A Kingdom Divided
The bells beneath the palace had not rung in three hundred years.
They hung in the oldest foundations of Iskandar, in the cold dark beneath the cellars and the archives, where the first Veinwright rulers had carved their throne from black stone and bound their bloodline to the dead. No one living had heard them. The masons who tended the deep foundations touched the wall beside the bell shaft for luck when they passed it, and did not linger.
They were not bells of celebration. They were not sounded for coronations, marriages or military victories; the city had brighter bells in its towers for those, rung so often that the pigeons on the bridges no longer troubled to rise. These were warning bells. According to the oldest law of the kingdom, they were to be rung only when the throne itself was threatened.
On the morning the first bell sounded, King Varyon Veinwright was seated in the Hall of Remembrance, listening to his ministers argue over the price of grain. It was, as it happened, an argument he was enjoying.
A minister from the eastern districts wanted the winter price of bread fixed in the capital, and a goblin clerk of the treasury was reading out the cost in a thin, unhappy voice. Varyon had always been more at home with grain prices and road tolls than with the rites his family was famous for, and he had been about to ask a question about the eastern granaries.
The sound rose through the floor like a groan from something buried alive. It came up through the black stone and through the throne and into the bones of the man sitting on it, and the clerk stopped reading in the middle of a figure, and every conversation in the hall ceased at once.
Dust trembled from the ribs of the vaulted ceiling and drifted down through the thin bars of daylight. The pale flames burning in the iron braziers bent low, all of them together, as though bowing toward the earth.
Along the walls, the stone faces of the dead kings seemed to deepen in shadow, until each one looked less like a carving than like a man standing very still at the back of a dark room.
A second bell followed, slower than the first, and then a third. No one in the royal court moved.
King Varyon sat upon the ancestral throne with one hand resting against its carved arm. He was not an old man, though the years had begun to gather around his eyes. His robes were dark and heavy, embroidered with silver veins that resembled roots spreading through soil, and a thin circlet of bone rested upon his brow.
He had worn the circlet since he was a child too small to lift his head beneath it, and he no longer felt its weight unless he thought about it, which this morning he did.
Behind the throne stood twelve preserved skulls, each belonging to a former ruler of Iskandar. Their eye sockets had been filled with black wax and their jaws sealed with gold thread, so that they could neither look nor speak, and yet every child raised in that court grew up certain that they did both. Varyon had stopped believing it at about the age of nine, and found, as the third bell faded, that he was no longer entirely certain.
The king looked toward the doors. “Who ordered the bells rung?”
His voice was quiet. That made the question more dangerous. He had learned young, in a court full of louder people, that the whole room leaned in to hear a man who did not raise his voice, and that nobody wished to be the one it had leaned toward.
The doors opened, and a captain of the palace guard came in at something between a march and a run. Mud covered his boots to the shin. Blood had darkened the edge of his cloak, and he left a faint track of both across the polished floor before he dropped to one knee at the foot of the steps.
“Your Majesty, the western tax road has fallen.”
A murmur passed through the hall, the sound of a whole court drawing breath at slightly different times.
Lord Chancellor Merovan stepped forward from his place at the council table. He was a narrow-faced man dressed in layers of ash-grey silk, which he wore as other men wore armour, and he had the habit of standing a little closer to the throne than his office required, as if to make certain that whatever was said to the king passed by him first. “Fallen to whom?”
The captain hesitated. “To the people, my lord.”
Several nobles laughed. It was not amusement. It was disbelief sharpened by contempt, the laugh of men who had been told that the floor was on fire and could see perfectly well that it was not.
The captain did not raise his head. “Farmers, miners, former soldiers. Men from the river settlements. They blocked the road before dawn and seized the wagons carrying the winter levy.”
“Bandits,” said Merovan.
“No, my lord.”
The answer came too quickly, and the captain seemed to hear it as soon as it was out of his mouth. The room tightened around him. Varyon watched him swallow, and watched his gloved hand close on his knee.
“They carried banners.”
The laughter stopped.
“What banners?” asked the king.
“A broken crown painted in red.”
Queen-Regent Ysara leaned forward from her seat beside the throne. She was the king’s aunt and the oldest living member of the Veinwright line, and she had sat in that chair, or in the throne itself, for longer than most of the court had been alive.
Age had reduced her body but not her presence. Her skin was pale as old parchment and her eyes were ringed with the dark markings worn by the kingdom’s highest occult priests, and a mantle of black feathers lay about her shoulders, so that when she moved she rustled faintly, like a bird settling on a branch. A staff of black wood rested against her knee. Varyon had been afraid of it as a boy.
“Did they name a lord?” she asked.
“No, Your Grace.”
“A commander?”
“No.”
She tapped the foot of the staff once against the floor. “A claimant to the throne?”
The captain shook his head. “They called themselves the Free Provinces of Iskandar.”
The silence that followed was deeper than the bells.
King Varyon looked out across the gathered court. The Hall of Remembrance had been built to intimidate foreign emissaries and to remind subjects of the permanence of Veinwright rule, and it did both very well.
