A Crown for Cold Silver Read online

  “As we told your husband,” he began, gesturing to the mayor’s head, “the terms of—”

  “What have you done?” the old woman whispered, her eyes fixed on the open kitchen door with such intensity that Sir Hjortt glanced over to make sure there wasn’t someone creeping up on him. “You stupid, wretched, idiot boy, what have you done?”

  “I’m not a boy,” said Sir Hjortt, hating her for forcing the sulky words to leave his mouth. “I am a knight of the realm, and I—”

  “To the village,” she said, the fear scoured off her face by something much, much worse as she directed a ferocious stare at her guest. “By the six devils I bound, what order did you give your Chainwitch, boy? What did you tell her to do to my people?”

  “Sisters of the Burnished Chain are not witches,” Sir Hjortt huffed, all this boy talk putting him in a ratty mood. This old bird was about to learn a very hard lesson about respecting one’s betters. “As for my orders, they involve the two hundred lances I positioned in your town before climbing up to this dump.”

  A distant scream rode in on the breeze just then, so perfectly timed that Sir Hjortt wondered if Brother Iqbal was eavesdropping on their conversation and had somehow given Sister Portolés a signal. Commendations all around, if so!

  Sir Hjortt realized with disappointment that he had forgotten to get his hawkglass back from Portolés before sending her down to the village; how was he supposed to see anything from up here without it? She should have known he’d want it and reminded him to hold on to it. It wouldn’t surprise him if she had taken it with her just to spite him. Well, even if he couldn’t see the action down in the town, he could still have some fun with this old coot.

  Rather than upsetting the matron, the distant scream had brought an evil grin to her chapped lips, twisting her already woodsy features into the grimace of an especially gnarled knothole. She turned to the open door leading onto the deck, where Sir Hjortt could see the chain-encircled-crown crest of the newly reunited Crimson Empire emblazoned on the back of Brother Iqbal’s cloak. The witchborn was looking down over the rail at the hamlet far below, and the mayor’s widow stepped out onto the deck to join him, her legs the only part of her not shivering like a plucked fiddle string.

  “As I told your husband before I had him executed…” began Sir Hjortt, thinking for sure this would regain her attention. It didn’t, but he went on anyway, following her to the door as she walked slowly to the railing. “I believe the terms your husband so generously offered our army are identical to those he brokered with Pope Shanatu’s troops when this territory fell under his dominion during the civil war. On an appointed day your mayor shall deliver to the crossroads below your valley approximately one-fifth of your yearly root wines, cheeses, and marmot oil in peacetime, and one-half in times of war. In exchange your citizens shall not be pressed into service, your children shall not be enslaved, and your borders shall be defended. Did I miss anything?”

  “No.” Her voice was no louder than the zephyr passing through the trees as she set her hands on the thin wooden balustrade and gazed down. Brother Iqbal glanced over at the woman beside him, offering her a sympathetic grimace.

  “Fair terms, Mum,” said Iqbal. “Most fair.”

  “Why?” she asked, still not looking away, although from up here she couldn’t possibly see much of the action. The distant screams and clangor had grown louder, though. “In the name of the six devils I bound, why?”

  That weird oath of hers seemed to befuddle Iqbal, the man’s perpetually snowmead-whitened lips silently repeating it as he stared at the woman. Sir Hjortt had heard stranger curses on a slow day at court. Following her as far as the doorway, he called after her, “I don’t owe you any answers, woman. Besides, I’m sure that smart mouth of yours can supply one of its own.”

  “Maybe so,” she said quietly, hands gripping the railing.

  “Really, though, we’re spoiled for choice, aren’t we?” said Sir Hjortt. “Maybe it’s because the fealty due the pontiff and queen shall not be decided by the hill-creatures who pay it. Maybe it’s because by your husband’s own admission, the citizenry of this village traded supplies to Pope Shanatu’s rebel army, which makes your people traitors to the Crown. And maybe an example has to be made, for all the other backwater towns who took up arms against the rightful ruler of the Crimson Empire—bad luck on your husband’s part, to be waiting at the crossroads with tribute for the losing team when our scouts spotted him.”

