He took a step back. For a moment in place of swirling smoke he saw a line of brittle blue sky. Come morning this place would be blackened spars, fallen walls. Years ago, when they had lifted him from that ditch, more dead than alive, they had carried him past the ruins of his home. He hadnt known then that Cerys lay within, beneath soot-black stones and stinking char.
Somehow Makin found himself inside the building, the air hot, suffocating, and thick with smoke around him. He couldnt remember deciding to enter. Bent double he found he could just about breathe beneath the worst of the smoke, and with stinging, streaming eyes he staggered on.
A short corridor brought him to the great hall. Here the belly of the smoke lay higher, a dark and roiling ceiling that he would have to reach up to touch. Flames scaled the walls wherever a tapestry or panelling gave them a path. The crackling roar deafened him, the heat taking the tears from his eyes. A tapestry behind him, that had been smouldering when he passed it, burst into bright flames all along its length.
A number of pallets for the sick lined the room, many askew or overturned. Makin tried to draw breath to call for the prince but the air scorched his lungs and left him gasping. A moment later he was on his knees, though he had no intention to fall. Prince Jorg a whisper.
The heat pressed him to the flagstones like a great hand, sapping the strength from him, leaving each muscle limp. Makin knew that he would die there. Cerys. His lips framed her name and he saw her, running through the meadow, blonde, mischievous, beautiful beyond any words at his disposal. For the first time in forever the vision wasnt razor-edged with sorrow.
With his cheek pressed to the stone floor Makin saw the prince, also on the ground. Over by the great hearth one of the heaps of bedding from the fallen pallets had a face among its folds.
Makin crawled, the hands he put before him blistered and red. One bundle, missed in the smoke, proved to be a man, the friars muscular orderly, a fellow named Inch. A burning timber had fallen from above and blazed across his arm. The boy looked no more alive: white-faced, eyes closed, but the fire had no part of him. Makin snagged the boys leg and hauled him back across the hall.
Pulling the nine-year-old felt harder than dragging a fallen stallion. Makin gasped and scrabbled for purchase on the stones. The smoke ceiling now held just a few feet above the floor, dark and hot and murderous.
I Makin heaved the boy and himself another yard. Cant He slumped against the floor. Even the roar of the fire seemed distant now. If only the heat would let up he could sleep.
He felt them rather than saw them. Their presence to either side of him, luminous through the smoke. Nessa and Cerys, hands joined above him. He felt them as he had not since the day they died. Both had been absent from the burial. Cerys wasnt there as her little casket of ash and bone was lowered, lily-covered into the cold ground. Nessa didnt hear the choir sing for her, though Makin had paid their passage from Everan and selected her favourite hymns. Neither of them had watched when he killed the men who had led the assault. Those killings had left him dirty, further away from the lives hed sought revenge for. Now though, both Nessa and Cerys stood beside him, silent, but watching, lending him strength.
They tell me you were black and smoking when you crawled from the Healing Hall. King Olidan watched Makin from his throne, eyes wintry beneath an iron crown.
I have no memory of it, highness. Makins first memory was of coughing his guts up in the barracks, with the burns across his back an agony beyond believing. The prince had been taken into Friar Glens care once more, hours earlier.
My son has no memory of it either, the king said. He escaped the friars watch and ran for the woods, still delirious. Father Gomst says the princes fever broke some days after his recapture.
Im glad of it, highness. Makin tried not to move his shoulders despite the ache of his scars, only now ceasing to weep after weeks of healing.
It is my wish that Prince Jorg remain ignorant of your role, Makin.
Yes, highness. Makin nodded.
I should say, Sir Makin. The king rose from his throne and descended the dais, footsteps echoing beneath the low ceiling of his throne room. You are to be one of my table knights. Recognition of the risks you took in saving my son.
My thanks, highness. Makin bowed his head.
Sir Grehem tells me you are a changed man, Sir Makin. The castle guard have taken you to their hearts. He says that you have many friends among them King Olidan stood behind him, footsteps silent for a moment. My son does not need friends, Sir Makin. He does not need to think he will be saved should ill befall him. He does not need debts. The king walked around Makin, his steps slow and even. They were of a height, both tall, both strong, the king a decade older. Young Jorg burns around the hurt he has taken. He burns for revenge. Its this singularity of purpose that a king requires, that my house has always nurtured. Thrones are not won by the weak. They are not kept except by men who are hard, cold, focused. King Olidan came front and centre once more, holding Makins gaze and in his eyes Makin found more to fear than he had in the jaws of the fire. Do we understand each other, Sir Makin?