Its pillars were engraved with the names of the dead from floor to capital. Its windows were narrow and high, letting in only thin shafts of daylight that never reached the ground, and beneath the polished black floor lay the royal crypts.
No ruler of Iskandar ever sat alone in that chamber. The dead were always beneath him. He had been told so on the day of his coronation, and had always taken it as a comfort of a stern, cold kind, like a wall at a man’s back.
Yet as he listened to the murmurs spreading among his ministers, and watched the glances thrown from one great house to another, he felt for the first time that the throne was not surrounded by ancestors. It was surrounded by enemies.
“Seal the western road,” said General Tharos. “Send two companies before the uprising spreads.”
Tharos was commander of the royal army, and had served the throne since before Varyon was crowned. He came to council in armour, as he went everywhere in armour, with his gauntlets laid beside his papers like a second pair of hands. The border campaigns had made him famous, and he had never seen any reason to stop speaking as he spoke in the field: in orders, and as few of them as would do.
Lady Elianor Vale turned toward him. She was the kingdom’s minister of provinces, a straight-backed woman who sat at the table as if it were a court of law and she had been asked to give evidence, and she had a way of turning the whole of her attention on a person that made them wish they had chosen their words with more care.
“Two companies will not reopen the road,” she said. “They will turn a protest into a massacre.”
“It ceased being a protest when they stole the king’s grain.”
“They claim the grain was taken from them first.”
General Tharos struck his fist against the council table, and the inkwells jumped. “It was collected by royal law.”
“Royal law does not fill an empty stomach.”
A few nobles shifted uneasily on the benches. Lady Elianor was not a Veinwright. Her family had governed the southern riverlands long before the dead kings conquered Iskandar. She had remained at court because the king trusted her judgment, but many among the old nobility considered her loyalty temporary, like a loan that would one day be called in.
Chancellor Merovan regarded her with open suspicion, smoothing the grey silk of one sleeve. “You speak boldly for those who raise banners against the crown.”
“I speak boldly because no one else here appears willing to tell His Majesty why those banners exist.”
The king lifted one hand. The argument stopped.
“Then tell me,” he said.
Lady Elianor faced the throne. She did not consult a paper; she had never needed one for this, and Varyon suspected she had been waiting a long time to be asked. “The western provinces have suffered three failed harvests. The mines have expanded, but the wages have not. The grain tithe was increased to feed the capital and maintain the northern garrisons. Families are selling their land to pay debts owed to noble houses.”
Merovan’s mouth tightened. “Debts entered willingly.”
“By starving people.”
“Need does not invalidate a contract.”
“No,” said Elianor. “It merely ensures that one side has no choice.”
A ripple of disapproval moved through the court, mostly from the benches where the oldest houses sat, and several of the noblemen there found something interesting to look at in the vaulting. From the far end of the chamber came the dry scrape of a staff against stone.
High Mortarch Selkos, chief priest of the royal cult, stepped out of the shadows between two pillars, where he had been standing so quietly that half the court had forgotten him. He carried a staff of yellowed bone in one hand and a small lamp in the other, and the flame inside the lamp burned blue.
His ceremonial mask was made from the jawbone of a former saint, cut and fitted to cover the lower half of his face, and small chains hung from its teeth that clicked softly whenever he spoke, so that every sentence he uttered came with its own faint accompaniment, like someone counting coins in the next room.
“The hardship of the provinces is not the true cause of this unrest.”
Lady Elianor looked toward him. “What is?”
“Fear.”
The Mortarch came up the length of the hall toward the throne, unhurried, the chains ticking with each step. He sounded, Varyon thought, like a man who had been given a puzzle he already knew the answer to and was enjoying the others’ attempts.
“For months, agitators have travelled through the villages spreading lies about the crown. They claim the Veinwrights summon the dead to spy upon the living. They say children are taken beneath the palace. They say the souls of criminals are bound into the walls.”
General Tharos gave a humourless smile. “Are any of those claims entirely false?”
No one laughed.
The Mortarch turned his mask toward him, and the blue flame in his lamp stood up very straight. “The sacred practices of the throne are not matters for soldiers.”
“They become matters for soldiers when villagers begin sharpening farm tools.”
King Varyon watched them carefully, the soldier and the priest, and kept his face still.
The Veinwrights had ruled Iskandar for generations through a mixture of law, fear and reverence. Their rites were old, older perhaps than the kingdom itself. The family communed with ancestral spirits, preserved the memories of the dead, and used forbidden knowledge to protect the bloodline, and Varyon had been taught all of it as other princes were taught to ride. The people had once regarded those rites with awe.
Now they whispered about them behind closed doors. There had been incidents, and the king knew the list better than he would have liked. Graves opened without permission. Bodies removed from battlefields before families could come to claim them. Condemned prisoners taken below the palace, and never seen again.
The crown had explanations for all of it. Varyon had read every one, signed most of them, and believed perhaps half. He was beginning to understand, as he looked from the Mortarch’s mask to the general’s fist, that the explanations no longer mattered.
