least pass through town tomorrow, Jorg.’ Makin tied off the feedbag on his mount’s nose and turned back to me. ‘The people love to see the guard ride past. You can give them that at least?’

I shrugged. ‘It should be enough that I keep court in the Highlands. Do you think they’ve forgotten that I’ve a palace bigger than the whole of Hodd Town down in Arrow?’

Makin kept his eyes on mine. ‘Sometimes it seems you’ve forgotten it, Jorg.’

I turned away and squatted to watch the dice roll. The ache in my thighs told me I’d been too long in the throne and the bed and the banquet hall. Makin had it right, I should travel my seven kingdoms, even if it were only to spend time on the road and keep its lessons sharp in my mind.

‘Son of a bitch!’ Keppen spat. All five of Grumlow’s dice showed sixes. Keppen started to empty his coin pouch, spat again, and threw the whole lot down at Grumlow’s feet. I shook my head. It seemed a waste of good fortune to buck such odds for a pouch of coin.

‘Don’t use up all your luck, Brother Grumlow. You might need it later.’ I stood again, biting back a curse at my legs.

I hadn’t wanted to live in the palace Prince Orrin had built for Katherine. I spent a few weeks there after we had secured the allegiance of Arrow’s surviving lords. The building reminded me of Orrin, austere but splendid, high arches, pillars of white stone, it could have been copied from the ruins of Macedon where Alexander grew to greatness. I rattled around in its many rooms with the brothers as my guards, and my captains planning the capture of Arrow’s remaining conquests. The palace felt deserted despite a staff of hundreds, strangers all of them. In the end I’d been glad to ride out to secure Normardy, somehow a relief though it proved the bloodiest of that spring’s campaigns.

If life in the Haunt had left me too soft for a day in the saddle then I was wise to avoid the luxury of that palace. Better the mountains than the plains, better the howl of the wind about snow-clad peaks than the foul air blowing off the Quiet Sea laden with the stench of the Drowned Isles. Besides, in Ancrath and in Renar the blood of my line ran thickest. I might not hunger for the warmth of family but in troubled times it’s wiser to be surrounded by subjects who follow out of habit rather than out of new-found fear.

A gentle rain began to fall as the light faded. I pulled my cloak tighter and moved to one of the campfires.

‘A tent for the king!’ Sir Riccard shouted, catching the arm of a passing guardsman.

‘A little wet won’t hurt me,’ I told him. A good swordsman, Riccard, and brave, but rather too taken with his rank and with shouting.

Time spent around a fire, among the bustle of warriors, was more to my liking than watching the walls of a tent twitch and flap, and imagining what might lie behind them. I watched the guards organize their camp and let the aroma of the stew-pots tease my nose.

When you are a troop of more than three hundred, a small army by most reckonings, all the simple matters of the road require discipline. Latrine trenches must be dug, a watch organized on a defensible perimeter, horses taken to graze and water. Gone the easy ways that suited our band of brothers on the roads of my childhood. Scale changes everything.

A guard captain came with a chair for me, a piece of campaign furniture that would fold down again to a tight flat package with brass-bound corners to weather the knocks and bumps of travel. Captain Harran found me sat in it with a bowl of venison and potatoes in my lap, food from my own stores at the Haunt, no doubt. The guard expected to provision wherever they stopped — a kind of highway robbery legalized by the last echoes of empire.

‘There’s a priest wanting to see you,’ Harran said. I let him drop ‘King Jorg’ into my expectant silence. The captains of the Gilden Guard hold the Hundred in mild contempt and are wont to laugh at our titles behind their oh-so-shiny helms.

‘A priest? Or perhaps the Bishop of Hodd Town?’ I asked. The Gilden Guard have little respect for the church of Roma either, a legacy of centuries punctuated by vicious squabbles between emperors and Popes. For the emperor’s loyalists Vyene is the holy city and Roma an irrelevance.

‘Yes, a bishop.’ Harran nodded.

‘The silly hat gives them away,’ I said. ‘Sir Kent, if you could go and escort Father Gomst to our little circle of piety. I wouldn’t want him coming to grief amongst the guard.’

