H
e already knew what his Helstrovian second-in-command wanted, but still he let Velmont explain it in the most dramatic terms. That, at least, meant spending some time on the rooftops. The two of them raced each other across the Stink and up into the no longer aptly named Smoke, that zone of manufactories and work yards that girdled the city and now lay mostly quiet, cold, and unproductive. Even the terrible smell of the place had dissipated. “There, brother, what do you see?” Velmont asked, pointing down into the courtyard of the city’s biggest grain mill.
“I see wheels that aren’t turning, and wheat rotting in sacks,” Malden said. The giant mills needed oxen to turn them, and the rich merchants had taken all the best livestock when they fled the city, long before Malden’s return. Now the mill wheels stood silent and unmoving. Some needed replacement, too, but none of the workers remaining in the Smoke—a bare handful of those who’d been there before the Burgrave enlisted all their fellows—knew how to lever a mill wheel off its axle.
“Slag says he has a solution,” Malden told Velmont. The dwarf had been working even longer hours than Malden on one project or another. “A way to use the current of the river Skrait to turn the wheels.”
“Won’t the grain get wet if you put ’em in yon river?” Velmont asked, looking confused.
“Don’t second-guess a dwarf when he says he’s invented something new,” Malden told the Helstrovian.
“Won’t matter, anyroad,” Velmont said, his shoulders slumping. “Come, keep up if you can, and follow me uphill. There’s more to see, and worse.”
The two of them hurried across the roofs of the Smoke and up the Golden Slope toward Castle Hill. It was not a place Malden truly wanted to see ever again. The burnt-out stones of the palace and the fallen public buildings were a mute accusation of guilt he would never be able to atone for. Yet when Velmont led him along the fire-besmirched wall to a place near the back of the courtyard, Malden saw why they’d come, and his stomach fell.
Six square towers stood along the back wall of the hill, each of them windowless and very tall, with a single thick door at the bottom. Each once possessed a steep conical lead-lined roof to keep snow and rain off, but the roofs had all melted in the fire.
“Not the granaries,” Malden moaned.
“Aye, yer lordship. Ever last one of ’em.” Velmont squatted on the battlements and then leapt over to the top of the nearest tower. Malden followed him down through the ruined top of the granary and they clambered down through scorched support beams to the level of the grain inside.
An entire harvest’s worth of wheat had gone into these towers before the barbarians came to Skrae. A winter’s worth of flour, once it was ground and sifted. Winter was always a lean time in Ness, a time of hunger when many of the poor died for lack of bread. The Burgrave kept these granaries full so that when the coldest months came, he would have something to distribute to his people, if only to keep them from rioting while he dined on succulent venison and rare sweetmeats in his palace.
This year there would be nothing to hand out. Malden knelt in the grain and picked up handfuls of it to study in the dim light. What wasn’t burnt outright was soaked through by exposure to the elements.
He dropped his hands and let the roasted grain fall from his fingers. It smelled wonderful, frankly. Its smell made his mouth water. In one way the fire had probably done them a favor. Malden had spoken with enough bakers and millers since his ascension to learn more than he ever cared to know about the proper storage and processing of wheat products. For instance, he knew that roasted grain was harder to mill into flour, but it didn’t spoil as quickly.
Which was one small saving grace on top of a very serious problem. Roasted grain might be better preserved, but only if it was kept dry. It had rained several times since the fire melted those leaden roofs, and Malden could feel the damp rising off the stored food. Mold was probably already spreading through the towers, and rats wouldn’t be far behind. He could repair the lead roofs of the granaries, but the damage was already done.
Malden had lived through enough famines in his brief life to understand that what he saw here, what Velmont had shown to him, could easily be the end of his career in politics.
He tried to think of what they could do. “We’ll need a small army up here to move the grain to better bins,” he said. “We’ll salvage what we can.”
“Won’t be near enough,” Velmont pointed out.
“You have a better idea?”
The Helstrovian shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe you and me don’t go home tonight. Maybe we light out for greener hills. Surely there’s a need for high-toned thieves like us in the Northern Kingdoms, or maybe the Old Empire. Bein’ Lord Mayor’s a plum job, certes, but—”
“But once people start starving, it won’t be mine for long.” Malden nodded unhappily. “How I wish I could do what you say. But no—the people of Ness are depending on me. I have to find an answer.”
D
ead bodies littered the forecourt of Easthull manor. Not a single one of them had been a soldier, but the Baron’s servants and those few peasants he’d kept to work the last of his fields. Croy saw no weapons in their cold hands, no sign they’d put up a struggle at all.
The roof of the manor had fallen in, and the entire south wing was rubble.
He’d come too late.
He’d ridden his horse until it died, and then he had walked. Through mud and fens up to his chest, he’d walked. He’d shed his armor as it became too heavy. Thrown away everything but Ghostcutter. He had not slept, nor eaten, since the berserkers took away his army.
