existence for you. When to move and when to stay. Dwell too long and we become the prisoner of our dreams, or someone else’s. Move too fast, live without pause, and you’ll miss it all, your whole life a blur of doing. Good lives are built of moments – of times when we step back and truly see. The dream and the dreamer. There’s the rub. Does the dream ever let go? Aren’t we all only sleepwalking into old age, just waiting, waiting, waiting for that kiss?
Bleeding, smeared with muck and ash, I staggered down the hill, all that survived the purge of Bunker 17. I might be counted one more ill to be visited upon the world, for I could hardly be called its hope. But, hope or horror, I had endured. I had been delivered from the thorns in fire and pain and set free.
I ran a hand across the baldness of my scalp and felt my mouth twist in its old smile, a bitter one to be sure – but not only bitter.
‘Sleeping beauty, woken by the princess’s kiss,’ I said.
And so I set off to find her.
Footnote
This was the first Broken Empire short story I wrote, prompted by a reader daring me to do a Jorg/fairy-tale mash-up. It’s framed around Sleeping Beauty but has a nod to Goldilocks and even Rapunzel! Chronologically it takes place between the two threads in Emperor of Thorns, before the Wedding Day thread in King of Thorns, on Jorg’s return to Ancrath from his first visit to Vyene. Hakon is a character seen in The Red Queen’s War trilogy.
Did Katherine wake Jorg using her dream-magic, or was it just a failure of the ageing machinery? That’s for the reader to decide.
At the age of eight Alann Oak took a rock and smashed it into Darin Reed’s forehead. Two other boys, both around ten years old, had tried to hold him against the fence post while Darin beat him. They got up from the dirt track, first to their hands and knees, one spitting blood, the other dripping crimson from where Alann’s teeth found his ear, then unsteadily to their feet. Darin Reed lay where he had fallen, staring at the blue sky with wide blue eyes.
‘Killer,’ they called the child after that. Some called ‘kennt’ at his back and the word followed him through the years as some words will hunt a man down across the storm of his days. Kennt, the old name for a man who does murder with his hands. An ancient term in the tongue that lingered in the villages west of the Tranweir, spoken only among the greyheads and like to die out with them, leaving only a scatter of words and phrases that fitted too well in the mouth to be abandoned.
‘You forgive me, Darin, don’t you?’ Alann asked it of the older boy a year later. They sat at the ford, watching the water, flowing white around the stepping-stones. Alann threw his pebble, clattering it against the most distant of the nine steps. ‘I told Father Abram I repented the sin of anger. They washed me in the blood of the lamb. Father Abram told me I was part of the flock once more.’ Another stone, another hit. He had repented anger, but there hadn’t been anger, just the thrill of it, the red joy in a challenge answered.
Darin stood, still taller than Alann but not by so much. ‘I don’t forgive you, but I wronged you. I was a bully. Now we’re brothers. Brothers don’t need to forgive, only to accept. If I forgave the blow you might forget me.’
‘Father Abram told me …’ Alann struggled for the words. ‘He said, men don’t stand alone. We’re farmers. We’re of the flock, the herd. God’s own. We follow. To stray is to be cast out. Strays die alone. Unmourned.’ He threw again, hit again. ‘But … I feel … alone here, right among the herd. I don’t fit. People are scared of me.’
Darin shook his head. ‘You’re not alone. You’ve got me. How many brothers do you need?’
Alann fought no more battles, not with his first wreaking such harm. They watched him, the priest and the elders, and hung about by his guilt the boy stepped aside from whatever small troubles life in the village placed in his path. Alann Oak turned the other cheek though it was not in his nature to do so. Something ran through him, something sharp, at the core, not the dull anger or jealous loathing that prompts drunks to raise their fists, rather a reflex, an urge to meet each and any challenge with the violence born into him.
‘I’m different.’ Spoken on his fourteenth name-day, out in the quiet of a winter’s night while others lay abed. Alann hadn’t the words to frame it but he knew it for truth. ‘Different.’
‘A dog among goats?’ Darin Reed at his side, untroubled by the cold. He swept his arm toward the distant homes where warmth and light leaked through shutter cracks. ‘With them but not of them?’
Alann nodded.
‘It will change,’ Darin said. ‘Give it time.’
Years fell by and with the seasons Alann Oak grew, not tall but tall enough, not broad but sturdy, hardened by toil on the land with plough and hoe. He walked away from his past, although he never once strayed further than Kilter’s Market seven miles down the Hay Road. He walked away from the whispers, from the muttered ‘kennt’, and all that came with him from those days was Darin Reed, the larger child but the smaller man, his fast companion, pale, quiet, true.
The smoke of war darkened the horizon some summers, and once in winter, but the fires that sent those black clouds rising passed by the villages of the Marn, peace still lingering in the backwaters of the Broken Empire just as the old tongue still clung there. Perhaps they lacked the language for war.
Sometimes those unseen battles called to Alann. In the stillness of night, wrapped tight by darkness, Alann often wondered what a thing it would be to take up sword and shield and fight, not for any cause, not to place this lord or that lord in a new chair – but just to meet the challenge, to put himself to the test that runs along the sharp edge of life. And maybe once or twice he gathered his belongings in the quiet after midnight and set off from his parents’ cottage – but each time he found Darin, sat upon the horse trough beside the track that joins the road to Melsham. Each time the sight of his blood brother, pale beneath the moon, watching and saying nothing, turned Alann back the way he came.
Alann found himself a woman, Mary Miller from Fairfax, and they married in Father Abram’s church on a chill March morning, God himself watching as they said their vows. God and Darin Reed.
More years, more seasons, more crops leaping from the ground in the green storm of their living, reaped and harvested, sheep with their lambs, Mary with her two sons, delivered bloody into Alann’s rough hands. As red as Darin Reed when he lay there veiled in his own lifeblood. And family changed him. The need to be needed proved stronger than the call of distant wars. Perhaps that was all he had ever looked for, to be valued, to be essential, and who is more vital to a child than its ma and pa?
Time ran its slow course, bearing farm and farmer along with it, and Alann watched it all pass. He held his boys with his calloused hands, nails bitten to the quick, prayed in God’s stone house, knowing every hour of every day that somehow he didn’t fit into his world, that he went through the motions of his life not quite feeling any of it the way it should be felt, an impostor who never knew his true identity, only that this was not it. Even so, it was enough.
‘None of them see me, Darin, not Mary, not my sons, or Father Abram. Only you, and God.’ Alann thrust at the soil before him, driving the hoe through each clod, reducing it to smaller fragments.
‘Maybe you don’t see yourself, Alann. You’re a good man. You just don’t know it.’ Darin stood looking out across the rye in the lower field.
‘I’m a bad seed. You learned that the day you came against me.’ Alann bent and took up a clod of earth, crumbling it in his hand. He pointed across the broken earth to where Darin’s gaze rested. ‘I sowed that field myself, checked the grains, but there’ll be karren grass amongst the rye, green amongst the green. You won’t see it until it’s time to bear grain – even then you have to hunt. But come an early frost, come red-blight,