I sat back in my chair and swigged from a tankard of ale they’d brought me, sour stuff from the breweries of the Ost-Reich. Rike watched the fire, gnawing on a bone from his meal. Most men watch the flames as if seeking answers in the mystery of that bright dance. Rike just scowled. Gorgoth came across and elbowed a space close enough that the glow lit him. Like me he had a measure of understanding when he stared into the flames. The magic I’d borrowed from Gog burned out of me on the day we turned the men of Arrow from the Haunt — it was never truly mine. I think, though, that Gorgoth had wet his hands in what Gog swam through. Not fire-sworn like Gog, but with a touch of it running in his veins.

Grumlow alerted us to Bishop Gomst’s approach, pointing out the mitre swaying above the heads of guardsmen lined for the mess tent. We watched as he emerged, arriving in full regalia with his crook to lean on and a shuffle in his feet, though he had no more years on him than Keppen who could run up a mountain before lunch if the need arose.

‘Father Gomst,’ I said. I’d been calling him that since I could call him anything at all and saw no reason to change my ways just because he’d changed his hat.

‘King Jorg.’ He bowed his head. The rain started to thicken.

‘And what brings the Bishop of Hodd Town out on a damp night like this when he could be warming himself before the votive candles banked in his cathedral?’ A sore point since the cathedral stood half built. I still poked at old Gomsty as if he were stuck in that cage we found him in years back on the lichway. My uncle had over-reached himself when he commissioned the cathedral project, a poorly judged plan conceived the same year my mother squeezed me into the world. Perhaps another bad decision. In any event, the money had run out. Cathedrals don’t come cheap, not even in Hodd Town.

‘I needed to speak with you, my king. Better here than in the city.’ Gomst stood with the rain dripping from the curls of his crook, bedraggled in his finery.

‘Get the man a chair,’ I shouted. ‘You can’t leave a man of God standing in the muck.’ Then in a lower voice, ‘Tell me, Father Gomst.’

Gomst took his time to sit, adjusting his robes, the hems thick with mud. I expected him to come with a priest or two, a church boy to carry his train at least, but my bishop sat before me unattended, dark with rain, and looking older than his years.

‘There was a time when the seas rose, King Jorg.’ He held his crook white-knuckled and stared at the other hand in his lap. Gomst never told stories. He scolded or he flattered, according to the cloth of his audience.

‘The seas rise each day, Father Gomst,’ I said. ‘The moon draws on the deep waters as it draws on women’s blood.’ I knew he spoke of the Flood, but tormenting him came too easy.

‘There were untold years when the seas lay lower, when the Drowned Isles were one great land of Brettan, and the Never Lands fed an empire, before the Quiet Sea stole them. But the waters rose and a thousand cities drowned.’

‘And you think the oceans ready themselves for another bite?’ I grinned and held a hand out to accept the rain. ‘Will it pour for forty days and nights?’

‘Have you had a vision?’ A question rasped from scorched lungs. Red Kent had come to squat beside Gomst’s chair. Since surviving the inferno at the Haunt Sir Kent had got himself a bad case of religion.

‘It seems I chose well when making court in the mountains,’ I said. ‘Perhaps the Highland will become the richest island kingdom in the new world.’

Sir Riccard laughed at that. I seldom made a joke that didn’t find an echo in him. Makin twisted a grin. I trusted that more.

‘I speak of a different rising, a darker tide,’ Gomst said. He seemed determined to play the prophet. ‘Word comes from every convent, from Arrow, Belpan, Normardy, from the cold north and from the Port kingdoms. The most pious of the faith’s nuns dream of it. Hermits leave their caves to speak of what the night brings them, icons bleed to testify the truth. The Dead King readies himself. Black ships wait at anchor. The graves empty.’

‘We have fought the dead before, and won.’ The rain felt cold now.

‘The Dead King has overwhelmed the last of Brettan’s lords, he holds all the Isles. He has a fleet waiting to sail. The holiest see a black tide coming.’ Gomst looked up now, meeting my eyes.

‘Have you seen this, Gomst?’ I asked him.

‘I am not holy.’

That convinced me, of his belief and fear at least. I knew Gomst for a rogue, a goat-bearded letch with an eye for his own comfort and a taste for grand but empty oratory. Honesty from him spoke more than from another man.

‘You’ll come to Congression with me. Set this news before the Hundred.’

