“Pride is a sin too, Jorg. Deadliest of the Seven. You have to let it go.” At last, a hint of challenge in her words. All I needed to give me strength.
“Have to?” Darkness swirled around us.
She held out her hands. The dark grew and her light quailed.
“Pride?” I said, my smile dancing now. “I am pride! Let the meek have their inheritance-I’d rather have eternity in shadows than divine bliss at the price you ask.” It wasn’t true, but to speak otherwise, to take her hand rather than to bite it, would leave nothing of me, nothing but pieces.
Glimmers held her now, glimmers against the velvet blackness. “Lucifer spoke thus. Pride took him from heaven, though he sat at God’s right hand.” Her voice grew faint, the hint of a whisper. “In the end pride is the only evil, the root of all sins.”
“Pride is all I have.”
I swallowed the night, and the night swallowed me.
39
“He’s not dead yet?” A woman’s voice, Teuton accent with a creak of age in it.
“No.” A younger woman, familiar, also Teuton.
“It’s not natural to linger so long,” the older woman said. “And so white. He looks dead to me.”
“There was a lot of blood. I didn’t know men had so much blood in them.”
Katherine! Her face came to me in my darkness. Green eyes, and the sculpted angles of her cheekbones.
“White and cold,” she said, her fingers on my wrist. “But there’s mist on the mirror when I hold it to his lips.”
“Put a pillow over his face and be done with it, I say.” I imagined my hands around the crone’s neck. That brought a hint of warmth.
“I did want to see him die,” Katherine said. “After what he did to Galen. I would have watched him die on the steps of the throne, with all that blood running down, one step after the next, and been glad.”
“The King should have slit his throat. Finished the job there and then.” The old woman again. She had a servant’s tone about her. Voicing her opinion in the security of a private place, opinions held back too long and grown bitter in the silence.
“It’s a cruel man who will take a knife to his only son, Hanna.”
“Not his only son. Sareth carries your nephew. The child will be born to his due inheritance now.”
“Will they keep him here, do you think?” Katherine said. “Will they lay him in his mother’s casket, beside his brother?”
“Lay the whelps with the bitch and seal the room, I say.”
“Hanna!” I heard Katherine move away from me.
They’d taken me to my mother’s tomb, a small chamber in the vaults. The last time I’d visited the dust had lain thick, unmarked by footprints.
“She was a queen, Hanna,” Katherine said. I heard her brush at something. “You can see the strength in her.”
Mother’s likeness had been carved into her coffer’s marble lid, as if she lay there at rest, her hands together in devotion.
“Sareth is prettier,” Hanna said.
Katherine returned to my side. “Strength makes a queen.” I felt her fingers on my forehead.
Four years ago. Four years ago I’d touched that marble cheek, and vowed never to return. That was my last tear. I wondered if Katherine had touched her face, wondered if she’d stroked the same stone.
“Let me end this, my princess. It would be a kindness to the boy. They’ll lay him with his mother and the little prince.” Hanna honeyed her voice. She set her hand to my throat, fingers coarse like sharkskin.
“No.”
“You said yourself that you wanted to see him die,” Hanna said. She had strength in that old hand. She’d throttled a chicken or three in her time, had Hanna. Maybe a baby once or twice. The pressure built, slow but sure.
“On the steps I did, while his blood was hot,” Katherine said. “But I’ve watched him cling to life for so long, with such a slight hold, it’s become a habit. Let him fall when he’s ready. It’s not a wound that can be survived. Let him choose his own time.”
The pressure built a little more.
“Hanna!”
The hand withdrew.
40
We wrap up our violent and mysterious world in a pretence of understanding. We paper over the voids in our comprehension with science or religion, and make believe that order has been imposed. And, for the most of it, the fiction works. We skim across surfaces, heedless of the depths below. Dragonflies flitting over a lake, miles deep, pursuing erratic paths to pointless ends. Until that moment when something from the cold unknown reaches up to take us.
The biggest lies we save for ourselves. We play a game in which we are gods, in which we make choices, and the current follows in our wake. We pretend a separation from the wild. Pretend that a man’s control runs deep, that civilization is more than a veneer, that reason will be our companion in dark places.
I learned these lessons in my tenth year, although little of them stayed with me. It took Corion only moments to teach me, the heart beats in which my will guttered like a candle flame in the wind, and then blew out utterly
I lay with the Nuban, boneless on the stairs. Only my eyes would move, and they followed the old man. He could have looked kindly in a different light. He had something of Tutor Lundist about him, though more gaunt, more hungry. The horror wasn’t in his face, or even his eyes, just in the knowing that these were mere skins, stretched taut across all the emptiness in the world.
The sight of him, an old man in a dirty robe, put the kind of fear into me that shame erases from our memories. The fear the rabbit has when the eagle strikes. The kind of fright that makes a nothing of you. The kind of fear that’d make you sacrifice mother, brother, everything and anything you’ve ever loved, just for the chance to run.
Corion shuffled closer, and stooped to take my wrist. In one instant the touch silenced the raw terror that had so unmanned me. As completely as if he’d turned the spigot on a wine-barrel, the flow stopped. Without a word he hauled me into his room. I felt the flagstones scrape my cheek.
The chamber held nothing, save for the Nuban’s crossbow, propped against the far wall. I imagined Corion closeted here in his empty chamber, a place to leave his old flesh whilst he stared into eternity.
“So, Sageous’s hunter finally tracked down something with more bite than him, eh?”
I tried to speak, but my lips didn’t as much as twitch. He knew about the dream-witch and his hunter. He’d called me the Thorn Prince. What else did he know?
“I know it all, child. The things you know, the secrets you hold. Even the secrets you’ve forgotten.”
He could read my mind!
“Like an open scroll.” Corion nodded. He turned my head with his boot, so that I could see the Nuban’s bow once more.
“You intrigue me, Honorous Jorg Ancrath,” he said. He moved to stand beside the bow. “You’re wondering why a man with such power isn’t emperor over all the lands.”
I was too.