  “Before this last war we always delivered our annual tithe to agents of the queen. We trade food to those who demand it, regardless of what banners they fly—to do otherwise would provoke an assault we could never withstand. And so you’re sacking a village guilty of no greater crime than common sense, and… and… bad luck?” She looked back at Sir Hjortt, her cobalt eyes wild as the Bitter Sea. “You’re destroying everything these innocents have as an example?”

  “That’s about the shape of it,” said Sir Hjortt, leaning against the doorframe. Another headache had been fomenting behind his temples ever since this nanny goat had started bleating why-why-why at him, and it was only growing worse. “But fret not, woman, fret not, the letter of the terms is being honored—your borders are quite secure, and my soldiers have it on my strictest orders not to flirt with a single villager, no matter how tempting, nor shackle even one of your plump little moppets, rich a price as they might fetch in Her Grace’s markets.”

  “No?” There was the most delicious tinge of hope in her voice.

  “No,” said Sir Hjortt, pleased that she had given him the setup he so dearly desired. Now for the punch line. “Every single one of your townies is being put to the steel. No exceptions. Other than you, of course. You we let live.”

  “Is that so?” She didn’t flinch—cold as the Queen of Samoth, this one.

  “You are charged with a task of the utmost importance to Crown and Chain,” said Sir Hjortt, a rumble in his belly turning up to keep his headache company. One of those scones might settle his stomach. “Fill her in, Iqbal.”

  “Good Colonel Hjortt and I discussed your future on our promenade up to your lovely home,” Iqbal said genially as Sir Hjortt returned to the kitchen table. “And we came to terms that I think will be most agreeable to Chain, Crown, and, of course, yourself.”

  The woman muttered something Sir Hjortt couldn’t quite make out, but it must have been fresh, for Brother Iqbal faked a laugh before continuing.

  “Our pontiff loves you, Mum, just as she loves all those worthy martyrs below. As her sole representative on this charming veranda, I offer you, nay, honor you with the charge of becoming one of her apostles. You shall be a mendicant witness, traveling from burg to burg to testify of your experience here today, and—”

  Sir Hjortt bit into a fluffy apple scone just as Iqbal let out a squeal, and the knight looked up from his snack in time to see the witchborn go toppling over the railing. Iqbal plummeted out of sight, and then his high-pitched wail abruptly cut off. The old woman straightened up from the half-crouch she had dropped into in order to launch the brother. Sir Hjortt laughed in surprise, crumbs flying—had that fat fool actually been murdered by a widow old enough to be his mother? This would make quite the story back in Cockspar!

  What a day, Sir Hjortt thought as he drew his sword and strode back onto the deck with more enthusiasm than he had felt all campaign, scone still trapped in his teeth; what an absurd, marvelous day!

  CHAPTER

  4

  The elders of Sullen’s clan blew a lot of smoke about how you never forgot your first devil. They claimed a Horned Wolf’s life was split between the nameless pup that sat at a storyteller’s knee, enraptured by tales, and the adult who lived legends instead of dreaming them. The turning point from whelp to worthy member of the clan was not your first battle, your first kill, or even your naming, but the first devil you saw watching you from the darkness, the first time you looked at a beast and knew it was something more than mundane. Until you h
ad squared off against a devil and stared it down, you had no right to call yourself a member of the Horned Wolf Clan.

  That rite of passage had been a lot easier back when the Star teemed with devils, of course, but nowadays they were almost as rare as the clan’s totem animal. Used to be folk could earn their place at the fire either way, by finding a devil or fighting a horned wolf, but such great deeds seemed near impossible in the modern age. Being as there were hardly any of the monsters left in the world—all praise the true goddess—proving your teeth to your people involved a whole lot of dicking around in the misty tundra outside of the village. Invariably the young ones went loopy from exposure or starvation, and stumbled back into town claiming to have seen all manner of bat-winged fiends perching in the boughs of what few bur oaks remained on the Frozen Savannahs. They were flogged by their parents for telling tales, and that was about it—most everyone under the age of fifty grumbled that the elders put a primacy of honor on devil sightings as a means of preventing younger members of the tribe from joining the ruling council.