His eyes widened at that, rain stuttered from his lips. ‘I–I have no place there.’

‘You’ll come as one of my advisors,’ I told him. ‘Sir Riccard will cede his place to you.’

I stood, shaking the wet from my hair. ‘Damn this rain. Harran! Point me at my tent. Sir Kent, Riccard, see the bishop back to his church. I don’t want any ghoul or ghost troubling him on his return.’

Captain Harran had waited in the next fire circle and led me now to my pavilion, larger than the guards’, hide floors within, strewn with black and gold cushions. Makin followed in behind me, coughing and shaking off the rain, my bodyguard, though a pavilion had been set for him as Baron of Kennick. I shrugged off my cloak and it landed with a splat, leaking water.

‘Gomst sends us to bed with sweet dreams,’ I said, glancing around. A chest of provisions sat to my left and a commode had been placed on the opposite side. Silver lamps burning smokeless oil lit me to my bed, carved timber, four posted, assembled from pieces carried by a dozen different guards.

‘I’ve no faith in dreams.’ Makin set his cloak aside and shook like a wet dog. ‘Or the bishop.’

A chess set had been laid on a delicate table beside the bed, board of black and white marble, silver pieces, ruby-set or with emeralds to indicate the sides.

‘The guard lay their tents grander than my rooms at the Haunt,’ I said.

Makin inclined his head. ‘I don’t trust dreams,’ he repeated.

‘The women of Hodd Town wear no blues.’ I started to unbuckle my breastplate. I could have had a boy to do it, but servants are a disease that leaves you crippled.

‘You’re an observer of fashion now?’ Makin worked at his own armour, still dripping on the hides.

‘Tin prices are four times what they stood at when I took my uncle’s throne.’

Makin grinned. ‘Have I missed a guest? You’re speaking to somebody but it’s not me?’

‘That man of yours, Osser Gant? He would understand me.’ I let my armour lie where it fell. My eyes kept returning to the chessboard. They had set one for me on my last journey to Congression too. Every night. As if no one could pretend to the throne without being a player of the game.

‘You’ve led me to the water, but I can’t drink. Tell me plain, Jorg. I’m a simple man.’

‘Trade, Lord Makin.’ I pushed a pawn out experimentally. A ruby-eyed pawn, servant to the black queen. ‘We have no trade with the Isles, no tin, no woad, no Brettan nets, not those clever axes of theirs or those tough little sheep. We have no trade and black ships are seen off Conaught, sailing the Quiet Sea but never coming to port.’

‘There have been wars. The Brettan lords are always feuding.’ Makin shrugged.

‘Chella spoke of the Dead King. I don’t trust dreams but I trust the word of an enemy who thinks me wholly in their power. The marsh dead have kept my father’s armies busy on his borders. We would have had our reckoning years back, father and me, if he were not so tied with holding on to what he has.’

Makin nodded at that. ‘Kennick suffers too. All the men-at-arms who answer to me are set to keep the dead penned in the marshes. But an army of them? A king?’

‘Chella was a queen to the army she raised in the Cantanlona.’

‘But ships? Invasions?’

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Makin, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ I sat on the bed and rotated the chessboard so the white queen and her army faced his way. ‘Make a move.’

Makin had six victories before I set him to snuffing out the lamps. That he took his six to the floor and I took my single win to the luxury of a bed proved scant comfort. I fell asleep with the pieces flashing before my eyes, black squares, white, the twinkle of rubies and emeralds.

A storm came in the night, raging against the canvas. Tents are boasters, telling exaggerated tales of the weather they save you from. The sound was of a deluge fit to drown the kingdom and a wind that could scour the rocks from mountain slopes. Under a weather blanket, curled below a hedge, it might not have woken me, but beneath the great drum of the pavilion roof I lay staring into darkness.

Sometimes it’s good to hear the rain, but not be wet, to know that the wind is howling but to feel no breath of it. I waited in that timeless comfortable dark and at last the scent of white musk rose, her arms folded about my chest, and she drew me down into dreams. There seemed an urgency to it tonight.

‘Aunt Katherine.’ No doubt my lips twitched toward the words while I slept.