He could barely stand. Yet he walked into the forecourt, sword in hand, just in case Mörgain had left behind anyone to watch the place. Anyone to pick off stragglers foolish enough to return.
Inside the house, birds lifted from a sodden floor and dashed past his face. He waved them away. Found the hearth cold. All the food gone.
He would not have eaten, even if he could. Not until he knew for sure.
In the apartments of the Baron he found blood everywhere. The wooden door to the receiving chamber was scarred by axe blows, and the lock had been hacked out of its mounting. He pushed open the door, which squeaked noisily on its hinges. Inside something moved furtively.
Croy crouched low, Ghostcutter held before him. He stepped inside, into shadows. He saw the Baron’s desk. The maps were gone, as were all the reports Easthull had gathered. Whatever the Baron had known about the defense of Skrae was old news now to the barbarians.
A beam of yellow light came through a stained-glass window at the back of the room. It fell on a scrap of cloth stained dark with blood. Croy stepped closer and picked it up. Linen. It was wrapped around a severed finger. Croy guessed the signet ring had been hacked off the Baron’s hand.
Behind him something stirred. He swung around instantly, ready for a fight.
One of the Baron’s hounds came limping toward him. The animal was unkempt and mad with fear. It bared yellow teeth and snarled.
There was fresh blood on its muzzle.
Croy pushed past the dog. It whimpered and snapped at him, but he ignored it and headed back out toward the kennels at the rear of the house. He found the Baron there. Easthull had been butchered and fed to his own pack. The dogs had not finished with the head yet, or Croy would not have been able to identify the nobleman.
He could only imagine what the barbarians had done to the king. Or Bethane, the king’s daughter. Mörgain had no love for princesses. Thinking about what Bethane might have gone through before she died, Croy began to weep.
Sharp iron touched the back of his neck.
Croy wheeled about, and Ghostcutter sliced through the wooden haft of a bill hook. The blade clattered to the ground. Croy started into a second stroke, one that would cut his attacker in half.
He barely managed to stop when he saw it was no barbarian who had accosted him, but an old woman in a russet tunic. A peasant. How had she even possessed the strength to lift the polearm?
He supposed that if the need was great enough, the strength could be found.
“Are you the one they call Croy?” the woman asked. She did not seem frightened, even though he had disarmed and almost killed her. “Answer me, lad, or it’ll go hard for ye.”
Croy almost laughed. But then he bowed his head. Sheathed his sword. “I am he.”
The old woman nodded and turned away from him. She started walking, and he followed, because this felt like a dream—or an enchantment—and there were rules about such things. When a guide presented itself, you had to follow. All the stories agreed.
Stories. Malden used to laugh at the old stories of gallant knights and noble crusades. The stories that had nourished Croy in his infancy, as surely as his nurse’s milk. He had always believed the stories held a deeper truth, a layer of reality beyond the gray banalities of the mundane world. He had always thought a man with a pure heart and a good cause really could prevail, no matter the odds.
Yet here he was. Doubly masterless, a knight errant without so much as an old story to lead him onward any longer.
Perhaps . . . perhaps the Lady would let him see Cythera again now. Perhaps he would see his beloved again before he died at the end of a barbarian’s blade.
The old woman led him into a copse of trees not quite deep enough to be called a forest. A wood lot, really, a place for the Baron’s men to collect firewood. Deep in the shadows of the naked branches lay a cottage, a sawyer’s hut. Croy had never seen such a crude dwelling. Its roof was moldering thatch, its walls made of wooden withes smeared with horse hair and dung to keep the wind out. It had no windows and its door was a simple plank that the old woman lifted free of its frame. She couldn’t even afford hinges.
Inside was a room that smelled of old fires and rotten vegetables. There was a fireplace Croy could not call a hearth. Most of the room was so thick with shadows he could see nothing. The old woman stepped inside and replaced the unhinged door, leaving him in darkness broken only by the dull light of the coals in the grate, and those illuminated nothing.
“You saw his face?” the old woman asked in the blackness. She wasn’t speaking to him. “It’s the one you wanted?”
Had he been led here by assassins? Brigands who would take his sword and trade it for a jug of wine? Croy wondered if he had the strength left to fight them.
“I saw it. Make a light, goodwife,” a new voice said. A voice Croy recognized.
Still—he could credit it not, until the old woman lit a stinking rushlight and he saw. There was no furniture in the tiny house, but a pile of straw had been shoved into one corner to make a pallet. Ulfram V lay upon it, sleeping.
And standing next to him was his daughter, Bethane, who would be queen hereafter.
Croy dropped to his knees. He had only the strength left to utter, “How?”
