From out the window came a peculiar whirring sound, the reflected noise of the clockwork in the northern tower of Blackcastle as it ground toward position to strike noon. Freelorn slipped out the door and pounded down the stairs to the tunnels that led into the courtyard.In the doorway full of hot light he paused, just behind the guards, peering out to see if he could see anyone he knew, Herewiss or Segnbora of any of his own people. None of them were in sight. As he stood there, eyes in the throng crowded up by the doorway glanced at him, noticed the device on his surcoat, and lips began to move.
King it out,
Lorn thought to himself, and stepped out into the crowd as if his stomach weren’t wringing itself like hands. People made way for him, a touch uncertainly, and glances fastened themselves to him and prickled under his skin as if he brushed his way through a field full of burrs.
Above him, noon struck, the slow deep notes falling heavy in the close courtyard. Lorn kept walking, looking for a good spot to stand. The midsummer sun bore down on the shoulders of the black surcoat like a hot weight, and Lorn began to regret his undertunic. But without it he would itch, and the silver embroidery would rub him raw; and he could hear his father telling him, when he was twelve, “Kings don’t itch, and they don’t squirm. It’s not dignified. But they’re allowed to sweat; no one minds that.”
We’ll find out today,
Lorn thought, making for the tree.
He stopped right at the front of the crowd, ten feet or so from the anvil, and stood quietly with his arms folded, feeling the eyes bite into his back. It was peculiar. He’d been stared at often enough before; but today it was really bothering him. If only there were someone else he knew in this crowd—
Abruptly he saw one: right across from him, on the other side of the tree, the Queen’s husband Wyn. Wyn was not a tall man, but didn’t need to be. He was one of those people who seem to be about twice anyone else’s height even when kneeling, with the face of a handsome hawk. Wyn was a wine merchant, and had a reputation for being a calm man—which made it interesting to consider the five-foot-long, unsheathed, two-handed broadsword he was leaning on, as casually as if it was a pruning hook. He met Lorn’s eyes with a slight twitch of a grin.
Freelorn returned the half smile, didn’t move otherwise. He casually looked over the people standing behind and around Wyn, wondering why their glances were bothering him so today, trying to conceal it. Just a crowd of city people, dressed for holiday: broad ladies in bright dresses, men in breeches and embroidered shirts, here and there a surcoat of some son or daughter of hedge-nobility; the flash of silver, the glitter of eyes; whispers, murmurs, chatter, the happy shouting of a little girl near the front waving a toasted sausage and getting its grease all over herself and her smock and the skirt of the lady next to her, who turned and—
You go first.
No, you.
He refused to turn around. “Kings don’t turn to overhear things,” his father had told him in that same severe session so long ago, which had ended with Freelorn arguing the point and having his bottom warmed. “Kings wait till the speaker comes round to face them in courtesy.” But it was hard not to turn, especially when the voices seemed so close behind him that they were nearly in his own head. And truly only the slightest difference in tone kept them from seeming as if they were in his own voice: one of them quicker, lighter than his own tone, with faint, odd harmonies weaving around it; the other with the touch of drawl that he almost knew better than his own voice anyway. That voice he had heard before, this way... though not realizing it at the time. But never before in broad daylight, in a crowd like this. Only in the dark, in the silence, and only a few times lately—only in moments when outer voices failed, and words ran out, and his heart heard the other’s overflowing heart whispering
My loved, my own, O my loved
.... until the urgency of their bodies built to strike the sweetness through with lightning, and left them both gasping and blind. This was not that slow, deep warmth, but something brisker, more businesslike... though in its own way just as personal, just as fierce—
Freelorn swallowed. Underhearing. It was the commonest of the othersenses... and something he had never had a problem with until recently, until Herewiss’s Fire burst free. Lorn gripped Súthan’s hilt and began to understand the piercing of eyes, the threatening pressure of minds he wasn’t sensitive enough to hear. But all his reading on the subject had never hinted that the sensitivity might be catching
— Well, never mind it now! They’re about to do something. Be ready for it.
I’m not ready, I can’t feel who—
—
Neither can I. No use waiting. Go!
Is she ready?
Yes.