In the beginning Katherine sent me only nightmares, as if she counted herself my conscience and needed to torment me with my crimes. Time and again baby Degran died in my hands and I woke screaming, sweat-soaked, a danger to any who shared my bed. I spent nights roasting over the slow fire of Sareth’s grief, shown from every angle by the arts her sister taught herself while married to the Prince of Arrow. Miana could not keep to my chambers and set herself a bed in the east tower.

Dream-sworn, I told myself. She’s a dream-witch. Sageous’s ilk. But it didn’t stop me wanting her. I painted Katherine’s image across the dark storm of my imagination. She never showed herself and so I brought forth my first sight of her, that time-locked memory when we collided in the corridors of the Tall Castle.

Katherine showed me her loved ones — those I had killed. Sir Galen championing her through the bright days of her youth in Scorron, and her maid Hanna at a time when she looked less sour and offered a child-princess comfort in a loveless court. In dreaming, Katherine made me care about her cares, about her people, twisting me with the strange logic of the sleeping mind such that they seemed important, real, as real as the memories from before the thorns. And all of this in the too-bright light of the Gelleth sun, the flesh-stripping glare of that Builder Sun, always behind me, throwing my shadow like a black finger into the midst of their lives.

I let her arms draw me down through midnight. I had never fought her, though I felt I could, and I think perhaps she wanted me to. Even more than she wanted to show me the wrongs I had wrought, even more than she needed to make me feel it as she felt it, I think she needed me to fight her, to struggle against her spell, to close my dreaming eyes and try to escape. But I didn’t. I told myself that I chose to face what I feared. That her torments would burn me clean of sentiment. But truly — I liked her arms around me, the feel of her close at hand, touching yet untouchable.

Whispers of light reached me through the starless night. Of late the dreams she drew me to were more confused, unfocused, as if she dreamed also. I would see her, or touch her, but never both. We would walk the Tall Castle, or the Palace of Arrow, her dresses flowing, silence binding us, the walls aging and crumbling as we passed. Or I would smell her, hold her, but be blind, or see only the graves of Perechaise.

Tonight though, the dream came cold and clear. Broken stone crunched beneath my shoes, the rain lashed me. I climbed a slope, bent against the gale. My fingers moved blind across natural rock, a wall rising before me. I knew every sensation but held no control as if I were a puppet and another kept the strings.

‘What lesson is this, Katherine?’

She never spoke to me. Just as I never fought her — she never spoke. At first the dreams she wrought on me were all anger and revenge. Still they often carried that edge but I thought also that she experimented, trained her talent — as a swordsman crafts his technique and adds new strokes to his repertoire. These had been Sageous’s skills and now that my aunt kept once more beneath Father’s roof it might be she filled the heathen’s role, though whether like him she spread a subtle web of influence and with touches turned the Hundred along Olidan Ancrath’s paths, or indeed her own, I didn’t know.

The storm fell away without warning and the wind died, though I heard it moaning behind me. A cave of some sort. I had passed through the narrow mouth of a cave. I crouched and swung the pack from my shoulder. Sure fingers found a flint and tinder. Within moments I lit the lantern fished from a pocket within the bag. I would have been proud of my work, but the hands that carried it out, the hands I held the flint in and struck flame with, were not mine. The lantern showed them to be pale, like flesh too long under water, and long-fingered. I have long fingers, but these were white spiders, crawling in the lantern’s shadows.

I moved on, or rather the man whose skin I shared moved on and bore me with him. The lantern’s glow reached out and found little to return it. My vision stayed where directed by the owner of the eyes I watched through — on the floor for the most part, natural rock smoothed by the passage of many feet. An occasional glance to the left and right showed waterfalls of frozen stone and unearthly galleries where stalagmites reached up to stalactites. And I knew where I walked. The Haunt’s eastern sally port. The pale man had climbed the Runyard in the dark of the storm and entered the sally port through the concealed slot high on the Runyard’s flank.

The man moved with confidence. Although many twists and turns led off to dark unknowns it took no special skill to find the way, polished as it was by countless predecessors. The dream seemed accurate, drawing on my memories to make substance. A shiver ran through me, though not through the pale man. If Katherine strove for accuracy then soon a black hand would close around the intruder, reaching from the shadow, and pull him with inexorable strength and merciful speed into the gaping maw of a troll. I hoped not to feel those black teeth close in my flesh, but it seemed likely. Already their stink hung in my nose and his collar chafed my neck.

