Chapter 5 - The Winter Council
By the first week of November, the snow had come down from the high crags, turning Aethelgard into a grey fortress island rising out of a sea of white drift.
The Great Hall was heated now by four huge bronze braziers filled with glowing charcoal from the southern river-valleys, but the air still tasted of wood-smoke and cold stone.
Clara sat at the head of the long oak table—not upon the high iron throne today, but among the captains and the wardens. She wore a doublet of dark blue leather, stitched with silver thread at the cuffs, and her hair was tied back with a simple leather thong instead of the wooden peg, though the Crown of Aurel still rested upon her brow with its quiet, unyielding weight.
“The western passes are blocked,” Captain Hael said, tossing a wet leather dispatch onto the table. His left hand rested casually on the hilt of his broadsword. “The snow is six feet deep in the gorge of the Silver-Water. If the cousins from the coast mean to move their siege engines toward Aethelgard, they’ll have to wait until the spring thaw.”
“They won't wait,” a voice said from the foot of the table.
It was a young man—not more than twenty-two—with hair the color of wheat straw and eyes as bright and restless as a hawk’s. He wore the green-and-gold surcoat of the Western Isles, his breastplate dented by three distinct lance-marks from the tourneys at the border.
Lord Eric of Westmere—Duke Raymond’s eldest son, who had spent the last three years commanding the horse-archers at the Iron Gate.
“Why won't they wait, Lord Eric?” Clara asked, looking across the table at him. She didn't use his title; she used his name, as she used the names of every man who sat in her council now.
“Because they know what’s under the mountain, Majesty,” Eric said, leaning forward and planting his scarred knuckles on the scarred oak. “My father told me before he died. My grandfather told him. The star-iron doesn't just make kings; it keeps the seal on the pit. When the old king grew old and weak, and Garrick stopped sending the oil to the northern wardens... the frost-born started to move.”
“The frost-born?” a merchant councillor whispered, his face turning the color of curdled milk. “You mean the stories—the old wives’ tales about the things that lived in the dark before the first Darian came over the sea?”
“They aren't tales, Master Gower,” Hael said quietly, his eyes fixed on the map of the northern passes spread out before them. “My father lost three brothers at the Second Gate. They didn't die by steel; they died by a cold that doesn't melt when you throw oil on it.”
Clara reached up and touched the cold metal of the crown. As her fingers brushed the central diamond, the map on the table seemed to shift—not on the paper, but in her mind. She saw the great stone corridors beneath Aethelgard, the ancient water-conduits running down to the subterranean lake, and—far below them all, deeper than the deepest silver mine—a great circular door of black basalt held shut by seven massive bars of star-iron.
One of those bars was rusted through.
She stood up so suddenly that her heavy oak chair scraped loudly against the flagstones.
“We don't wait for the spring,” she said.
May you like
Hael looked up, his grey eyebrows drawing together. “Majesty? The pass is choked with snow. Even the mountain goats aren't moving today.”
“The crown doesn't need a goat-track, Captain,” Clara said. She walked around the table until she stood beside the great window that looked out toward the northern ridge. The wind was howling down from the crags, driving sheets of frozen sleet against the leaded glass. “Get fifty men. The ones with the broad-axes and the pitch-barrels. We’re going down to the Third Level.”