“When they came we had very little warning,” Bethane explained. “A man came running down the road, screaming. It was enough. I dragged Father back here. Baron Easthull sacrificed himself by staying behind. He knew Mörgain would not rest until she’d found a noble who’d dared to stand up to her. He died swearing he was alone in the house, and I suppose she believed him.”
There was no passion in Bethane’s voice. Her words were as flat and uninflected as those of a parish priest reading a very dry passage of the Lady’s word.
“I saw much of what happened, though I dared not go so close as to help. I saw them die,” Bethane went on. She did not weep. “I saw my country dying. Before it was over I came back here, and knelt by my father’s side, and prayed the Lady would take him into her bosom before ever he awoke. I do not want him to know what has become of his kingdom.”
Croy lowered his head in grief.
“It was not good for him, to be dragged through mud so far, nor is the air in here fit for royal lungs. Come, Sir Croy, and listen. Tell me what this sound means, though I know it too well already.”
Croy moved to kneel over his king. Ulfram lived still, but the breath that came in and out of his lungs rattled and choked. A sound that could have been mistaken for snoring, if Croy had never heard it before.
“It is his death rattle,” he agreed.
“Sit vigil with me tonight,” Bethane said, and he obeyed. They knelt together, deep in prayer and meditation. Time went away.
In the morning the old woman rose from the pile of blankets she had instead of a bed, and she stirred the fire. “I need to get some water on, if we’re having pottage,” she said. Neither Bethane nor Croy responded. The old woman went out, letting light into the room when she moved the door.
The sunlight fell across Ulfram V’s face, and showed it pale, and the eyes empty, open, staring upward.
Croy broke his reverie long enough to place one hand against the king’s neck. There was no pulse, and the skin was cold as ice.
“The king is dead,” he whispered. “Long live the queen.”
It was only then that Bethane allowed herself to cry.
“T
he king is dead,” Coruth said, plucking at long blades of yellow grass on the shore of the Isle of Horses. She said it offhandedly, as she might comment on an unusual formation of clouds overhead. “Skrae is in tatters.”
Cythera shivered and pulled her cloak around her shoulders. Then she went and gathered some more driftwood and piled it on the fire.
Coruth had set up a small kettle on a tripod well clear of the house, and it was Cythera’s job to keep it hot, tending the fire beneath it as necessary. From time to time Coruth came over and threw a handful of herbs in, then replaced the thick iron cover.
“You care about Skrae,” Cythera pointed out, when her mother was silent for too long. All day Coruth had been distracted, staring endlessly out across the waters of Eastpool. Cythera knew perfectly well that her mother was not looking at the clutter of shacks and houses on the far shore. She was sending her mind out—not all of it, not as she did when she flew on the wings of birds and saw the whole of the world. Just feelers, tendrils of her consciousness, testing and probing at the flow of events. “I would have thought witches were above petty politics.”
Coruth snickered. “Do you mean, am I heartbroken that we’ve lost Ulfram V? Hardly. The man was better than his father, but not overmuch. He had a habit of speaking to everyone as equals rather than subjects. I liked that.”
Cythera remembered meeting the king, back before the barbarians came. Back when she had thought she knew what the future would hold. That seemed a long time ago. “He seemed a straightforward man.”
“But a fool. Too concerned with small matters, the daily accounts and business of running a kingdom. He could not see the larger picture. No, there will come better kings. If there will be any kings at all.” Coruth rose to her feet and came over to tend to the kettle. When the lid came off it let loose a stink that made Cythera’s head reel, a must of old graves. The liquid in the pot had thickened to a gelid consistency with a crust of foulness at its top. It had the color a fish’s eyes get after it sat too long in a vendor’s cart. With another few hours of heat it would congeal even further, until it became as stiff as wax.
Cythera thought she knew exactly what this substance was for. And it made her so cold she couldn’t bear to look at it.
“You’ll be interested to know,” Coruth said, “that Croy is still alive.”
“I—” Cythera said, but the thought she’d had, the immediate emotional reaction, died inside her as soon as it was born. “Croy,” she said. “Is he in danger?”
“Always,” Coruth cackled. “He’s an Ancient Blade. He lives to fight. How could a man like that ever be safe? But for now he’s still on two feet. If that still matters to you.”
“It does,” Cythera said, looking down at her feet. It always would, she knew. No matter how her love for Malden grew, there would always be a little room in her heart where Croy would live. A room with a door that could not be locked.
Coruth came and stood next to her, looking down into the kettle of ointment. “Almost ready,” she said. She had changed, become more present—more fully integrated with her own body. “You know what this is, don’t you?”
Cythera went to get some more wood for the fire before she answered. “It’s witch’s unguent. It opens up the inner eye. Brings on the second sight.”
“Yes,” Coruth said. “When it’s ready—when all the preparations are ready—we’ll begin your initiation.”
Cythera closed her eyes and tried not to weep.