He walked his path and no hand came reaching. If I had been able to hold a breath I would have let it sigh through my teeth. For a while the dream had convinced me I was there, but no; Gorgoth’s trolls guarded the subterranean paths to the Haunt and many more secret routes besides.

We came now through hand-hewn tunnels, gouged into the rock to join the Haunt to the natural caves. The man stopped, not far from the lowest of the Haunt’s cellars. Ahead a clot of darkness swallowed the lantern light and gave nothing back. For long moments he held still, no motion in him, almost inhuman in his lack of twitch or tremor. When he advanced he moved on swift feet, the hilt of a knife cool in his grip though I couldn’t see the blade. A single troll lay across the rough stone, sprawled out with its long limbs reaching. The beast’s face nestled, hidden against the black knob of its shoulder. It might have been dead, but with careful observation the pale man and I saw the slow rise and fall of its back as breath came and went.

Without haste the man stepped around the sleeping troll, ducking where the tunnel’s roof curved low, picking his way over black legs.

‘A poor dream, Katherine.’ I spoke without needing his lips. ‘Trolls are made for war. It’s written through them. This man’s scent would have woken a dozen by now and set their mouths running with hunger.’

My escort found the wooden door that gives onto the Haunt’s wine cellars. He worked the lock with heavy picks suited to such an old and solid mechanism. A drop of oil to take any squeak from the hinges and he pushed it open, stepping through without hesitation. I caught sight of his knife then, an assassin’s tool, long and thin, its handle of turned white bone.

He emerged from the false front of the huge barrel that disguised the exit. Propped against a real barrel, opposite the false one and of nearly equal size, a guardsman in my colours sat, helm to one side, legs stretched in front of him, head forward in slumber. I crouched before him. I felt my haunches settle on my heels, I felt the strain in the muscles of my thighs, the coarseness of the guard’s dirty blond hair as I pulled his head back. I knew him. The name fluttered behind my thoughts. Rodrick, a little fellow, younger than me, I once found him hiding in my tower when Arrow besieged the castle. My knife lay cold against his throat now, and still he didn’t stir. I’d half a mind to open his neck just for being such a useless guard. Even so it came as a shock when my hand slipped lower and drove the blade into his heart. That woke him! Rodrick watched me with hurt eyes, mouth twisting but silent, and he died. I waited. All trace of motion left the boy but still I waited. And then I pulled the knife free. Very little blood flowed. I wiped my blade clean on his tunic.

The pale man had black sleeves. I noticed that much before his gaze found the stairs and he went to them. He left his lantern beside Rodrick and his shadow led the way.

The man walked through the Haunt’s corridors and halls as if he belonged there. The castle lay in darkness with only the occasional lamp set to light a corner or doorway. Shutters rattled, shaken by the wind, rainwater pooled below, driven past lintels and running over stone floors. It seemed my people huddled in their beds while the storm howled, for none of them wandered, no servant tending lamps, no dun-man for the night-soil, not a nursemaid or guardsman’s harlot slipping from the barracks … not a guardsman come to that.

At last, as the assassin reached the internal door to the east tower, we found a guard who hadn’t abandoned his post. Sir Graeham, knight of my table, asleep on his feet, held upright by a combination of plate armour, a halberd, and the wall. Pale hands positioned the long knife at the gap between gorget and shoulderplate. The assassin set the heel of his palm over his knife’s bone hilt, positioned so a sharp blow would puncture both leather and chainmail, and find the jugular beneath. He paused, perhaps sharing my thought that the knight might create quite a clatter if he fell. We held, close enough that I could draw Sir Graeham’s ripe stink in with each breath. The wind howled and I drove the knife home. Its hilt stung the hand that wasn’t mine, the business end stung Sir Graeham worse, and he fell, twitching. His weight pulled him from the knife.

Again the assassin cleaned his blade. This time on the knight’s red cloak, smearing it with a brighter shade. Fastidious, this one.

