Emperor of Thorns. Mark Lawrence

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      Several hundred horsemen throw up a lot of dust. We left the Matteracks in a shroud of our own making, the Gilden Guard stretched out across half a mile of winding mountain path. Their gleam didn’t survive long and we made a grey troop as we came to the plains.

      Makin and I rode together along the convolutions of the track on which we once met the Prince of Arrow, headed for my gates. Makin looked older now, a little iron in the black, worry lines across his brow. On the road Makin had always seemed happy. Since we came to wealth and fortune and castles he had taken to worry.

      ‘Will you miss her?’ he asked. For an hour just the clip and clop of hooves on stony ground, and then from nowhere, ‘Will you miss her?’

      ‘I don’t know.’ I’d grown fond of my little queen. When she wanted to she could excite me, as most women could: my eye is not hard to please. But I didn’t burn for her, didn’t need to have her, to keep her in my sight. More than fondness, I liked her, respected her quick mind and ruthless undercurrents. But I didn’t love her, not the irrational foolish love that can overwhelm a man, wash him away and strand him on unknown shores.

      ‘You don’t know?’ he asked.

      ‘We’ll find out, won’t we?’ I said.

      Makin shook his head.

      ‘You’re hardly the champion of true love, Lord Makin,’ I told him. In the six years since we came to the Haunt he had kept no woman with him, and if he had a mistress or even a favourite whore he had them well hidden.

      He shrugged. ‘I lost myself on the road, Jorg. Those were black years for me. I’m not fit company for any woman I’d desire.’

      ‘What? And I am?’ I turned in the saddle to watch him.

      ‘You were young. A boy. Sin doesn’t stick to a child’s skin the way it clings to a man’s.’

      My turn to shrug. He had seemed happier when murdering and robbing than he did thinking back on it in his vaulted halls. Perhaps he just needed something to worry about again, so he could stop worrying.

      ‘She’s a good woman, Jorg. And she’s going to make you a father soon. Have you thought about that?’

      ‘No,’ I said. ‘It had slipped my mind.’ In truth though it surfaced in my thoughts in each waking hour, and many dreaming ones. I couldn’t find a way to grip the idea and it did indeed slip from me. I knew a squalling infant would soon appear, but what that would mean to me – what it was to be a father – I had no hold on. Coddin told me I would know how to feel. Instinct would tell me – something written in the blood. And perhaps it would come to me, like a sneeze arriving when pepper’s in the air, but until it did I had no way of imagining it.

      ‘Perhaps you’ll be a good father,’ Makin said.

      ‘No.’ Whether I somehow came to understand the process or not I would make a poor father. I had failed my brother and I would doubtless fail my son. Somehow the curse Olidan of Ancrath bestowed on me, and got most likely from his own sire, would infect any child of mine.

      Makin pursed his lips but had the grace or the wisdom not to argue.

      There’s not much of the Renar Highlands that lies flat enough to grow crops on, but close to the border with Ancrath the land stops leaping and diving long enough for farming and for a city, of sorts. Hodd Town, my capital. I could see the stain of it on the horizon.

      ‘We’ll camp here,’ I said.

      Makin leaned in his saddle to tell Sir Riccard, and he raised my colours on his lance.

      ‘We СКАЧАТЬ