  Sullen couldn’t recall his first devil, because for as long as he could remember they had been there, watching him. Not the corporeal ones—the ones that counted, according to the elders—but vague, phantasmal creatures that sometimes flitted around the edge of his vision, brightening into focus only as he was drifting off to sleep. In the Immaculate tongue his mother insisted he learn to deal with the foreign traders, these immaterial monsters were called spirits, but Sullen knew they were the same devils from all the songs, only ones that hadn’t yet claimed a living body. Grandfather said Sullen could see the devils that nobody else could because he’d been born with the eyes of a snow lion, and the one time Sullen had broken the clan’s laws about not looking at your own reflection lest one of your evil ancestors possess you, he had seen that the old man was right. Unlike the rest of his clan, whose uniformally human peepers came in various shades of brown and green, Sullen’s pupils were slits in eyes the rich blue of the glaciers bordering the nearby coast where the Immaculates landed their ships. It had scared him, seeing a monster looking back at him from the still pool where he had stolen a peek at himself, and from that day on he better understood why his clan viewed him the way they did.

  He actively tried to avoid thinking about his affliction, as his mother called it, for the devils never bothered him… but his grandfather, who’d been kicked off the council ages ago after getting into a row with the poison oracle, insisted that in his day Sullen would have been a great shaman, to be so marked by the gods.

  “Marked by devils, you mean.” Sullen’s mother shuddered, making the sign of the Chain as they finished their bowls of rice and cassava porridge. “My poor boy. I don’t blame you, Sullen, you know I don’t.”

  At ten, Sullen was bigger than any other pup in the village, and by sixteen he was the tallest, broadest Horned Wolf in the clan. He could do the work of five (and frequently did), and when Old Salt’s donkey pitched over dead halfway through the planting, Sullen hitched himself up and finished the field. He tried never to let his strength go to his head, and went out of his way to help those less physically blessed than himself. For all his might, he was a gentle, caring boy.

  And with the exception of his mother and grandfather, every single person in his entire clan hated him and wished he would die. He was marked by the devils.

  “I mean marked by the gods!” Sullen’s grandfather crowed at his daughter, tossing his empty bowl onto the dirt floor of the hut. Sullen retrieved it so his mom wouldn’t have to. “We call ourselves Horned Wolves, but here’s a real beast, one of the chosen of old, and they all despise him! A boy with the blood of shamans treated like an oath-breaker, it’s enough to—”

  “I told you the last time, we will not speak of this again,” said Sullen’s mom, in her most dangerously even tone. “Our ways are the only ways, and the council has been merciful with him. With both of you.”

  “Our ways?” said Grandfather with a sneer. “Our ways are dead, child, ever since those toothless greypelts decided we should forsake our ancestors and start bowing before a Samothan devil. I don’t even know these people anymore. Where do a pack of limp-horned Chainites get off—”

  “Old man, I won’t warn you again to pay me more respect,” said Sullen’s mother, rising from the floor with all the foreboding solemnity of a gathering storm. “Had I not shamed myself by letting you back into my hut, I would have taken another husband by now. And if I were to cast you out, who else in the clan would take you? Either of you?”

  “It’s all right, Fa,” said Sullen, coming between the two to clear the rest of the dinner mat. “It’s all just a test, is all. The Fallen Mother tests us all.”

  “The Fallen Mother is a lie,” Grandfather hissed much later that night, when even the coals in the hearth were trying to get a little shut-eye. “A liiiiiiie, cooked up by Imperials to take our teeth. What kind of goddess doesn’t show herself to her people, eh? When the Old Watchers wanted to test us, they put a damn monster in our path to see how well we fought! None of this walking ’round with your hands at your sides, playing the anvil to those backbiting little hyenas!”

  “I ain’t been hit in ages,” Sullen said, forgetting that his mother wanted him to pretend to be asleep when her dad went on his heretical rants. “Not since I lost my temper with Yaw Thrim all them summers back.”