“Your Majesty,” said Elianor, “the people do not distinguish between sacred tradition and necromancy. They see nobles living behind walls while their children starve. They see royal priests entering graveyards at night. They hear rumours that the dead serve the throne more faithfully than the living.”
“They should,” said Queen-Regent Ysara.
Every eye turned toward her. The old woman remained perfectly still in her feathers, her hands folded on the head of her staff.
“The dead do not rebel.”
King Varyon’s jaw tightened. His aunt had ruled as regent during his childhood, and had taught him a great deal in those years that he had spent the rest of his life trying to forget.
She had taught him that mercy was useful only when it was remembered as a gift from the throne. She believed that the realm was held together by obedience, and obedience by fear, and she had never once in his hearing allowed that there might be a third thing. To her, the uprising was not a crisis. It was an insult, and insults were answered.
“Send the army,” she said. “Hang the leaders above the western road. Leave them there until winter.”
Lady Elianor stared at her. “There may be thousands involved.”
“Then choose a hundred.”
“And if that creates ten thousand more?”
Ysara’s thin lips curved, and she struck the floor once with her staff, lightly, the way another woman might have closed a fan. “Then we will know where the disloyal live.”
The king rose from the throne. The skulls behind him seemed to rise with him; it was a trick of the braziers, and he knew it was a trick, and the whole court flinched at it anyway.
“No executions,” he said.
His aunt’s expression did not change, but the disappointment in her eyes was unmistakable, and he felt it on the back of his neck as he descended the steps, as he had felt it as a boy when he answered a question wrongly in front of the court. He did not look round.
“General Tharos will send soldiers to restore the road, but they will not advance unless attacked. Lady Elianor will accompany them with authority to negotiate.”
Merovan stiffened, a hand going to the edge of the table. “Your Majesty, negotiation grants legitimacy.”
“So does failure.”
The chancellor fell silent and bowed his narrow head. Varyon turned back to the captain, who was still kneeling where he had first gone down, mud drying pale on his boots.
“How many wagons were taken?”
“Twelve, Majesty.”
“And the drivers?”
“Released unharmed.”
That troubled Varyon more than slaughter would have. Bandits killed witnesses. Desperate mobs burned what they could not carry. Men who let the drivers walk home and took only what they had come for were neither. These rebels had discipline. They had purpose, and somebody among them had thought about what the court would make of a road with no bodies on it.
“Did they take the tax silver?”
“No, Majesty. Only the grain and weapons.”
“Weapons?”
The captain looked up for the first time. “Hidden beneath the grain sacks.”
All eyes turned toward General Tharos, and the general’s face hardened as though someone had struck it. He did not stand. He laid both hands flat on the table beside his gauntlets and spoke to the king and to no one else.
“I ordered no weapons transported along that road.”
Chancellor Merovan looked to the king. “Then someone within the court did.”
The bell beneath the palace sounded again, one long note that set the flames bowing in their braziers and the dust drifting down through the light. This time, no one mistook it for an echo.
The rebellion had begun long before the first banner was raised.
It began in the lower streets of the capital, where the gutters ran grey after rain and the smoke of cooking fires hung in the lanes like wet wool. Labourers stood in their doorways there and watched gilded carriages cross the high bridges between the Veinwright towers, bridges they had built and could never use. Stonekin porters stood beside them, and goblin carters, and scaled traders from the southern coast, and none of them had ever set foot on those bridges either.
It began in the western mines, where men descended before sunrise and returned after dark with silver dust in their lungs and in the creases of their hands, and coughed it up at night into the straw.
It began in the riverlands, where the noble collectors measured grain more carefully than they counted the hungry, and where a family could watch its harvest go down the road in a royal wagon and wonder what it would eat when spring came.
It began in whispers. Why did the dead receive tombs of marble while the living slept beneath leaking roofs? Why were the laws written by families who never suffered beneath them? Why did the king’s priests require bodies? And last, and quietest, asked in the back rooms of taverns with the shutters closed: why did Iskandar belong to the Veinwrights at all?
In taverns and market squares, travelling speakers offered answers. Some were former soldiers dismissed without pensions, who still stood like soldiers on an upturned crate. Some were village priests disturbed by the royal cult’s practices, and some were provincial nobles who had lost their influence to the Veinwright court and wanted it back. Others were ordinary people who had simply grown tired of kneeling.
They did not yet agree on what should replace the crown. They agreed only that the crown must change, and for a long time that was enough.
Behind them moved strangers carrying Gilded coin. They arrived dressed as merchants, lenders, scribes and the representatives of distant trade houses, men and women of pleasant manners and forgettable faces. Their clothing bore no guild crest. Their contracts mentioned no capital beyond Iskandar.
They offered grain where the royal storehouses remained closed. They paid the debts of local leaders, quietly, so that a man who had been about to lose his forge woke one morning to find that he owed nobody anything and could not say why. They bought failing workshops and returned them to their owners. They supplied printing presses, too, though few people knew where the machines had been built, and fewer still thought to ask.
