“Back away, Tommy, or he’ll have you too!” a man shouted over the child’s head. The man was well-dressed also, with manicured hands. . . . A rich man, Christian thought, bringing his son down to the Creche for a taste of the wild side. Losing interest, Christian turned away, but as he did so, the well-dressed man stroked a hand along his bottom. Christian stiffened, but then an iron grip descended on his shoulder.
“Do nothing!” Wigan hissed in his ear. “It’s the Prince and his handler. This is a fight you can’t win, boy. Get a move on.”
A fight he couldn’t win. Wigan might think so, but Christian had already marked the handler, engraving the man’s face on his memory. He might never see the man again, but then again, he might run into him, find him all alone in one of these dark tunnels. . . .
“Go on, boy,” Wigan growled. “Don’t go getting too big for yourself. They’re all waiting. Go on.”
Christian went, rolling his shoulders, leaving the Prince and the rest of the world behind. He was in the ring now, and in the ring there was only the opponent across from him, who would present no challenge at all. Christian could smell weakness, even well-hidden weakness, and he perceived that the huge boy-man in front of him was frightened, too frightened to make full use of his enormous biceps, hopelessly cowed by the reputation of a small, quick boy who did not lose.
“Christian! Christian!”
Turning, he saw Maura on the far side of the ring, leaning over the gates. She wore a low-cut green dress that sat absurdly on her child’s body. Mrs. Evans often let a few of her girls out on fight nights, so that they could go trawling through the crowd for johns. But Maura had not been at one of Christian’s fights in months, and he suddenly found that he did not want her here, did not want her to see what was about to happen. But he waved to her, smiling, ignoring the men who crowded around her, hemming her in.
“Christian! Here!”
She was holding something out to him. Reluctantly—for he knew that many eyes watched and marked such things—he moved toward her, crossing the ring.
“What is it?”
“I made it for you. For luck.”
She dropped something into his open palm, and Christian stared at it stupidly for a moment before he realized that it was a bracelet of some kind, woven of many different-colored threads. The design showed a bright orange circle that Christian recognized as the sun, sitting over a blue line: water.
“Thank you,” he told her. “It’s a pretty thing.”
“Do you want me to help you tie it on?”
“No. I can’t wear it in the ring.”
Maura’s smile dimmed for a moment. She was older than Christian, by perhaps a year, but he often felt that he topped her by five years, or ten. She retained a strange innocence that this place had barely touched, and he hated to puncture it, to watch her smile fade. But after a moment, she cheered.
“Well, put it in your pocket, then. For luck.”
Christian tucked the bracelet deep into the pocket of the short trousers he wore in the ring. It would likely get ruined in there, stained with blood and sweat, but somehow he could not ask Maura to take it back, or even to hold it for him until the fight was done. Either request, he knew, would hurt her. He put a light hand on her shoulder.
“Let’s go, boy!” Wigan shouted behind him. “Time enough for that later!”
Christian turned and saw the promoter waiting on the sidelines. Someone offered Wigan a shot of whiskey, and he downed it, then gave Christian a quick grin, a comradely grin, as though they were partners. Christian closed his eyes, feeling a wintry chill descend upon him. He took his hand from Maura’s shoulder and moved back toward his corner.
“A perfect fighter!” Wigan cried over the din, nodding this way and that, his face gleaming with drink. “He cannot be bested!”
He waited a beat, until the crowd quieted down, and Christian felt an unwilling twinge of admiration; drunk or sober, Wigan was a solid showman. He always knew how to play a crowd.
“I give you . . . LAZARUS!”
Ignoring their howls, Christian waded in. A circle, quiet and cool, seemed to close around him, sealing him off from the world. Only when the opponent lay dead would there be anything else. Christian lashed out with his right fist and broke Maartens’s nose, sending him toppling backward against the ropes. He had already forgotten everything: Maura, Wigan, even the well-dressed Prince and his leering guardian. But Christian never forgot anything, not really, and years later, when he saw Thomas Raleigh again, he would recognize those hungry green eyes with no trouble at all. The Prince had aged, yes, but that was only chronology. Whatever he sought, it still eluded him.
But now there was only the ring, another fight that was over before really beginning. Brendan Maartens had begun to sob now, but Christian was beyond caring. Deep cold had descended upon him, for he already knew that there would be nothing for him but this ring. There was a different life elsewhere, he knew, high above the stinking tunnels of the Creche, but that life was not for him, and as Christian lunged forward and began to kick his opponent to death, he never thought of the world above, not even once.
Book I
CHAPTER 1
THUNDERCLOUDS ON THE HORIZON
In retrospect, the seeds of rebellion in the pre-Glynn Tearling are easy to see. The divide between rich and poor was monstrous. More than one million tenant farmers labored in subsistence for the pleasure of some thousand noble families. The Tear had an entrepreneurial class, but it was only a tiny fraction of the population. Economic mobility was almost a myth. The Raleigh ruling family was chronically disengaged, making no move to check the deepening progression of social ills in the kingdom. God’s Church was widespread, but the Church kept its wealth carefully hoarded; Arvath priests offered only salvation in the hereafter, not material assistance in the here and now. In the cities, the unemployed begged; in the country, tenants starved. Looking at the entire map, one sees a kingdom ripe for revolution.
—The Early History of the Tearling, as told by Merwinian
Miles, Lord Marshall, had never wanted to come down here in the first place. He’d heard enough about the Creche to want no part of it, and most of the others seemed to feel the same; looking around the dim, crowded room, Miles saw expressions of boredom, exasperation, disgust. But no one made a move to leave.
Lord Williams had produced the crone off of one of his tenant patches. Even Miles, whose acreage was more than fifty miles away in the Almont Plain, had heard about this woman: Orra, the Eye of the Crithe. They said she could foretell the weather, and though Miles did not quite believe in such things, it could not be denied that Williams had been extraordinarily lucky. Bumper crops, averted floods . . . Miles had even heard that Orra had helped foil a plot by the Blue Horizon to rob one of Williams’s caravans on its way to New London. Several lords from the northern Almont had tried to steal the old woman once, Miles had heard, but she had seen them coming, and her entire village had beaten the would-be kidnappers off with sticks. Miles didn’t know if the rumor was true, but it made a good tale, and he loved a good tale.