  Yaw Thrim was now known as One-arm Yaw, on account of Sullen’s slippery temper. Sullen had been fourteen at the time, Yaw twenty-three. Sullen didn’t even remember what had happened after Yaw pinned him down in the permafrost and started pummeling his face; everything after that was as hazy as the devils that danced just beyond his vision. Yaw remembered, though, and his family said he still woke up screaming some nights, clutching at the twisted burl of scar tissue with his only remaining hand.

  “They almost done you for that,” said Grandfather. “Even with you just defending yourself, they would’ve done you for sure if you’d had one more hair on your balls, or that bullyboy had one less hair in his beard. Next time you stick up for yourself they’ll kill you, boy, they’ll kill you twice to make sure it takes.”

  “It’ll be all right, Fa,” said Sullen, rolling over to face the dark wall.

  “It won’t be all right until you act like a ruddy Horned Wolf and leave these pagans in your dust,” said Grandfather. “When I was your age we didn’t trade with no Immaculates, we raided ’em! Now we don’t even build boats no more, and moved too far from the sea to hear the songs of the Deep Folk. Horned Wolves, digging fields and building churches like Red Imperials. I wish they’d had the decency to burn me alive so I didn’t have to see such things come to pass. Craven knew what was coming. I’ve cursed him every dawn and dusk for leaving us the way he did, but now I wish he’d come back and taken me with him. He could’ve lashed me to his back and carried me out of here—Horned Wolves my arse, we’re just plain old sheep these days.”

  “Do you think Uncle’s still alive?” asked Sullen, forgetting he was trying to sleep and rolling back over to face his crotchety grandfather on the prickly cot they all shared.

  “Might could be, might could be,” said Grandfather, as though considering the possibility for the first time. Sullen’s mother snorted in her sleep, and even lower than before, Grandfather said, “I don’t see a man die I don’t assume he’s dead. The last time we seen him he was alive enough, I expect you remember that.”

  Sullen definitely remembered more than he cared to from the day Uncle Craven had forsaken them… the day Sullen’s father had died, the day Sullen fought his first battle against a rival clan. The day he took his first kill. He remembered how rich the air tasted before the fighting started; it was the first time he had come close enough to the Bitter Sea to smell salt and sand mingling with the scent of fresh snow. He remembered how he had pretended he was fighting alongside his ancestors in one of the old songs, how he had believed Old Black would shield them from their enemies. He remembered
the glint of sunlight on the blade that ran through his father’s heart, and the way the blood seemed to turn the sword to black ice when it was pulled free of his breast. He remembered how weightless his arm had felt when he threw his sun-knife, and how heavy it became when he saw his weapon enter a man’s hip and bring him crashing to the ground, to be stomped and stabbed in the chaos. He remembered how the Jackal People had laughed as they fought, laughing harder as they lost, laughing until the last of them was brought low on the blood-thawed battlefield. He remembered how sad and scared he had been, remembered it like it was yesterday.

  He also remembered what had come after, would remember it until his dying day. The dead eyes of his father, staring past his sobbing son and into the whiteness beyond. The gleaming eyes of the snow lions creeping in to eat the dead before the victorious Horned Wolves had even quit the scene, eyes that were the same as Sullen’s. Grandfather lying howling in the gore-spattered tundra, hacked through the tailbone by a pepper-smeared sword. And the backs of their people as the Horned Wolves headed home, his mother, Uncle Craven, and the rest of the clan following custom by leaving his wounded grandfather to the scavengers, and Sullen, too, when he wouldn’t leave the old man’s side.

  Sullen had been eight thaws old. He killed his first snow lion that night, and started dragging his grandfather back to the village. It had taken six days, Sullen collecting snow in the mornings for their waterskins and frost-termites for their breakfast. By the time they’d made it back to the disbelieving scowls of their clan, Uncle Craven was long gone. Again.

  “But you said—” Sullen paused as his mother rolled over beside him, so excited he could barely keep his voice to a whisper. “You said they’d ambush Uncle before he got a week out, kill him good to make sure he couldn’t shame our people ever again.”