Soon pamphlets appeared across the western provinces, pasted to tavern doors and shrine walls and the sides of the royal tax offices themselves. Some said THE KINGDOM FEEDS THE DEAD WHILE THE LIVING STARVE. Others said, more simply, NO THRONE IS ETERNAL. The commonest of all, which the children of the mining towns learned to chalk on walls before they could read anything else, said ISKANDAR BELONGS TO ITS PEOPLE.
The most powerful lie within those pamphlets was that they contained no lies. The suffering was real. The inequality was visible to anyone who stood in the lower city and looked up at the bridges, and the fear of what the Veinwrights did beneath their palace had existed for generations before anyone thought to print it.
The Gilded Coven did not invent the grievances of Iskandar. It merely taught the grievances how to organise.
Three days after the bells rang, Lady Elianor rode west beneath a white banner, through country she had once thought she knew. It was late in the year and the fields on either side of the tax road lay stripped and brown under a low sky, with crows working the stubble and no one else in sight.
The farmhouses they passed had their shutters closed. Twice she saw smoke from a chimney, and twice, as the column came near, the smoke went out. General Tharos rode beside her at the head of five hundred soldiers. He had not spoken a dozen words to her since the capital, and most of those had concerned the pace.
She did not hold it against him. Of all the men who opposed her in council, he was the one who did it honestly, to her face, which was more than could be said for the chancellor.
They found the tax road blocked by overturned wagons, felled trees and walls of packed earth thrown up across the way, and behind them, hundreds of rebels waiting. Elianor reined in and lifted her brass viewing glass, and the barricade jumped close.
Farmers stood beside miners. Former royal soldiers wore pieces of their old armour beneath rough cloaks, a breastplate here and a dented helm there, and a broad-backed stonekin quarryman leaned on a hammer nearly as long as she was tall. Women carried hunting bows. Children moved between them with baskets of stones, as calmly as if they were bringing in the washing.
Above the barricade flew the symbol of the broken crown, red on unbleached cloth, cracking and slapping in the wind.
She lowered the glass. A man had climbed over the wagons and was walking out to meet them, alone and on foot, with nothing in his hands.
His name was Darien Rusk, once a captain in the king’s army. Elianor knew the name from the reports, and Tharos, it was plain, knew a great deal more than the name. She saw the general’s whole body change in the saddle as the man came near, the way a hound’s does when it sees something it was once told to bring down.
“You deserted your post at Blackwater Ford,” Tharos said.
“I resigned.”
“A soldier does not resign during war.”
“The war ended seven years ago.”
“Not for a soldier.”
Rusk looked past him at the royal troops drawn up along the road, at the spears and the shields and the young faces under the helms. “Is that what you told them? That they belong to the crown forever?”
Tharos rested one hand on the pommel of his sword. Lady Elianor touched her heels to her horse and moved it between them, not quickly, because a quick movement here might be taken for something else.
“We have not come to trade accusations,” she said.
Rusk’s attention shifted to her, and stayed. “You are the king’s provincial minister.”
“I am.”
“Then you know what has been taken from us.”
“I know what the law has demanded.”
“That was not my question.”
Elianor studied him. He was not dressed like a revolutionary hero, or like anything the court had imagined when it laughed in the Hall of Remembrance.
His coat was worn at the cuffs and patched at one elbow, and his beard had grown in unevenly, as beards do on men with other things to think about. A scar crossed his left cheek, earned during the same border campaigns that had made General Tharos famous, and it pulled tight when he frowned, which he was doing now.
He stood with his feet apart and his hands still, and he answered her the way an officer answers a superior he does not much respect: exactly, and no further.
Behind him stood people who looked tired rather than triumphant. That made them more dangerous. Elianor had seen triumphant crowds before, and they went home when the drink ran out. Tired people had already counted what they had left to lose, and found the sum was very small.
“What do you want?” she asked.
Rusk did not need to think. He gave his demands as he might have given a quartermaster’s list, one item at a time. “The winter levy ended. The mine debts suspended. Provincial councils restored.”
“And the seized grain?”
“Distributed.”
“The weapons?”
“Kept.”
General Tharos laughed once, a short bark with nothing in it. “Then this is not negotiation.”
Rusk looked at him, and the scar on his cheek tightened. “No. It is the last chance before war.”
The general drew his sword. The sound of it was very loud on the empty road. On the barricade the rebels raised their bows, and all along the royal line the spears came down in answer, rank after rank, with a noise like a wave going over shingle.
Lady Elianor lifted both hands. “Stop!”
For a moment, the entire kingdom seemed balanced upon that word. She would remember the stillness afterwards more clearly than anything that followed it: the wind in the broken-crown banner, a horse blowing somewhere behind her, Rusk’s face turned toward her with something in it that might almost have been hope.
Then a crossbow fired.
