Chapter The First
The dragon's skull was gargantuan, but its shadow, when the sun was low in the sky, was ever more enormous, enveloping the entire courtyard in a certain spiked shadow when the light was right. Sometimes the First Lord would find himself standing here on the cobblestone, gazing up at it in a rapt, respectful silence, watching cobwebs waft gently in those massive empty eye sockets.
There had been a time, not so long ago, when this beast would have curled about the spires of the King's Keep, when it could have soared over the capital city, blotting out an entire swathe of cloud as to make one wonder whether they had only ever imagined what the sky looked like. He could not imagine that the ordinary person felt any nostalgia for that period. It had been a season of inferno – a summer of summers, each hotter than the last, until that final, awful culmination.
Men, women and children alike had burned. The First Lord himself still had the scars.
This morning, he found himself in this place again and thinking how sharp the thing's teeth seemed. Syýa wanted him to allow the creeping ivy of the castle to colonise the skull now, so that the teeth would be flossed by vines, so that flowers might bloom in the eyesockets, so that it would spew petals in the place of char. The First Lord had turned her down but gently: it would not do to soften what this thing was. It would not do to beautify it. It ought to remain as it was, silently snarling for eternity about the entryway to the Watchtower.
Besides: the necromancers would not abide to have such potent material tainted by being intertwined thus with life. He would never hear the end of it.
He was content to stand thus until his old guard, Badb, came to fetch him for the meeting. Badb, though now as grizzeled and grey as any civilised grandfather, would have been the First Lord's chevalier had the Selection gone forward in their youth, and he remained, in the First Lord's eyes, the best such example of what a chevalier ought to be: strong and sure, without an ego to speak of, as certain in his own skin as he was of his footing.
He hoped the Houses would produce chevaliers that proved one-fifth as worthy.
Badb said, "your Grace, they're congregating."
"How many?"
Badb's voice was soft and regretful. "Only two have arrived so far."
To be expected, and yet – a slight sting of uncertainty. Was this the correct path?
More to the point – who had dared to accept his invitation?
He almost need not have asked. The emissary of the Seventh House was present, characteristically early: a strangely luminous vassal, pale like bleached bone, of no clear relation to the Seventh Lord. Upon entering into the brotherhood of the ossuary, before they could cross the threshold of the cathedral, the necromancers of the Seventh Land were obliged to shave themselves cleanly of all hair, on their head and otherwise. In days past, they would have pulled out their nails as well, for they could not abide to wear anything dead upon them lest it provide a handhold for an enemy as adept with the dead as they. The emissary did not seem to have followed this older tradition – their nails rapped gently on the stone surface of the Watching Table – but their shaved head and wide eyes, made the wider by a conspicious lack of eyelashes or eyebrows, made them ostentatious nonetheless.
To his amusement, the First Lord noted that the leather-garbed representative of the Eighth Land was regarding the necromancer with enormous scrutiny, his gaze made all the more piercing by the woad-blue paint smeared about his eyes, lashed in finger-thick lines across his scarred cheeks and forehead. Was his horseskin coat tightening around their chest, was the bone handle of his khepesh warming unnaturally against his knuckles when he reached for it? It was wonder enough that a horse lord had conceded to enter the capital, to sit static and to dine civil and to pillage little; it was apparent that, sitting square thus with a dread zealot, he would be ill-inclined to return. The Mkhedrebi, as a rule, did not trust that which did not adhere to the natural order of things, and the most simple Mkhedari rule was this: dead things ought to stay thus, particularly when a good amount of work had gone into making them that way in the first place.
They made for ill company, silent but for that click-click-clicking of the necromancer's nails on the stone. They had been obliged to leave their retinues outside the castle walls, which created a tense silence that the First Lord saw no real reason to disturb. He could attend to his maps and his papers, silently ensuring that all was in order for the meeting. There was time yet; it was not yet noon. It was a time of peace: what issue could the Houses find in sending a single man to the castle for a single meeting, even if it was to meet with a traitor from a family of traitors?
He was right to have counselled himself into patience, for the others drifted in gradually: next was the bannerman of the Fourth House, who entered with a typically elegant apology and an equally graceful curtesy, before taking her place at the table. The First Lord suspected that the Second House had sent a pyromancer, for their representative, when he arrived, was wearing a set of flint wristbands and a tinder-strike ring endemic to graduates of the Burning Schools. He opted to kneel, which was an older greeting, but no less appreciated.
The necromancer regarded this expression of fealty with a look of vague disdain, but said nothing.