A third voice, drier.
Let’s play out our hand.
All this in a second’s flicker. And because Freelorn had not turned around, he saw the darkness draw itself together on the far side of the courtyard, by the postern door; saw day slide back defeated from a growing patch of night, in which darker shapes moved, and voices chanted slow warning in a choir of muted thunders, while many eyes gazed out, glowing like those coals of which gems were said in lore to be the burnt-out cinders. People backed away hurriedly from that darkness, all but the smallest children, who stared at it in calm fascination and had to be pulled back.
Out of that dark came walking a slight slim form in black, wearing a long formal surcoat, tenné-brown, the arms on it the undifferenced arms of a Head of one of the Forty Houses: lioncelle passant regardant in blood and gold, holding a sword. Unsheathed in her hand the woman held a three-foot splinter of pure night, black enough to have been broken off death’s own Door. And so it had been, for this was Skádhwë out of legend, the sword Shadow, won and lost in the ancient days by Efmaer Queen of Darthen, and newly recovered from Glasscastle beyond the world’s bourne. For a thousand years and more that sword had not seen the light of day. Now the midsummer sun fell in vain on its blackness, and around the length of it blue Fire wreathed, curling upward in quick fierce flames the color of deep twilight at their hearts.
Segnbora pushed her silvering hair back out of her face, where a breeze had blown it, and paused just out of the Blackstave’s shade. One hand in her pocket, she leaned casually on the Shadowblade... and then looked down in understated surprise as the needle point of the shadow calmly slipped downward into the cobble it rested on, as if she had chosen to lean on a cheese.
Segnbora pulled the sword out of the stone and stood straight with it, looking around the crowd in cool assessment. So did the larger pair of eyes in the darkness about and above her, silver with a cast of blue.
I think we have their attention,
Segnbora said, and her amused bespeaking seemed to Freelorn so loud in the silence that the whole crowd should have been able to hear it.
No agreeing answer came—just another movement over by another of the gates, the south gate that led out into the marketplace. There was less motion in the crowd this time, but more sound; a gasp that turned into a whisper that became a murmur, and then a cry that many voices took up, unbelieving, astonished: “Fire!” And so it was: for here, sauntering casually, nodding and smiling at people, came a tall broadshouldered man all in white—the white of the Brightwood surcoat, with its Phoenix in flames, and the white Cloak of the Wood’s ancient livery, now only given to lords of the Brightwood line, or the Queen’s own knights. The man had a hand-and-a-half broadsword resting on his shoulder, and the Flame of Power wound and wreathed about it and streamed away behind, harsh, hot-colored and clear, the pure fierce blue of a midsummer noon or a Steldene cat’s eyes. “Fire,” they shouted after him, unbelieving, astonished, delighted, “Fire!” Millenia, it had been, since anyone but women had wielded the Fire. And the last two men to wield it, more than two thousand years ago, had had to become gods to do so, and died of it. If the Goddess Herself had walked in from the market square, it would probably have caused less amazement. After all,
everyone
saw
Her
at least once before they died. But
this—!
Lorn watched the crowd push back and forth and reel and shout at the miracle that walked through them. Herewiss slipped free of the crowd, about halfway between Freelorn and Segnbora, and slid Khávrinen off his shoulder and set it point down on the cobbles before him, folding his hands about the hilts. His glance flicked left to Segnbora; she tilted her head at him, the slightest nod.
Do you ever stop eating?
Freelorn underheard her ask Herewiss silently, in that moment’s look.
You’ve got sausage smutch on your face.
Which side?
Just under the left cheekbone.
Herewiss turned to Freelorn, gave him that slight nod, binding them all together into a united front, a gesture to whomever or Whatever watched. Freelorn returned the nod.
If you’d get up at a decent hour, he said inside,
experimentally,
you wouldn’t need to be scrounging snacks in the marketplace.
Herewiss put one eyebrow up.
When I do wake up early, someone who shall remain unnamed rarely lets me get up.
He circumspectly wiped his face.
Loud today, are we? Must be nerves.
Dusty, I’ve been meaning to ask you—
But Freelorn was jolted out of concentration as the trumpets on the walls sounded a sennet. The Queen came out.