The bolt struck a royal soldier in the throat. No one ever discovered who had loosed it. The young man fell from his horse, clawing at the shaft, and his heels drummed on the road, and before he had stopped moving the soldiers around him surged forward with a shout that had no words in it at all.
The barricade erupted. Stones, arrows and curses filled the air, and the royal shields locked together and went up against the overturned wagons like a battering ram. Horses screamed. Rebels dragged soldiers from their saddles and fell on them in the mud.
Elianor saw a miner swing a hammer into a polished helm and the helm fold, and she saw a cavalryman cut down a farmer whose weapon was nothing more than a sharpened rake, and then she could not see anything clearly for the smoke and the struggling bodies and her own horse turning under her.
General Tharos shouted for formation. Lady Elianor shouted for retreat. Neither command could be heard, and neither would have been obeyed if it had.
By sunset, the western road had been reopened. Two hundred rebels lay dead around the barricade, and sixty-three royal soldiers died with them. Darien Rusk escaped. The captured rebels were placed in chains in the last of the light and roped together in a long, stumbling line, to be marched toward the capital.
As darkness fell, Elianor found General Tharos standing beside the broken barricade, staring down at a torn banner trampled into the mud. The red crown painted on it had run in the wet, so that it looked less like paint than like what it was meant to suggest.
The general had not cleaned his sword. He held it point down beside his boot, as if he had forgotten it was in his hand.
“You wanted a demonstration of strength,” she said.
He did not look at her. “I did not order the crossbowman to fire.”
“Neither did I.”
“Then Rusk did.”
“Why would he begin a battle while standing in the open?”
“To create martyrs.”
Elianor looked across the field. The soldiers were going among the dead with lanterns, turning them over, and in the swinging light she could see faces. Some of the dead were barely old enough to carry weapons. One of the stone-baskets lay on its side near the barricade, its stones spilled out across the road, and nobody had picked it up.
“He has them now,” she said.
News of the battle reached the capital before the army returned, and by the time the prisoners were marched through the western gate, thousands had gathered along the streets to see them come in.
Chancellor Merovan watched from a balcony above the great avenue, with a cold wind coming down off the towers and the smell of wet stone and chestnut-roasting braziers rising from below. He had come up to see the city cheer its soldiers home. He had wanted, very badly, to hear it.
The royal council expected the people to jeer. Instead, they watched in silence. They lined the avenue from the gate to the palace bridges, ten and twenty deep, humans and goblins and stonekin shoulder to shoulder, feather-crested couriers perched on the rails of the fountains, and not one of them made a sound.
The prisoners walked with bloodied faces and bound hands. Some limped. Some had lost their boots or their cloaks in the fighting and came barefoot over the cold stones. One elderly man could no longer stand, and was carried between two others with his arms over their shoulders and his feet trailing, and the soldiers on either side of the column did not stop them.
A woman in the crowd began to sing. Merovan could not see her, only hear her, a single thin voice somewhere below the balcony, and it was a moment before he recognised the tune as an old harvest song from the riverlands, the kind sung over the last load of the year.
Another voice joined her. Then another, and another, until the song was running ahead of the prisoners up the avenue like fire along a fuse, and the entire street was singing.
The royal soldiers marched faster.
Merovan’s hands had found the balustrade. He became aware that the man beside him was watching them, and took them off it.
He knew the man only as Master Corven, an emissary of the Gilded Coven. Corven wore no gold. That would have been too obvious, and in all the months Merovan had known him, Corven had never once been obvious about anything.
He was a broad-shouldered man in a brown coat, with plain gloves kept so immaculate that they might have been put on that minute, and a plain cane hooked over the balustrade at his side. He resembled a prosperous clerk. Merovan had dealt with clerks all his life, and had never met one who frightened him so much.
“You said the western protest would collapse,” Merovan whispered. Even up here, even under the singing, he could not bring himself to say it louder.
“I said it lacked leadership.”
“You supplied them with weapons.”
Corven smiled faintly. “You supplied the wagons.”
Merovan turned to look at him. The emissary’s expression remained pleasant, the expression of a man discussing the rate on a modest loan, and he kept his eyes on the avenue below as though the conversation were happening to somebody else.
The chancellor had entered his arrangement with the Gilded Coven believing he could control it. He had been sure of that, at the beginning; he had drafted treaties for thirty years and had never put his name to a clause he did not understand.
The kingdom’s treasury was failing. Trade had slowed. Provincial taxes arrived late or not at all, and the great houses would sooner have sold their ancestors’ bones than lend the crown a copper. Corven had offered loans without demanding land, ports or titles. Only influence.
At first, that influence had seemed harmless. A trade exemption, signed on a dull afternoon among forty other papers. A change to mining rights, which no one at court had noticed. Permission for Gilded agents to negotiate directly with the provincial guilds, which had seemed to Merovan at the time like nothing more than saving everybody a journey.
Then came the weapons. Merovan had protested. Corven had reminded him of his debts, courteously and precisely and to the last copper, and Merovan had gone home that night and sat in his study until dawn with a cold supper in front of him, and in the morning he had signed for the wagons.
