I catch her wrist as she drives the knife at me. She is stronger than I imagined. We both look down at my hand, dark on her white wrist, and the thin blade quivering with its point an inch from my groin.
“A low blow.” I twist her arm but she drops the knife before I make her.
“What?” She stares at her hand and mine, mouth open.
“You’re making a habit of trying to stab me,” I say. The bitterness rises in me. I taste it.
“I killed our child, Jorg.” Her laugh is too high, too wild. “I killed it. I swallowed a sour pill from Saraem Wic. She lives here.” Katherine whips her head around, unfocused, as if expecting to see the crone among the trees.
I know of Saraem Wic. I’ve seen her gather her herbs and fungi. I crept to her hut once, almost close enough to look in, but I didn’t want to go closer. It smelled of burned dog. “What are you talking about?” I ask. She looks beautiful. She curses being a woman but here I am forgetting even the knife on the ground, the knife she almost buried in me, forgetting it because of the curve of her neck, the tremble of her lips. Want makes fools of men.
“You hit me and then you took me. You put your seed in me.” She spits. It misses my face but drips in my hair and wets my ear. “And I drove it out. With a sour pill and a paste that burned.”
She grins and I can see the hatred now. She sees me clear for once, head down, hair framing her, eyes dark. She shows her teeth. She dares me.
I remember her lying there in the sapphire pool of her dress. Senseless. The voice from the briar, maybe mine, maybe Corion’s, or something of both, told me to kill her. My father would give that advice. The hardest line. Want makes fools of men. But I didn’t kill her. The voice told me to rape her too. To just take her. But I only touched her hair. What I wanted couldn’t be taken.
“Nothing to say, Jorg?” She spits again. This time it’s in my face. I blink. Warm spittle cools on my cheek. She wants me angry. She doesn’t care what I might do. “I bled your baby out. Before he was even big enough to see.”
And I don’t know what to say. What words would serve? I wouldn’t believe me. I have to believe my memory-things have been taken from it in the past, but never added-but who else would give Jorg of Ancrath the benefit of the doubt? Not me.
I fold Katherine’s arm up behind her and walk her through the graveyard, back the way I came. There are white marks where my fingers touched her skin. Did I grip her that hard? Imagination has put my hands on her many times, but this feels as though I’ve broken something precious and I’m carrying the pieces, knowing they can’t be reassembled.
“You’re going to do it again?” The anger has leaked from her. She sounds confused.
“No,” I say.
We walk on. Brambles catch at her dress. Her riding boots leave heel marks a blind man could follow. “I’ve left my horse tied,” she says. This isn’t the Katherine I left on the floor that day. That Katherine was sharp, clever; this one is dazed, as though just waking.
“I’m going to marry the Prince of Arrow,” she says, twisting to look at me over her shoulder.
“I thought you didn’t want to be a prize,” I say.
She looks away. “We can’t always have what we want.”
I need her. I wonder if I can have what I need.
We walk in silence until Red Kent steps out of the undergrowth before us. My sword is strapped over his shoulder. “King Jorg.” He nods. “My lady.”
“Take her to Sir Makin,” I say. I let her arm go.
Kent gestures for Katherine to lead the way along the trail he’s been guarding. “No kind of harm is to come to her, Kent. Watch Row and Rike particularly. Tell them you’ve my permission to cut from them any part that touches her. And move camp. We’ve left a trail from there to here.” I walk away.
“Where are you going?” she asks.
I stop and turn, wiping her spit from my cheek. “Who found you?”
“What?”
“Who found you after I hit you?” I ask. “A man was with you when you recovered your senses.”
She frowns. Her fingers touch the place where the vase shattered. “Friar Glen.” For the first time she sees me with her old eyes, clear and green and sharp. “Oh.”
I walk away.
Schnick and a heartbeat later the box closes again, snapped shut by numb fingers.
Back on the mountain, knee-deep in snow. My shin hurts. I tripped over a spade.
There are men to walk to the mountain with and then there are men that are the mountain. Gorgoth, though I may not call him brother, was forged from the qualities I lack.
28
Four years earlier
There are books in my father’s library that say no mountain ever spat lava within a thousand miles of Halradra before the Thousand Suns. They tell it that the Builders drilled into the molten blood of the Earth and drank its power. When the Suns scorched away all that the Builders had wrought, the wounds remained. The Earth bled and Halradra and his sons were born in fire.
Gorgoth carried me to where Sindri waited. The sun still shone outside though I felt it should be dark. I came to my senses halfway down the mountain, bouncing on Gorgoth’s broad back. They came one by one, my senses, first the pain and only the pain, then after an age, the smell of my own burned flesh, the taste of vomit, the sound of my moaning, and finally a blurred vision of Halradra’s black slopes.
“God, just kill me,” I whimpered. The tears dripped off my nose and lips, hanging as I was like a sack over Gorgoth’s shoulder.
It wasn’t Gog I was sorry for, it was me.
In my defence, having a hand-sized part of your face burned crisp is ridiculously painful. It hurt worse hanging there, bumping with the monster’s strides, than when it happened, and I had wanted to die back there in the cave.
“Kill me,” I moaned.
Gorgoth stopped. “Yes?”
I thought about it. “Christ Jesu.” I needed someone to hate, something to take my mind off the fire still eating into me. Gorgoth waited. He would take me at my word. I thought of my father with his young wife and new son, snug in the Tall Castle.
“Maybe later,” I said.
I remember only snippets until Gorgoth laid me down in the bracken and Sindri leaned over me.
“Uskit’r!” He fell back into the old tongue of the north. “That’s bad.”
“At least I’m still half-pretty.” I retched and turned my face to spit sour liquid into the ferns.
“Let’s get him back,” Sindri said. He looked around for a moment, opened his mouth then closed it.
“Gog’s gone,” I said.
Sindri shook his head and looked down. He drew a breath. “Come, we need to get you back. Gorgoth?”
The monster made no move.
“Gorgoth’s not coming,” I said.
Gorgoth bowed his head.
“You can’t stay here,” Sindri said, alarmed. “Ferrakind-”
“Ferrakind is gone too,” I said. Each word hurt, almost enough to make them into one scream.
“No?” Sindri’s mouth stayed open.
“We are not friends, Jorg of Ancrath,” Gorgoth said, deeper than he’d ever spoken. “But we both loved the boy. You loved him first. You named him. That means something.”
I would have told him what rubbish he was speaking but my face hurt too much for more words.
“I will stay in the Heimrift, in the caves.”