The First Lord had taken the unprecedented step of permitting the emissaries to wear their weapons into the meeting room, which meant that the necromancer's nail-click chorus was joined now by the soft hissing bridge of the pyromancer flicking his thumb against his ring, drawing out sparks with each nervous motion. The representatives of Three and Five arrived at the same time, though they had come from opposite coasts: the Third man, behind whom the scent of salt water hung like a cloud, was all warm smile and flattery; the Fifth looked relieved to find that the First Lord had not brought his scion along to do to him what had no doubt been done to his brothers and cousins on the battlefield.
A disturbance behind: a late arrival had instructed the guards at the threshold to part the doors and damn punctuality should I bring this up with the King? He must have been more persuasive than his guttural voice and northman's accent suggested; the doors creaked open as though to vomit out the new arrival, and the First Lord turned to greet him. "Ah. Six. I believe we can get started now."
"Your Grace." The equerry of the Sixth House, with burned hands and ruddy face, greeted the king as an old retainer might; dragon-whisperer and dragonslayer clasped hands briefly with an affection borne not of acquaintance but of long alliance. After all, when the First House had broken with tradition and eschewed the Selection for the first time in millenia, it had been with the soft-spoken might of the diminutive Sixth House at their back. Their propinquity in that time was what permitted the Sixth to dispatch a mere servant to this gathering, when all others had sent minor lords and knights and, yes, in the case of the Seventh, a devotee of the dead man's faith. Only the Sixth could show such informality and escape censure.
This was so, even if the matter for discussion this day allowed the First Lord to look upon those days with naught but regret.
"I'd apologise," the equerry of the Sixth House said, "but I have no excuse for my lateness except a lazy mount."
"That's excuse enough, Dariush, I appreciate that you came at all."
With the equerry seated, the Watching Table was encircled with emissaries – men who would have, some years past, have far preferred a blade at their neighbour's throat to the prospect of pouring wine for one another, though in fact the First Lord thought that the Eight Land's man retained still a hand on his khepesh. Certainly, the bannermen of Two and Three remained coiled. Only Dariush and the woman from the Second House seemed truly relaxed; all others had a certain hunted look to their faces. Houses forgot little; ancestral memory ran deep.
They numbered but eight: the ninth of their ilk, the Floating House, whose ancestral lands now comprised the capital city and its crownlands, had sent no man to stand for them. In truth, it was not apparent that the Floating House still had a head, or an heir, or even a horse between them. They existed but in the ether: though Ezust claimed them extinct, the First Lord was clever enough to know that this was mere arrogance on the part of his scion. Well, if they wanted to put a man forward, they could: he would not exclude them for poverty alone.
And now, to business.
The First Lord did not waste time with niceties or greetings. He simply told the truth. Bracing his hands on the Watching Table, he said, quite plainly:
"Some years past, my ancestor did wrong unto yours and broke a very old oath. This has weighed on me heavy for as long as – for a very long time. I wish to right it, in the years that the gods see fit to leave to me. A return to the old ways. A chance to redeem my legacy."
At last, the necromancer had stopped tapping their nails on the stone, so baffled by this pronouncement did they seem; the pyromancer, similarly, was shocked out of nervous motion, a smile spreading slowly across their smile. The emissary of the Eighth turned his head slowly to regard, not the First Lord, but the enormous scythe which still hung over the window of the watchtower, rusted brown with blood; the paint beneath his eyes caught the noontide light, so that for a split second, it looked as though his face had been gashed open and he was bleeding sapphire.
And Dariush the Sixth was the only one of them brave enough to clarify: "you cannot possibly mean that – you mean to restart the Selection?"
Ezust the First's voice was as cold as the flagstones. "You cannot be serious."
"And why not, boy?"
The Fifth Land had, in its ill-fated rebellion, known the young prince as Cú n'Ármhagh – the hound of the scene of the slaughter. Fool them – Ezust had mounted a set of antlers on his helmet at the final battle at Kirghon's Pass to show the animal to which he would prefer to be compared – but in moments like these, the inspiration for such an epithet was apparent: Ezust had a knack for stilling entirely when he fixed his gaze upon someone, fixed his gaze as a dog might, all focus and quiver, so that it quite seemed that not even the wind would dare to stir his hair or shift his clothes.
Well, there was no wind here: the world was still.
Reality did not dare to intrude upon the throne room of the king.
Syýa observed, doe-like in her silence, barely visible in the shrouded gloom along the edge of the throne room, even garbed as she was in a coined headdress and a set of golden jewellery bound tightly around her arms, which caught the light and twinkled dangerously. She had a most unerring knack for not existing when it was important for her to do so. Her fingertips were still stained with wine and ashes; she had clearly arrived here straight from the temple when she had heard what was happening. It would not have done for Ezust to protest alone: that way, ruin lay.
The king met his heir's gaze levelly and said again, quite clearly, "well? Why not?"