“You told me the arms would be found,” he said now. His voice cracked on it, and he hated the sound. “You said their discovery would justify arrests.”
“And so they were found.”
“After the rebels seized them.”
“A small complication.”
“Men are dead.”
Corven looked down at the singing crowd. The tail of the column was passing beneath them, the old man with his feet trailing, and the song had reached the palace bridges and was coming back down the avenue the other way, so that the whole street seemed to be singing to itself.
“Men were always going to die.”
Merovan’s face drained of colour. He felt it go, a cold pricking in his cheeks, and he held on to the balustrade again and no longer cared who saw. “You want a civil war.”
“No.” The Gilded emissary adjusted one glove, drawing the leather smooth over the back of his hand. “We want stability.”
“You call this stability?”
“Not this.” Corven lifted his eyes from the avenue toward the distant palace, where the towers of the Veinwrights stood black against the sky with their pale lanterns already lit beneath the arches, and looked at them the way a man looks at a house he is thinking of buying. “What comes after.”
The Hall of Remembrance smelled of wet wool and blood when King Varyon ordered the captured rebels brought before the court. It had rained in the night, and the prisoners brought the rain in with them, and the mud of the western road, and the sour smell of men who had been chained together a long time. The braziers had been banked high against the cold.
Queen-Regent Ysara had demanded immediate execution before the prisoners were halfway across the floor. High Mortarch Selkos had requested permission to interrogate them beneath the palace, where the ancestral spirits could distinguish truth from deception. Lady Elianor had opposed both, at length, and Varyon had let her.
General Tharos said little. He stood near the council table, still wearing the armour he had worn at the western road, the steel unpolished and dull, and dried blood marked the edges of his cloak where it had dragged in the mud. Varyon did not think he had slept. He did not think the general would have thanked him for saying so.
The prisoners were forced to kneel on the black floor. King Varyon came down from the throne and walked among them, slowly, his heavy robes whispering over the stone, and the guards drew back to let him pass.
He expected hatred. He found exhaustion. A young woman stared up at him with one eye swollen shut and the other perfectly steady. An old man muttered prayers beneath his breath, the same few words over and over, worn smooth. A miner with a broken hand, cradled against his chest in a filthy rag, looked not at the king at all, but past him, at the skulls behind the throne.
“You raised arms against your sovereign,” Varyon said.
It was the miner who answered, still looking at the skulls. “My sovereign has never been hungry.”
General Tharos crossed the floor in three strides and struck him across the mouth with the back of his gauntlet. The miner’s head snapped sideways, and the sound rang off the pillars.
The king turned sharply. “I did not command that.”
“He insulted the throne.”
“He answered a question.”
Tharos stood a moment longer over the kneeling man, breathing hard through his nose, and then stepped back. Varyon crouched in front of the miner, so that their faces were level, close enough to smell the blood. The rest of the court, he knew, was appalled; kings did not crouch. He found he did not much care.
“Who supplied the weapons?”
The man spat blood onto the black floor. “We found them.”
“Where?”
“In your wagons.”
A few courtiers exchanged glances along the benches. Varyon did not look at them. “Who told you they were there?”
The miner smiled through broken teeth. “The dead.”
High Mortarch Selkos stepped forward, his chains ticking against the bone of his mask, the blue flame steady in his lamp. “Give him to me.”
“No,” said the king.
“Someone is using forbidden knowledge against the crown.” The Mortarch’s voice was patient and very nearly amused, a teacher’s voice for a pupil who had not yet understood. “The ancestors must be consulted.”
Varyon stood. “You have consulted them every night since the uprising began.”
“They are disturbed.”
“By what?”
Selkos hesitated. It was a very small hesitation, a breath where there should not have been one, but no one in that hall had ever seen the High Mortarch hesitate over anything, and it silenced the room more completely than the bells had.
King Varyon looked at him. “Speak.”
The Mortarch bowed his head, and the chains hung still. “Some refuse to answer.”
Queen-Regent Ysara rose from her seat with a rustle of black feathers, the staff hard in her fist. “Impossible.”
“The ancestral chamber has grown cold. The names of three former kings have vanished from the Book of Communion.”
Murmurs spread through the court like water through a cracked floor. The Veinwrights believed that as long as the names of their rulers were preserved in the Book, their spirits remained bound to the kingdom, keeping watch over it, lending it their strength. A name disappearing from the book was not merely an omen. It was a rejection.
“Which kings?” asked Varyon.
Selkos did not answer.
Ysara’s voice hardened, and the staff came down once on the stone. “Which kings?”
“The founders.”
The pale flames in the braziers flickered, all at once, as though a door had opened somewhere far below. For the first time in Varyon’s memory, fear entered the old queen’s face. It did not stay long. But he saw it, and she saw that he had seen it, and neither of them would forget.
The king looked toward the sealed mouths of his ancestors. All his life he had been taught that the dead legitimised his rule, that he sat on that throne because they had sat on it, and that their consent ran down through the black stone into him like water into a root. Now even the dead seemed to be withdrawing their consent, and he did not know to whom a king could appeal after that.