She came in a plain shirt and breeches of bleached linen, and wearing boots, like any other countrywoman with a morning’s yardwork to do in hot weather. The shouting in the crowd quieted at the sight of her. Eftgan d’Arienn, like her husband, was short, though no one under any circumstances could have called her small: an oval-faced woman, with a sweet expression and short-cropped blond hair. Her close-set blue eyes and sharp nose sometimes made her look to Freelorn rather like a small, inquisitive bird, a chirper like the wren. But her voice always broke the illusion. It was the pure North Darthene drawl, like Herewiss’s, reflective and cool, and the mind behind the blue eyes was hard and deep and missed little. That was no surprise, since she was a Rodmistress as well as a Queen, trained in the Silent Precincts. Indeed she had been marked down to succeed one of the Wardresses, till the death of the heir, her brother, had brought her out of the Silent Places to Blackcastle. But Eftgan’s Power would do her little good here and now. She was without her Rod, the focus of her Power, and forbidden to use the Fire for her defense in any case. Eftgan carried nothing but a leather bag, which she dropped by the anvil with a clank and looked around her.
Here and there in the crowd a hat or bonnet came off; many bowed, those on high horse as well as those standing. Eftgan bowed her head briefly to them. “Lords and friends,” she said, the old words, “today I must know your will with me. Before the Goddess, I tell you I’ve done my best for you this year past. Here while I make my crown, you shall make plain to me whether my best has been yours as well. Our Lady defend my right, and yours; and see Her right done, for the land’s good and in the Shadow’s despite.”
“Be it so,” the crowd murmured; and the Queen nodded again, less formally, and turned around to sit down at the anvil, on the stool. She rummaged in the toolbag and came up with several small hammers, and a punch and hand riveter. Then from the other bag she produced the gold, a small fat ingot that she turned in her hands for a moment and gazed at, watching the way the sunlight fell through the moving leaves and caught on it, glancing bright.
The crowd fell quite silent. Eftgan picked up one of the larger hammers and began working on the ingot. The crown didn’t have to be ornate—just recognizably circular, something that would go on the forger’s head. Some kings had practiced in secret and had then astonished everyone with how little time they spent turning a block of gold into a band. But Eftgan looked unconcerned with speed. She sat there, a little hunched over, pounding the ingot flat, the ringing of the hammer muted as it hit the gold, brighter when it missed or bounced and hit the anvil. She didn’t look up at the people around her; not a glance for her husband, for her children peering between the people in the front rows, for Herewiss or Segnbora, and certainly no glance for Freelorn, right behind her.
He slowly began to gnaw on the inside of his cheek, an old nervous habit. Here they all were, in force, but what could they really do? Herewiss and Segnbora and Hasai were effectively helpless. Oh, perhaps anyone who moved against the Queen would have their mind wrung dry for information at a later date—but a lot of good that would do Eftgan if she fell. The heir to Darthen was presently twelve years old, busily eating an apple some feet away from Herewiss, and staring at Khávrinen... and it seemed unlikely that Wyn his father would be made regent if something untoward should happen. The Forty Houses were nervous about Arlen’s recent aggression, and would welcome an excuse to back away from the “dangerous” course of confrontation that Eftgan had been steering them. Some other regent would be chosen, someone more cautious, and in that caution Darthen and Arlen would founder together—
—and the shriek and motion across the courtyard brought his head up with a jerk, blood jumped in him, he flushed—
—and felt stupid, because it was the broad lady in the bright skirt, bending down to do something about her daughter, who had had the sausage stolen out of her hand by a small brown furry dog that had wriggled out from behind them. The young girl was crying and trying to hit the dog, and the people around them were beginning to chuckle as their shock passed. Eftgan glanced up sidewise from her work, grinned, looked down again.
—and too suddenly for shock Lorn found himself looking at that woman as well as at Eftgan—looking at the woman with two other sets of eyes, seeing her as it were from two different angles. And he saw, as those other eyes did, how the gesture that had begun as a straightening of the woman’s skirts, now ended with one of her hands bringing up from under the volume of them a small cocked crossbow—