"It is a throne," Ezust said. His lip curled. He had come fresh from some place of brutality: he had blood, not his own, on his lip, and a bruise, his own, blooming beneath one of those fixed green eyes. His armour was slight – he preferred hide and iron to the chainmail and gold of his king's men – and he wore his hair back in a style more similar to the way it was worn in the Eighth Land, rather than the First to which he nominally belonged. He had similarly carried a warhammer, like a slaughterman from the Fourth, for most of the war; it rather seemed, his fingers curling thus, that he might miss it. "Not a party favour."
"I hope," the First Lord said. He was sitting, as he tended to sit, in a low mahogany chair half-way up the steps which led to the Paper Throne proper. It had been his habit for as long as either sibling could remember; he took the throne, as he took the crown, only in the rarest of circumstances, when ritual and expectations would countenance nothing to the contrary. He disdained it; he preferred to be able to see expressions when he spoke to court and subject alike. "You do not mean to imply that your king is being frivolous with the..."
"It's a birthright."
"Yours?"
Ezust was the only person Syýa had ever seen snarl. "Whose else's?"
"That's rather," the First Lord said calmly, "the point."
Ezust could not recall when the last Selection had been held; he rather suspected that Morghon, regardless of his irritating placid demeanour, couldn't remember either. All this talk of broken oaths and betrayal, and none of them would have been able to name the ancestors who had made the damned promise in the first place.
It shouldn't have mattered. The crown could not be left up to chance. What did the king expect to happen? They could end up with a child or a maniac on the throne; some dragonhide in Six would finish the job of razing the city. All they would need was a half-decent chevalier to chivvy them through the Selection while those wiser and stronger cut one another to ribbons around them.
He had left the throne room rather than argue the point further. One could not speak reason to an unreasoned mind. If it was a Selection his uncle wanted, then it would be a Selection that he would get, and there was no point tarrying on that point.
Swords would need sharpening.
He had not realised that he had a shadow until she spoke. She had been three strides behind him this whole time, though she was softer on the stones than he was. Syýa said, "perhaps you should consult Lady Näktergal. See whether there have been any new women brought into the keep."
Ezust glanced at his sister, clearly baffled by this strange stroke of concern. It rather seemed that he had not expected his sister to know this name at all – it rather seemed like he had absolutely no intention of asking how she knew this name. "I'm not sure that a brothel," he said, slowly, dragging out the words as though to emphasise his unwillingness to be persuaded otherwise, "will help with this situation."
"Not what I meant, silly." Syýa smiled. "Make enquiries. Check their records. Sharing beds often leads to the sharing of ideas, you know. Perhaps someone has come awhispering."
"No," Ezust said, "this is surely Morghon's madness alone. His stubbornness. His pride."
"He is coming to the age for for a natural confusion..." Syýa widened her eyes dramatically. Lined with kohl as they were, it had the effect of making her look rather frenzied, particularly when the dim light of the lower corridors painted such interesting shadows across the flat places of her face, curling around what few strands of her dark hair had managed to escape her cloche. "Ah, here, Ezu – are you really worried?"
They were in the bowels of the castle, moving through one of its many draughty, cold hallways which curled, eventually, to the courtyard – and indeed, ahead of them, was a small doorway leading to the forecourt of the castle's stables. Ezust suspected this might be near enough to the servant's quarters, near enough that he dropped his voice low as he descended a small set of steps and answered his sister venomously: "vexed."
She giggled. "You're worried. You don't think you can take a handful of backwater cavaliers and what amounts to a scion in the small-lands these days?"
"I don't think I should have to."
"I'll chev for you," Syýa said, deeply sympathetic, "shall I?"
Her brother paused. Even standing on the bottom step thus, he had a clean two inches on her. She suspected that she might be no taller than his broadsword – she had heard its kind called horse-cutter, to the displeasure of the riding slavers in the Eighth – even when, as now, she wore her headdress and her heeled boots. Where her brother was tall and broad and hard-faced, she was reed-limbed and soft-handed after a life of instruction in embroidery and enacting rituals.
She smiled blithely at him and conceded sweet-voicedly: "perhaps not."
Alas – no smile.
"Santora shall second me," Ezkust said, shortly. "As she always has."
"Dear Santora. She'll achieve sainthood yet."
"Don't say that." Ezust had turned to address her on the very threshold of the palace, knowing that she could go no further. It was one of his most irritating and childish habits – walking away in the middle of an argument, crossing the boundary of the castle to cut a conversation short, knowing that she would be unable to follow, knowing that she was bound to its borders. "You'll curse us for the weeks ahead."
"Whyever not? She would make a wonderful svata, don't you think? Patron of dogs, and of playing cards, and of drowning on dry land."
"Saints must die first, Sy."
"All men must."
She spoke it like a prayer; she spoke it like a fervent wish. Her brother swayed over the threshold between here and there.
"Fortunate," Ezust said, "for you."
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