“Yes.”
Elspeth peeled another strip of charred skin from her arm and edged closer to Melanna. “A sword,” she hissed. “He cannot be crowned without a sword.”
And her father’s sword was lost in the sanctum. Melanna glanced at the trampled grass where her own had fallen. It caught light anew as she took it by the blade, but the moonfire made no mark upon her skin.
“For you, my prince.” She paused, savouring the words. “My Emperor.”
Melanna felt a pang as her father took the sword, as if she’d given up a piece of herself.
Ashana nodded. When she spoke, it was not with the wry warmth Melanna knew so well, but tones cold as ice and hard as glass. They carried across the cloister.
“I will not ask whose coin brought a vranakin to my temple. But from now on, a hand raised against the House of Saran is a hand raised against me. And among my many questionable virtues, patience cannot easily be found. You might seek it the rest of your brief lives and never catch a glimpse.”
She paused. The Huntsman ripped his spear free of the kernclaw’s corpse. The thud of its butt against the grassy mound was that of a stone casket falling closed.
The courtyard, already drowning in quiet, fell utterly silent.
“You name me Goddess, and as she I call upon you now! Dark is returning to this world! Will you bicker as it takes your children? Or will the Hadari Empire stand as one, and bring light to those who have squandered their own? The road ahead requires sacrifice and offers glory. Will you follow your Emperor to its end?”
Ashana’s expression shifted, the regal mask of an eternal goddess slipping to reveal a younger, unsteady soul beneath. But the moment passed, and Ashana was once again as unknowable and ageless as the heavens.
“Ashanael Brigantim! Saran Amhyrador!” The Icansae prince rose to one knee, his sword point-down on the bridge’s timbers. “For Goddess and Emperor!”
“For Goddess and Emperor!”
The cloister boomed with sound and fury as other voices took up the cry. Swords offered salute from balconies. The Huntsman watched unmoving, inscrutable; Elspeth with grey-eyed resentment. And Ashana, the Goddess who sometimes claimed not to be a goddess at all, set a circlet of moonsilver upon the brow of a man delivered from delirium to rule.
Thus Kai Saran – who had knelt a prince – rose an Emperor, and swept a sword swathed in moonfire to the heavens.
And Melanna Saranal, who had longed for this day all her life, wondered why she shivered.
Lunandas, 28th Day of Ashen
The past is not dead.
It slumbers, the custodian of our follies.
A moment’s waking brings all to ruin.
from Eldor Shalamoh’s “Historica”
One
Dawn stumbled across Tressia’s crooked rooftops, Lumestra’s radiance as reluctant as Josiri’s blood. No. Not Lumestra’s. The goddess was gone, dead perhaps even before his birth. The sunlight was her legacy. And in Dregmeet every scrap of light counted.
Tressia had been founded before the Age of Kings, a labyrinth of townhouses, mansions and churches reaching into the sunlit sky, white stone agleam and stained-glass windows rich as gemstone. A place of industry and guilds, where farmers and millworkers jostled beneath bright market canopies, soldiers drilled to perfection on muster fields, and gold-frocked priests preached to the bright carillon of bells. At least, that was so of the wider city. Dregmeet was Tressia’s most ancient quarter – or the oldest not to have been torn down and built upon across passing centuries. Decaying wattle and timber buildings that were the last refuge for those who had nothing.
Even on the district’s fringes as Josiri was that morning, far from where ancient walls held the western sea from sunken streets, mist muffled the sounds of the wider city. The further one descended into Dregmeet’s slums, the deeper one trod another world. Or so nursery rhyme and folk tale insisted.
Stifling a yawn, Josiri brushed a tangle of blond hair from his eyes, and clung deeper to the alley’s shadows. A year ago, he’d lived a life of broken hours, sleep snatched wherever it could be found. Today, rising before dawn had almost destroyed him.
Captain Kurkas scratched beneath his mildewed and curling eyepatch. “Pardon me for asking, sah, but you’re sure about this?”
Josiri stared across the empty street, past the crumbling spire of Seacaller’s Church to the dilapidated manor house. Decades before, Crosswind Hall had served as the portreeve’s home and headquarters. Then, its windows had shone with light, bright heraldic banners of council and family streaming to welcome guests and petitioners. Now, sagging timbers covered broken glass, and the overgrown garden was caged only by the iron railings at the boundary. The roofs were sunken, weatherworn expanses shed of tiles.
“Quite sure, captain,” Josiri replied. “And I’ve told you before. It’s Josiri.”
“Right you are, sah.” The gruff accent remained steadfastly neutral. “Still, I can’t help but wonder if the First Councillor…”
Josiri frowned away his annoyance. “We can’t wait for the Council’s approval. If the Crowmarket move the captives, we might not see them again.”
“Not ’till we find them floating in the Silverway.” Kurkas sighed. “And I suppose it’s too late anyway, what with half the constabulary lurking hereabouts.”
True. Little went unnoticed in Dregmeet. Eyes would be watching.
“Glad to have your support, captain.”
“I just don’t want this turning sour on you, sah.”
Josiri tried to read his mood. A wasted effort. The captain had been too long a soldier, and far too accomplished at misdirecting superiors’ questions.
Kurkas had parted with his right eye and most of his left arm on the battlefield, and what remained never seemed terribly concerned about parting ways with the rest. Or appearance. The eyepatch was the least of it. Nothing crumpled a uniform so swiftly as surrendering it to Kurkas’ care. Even in Dregmeet’s gloom, the Trelan phoenix on his king’s blue tabard should have glittered – gold thread giving shape to white feathers. Instead, it more resembled a guttershrike’s filthy plumage. Taken alongside a shock of black hair that surrendered but reluctantly to the comb, and Kurkas looked more suited to a life in Dregmeet than as captain of a noble’s hearthguard.
But he’d come with the highest possible recommendation. Besides, Anastacia liked him. That placed Kurkas on a very short roster indeed, and brought forgiveness for less esoteric flaws. And without Kurkas, they’d never have known about the vranakin nest at Crosswind Hall. Beneath the crumpled respectability of his hearthguard uniform, he was still a son of Dregmeet, with contacts who’d never consider speaking to a constable, far less a Privy Councillor.
Footsteps heralded a woman’s emergence from the alley’s depths. Like Kurkas, she wore a blue tabard belted tight about her waist, and a captain’s star at her throat. But she was otherwise his opposite; watchful, heavyset and controlled.
“Are we ready, Captain Darrow?” asked Josiri.
She nodded, one hand on her sword’s pommel and the other about the stem of a muffled hand bell. “My lot are in place. Unless you’ve kraikons coming, it won’t get better than this.”