‘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. Only wrongs. ‘Don’t.’ The word choked him.

‘Death isn’t—’ And Red Kent died amid the circle of his brothers who did love him each in our way. ‘Isn’t what it was,’ I finished for him.

Chella stepped closer. No one moved to stop her. ‘He’s gone where you can’t follow, Jorg.’

‘You can’t.’ Marten’s voice thick with knowing.

‘Even now they tell me “can’t”, Makin,’ I said, half in sadness, half in the joy of ending. The bitter and the sweet. ‘They tell me “no” and think there must be something I won’t sacrifice to get what I want.’ What I need.

Makin looked up at that, confused but understanding we none of us were speaking of Kent. He struggled to rise and that’s when I hit him. A man like Makin you have to catch off-balance. I struck him hard enough to break my hand, and did. He fell boneless, one arm flopping out almost to Chella’s feet.

‘What?’ Rike took his gaze from Brother Kent, amazed.

‘He would have tried to stop me. Tell him he’s to be steward. An order, not a choice.’ I cradled my hand, let the pain sharpen away sorrow. ‘He would have tried to stop me. Even with his little girl gone all these years, he wouldn’t understand. Not Makin.’

‘Fuck Makin. I don’t understand.’ Rike bristled, the sword in his fist still dripping.

Movement at the Gilden Arch. Katherine, a sword clutched across her, unsteady.

‘Rike, glorious Rike! I knew I kept you around for a reason, Brother.’ I pulled the breastplate from me and opened my arms. ‘Do it.’

‘What?’ He stared as though I were mad.

‘I need to follow him, Rike. I need to find my brother.’

‘I—’

‘Kill me. You’ve threatened it often enough. Now I’m asking.’

Rike just stared, eyes wide and bright. Behind him Katherine had started to run toward us, shouting, begging me to stop or urging me on – I couldn’t tell.

‘I’m your fecking emperor. I command you.’

‘I—’ And the big idiot looked at his sword as if it were a foreign thing. ‘No.’ And dropped it.

And that’s when Chella stabbed me. My brother’s knife, taken from his corpse, stuck near enough into the wound that father gave me. She went one better though, and twisted the blade. Our final kiss.

‘Go to hell, Jorg Ancrath.’ The last words I ever heard.

53

On the road my brothers spoke of death many a time. The stranger who walked with us. But more than they talked of death they talked of dying, and often the business of avoiding it. Brother Burlow would speak of the light. The light that came to a man lying in his blood, when more of it lay out than in.

‘I’ve heard men say it starts so faint, like a dawn, Brothers. And you look and you find yourself in the tunnel that’s your life, that you’ve walked in darkness all your years.’

Burlow was a reader, you understand. It doesn’t pay to trust a lettered man on the road, Brothers, their heads are full of other men’s ideas.

‘But don’t look into that light,’ he said. ‘For sweet as it might be, there’s no coming back from there, and it will draw you in, yes it will. I’ve sat by too many men, laid broken on the verge, and heard them whisper about that light through dry lips. They none of them walked the road again.’

At least that’s how Fat Burlow had it. And maybe his light was sweet, Brothers. But I’ve looked into that light and it comes at first as a cold star in the dark of night. Closer and more close it draws, or you are drawn – these things are equal in a place without time – and you come to know it for what it is. A white hunger, Brothers, the incinerating incandescence of the furnace mouth, ready to consume you utterly.

That light took me in and it spat me out, far from the world.

I thought I knew death. I thought it dry. But the death I fell into was an ocean, cold and infinite and the colour of forever. And I hung there, without time, or up, or down. Waiting, always waiting, for an angel.

This death fell wet upon me.

I spat the water from a dry mouth. A cry escaped me and the pain came again, too deep to be endured. Lightning flashed and the thorns and coils of the briar made sharp black shapes against the sky. The rain lashed cold, and I hung in its embrace, unable to fall.

‘The thorns.’ My senses had left me for a moment.

A second crack of lightning, across the rolling thunder of the previous stroke. The carriage lay beside the road, figures moving all about it.