Chapter 3 - The Gathering of the Ravens
The funeral of Lord Garrick was conducted with the speed of a military execution and the silence of a tomb.
By midnight, his body had been laid in the lower crypt beside the ancestors he had spent twenty years trying to disinherit. No bells were tolled in the city; no mourning banners were hung from the ramparts of the lower bailey. The official proclamation, nailed to the iron gates of the fish-market by dawn, spoke only of “a sudden visitation of the chest-fever” that had carried off the Lord Chancellor in the midst of his duties.
In the royal apartments—rooms Clara had spent seven years scrubbing with sand and lye—the transformation was more terrifying than the transition from the scullery to the court.
The grey wool tunic was gone, replaced by a gown of dark green velvet lined with silver fox fur that had belonged to Queen Isolde. It was too long in the hem; Clara had to walk with a slow, measured glide—the court-step, as the mistress of the robes called it—to avoid tripping over her own slippers.
She sat now in front of a high, silver-framed mirror that had been polished until it gleamed like pond ice.
Behind her stood Master Almon, the royal archivist—a man so old his skin looked like parchment that had survived a fire, his fingers yellowed with ink-stains up to the second knuckle. He was holding an open ledger bound in pigskin, turning the dry, crackling leaves with a sound like autumn leaves blowing across a stone yard.
“The Duchy of Westmere has acknowledged the seal,” Almon rasped, his voice sounding like dry gravel sliding down a chute. “Duke Raymond sent three white horses and a cart of winter wheat as a coronation offering. But the Margrave of the Southern Marches has not replied.”
Clara didn't look at the archivist; she looked at her own reflection. The girl with the apple-wood peg in her hair was gone. In her place was a stranger with high, aristocratic cheekbones, deep grey eyes that seemed to hold the cold light of the northern stars, and the Crown of Aurel resting upon her brow like a weight of lead and starlight.
“Why hasn't the Margrave replied?” she asked. Her voice was lower now, sharpened by three days of lessons in elocution and statecraft with Father Thomas.
“Because the Southern Marches were Lord Garrick’s purse, Highness,” Almon said without looking up from the ledger. “For fifteen years, the silver mines at Red-Water paid their tithes directly to Garrick’s private steward, not to the royal treasury. Now that Garrick is in the crypt and you are in the high seat, the Margrave doesn't know whether to send soldiers or gold.”
“Send neither,” a voice said from the doorway.
King Darian entered without his guards. He walked more slowly today, leaning heavily on a cane of black thornwood, his left leg dragging slightly behind him. The sixty-eight years of his reign seemed to have settled into his shoulders like an iron yoke.
Almon bowed low, backing out of the chamber until his heels clicked against the threshold, leaving the king and his granddaughter alone in the quiet room.
Darian walked to the window, looking out over the grey slate roofs of Aethelgard toward the distant peaks of the mountains where the snow was already beginning to whiten the high passes.
“You look like her,” the old man murmured, his back turned to her.
“My mother?” Clara asked.
“Helena.” Darian turned his head slightly. “She had that same look when she told me she wouldn't marry the Prince of the Western Isles. Stubborn as an oak root in a granite cleft. I should have listened to her then. I should have told Garrick to take his ships and go back to his southern estates.”
“He killed my nurse,” Clara said, her fingers tightening on the silver armrests of her chair until the wood creaked. “In the forest near the border. I remember the smell of burning pine. I remember a man with a scarred cheek lifting me out of the snow and giving me to the monastery women.”
“Garrick was thorough,” Darian said bitterly. “He thought he had cleaned every branch of the tree. But he didn't know about Father Thomas. The old man has kept the records in the crypt vault since the days of my grandfather.”
The king walked slowly across the room, stopping beside her chair. He reached out a trembling, unarmored hand and touched one of the diamond spires of the crown.
“They are coming, Clara.”
“Who?”
“The wolves. The cousins from the western coast, the trade-lords of the lower river, the high priests from the southern temples who think a woman has no right to hold the star-iron. By the time the first snow closes the high passes, this castle will be surrounded by forty thousand men who want to know if the kitchen-maid can hold a sword as well as she held a scrubbing-brush.”
Clara stood up. The green velvet gown hissed against the floor. Because she was taller than she had seemed in her rags, she looked down into her grandfather’s milky eyes with a calm that surprised even herself.
“They didn't give me the crown, Grandfather,” she said softly.
“No?”
“The crown took me.” She raised her hand, the pale skin of her palm unmarked save for the faint, silver crescent at her wrist. “Every time I touch it, I hear them—all the kings and queens who walked these stones before the walls were even built. They aren't worried about the Margrave’s silver, and they don't care about the trade-lords’ wheat.”
“What do they care about?”
“The gate,” Clara said, her voice dropping into a register that made the candle flames flicker in their iron sconces. “The thing that sleeps beneath the northern mountains. The thing Garrick was trying to buy off with the kingdom’s gold.”
King Darian’s face went very still. For a long moment, the old man didn't breathe. Then he let out a long, shuddering sigh that smelled of old wood and iron.
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“So you know that too,” he whispered.
“I know everything,” Clara said, and for the first time since the crown had touched her head, her grey eyes flashed with a cold, terrifying fire that belonged neither to a scullery maid nor to a princess, but to something much older than them both. “And tomorrow, we begin the trials.”
