Prince of Thorns (Broken Empire #1)

by Mark Lawrence

Hate will keep you alive where love fails.

I’ve been known to be contrary. When something pushes me, I shove back. Even if the one doing the pushing is me.

Anger carries less horror with it, men understand anger. It promises resolution; maybe bloody resolution, but swift.

Lundist held that a man who can observe is a man apart. Such a man can see opportunities where others see only the obstacles on the surface of each situation.

It’s always been that way with me. Answers come when I stop trying to think it through and just speak. The best plan I’ll come up with is the one that happens when I act.

But in the night, before the dreams come, a voice whispers to me that it was fear that held me back, terror that rooted me in the briar, safe while I watched them die.

Every waking hour I felt an ache, a pain that grew each time I turned the memory over in my hand. And I returned to it, time and again, like a tongue to the socket of a missing tooth, drawn by the absence.

And, because in some hard core of me, in some stubborn trench of selfish refusal, I could not, even at ten years of age, surrender to anything or anyone, I fought that pain.

I cut from myself all the weakness of care. The love for my dead, I put aside, secure in a casket, an object of study, a dry exhibit, no longer bleeding, cut loose, set free. The capacity for new love, I burned out. I watered it with acid until the ground lay barren and nothing there would sprout, no flower take root.

I wondered if he thought I lacked the imagination for fear. Some men are too dull to feel what might happen. Others torture themselves with maybes and populate their dreams with horrors more terrible than their worst enemy could inflict upon them.

Wait when waiting is called for. That’s what Lundist used to tell me. But never hesitate.

remember his name when I saw him in the doorway. But something about the girl made me want to be the kind of man who would remember.

It was a test. That was just how we spoke. Every conversation a game of poker, every line a bet or a raise, a bluff or a call.

Strength requires sacrifice. All weakness carries its cost.

Strange how the deeper a hole the stronger it draws a man. The fascination that lives on the keenest edge, and sparkles on the sharpest point, also gathers in depths of a fall. I felt the pull of it every moment of that climb.

“Thieves and road-scum the lot of you. Tell the Devil I said to take good care of you.”

guess when the Builders bought their hellfire from Lucifer they must have paid for it with their imaginations.

“Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you’ll find an edge to cut you.” I looked into my own darkness. I knew what it was to be trapped, and to watch ruination. “Each day the memories weigh a little heavier. Each day they drag you down that bit further. You wind them around you, a single thread at a time, and you weave your own shroud, you build a cocoon, and in it madness grows.” The lights pulsed beneath my fingers, ebbing and flowing to the beat of my voice. “You sit here with your yesterdays queuing at your shoulder. You listen to their reproach and curse those that gave you life.”

The road may go ever on, but we don’t: we wear out, we break. Age makes different things of different men. It will harden some, sharpen them, to a point.

Hold to a thing long enough, a secret, a desire, maybe a lie, and it will shape you.

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 was like Gog’s little wooden soldier, running in wild and meaningless circles. I can’t say I’m sorry for the things I did. But I’m done with them. I wouldn’t repeat those choices. I remember them. Blood is on these hands, these ink-stained hands, but I don’t feel the sin. I think maybe we die every day. Maybe we’re born new each dawn, a little changed, a little further on our own road. When enough days stand between you and the person you were, you’re strangers. Maybe that’s what growing up is. Maybe I have grown up.