The young woman among the prisoners began to laugh. It was a cracked, breathless sound, and it went on too long.
General Tharos seized her by the hair and dragged her head back. “What is amusing?”
She looked up past him at the throne, her one good eye wet and bright. “You built your kingdom on graves.” Blood ran from the corner of her mouth, and she did not seem to notice it. “Now the graves are opening.”
High Mortarch Selkos raised his staff. The king caught it before it fell.
For several breaths, ruler and priest stood locked together in the middle of the hall, both hands on the bone, close enough that Varyon could hear the chains of the mask ticking and smell the old, sweetish smell of the crypts that clung to the Mortarch’s robes. Selkos was stronger than he looked. Varyon did not let go.
Then he pushed the staff aside, and the Mortarch let it go with him, and stepped back, and bowed as if nothing had happened at all.
“No executions,” the king said. “No interrogations beneath the palace. The prisoners will be held until a provincial assembly can hear their grievances.”
Queen-Regent Ysara stared at him. “You would place rebels before an assembly?”
“I would place Iskandar before one.”
“You shame your blood.”
“No,” Varyon replied. “I am trying to prevent more of it from being spilled.”
His aunt came down from her seat, the feathers whispering about her and the staff striking the stone at every step. The court held its breath. When she reached him she stopped very close, and spoke quietly enough that only he could hear, and her breath smelled of cloves.
“A throne that asks permission to rule has already fallen.”
She turned and left the hall. One by one, with a scraping of benches and a rustle of mourning silk, the oldest Veinwright nobles rose and followed her, and the great doors stood open a long time to let them all go through.
The court divided before the prisoners’ eyes. Some remained beside the king. Others departed with the queen-regent, not looking back, and the kneeling rebels watched them go with an attention Varyon did not like at all.
Chancellor Merovan stood between them, in the middle of the floor, his hands folded in the long sleeves of his grey silk. For a moment, Varyon thought he would leave. Instead the chancellor turned to the throne and bowed, low and correct.
“Your Majesty,” he said, “I will begin preparations for the assembly.”
The king nodded. He did not see Merovan’s hands trembling inside his sleeves.
The assembly never took place.
Two nights before the provincial delegates were due to arrive, the western prison caught fire. It burned through the small hours with a light the whole lower city could see, and by the time the bucket chains had been formed and the roof had fallen in, there was very little left to save.
The guards claimed that masked figures had attacked shortly after midnight. The cells were opened, one after another. More than a hundred prisoners escaped.
By dawn, rebel pamphlets appeared across the capital, still damp from the press, accusing the king of planning a secret execution. At noon, three provincial governors declared they would no longer send taxes to the Veinwright throne. And by sunset, Darien Rusk was standing on the steps of an abandoned magistrate’s court in the lower city, addressing a crowd of thousands.
The square below the steps was packed from wall to wall, and people stood on the fountain rim and hung from the windows of the tenements and sat astride the roof-ridges, and a smell of smoke still drifted over all of it from the ruin of the prison.
Rusk held no crown. He wore no noble colours, only the same worn coat he had worn at the barricade, and behind him, nailed across the empty doorway of the court, hung the red symbol of the broken throne.
“The king offers an assembly,” he told them, “after sending soldiers against the hungry.”
The crowd roared, and the sound came back off the walls of the square doubled.
“He offers mercy for resisting laws that should never have existed.”
Another roar, longer, with fists in it.
“He promises that the throne will listen, but only after the dead have finished whispering in his ear.”
The people raised their fists, and kept them raised.
Among them stood men carrying newly forged swords, still bright from the grinding wheel. Crates of grain had arrived in the lower city that morning from an unnamed foreign benefactor. Printing presses worked day and night. Local magistrates who joined the separatists were promised protection for their lands.
The rebellion no longer resembled a mob. It had clerks, quartermasters and messengers. It had coin, and plenty of it, and nobody in the square could have said where that coin was minted. It had law, written by scholars who had never lived in the provinces, in a fine hand on good paper. It had weapons stamped with marks that had been filed away before delivery, and it had friends no rebel could name.
Darien Rusk lifted both hands, and the crowd quieted for him, slowly, like a field going still after wind.
“We do not rise against Iskandar,” he said. “We rise for it.”
The declaration travelled faster than any royal decree. Within a week, the western provinces announced the formation of a separatist council. Within two, royal tax offices were burned across the riverlands, one after another, the smoke going up from market towns along the rivers like a line of signal fires. Within three, soldiers began deserting their posts.
Some joined the rebels because they believed in the cause. Some joined because they had not been paid, and the rebellion fed its people regularly. Some joined because the rebellion offered silver, and there was a great deal of it, and none of them thought to ask where it came from.
In the capital, everyone had someone to blame. The nobles blamed the king’s hesitation, and the provincial ministers blamed the queen-regent’s brutality. The priests blamed foreign corruption, and the army blamed the court. The people, standing in the long queues outside the bakeries with their collars turned up against the cold, blamed them all.
