Luntar’s paper fluttered from my sleeve. I picked it up as the dead guards toppled, in scores, then hundreds, all around the room.
‘You can save him.’ Four words. The future-sworn see less than they think. I had stabbed my brother.
‘I don’t understand.’ Makin shouldered a corpse off him, rivulets of dark blood across half his face in three parallel lines. He spoke into the speechless moment. ‘How did you kill him?’
‘I watched him die.’ I muttered the words. ‘I stayed hidden and let them kill him.’
Makin half-climbed, half-crawled, to me.
‘What?’ He set a hand to my wrist, stilling the tremble in the dripping dagger. I let the blade fall.
‘I didn’t kill him. He was already dead. He died eleven years ago.’
Marten came from behind, shoulder laid open to the bone, an ear missing. He took the paper from me, awkward in trembling fingers. ‘Save who?’
‘My brother, William. The Dead King. Always quicker, more clever, stronger-willed. And yet it never occurred to me that death wouldn’t be able to hold him.’
‘Death isn’t what it used to be.’ Perhaps the wisest words ever to come from Red Kent’s lips. He lay dying among the dead, among the foe he had laid low, so torn there could be only minutes left to him. Makin went to his side.
‘Miana!’ As I shouted it I knew a hint of the pain I would feel were she not to answer. Fewer than half the Hundred still survived, many fewer. I saw no sign of Sindri, of my grandfather or uncle. Ibn Fayed I saw. At least I saw his head.
‘Here.’ And I found her, almost pinned to the wall behind Gorgoth’s bulk. The red trolls lay broken in the carnage. Gorgoth unfolded, dripping and ripped. In one hand he held my son against his chest.
Something struck through me, seeing my child, there in that moment. Something sharper than edges. A certainty. The knowing that my father had failed to mould me in his image. I loved that baby, small and bloodied and ugly as he was. The denial had run from me. And with that knowing came another: the certainty that I could only ever hurt him. That the taint of my father would drip from my fingers unbidden and make another monster of my son.
I staggered back and fell into my throne. An autumn leaf swirled around my feet, brought in with the dead. A single maple leaf, scarlet with the season’s sin. A sign. In that moment I knew myself too full of poison to do anything but drop. The fall had come for me. With numb fingers I undid the straps on my breastplate.
‘Still …’ Marten shook his head and crouched beside Kai. ‘A child. A boy. What was he? Ten?’
‘Seven.’
‘A boy of seven. Lost in the deadlands. Fought his way out? Became king?’ With each question he shook his head. I could see the possibilities bubbling inside him.
You can save him. Luntar’s words. A man who saw the future.
‘I’ll bet he gave them hell.’ A grim smile tugged at me. I wondered if that same angel, the one that came to me past death’s doorstep, had visited little William. I wondered what short shrift he gave her. ‘I’ll bet he took the hardest path.’ Like the Conaught spear, William would have hauled himself deeper, aimed for the heart of darkness, found the lichkin. The rest lay beyond my imagining.
Kai sprawled, shattered and empty, William gone, the dead fallen, only Chella standing amid the gleam of their armour. My enemies defeated, and yet the sorrow remained, keener, more true, more clean, for I had always owned it. It echoed back to the thorns, the tone of a bell resounding through the years. We’re fashioned by our sorrows – not by joy – they are the undercurrent, the refrain. Joy is fleeting.
‘I let the thorns hold me, and a crack has run through all my days, deeper than the feelings it divides.’ The calligraphy of those scars lay writ across me still, white upon my flesh. ‘To everything there is a season.’ I spoke Ecclesiasticus. ‘A time to be born. A time to die.’
‘He will return: you can’t destroy him.’ Chella from the heaped corpses, her former troops. She sounded neither happy nor sad. More lost.
‘I don’t want to destroy him,’ I said. ‘He’s my brother. It was given to me to save him.’ I knew what to do. I had always known. I set a hand to the throne. ‘I hadn’t known how bitter-sweet this would taste.’ Across the hall my son cried in his mother’s arms, both of them beautiful. My brother would always return and my boy would never be safe, for our pain had become a wheel and the world lay broken. My brother, my son, my fault.
A tear made its slow passage across my cheek.
I stood somehow, though the strength had gone from me. And joined Makin, standing above him as he knelt with Kent. Marten at my shoulder. Rike came across, bloodied but whole, a gold chain decorated in diamonds and gore hanging from one fist, almost an afterthought.
‘I don’t want to destroy him,’ I said. ‘I want to save him. I should have saved him back when the thorns held me. Nothing has been right since then.’ Fear shook me, sudden, fierce, fear of what I had to do, fear that I hadn’t the courage.
‘No.’ Marten behind me. Marten would always be the first to understand. Marten who failed his son, who let his boy die. There are no rights and wrongs in such matters.
