Emperor of Thorns - Mark Lawrence

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and from every joint and seam in the doors pus began to ooze. The sweet stench of it drew me to the night I woke in sweat and pain to find Friar Glen’s man, Inch, with his hands upon me. As a child of nine I didn’t understand much, but the way he snatched back from me, the look on that mild face, the beading sweat as if a fever held him also, all helped me to know his mind. He turned without words and started for the door, hurried but not running. He should have run.

      My hands, white upon the icy bronze of the handles, felt not the cold metal but the weight and heat of the poker that I had snatched from before the fire. I should have been too weak to stand but I had slipped from the table where they bled and purged me, let the sheet fall from me, and ran naked to the roaring fire. I caught Inch at the door and when he turned I thrust the poker up between his ribs. He squealed like pigs do when the butcher is killing them. I had only one word for him. A name. ‘Justice.’

      I spread the fire not to be warm, though the fever set my teeth chattering and my hands shaking too much to be of use. I set the fire to be clean again. To burn up every trace and touch of Inch and his wrong. To devour all memory of my weakness and failure.

      ‘I meant to stay there,’ I said, my voice a whisper. She would hear me even so. ‘I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember how close the flames came.’

      They found me in the forest. I had wanted to reach the Girl-who-waits-for-Spring, to lie on the ground where I buried my dog and to wait with her, but they caught me before I got there.

      I raised my head. ‘But that’s not where I’m bound tonight, Katherine.’

      There are truths you know but will not speak. Even to yourself in the darkness where we are all of us alone. There are memories you see and yet don’t see. Things set apart, made abstract and robbed of meaning. Some doors when they are opened may not be shut again. I knew that, even at nine I knew it. And here, a door that I had closed long ago, like the lid on a coffin, the contents no longer fit for inspection. Fear trembled in my hands and I tightened my grip against it. No part of me wanted this, but I would chase Katherine from my dreams and own my nights once more – and honesty remained my sharpest weapon.

      I pulled on the handles to those doors of frost and corruption, I hauled on them and it felt as if I dragged a spear into my guts, inch by bloody inch. And with a squeal of protest the doors opened, not onto a throne room, not to my father’s court, but to a dull autumn day on a rutted path that wound away up the valley to where the monastery sat.

      ‘Damned if I will!’

      Brother Liar was damned long ago but we none of us mentioned that. Instead we stood in the mud of the road and in the chill of a damp westerly breeze and watched the monastery.

      ‘You’ll go up there and ask them to see to your wound,’ Fat Burlow said again.

      Burlow could swing a sword better than most and lay a cold eye on a man. He wasn’t jolly with all that lard, but he didn’t have the authority that Brother Price used to wield.

      ‘Damned if—’

      Brother Rike slapped Liar around the back of the head and he pitched forward into the mud. Grumlow, Roddat, Sim and the others crowded at Rike’s elbows.

      ‘He wouldn’t see much,’ I said.

      They turned to look at me, leaving Liar to get to all fours, the road dripping from him. I may have killed Price with three stones but that didn’t stop me being a skinny ten-year-old child and the brothers weren’t about to take direction from me. That I lived at all came down in equal measures to a quick hand with the knife and to the Nuban’s protection. It would be another two years, after Sir Makin had found me, with both him and the Nuban to watch my back, before I would openly make the brothers’ decisions for them.

      ‘What’s that, runt?’ Rike hadn’t forgiven me for Price’s death. I think he felt I’d stolen it from him.

      ‘He wouldn’t see much,’ I said. ‘They’d take him to the infirmary. It’s a separate building usually. And they’d watch him because he looks as though he’d be stealing the bandages while they wrapped him.’

      ‘What do you know?’ Gemt aimed a kick to miss me. He didn’t have the balls to risk connecting.

      ‘I know they don’t keep their gold in the infirmary,’ I said.

      ‘We should send the Nuban in,’ Brother Row said. He spat toward the monastery, lofting the thick wad of his phlegm a remarkable distance. ‘Let him work his heathen ways on those pious—’

      ‘Send me,’ I said.

      The Nuban had shown no enthusiasm for the venture from the moment Fat Burlow first dreamed it up. I think Burlow only suggested hitting St Sebastian’s to shut Rike’s moaning. That and to give the brothers something to better unite behind than his own wavering command.

      ‘What’re you a-goin’ta do? Ask them to take pity on you?’ Gemt snorted a laugh through his nose. Maical echoed him back down the line, with no idea what the joke was.

      ‘Yes,’ I said.

      ‘Well … it does have an orphanage.’ Burlow rubbed his stubble, folding himself a few more chins.

      We made camp a couple of miles back along the road in a copse of twisted elm and alder, thick with the stink of fox. Burlow had decided in his wisdom that I would approach the monastery a little after dawn when they should be finished with matins prayers.

      The brothers lit campfires among the trees and Gains took his cauldron from the head-cart to set over the biggest blaze. The night turned mild with cloud unrolling as the gloom thickened. The aroma of rabbit stew started to spread. We were twenty strong or thereabouts. Burlow moved about convincing men to their duties, Sim and Gemt to watch the road, old Elban to sit where the horses were corralled and listen out for wolves.

      Brother Grillo began to pick at that five-string harp of his – well his since he took it from a man who could really play it – and somewhere in the dark a high voice ran through the Queen’s Sorrow. Brother Jobe it was who sang that evening. He’d only sing when it got too dark to see much, as if in the blind night he could be another lad in another place and call out the songs they’d taught that boy.

      ‘You don’t think we should rob St Sebastian’s?’ I asked the darkness.

      It spoke back with the depth of the Nuban’s voice. ‘They’re your holy men. Why do you want to steal from them?’

      I opened my mouth, then shut it. I had thought I just wanted to build my reputation with my road-brothers and to share out a little of the anger gnawing inside me. More than that though … they were my holy men, these monks in the fortress of their monastery, echoing psalms in its stone halls, carrying golden crosses from chapel to church. They spoke to God and maybe he spoke back, but the wrongs done to me hadn’t even rippled the deep pool of their serenity. I wanted to knock on their door. My mouth might ask for sanctuary, I might play the orphaned child, but truly I would be asking ‘why’? Whatever lay broken inside me had started to wind too tight to be ignored. I would shake the world until its teeth rattled if that was required to have it spit out an answer. Why?

      Brother Jobe ended his song.

      ‘It’s something to do, a place to go,’ I said.

      ‘I have a place to go,’ the Nuban said.

      ‘Where?’ If I hadn’t asked he wouldn’t have told. You couldn’t leave a gap long enough that it would force the Nuban to fill it.

      ‘Home,’ he said. ‘Where it’s warm. When I have enough coin I will go to the Horse Coast, to Kordoba, and take a ship across the narrows. From the port of Kutta I can walk home. It’s a long way, months, but across lands I know, peoples I know. Here though, in this empire of yours, a man like me can’t travel far, not alone, so I wait until fate leads us all south together.’

      ‘Why did you come here if you hate it so much?’ His rejection stung though it hadn’t been aimed my way.

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