LITMIR.BIZ

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I had a name. A black crow on a red field. The insignia flashed across my eyes, seared deep by the lightning of last night’s storm. A fire lit within me, and the pain from a hundred hooks burned in every limb. A groan escaped me. My lips parted, dry skin tearing.

      And Reilly found me.

      ‘There’s something here!’ I heard him curse as the hook-briar found every chink in his armour. ‘Quickly now! Pull this stuff apart.’

      ‘Dead.’ I heard the whisper from behind Sir Reilly as he cut me free.

      ‘He’s so white.’

      I guess the briar near bled me dry.

      So they fetched a cart and took me back. I didn’t sleep. I watched the sky turn black, and I thought.

      In the Healing Hall Friar Glen and his helper, Inch, dug the hooks from my flesh. My tutor, Lundist, arrived while they had me on the table with their knives out. He had a book with him, the size of a Teuton shield, and three times as heavy by the look of it. Lundist had more strength in that wizened old stick of a body than anyone guessed.

      ‘Those are fire-cleaned knives I hope, Friar?’ Lundist carried the accent of his homelands in the Utter East, and a tendency to leave half of a word unspoken, as if an intelligent listener should be able to fill in the blanks.

      ‘It is purity of spirit that will keep corruption from the flesh, Tutor,’ Friar Glen said. He spared Lundist a disapproving glance, and returned to his digging.

      ‘Even so, clean the knives, Friar. Holy office will prove scant protection from the King’s ire if the Prince dies in your halls.’ Lundist set his book down on the table beside me, rattling a tray of vials at the far end. He lifted the cover and turned to a marked page.

      ‘“The thorns of the hook-briar are like to find the bone.’” He traced a wrinkled yellow finger down the lines. ‘“The points can break off and sour the wound.”’

      Friar Glen gave a sharp jab at that, which made me cry out. He set his knife down and turned to face Lundist. I could see only the friar’s back, the brown cloth straining over his shoulders, dark with sweat over his spine.

      ‘Tutor Lundist,’ he said. ‘A man in your profession is wont to think all things may be learned from the pages of a book, or the right scroll. Learning has its place, sirrah, but do not think to lecture me on healing on the basis of an evening spent with an old tome!’

      Well, Friar Glen won that argument. The sergeant-at-arms had to ‘help’ Tutor Lundist from the hall.

      I guess even at nine I had a serious lack of spiritual purity, for my wounds soured within two days, and for nine weeks I lay in fever, chasing dark dreams along death’s borderlands.

      They tell me I raged and howled. That I raved as the pus oozed from slices where the briar had held me. I remember the stink of corruption. It had a kind of sweetness to it, a sweetness that’d make you want to hurl.

      Inch, the friar’s aide, grew tired of holding me down, though he had the arms of a lumberjack. In the end they tied me to my bed.

      I learned from Tutor Lundist that the friar would not attend me after the first week. Friar Glen said a devil was in me. How else could a child speak such horror?

      In the fourth week I slipped the bonds that held me to my pallet, and set a fire in the hall. I have no memory of the escape, or my capture in the woods. When they cleared the ruin, they found the remains of Inch, with the poker from the hearth lodged in his chest.

      Many times I stood at the Door. I had seen my mother and brother thrown through that doorway, torn and broken, and in dreams my feet would take me to stand there, time and again. I lacked the courage to follow them, held on the barbs and hooks of cowardice.

      Sometimes I saw the dead-lands across a black river, sometimes across a chasm spanned by a narrow bridge of stone. Once I saw the Door in the guise of the portals to my father’s throne room, but edged with frost and weeping pus from every join. I had but to set my hand upon the handle …

      The Count of Renar kept me alive. The promise of his pain crushed my own under its heel. Hate will keep you alive where love fails.

      And then one day my fever left me. My wounds remained angry and red, but they closed. They fed me chicken in soup, and my strength crept back, a stranger to me.

      The spring came to paint the leaves back upon the trees. I had my strength, but I felt something else had been taken. Taken so completely I could no longer name it.

      The sun returned, and, much to Friar Glen’s distaste, Lundist returned to instruct me once more.

      The first time he came, I sat abed. I watched him set out his books upon the table.

      ‘Your father will see you on his return from Gelleth,’ Lundist said. His voice held a note of reproach, but not for me. ‘The death of the Queen and Prince William weigh heavy on him. When the pain eases he will surely come to speak with you.’

      I didn’t understand why Lundist should feel the need to lie. I knew my father would not waste time on me whilst it seemed I would die. I knew he would see me when seeing me served some end.

      ‘Tell me, tutor,’ I said. ‘Is revenge a science, or an art?’

      Chapter 6

      The rain faltered when the spirits fled. I’d only broken the one, but the others ran too, back to whatever pools they haunted. Maybe my one had been their leader; maybe men become cowards in death. I don’t know.

      As to my own cowards, they had nowhere to flee, and I found them easily enough. I found Makin first. He, at least, was headed back toward me.

      ‘So you found a pair then?’ I called to him.

      He paused a moment and looked at me. The rain didn’t fall so heavy now, but he still looked like a drowned rat. The water ran in rivulets over his breastplate, in and out of the dents. He checked the marsh to either side, still nervy, and lowered his sword.

      ‘A man who’s got no fear is missing a friend, Jorg,’ he said, and a smile found its way onto those thick lips of his. ‘Running ain’t no bad thing. Leastways if you run in the right direction.’ He waved a hand toward where Rike wrestled with a clump of bulrushes, the mud up to his chest already. ‘Fear helps a man pick his fights. You’re fighting them all, my prince.’ And he bowed, there on the Lichway with the rain dripping off him.

      I spared a glance for Rike. Maical had similar problems in a pool to the other side of the road. Only he’d got his problems up to the neck.

      ‘I’m going to fight them all in the end,’ I said to him. ‘Pick your fights,’ Makin said. ‘I’ll pick my ground,’ I said. ‘I’ll pick my ground, but I’m not running. Not ever. That’s been done, and we still have the war. I’m going to win it, Brother Makin, it’s going to end with me.’

      He bowed again. Not so deep, but this time I felt he meant it. ‘That’s why I’ll follow you, Prince. Wherever it takes us.’

      For the moment it took us to fishing brothers out of the mud. We got Maical first, even though Rike howled and cursed us. As the rain thinned, I could see the grey and the head-cart off in the distance. The grey had the sense to keep to the road, even when Maical didn’t. If Maical had led the grey into the mire I’d have left him to sink.

      We pulled Rike out next. When we reached him the mud had almost found his mouth. Nothing but his white face showed above the pool, but that didn’t stop him shouting his foulnesses all the way. We found most of them on the road, but six got sucked down too quick, lost forever; probably getting ready to haunt the next band of travellers.

      ‘I’m going back for old Gomsty,’ I said.

      We’d come a way down the road and the light had pretty much gone. Looking back you couldn’t see the gibbets, just grey veils of rain. Out in the marsh the dead waited. I felt their cold thoughts crawling on my skin.

      I

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