He found the key on Graeham’s belt and unlocked the oak door, iron-bound and polished by the touch of hands. Old as the door was, the archway held more years. My uncle’s scrolls spoke of a time when the Haunt was nothing but the east tower, a single watchtower set on the mountain’s shoulder with a military camp about its base. And even those men, who fought the tribes of Or and forged a stronghold in the Highlands, did not build the tower. There is writing on that arch, but time has forgotten even the name of the script. Its meaning has passed beyond knowing.

The assassin stepped beneath the archway and beneath the runes deep-set upon the keystone. Pain shot through me, thorns found my flesh, hooking through skin and blood in a manner that promised no easy release, like the barbed arrow that must be dug free, or the lock-hound that needs killing before the muscles and tendons along its jaw can be sliced and its teeth pried from the bone. It hurt, but I found my freedom, torn from the body that had held me. He walked on without pause and I staggered in his wake, following as he mounted the stair. Across the back of his black cloak a cross had been sewn in white silk. A holy cross.

I ran at him, but passed through as if I were the ghost, though in truth it was me that shivered at the contact. Lamp light offered me his face as I turned, just for a moment before he walked through me and left me standing on the steps. The man held no colour, his face the same pale, drowned hue as his hands, hair oiled to the scalp, the iris of his eyes matching the ivory of the whites. He bore a cross embroidered in white silk across the front of his tunic to echo the one on his back. A papal assassin then. Only the Vatican sends assassins out into the world bearing a return address. The rest of us would rather not be caught using such agents. The papal assassin however is merely an extension of the Pope’s infallibility — how can there be shame in executing the word of God? Why would such men cloak themselves in anonymity?

Sprawled in an alcove off the stairwell, Brother Emmer lay dead to the world. The assassin knelt and applied his knife to make sure it was a permanent state of affairs. Emmer had shown little interest in women on the road and had seemed a good choice to watch over my queen. I watched the Pope’s man climb the stairs until the turn of the tower took him from view. Emmer’s blood washed down, step by step, in crimson falls.

I never fought Katherine, never tried to escape her illusions, but that didn’t mean I had to cooperate. Somehow I had broken free of the assassin and I had no reason to watch what else he might do. Murder my queen, no doubt. Miana would be sleeping in the chamber at the top of the stairs if Katherine kept to the castle plan she had mined from my memories. Should I follow like a fool and watch Miana’s throat slit? See her thrash in her blood with my child dying inside her?

I stood in the darkness with just the echoes of lamplight from beyond the winding of the stair above and below.

‘Truly? You think you can show me anything that would hurt me?’ I spoke to the air. ‘You’ve walked my rememberings.’ I let her wander where she pleased when she came with her nightmares. I thought perhaps that daring the long corridors of my memory was more torment to her than her punishments were to me. Even with the key to each of my doors in her hand I knew there were places in me she didn’t go. Who in their right mind would?

‘Let’s play this game, Princess, all the way through. Let’s discover if you find the end too bitter.’

I ran up the stairs, the contacts between foot and stone were light and without effort, as if only in the assassin’s flesh could I properly touch this dream. I caught him within moments, passed him and won the race to the top.

Marten waited there, crouched before the queen’s door, his sword and shield on the floor, his eyes bloodshot and wild. Sweat held dark hair to his brow and ran down the straining tendons of his neck. In one fist a dagger, making constant jabs into his open palm. His breath came in short gasps and blood brimmed crimson from the cup of his hand.

‘Fight it,’ I told him. Despite my resolve I found myself drawn in by his struggle to stay awake and guard Miana.

The assassin came into view, my view, not Marten’s. He stopped, sniffed the air without sound, and cocked his head to catch the faint gasp of Marten’s pain. Whilst he paused I dived into him, determined to settle around his bones, clinging to anything tangible. A moment of blind agony and I stared once more out of his eyes. I tasted blood. He had shared the hurt of reunion with me and although he hadn’t cried out, a sharp intake of breath had passed his lips. Perhaps it would be enough to warn Marten.

The Pope’s man reached into his robe, replacing the long bone-handled blade and drawing forth two short and heavy daggers, cruciform and weighted for throwing. He moved very fast, diving into Marten’s line of sight whilst at the same time releasing the first of his knives, just a flick of the wrist but imparting lethal force.