Yes, highness. Makin looked away.
You may go. See Sir Grehem about your new duties.
Yes, highness. And Makin turned on his heel, starting the long retreat to the great doors.
He walked the whole way with the weight of King Olidans regard upon him. Once the doors were closed behind him, once he had walked to the grand stair, only then did Makin speak the words he couldnt say to Olidan, words the king would never hear, however loud-spoken. I didnt save your son. He saved me.
Returning to his duties, Makin knew that however long the child pursued his vengeance it would never fill him, never heal the wounds he had taken. The prince might grow to be as cold and dangerous as his father, but Makin would guard him, give him the time he needed, because in the end nothing would save the boy except his own moment in the doorway, with his own fire ahead and his own cowardice behind. Makin could tell him that of course but there are many gaps in this world and there are some that words cant cross.
Footnote
Makin has always been an interesting character for me, a failed father-figure if you like. He should be Jorgs moral touchstone but too often finds himself swept along by the force of Jorgs personality and by the chaos/cruelty of the life hes entangled in. We root for him to recover himself.
Sleeping Beauty
A kiss woke me. A cool kiss pulled me from the hot depths of my dreaming. Lips touched mine, and deep as I was, dark as I was, I knew her, and let her lead me.
Katherine? I spoke her name but made no sound. A whiteness left me blind. I closed my eyes just to see the dark. Katherine? A whisper this time. Damn but my throat hurt.
I turned my head, finding it a ponderous thing, as if my muscles strove to turn the world around me whilst I remained without motion. A white ceiling rotated into white walls. A steel surface came into view, gleaming and stainless.
Now I knew something beyond her name. I knew white walls and a steel table. Where I was, who I was, were things yet to be discovered.
Jorg. The name felt right. It fitted my mouth and my person. Hard and direct.
I could see a sprawl of long black hair spread across the shining table, reaching from beneath my cheek, overhanging the edge. Had Katherine climbed it to deliver her kiss? My vision swam, my thoughts with it was I drunk or worse? I didnt feel myself I might not yet know who I was, but I knew enough to say that.
Images came and went, replacing the room. Names floated up from the back of my mind. Vyene. I had a barber cut my hair almost to the scalp when I left Vyene. I remembered the snip of his shears and the dark heap of my locks, tumbled across his tiled floor. Hakon had mocked me when I emerged cold-headed into the autumn chill.
Hakon? I tried to hang details upon the void beneath his name. Tall, lean no more than twenty, his beard short and bound tight by an iron ring beneath his chin. Jorg the Bald! hed greeted me and fanned out his own golden mane across his shoulders, bright against wolfskins.
Watch your mouth. Id said it without rancour. These Norse have little enough respect for royalty. Mind you neither do I. Has my beauty fled me? I mocked sorrow. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in war, Hakon. I surrendered my lovely locks. Then I watched them burn. In the battle of man against lice I am the victor, whilst you, my friend, still crawl. I sacrificed one beauty for another. My own, in exchange for the cries of my enemies. They died by the thousand, in the fire.
Lice dont scream. They pop.
I recalled the bristling of scalp beneath palm as I rubbed my head trying to find an answer to that one. I tried now to touch the hair spread out before me across the steel but found my hands restrained. I made to sit up but a strap across my chest held me down. Straining, I could see five more straps binding me to the table, running across my chest, stomach, hips, legs, and ankles. I wore nothing else. Tubes ran from glass bottles on a stand above me, down into the veins of my left wrist.
This room, this white and windowless chamber, had not been made by any people of the Broken Empire. No smith could have fashioned the table, and the plasteek tubes lay beyond the art of some kings alchemist. I had woken out of time, led by dreams and a kiss to some den of the Builders.
The kiss! I flung my head to the other side, half-expecting to find Katherine standing there, silent beside the table. But no only sterile white walls. Her scent lingered though. White musk, fainter than faint, but more real than dream.