And the Gilded Coven continued to pay.
King Varyon stood alone upon the highest balcony of the palace, with the night wind pulling at his heavy robes and the cold of the stone coming up through his boots. From there he could see the lights of Iskandar stretching toward the horizon.
The wealthy upper district burned with golden lanterns, ranked along the bridges between the towers like beads on a string. Beyond it lay the crowded lower city, where the light was redder and less orderly, cooking fires and torches flickering between the rooftops and down the narrow alleys, and the murmur of the place came up to him faintly on the wind.
Farther west, beyond the walls, signal beacons glowed upon the hills. One. Then another, a little to the south of the first. Then another, and another, until he lost count, a whole line of small steady lights laid out along the dark rim of the world. Rebel fires.
Lady Elianor joined him. She came quietly, as she always did, and stood a little apart from him at the parapet with her hands folded at her waist.
“The southern council has declared neutrality,” she said.
“Neutrality between a king and his subjects.”
“They no longer consider themselves subjects.”
Varyon looked toward the western lights. “Does Rusk command them?”
“He speaks for them. That is not the same thing.”
“Who does he answer to?”
“We do not know.”
“We know.”
Elianor said nothing. The wind tugged at her hair and she let it, and kept her eyes on the hills.
The king turned toward her. “The weapons. The grain. The printing presses. Rebellions do not build themselves this quickly.”
“No.”
“The Gilded Coven.”
She weighed it, as she weighed everything, and he watched her do it and was almost grateful. “It is likely.”
“Likely?”
“It is not proof.”
He laughed, bitterly, and the wind took the sound away. “Proof is a luxury enjoyed by rulers who are not losing kingdoms.”
Behind them the palace doors opened, letting out a spill of warm lamplight across the balcony stones, and General Tharos came through it. He had changed his cloak, but not his armour.
He carried a sealed message in one gauntleted hand, and he held it a little away from himself, as a man holds something that has been in a fire.
“The western garrison has surrendered,” he said.
Varyon closed his eyes. “How many?”
“Eight hundred soldiers.”
“To Rusk?”
“To the Free Provinces.”
The king opened his eyes and held out his hand, and Tharos put the message into it. It was heavy paper, folded small and sealed with red wax. Varyon did not break the seal. He held it, and turned it over once, and looked at the general.
“What do you recommend?”
The general answered without hesitation. “War.”
Lady Elianor turned toward him. “And how many provinces must burn before you call it victory?”
“As many as necessary.”
“That answer is why they are rebelling.”
“No,” Tharos said, and his fist closed on the parapet as though it were the council table. “They are rebelling because they believe we are afraid to stop them.”
“We are afraid.”
Both of them looked at the king. Varyon’s gaze remained fixed upon the distant fires, and he did not take it back.
He thought of the miners beneath the earth, with the silver dust in their lungs. He thought of the farmers at the barricade, and of the dead soldier with the crossbow bolt in his throat, who had been younger than any of the guards at the doors behind him. He thought of the crowd singing as the prisoners entered the capital, the sound of it carried up to the palace on the wind.
He thought of his aunt’s warning, spoken into his ear in the Hall of Remembrance in a breath that smelled of cloves. A throne that asks permission to rule has already fallen.
He thought of the founders, whose names had vanished from the Book of Communion. Perhaps they had abandoned him. Perhaps, and this was the thought he had been keeping from himself for days, the one that waited for him at the end of every other thought, they had never been there at all.
Below the balcony, the bells beneath the palace began to ring again. This time, they did not stop.
The sound spread across the capital, rolling through noble towers and crowded tenements alike, until the whole city seemed to hum with it like a struck bowl. People came out into the streets with lamps in their hands and their coats over their nightclothes.
Soldiers on the walls turned to look toward the palace. In the shrines, priests abandoned their prayers in the middle of a line. And in the west, on the dark hills, the rebel beacons answered, one after another, as if the bells had been a signal they had all been waiting for.
King Varyon opened the message. Inside was a single sheet of good paper bearing the broken crown, drawn in red ink with a careful hand. Beneath it were the words: The Free Provinces of Iskandar no longer recognise the authority of the Veinwright throne.
The king read the declaration twice. Then he folded it carefully along its creases, as if it were something he meant to keep, and put it inside his robe.
“Summon the court,” he said.
Lady Elianor watched him. “What will you tell them?”
Varyon looked west, toward the kingdom that no longer accepted that it belonged to him, and toward the line of fires that marked where it ended. “That Iskandar is divided.”
General Tharos rested his hand upon his sword. “And then?”
The king’s face hardened, and for a moment, in the light from the open doors, he looked a great deal like the skulls behind his throne. “Then we decide what remains of it.”
Beneath their feet, the dead kings were silent. Across the western provinces, new banners rose in the dark. And in distant golden halls, where contracts mattered more than crowns, the architects of the rebellion raised their cups to the beginning of war.
End of Act I