Marten launched himself almost in the instant we faced him, slowed for a heartbeat perhaps by the weight of sleep he denied. The assassin’s dagger hit somewhere between neck and belly — I heard chain links snap. He passed us with a roar and the assassin’s foot lashed out, catching Marten’s chin, propelling him into the curved wall. Momentum carried him feet over head over feet, clattering down the stairs. We hesitated, as if unsure whether to pursue and check if any bones remained unbroken. The hot wetness below our knee convinced the assassin otherwise. Somehow Marten had sliced the assassin as he passed. The Pope’s man hobbled on toward the door, hissing at the pain now spreading from the cut Marten had left on us. He paused to tie a bandage, a silk sash from an inner pocket, pulled it tight, then advanced up the steps.

Any key had clattered down the stairs with Marten and the Pope’s man took out his picks once more to work the lock. It took longer than before, the queen’s door boasted a tricky mechanism perhaps as old as the tower. Before it yielded to our patient work the flagstones were pooled with the assassin’s blood, red as any man’s despite the pallor of his skin.

We stood, and I felt his weakness — blood loss and something else — he strained some muscle I didn’t share, but I knew the effort wearied him. Perhaps the all-encompassing sleep had cost him dear.

The door opened without sound. He took the lamp from its hook where Marten had crouched and stepped in. The strength of his imaginings began to reach me as at last his excitement mounted. I saw the pictures rising in his mind. All of a sudden, dream or no dream, I wanted him to fail. I didn’t want him to slice Miana open. I had no wish to see the red ruin of my unborn child drawn from her. The fear surprised me, raw and basic, and I knew it to be my own, not some sharing with Katherine. I wondered if it might be an echo of what Coddin warned I would feel for my son or daughter when I first saw them, held them. If that were true then I had my first inkling of how dangerous the bond might be.

On the dresser by the bed a glimmer from the silver chain I gave Miana on her name day. Under the covers a mounded form caught in shadows, wife and child, soft in sleep.

‘Wake up.’ As if saying it would make it happen. ‘Wake up.’ All my will and not even a tremble of it on his lips.

Cold certainty gripped me by the throat. This was real. This was now. I slept in my bed in a tent, Miana slept in hers miles from me, and a pale death approached her.

‘Katherine!’ I shouted her name inside his head. ‘Don’t do this!’

He stepped toward the bed, the second of his throwing knives raised and ready. Perhaps only the size of the lump beneath the covers prevented him from flinging the blade at it immediately. Miana could not be said to be a large woman, even with a baby straining to get out of her. It looked as though she had company in there. I might even have thought it, but for Marten at the door.

Another step, his injured leg numb and cold now, his lips muttering some spell in silence, as if his magics mirrored his unsteady gait and needed support. I had no warning, my arm — his arm — drew back to throw. In that moment the covers fluttered, I heard a muted ‘choom’ and a fist hit my side, hard enough to throw me back, spinning twice before slamming into the wall. I slid to the floor, legs stretched before me and looked down. Both pale hands covered my side, blood spurting between my fingers, pieces of flesh hanging.

The covers lifted and Miana faced me, crouched around the black mass of the Nuban’s crossbow, eyes wide and fierce above it.

My right hand found the bone handle of the longer knife. Spitting blood I crawled to my feet, the world rotating around me. I could see that no bolts remained in the crossbow. Inside the assassin I strained with every piece of my being to still his legs, to lay down the weapon. I think he felt it this time. He moved slowly, but keeping between Miana and her door. His eyes fell to her belly, taut beneath her nightgown.

‘Stop!’ I held to his arm with all my will, but still it crept forward.

Miana looked angry rather than scared. Ready to do bloody murder.

My hand started forward, lunging with the knife, aimed low, below the swing of Miana’s bow. I couldn’t stop it. The gleaming blade would pierce her womb, and slice, and in a welter of gore she would die. Our child with her.

The assassin thrust, and a hand span from finding flesh our arm shuddered off course, all its power cut clean away by a blow that sheared through my shoulder. I twisted as I collapsed, the ironwork of the crossbow smashing into my face. Marten stood behind me, a devil clothed in blood, his snarl veiled in scarlet. My head hit the carpet, vision turning black. Their voices sounded far away.

‘My queen!’

‘I’m not hurt, Marten.’

‘I’m so sorry — I failed you — he passed me.’

‘I’m not hurt, Marten … A woman woke me in my dreams.’