Me, a table, a simple room of harsh angles, kept warm and light by some invisible artifice. The warmth enfolded me. My last memories had been of cold. Hakon and me trudging through the snow-bound forests of eastern Slov, a week out from Vyene. We picked our path between the pines where the ground lay clearest, leading our horses. Both of us huddled in our furs, me with only a hood and a quarter inch of hair to keep my head from freezing. Winter had fallen upon us, hard, early, and unannounced.
Its buggery cold, I said unnecessarily, letting my breath plume before me.
Ha! In the true north wed call this a valley spring. Hakon, frost in his beard, hands buried in leather mittens lined with fur.
Yes? I pushed through the pine branches, hearing them snap and the frost scatter down. Then how come you look as cold as I feel?
Ah. A grin cracked his wind-reddened cheeks. In the north we stay by the hearth until summer.
We should have stayed by that last hearth then. I floundered through snow, banked along a break in the trees.
I didnt like the company.
I had no answer for that. Exhaustion had its teeth in me and my bones lay cold in white flesh.
The house in question had stood implausibly deep in the forest, so isolated that Hakon had been convinced the tales of a witch were true.
Dont be stupid, Id told him. If theres a witch living in the forest and she eats children then shes going to want to live on the edge, isnt she? I mean how often does a little Gerta or Hans come wandering this far in?
Hakon had caved beneath the undeniable weight of my logic. Wed gone to ask for shelter, and failing it being offered, to take it. The door stood ajar never a good sign in a winter storm, and the snow in front of the porch lay heavily trodden, covered with a fresh fall that obscured detail.
Somethings not right. Hakon unslung his axe, a heavy, single-bladed thing with a long cutting edge, curved to bite deeper.
Id nodded and advanced, silent save for the crump of fresh snow beneath my boots. Reaching out with my sword, I pushed the door wider. My theory about little girls and the middle of forests didnt survive the hallway. A child lay sprawled there, golden curls splashed with crimson, arms and legs at broken angles. I advanced another step, my nose wrinkled against the stink. Blood, the reek of guts, and something else, something rank and feral.
A hand clamped my shoulder and I nearly spun to hack it off. What?
We should leave the witch
Theres no witch living here. I pointed at the corpse. Unless shes got teeth big enough to bite a girls face off, a taste for entrails, and a nasty habit of shitting in her own hallway. I pointed to the brown mound by the foot of the stairs, which, unlike the girls guts, was still steaming ever so slightly.
Bear! Hakon released my shoulder and started to back away. Lets run.
Lets, I agreed.
A big black head thrust out from beneath the stairs as we retreated to the horses. I saw another bear, larger still, through the broken shutters to the side of the house, licking out a bowl in the kitchen. And, as we reached our steeds and started to hurry away, a cub watched us from the attic bedroom, its wet muzzle thrust out between the winter boarding, teeth scarlet.
Why did it have to be bears? If it had been a witch Id have stuck my sword through her neck and moved in. Bears though Better to run, even if its out into the killing cold.
Each step sapped my strength as the heat left me, stolen a scrap at a time, squandered into the night air with every breath.
I plodded on, deep in myself, refusing exhaustion. It had been time to leave Vyene, whether winter was approaching or not. I might regret it now, freezing in the pathless forest, but Id stayed too long. Sometimes the dream of a place sucks you in and before you know it youre part of that dream too. In a city as grand and as old as Vyene the dream is one of glory, steeped in history, but like all dreams its an illusion that will use you up while grass grows under your feet, while thorns spring up, dense on all sides, and hem you in. A kiss had woken me there too. Elin, leaving with her brother, Sindri, to their halls and duties in the north. Hakon had wanted to stay, but hed had enough of the ancient capital and wanted to see the provinces, to slum it with the King of Renar. And so wed left, escaped the trap of intrigue and politicking that was Vyene, shook ourselves free before its soft jaws closed entirely around us, and moved along.
Full night and a bitter moon found us some miles further on, breaking from the treeline and setting out across a snowfield where the land turned stony and started to rise. Snow began to fall once more, large-flaked, ghostly, ponderous at first, then rushing as the wind picked up again.