Crownhaven. Three days before the Aptitude Trial.
The east gate of Crownhaven was bigger than Ren remembered.
Perhaps it was because he had last seen it from a carriage window, when he was ten and more interested in the horses than in walls. Perhaps it was because for seven years he had seen nothing but palisades of sharpened tree trunks. At any rate he stopped under the archway, in the middle of the stream of traders and farmers and carts, and looked up until an oxcart nearly ran him over.
“Watch where you’re going, clodhopper!”
Ren stepped aside. The carter went on cursing until he was out of earshot. No one else paid him any attention.
Good. That was good. No one was supposed to pay him any attention.
He walked on.
Crownhaven smelled exactly as it had back then. That struck him first, before he recognised anything at all. Smoke from a thousand chimneys. Fresh bread and rotting vegetables. Horse dung and spices and the heavy brown smell of the Calder, which lay over everything like a blanket. Ren had not known that he could remember smells. But he stood on a street corner and breathed in, and suddenly he was ten years old and running across a courtyard to the well, and the scent of Agnes’s bread was drifting over from the kitchen.
He shook his head and walked on.
The streets were full. Even fuller than in Harlby, so full that you had to push sideways through the crowd. Everywhere there were young people his own age, with bundles on their backs and faces that wavered between excitement and fear. Farmers’ sons in patched shirts. Craftsmen’s daughters with carefully braided hair. A boy dragging his mother along by the arm, explaining that she really did not need to come to registration with him, really not, while she calmly straightened his collar.
Ren looked away. Quickly.
He was almost at the great market when he heard the name for the first time.
On a little square in front of a tavern someone had set up a puppet stage. A brightly painted wooden box with a red curtain, in front of which a cluster of children sat on the cobbles shrieking with delight. Ren would have walked past. But then he saw the puppets.
One wore a golden crown and a purple cloak and had a broad, friendly face. The other was black. Black cloak, black hat, a long, curved nose like a beak. A raven of silver paper was glued to its chest.
“And then,” cried the puppeteer in a disguised, croaking voice, “the wicked raven wrote a letter to the dwarves! Give me land and gold, and I’ll give you the crown! Kraah! Kraah!”
The children booed. The raven puppet hopped up and down and rubbed its hands.
“But the good king,” the voice grew deep and warm, “the good king was watchful! He saw the letter! And he said: No traitor shall ever sell my people!”
The king puppet raised a little wooden sword and hit the raven puppet on the head with it. Once, twice, three times. With every blow the children shrieked louder. On the third the raven puppet toppled over, and the puppeteer let it flop behind the curtain with a long, drawn-out, miserable Kraaaaah …
The children cheered. A little girl in the front row, perhaps six years old, jumped up and clapped her hands.
“Again! Hit the raven again!”
Ren stood at the edge of the square, and only noticed that he had clenched his hands into fists when his fingernails cut into his palms.
My father listened to the goat man.
He opened his hands. Slowly. Finger by finger. The way Owen had taught him, on the evenings in the hut when the anger grew too big. Anger is a tool. Not a master.
The girl in the front row did not know who Aldwyn Ravenmoor had been. She did not know that he had once sent a grain wagon over the mountains, every autumn, for the dwarves. That he had stood up in the throne room when everyone else stayed seated. That he had held his wife in his arms on a burning staircase. She only knew that the raven was wicked and the king was good. Because that was what she had been told.
And tomorrow they’ll believe whatever they’re told.
He had thought that at ten. On the night they fled the city. He had been right.
He turned away and walked off. Behind him the puppeteer began again from the beginning.
It was not hard to find the house. His feet knew the way, even if his head had long believed it forgotten. The broad street behind the market. Left past the cathedral, whose bells were just striking the noon hour. Through the lane of the cloth merchants. And then round the corner.
Ren stopped.
The Ravenmoor residence was still standing.
If you could call it standing. The walls were there, the outer ones at least, grey and blackened with soot, with empty window holes from which grass and young birches were growing. The roof was gone. Only a few charred beams still jutted into the sky, black and crooked like the ribs of a dead animal. The great gate to the inner courtyard hung askew on one hinge. Someone had put a chain across it, with a rusty lock.
And on the gate hung a sign. A board on which someone had written in red paint, in big, crude letters that the rain of seven years had half washed out:
HOUSE OF THE TRAITOR.
Beneath it someone had drawn a raven in chalk. A raven with its head crossed out.
Ren stood on the other side of the street and looked at it.
He had thought it would hurt. He had prepared himself for it, the whole way from Fernwick, every evening by the fire. He had thought he would tremble or cry or perhaps scream. But he only stood there, and inside him it was quite still. Still and cold and empty, like the courtyard behind the crooked gate.
People walked past the ruin without looking. A woman with a basket. Two apprentices arguing. A man with a dog that sniffed briefly at the gatepost and then lifted its leg. To them it was only an old, burnt house. Part of the street. As ordinary as a well or a lantern.
For the towers, nothing had happened.
Ren crossed the street.
The chain on the gate was old. So was the lock. But he did not have to break it. A few paces to the left the wall had collapsed, probably years ago, and nettles grew in the gap, through which someone had trodden a narrow path. Children perhaps. Or beggars looking for a place to sleep.
He looked around. No one was paying him any attention. He climbed through the gap.
The courtyard was full of weeds. Dandelions grew between the cobbles on which he had once trained with Desmond. The well in the corner was still there. Ren went over and looked in. The water was black and still, with a skin of green algae on it. He remembered how he had washed his face here, that morning. How he had secretly held a flame above his hand and counted to six.
He went on. To the great door. It was no longer there. Only an empty hole in the wall through which you could see into the hall.
The hall had no roof any more. The sky hung grey and low over it. The floor was covered in rubble, in charred beams and broken tiles and shards of glass that glittered in the light. On the walls he could still see the outlines of rectangles, paler patches in the soot, where the ancestral portraits had once hung.
And the staircase.
The staircase was stone, and stone did not burn. It still led upwards, broad and curving, step after step, to a landing on which there was nothing any more but sky. The banister was gone. The top steps were black with soot.
Ren stood at the foot of the stairs and looked up.
Then he climbed them. Slowly. One step after another. He did not count. He did not need to count. He knew which one it was.
The top one.
He stopped before it. The stone was black like all the others. Nothing distinguished it from the steps below. No stain, no trace. Seven winters had washed everything away.
Ren knelt down. He laid his hand on the stone. It was cold.
Looks as if you’d slept in it.
He stayed like that, he did not know for how long. The cathedral bells struck once, at some point. A pigeon landed on the top of the wall and flew away again.
Then he spoke. Quietly, barely more than a whisper, to the stone beneath his hand.
“I’m back.”
Nothing answered. Of course not. But he had said it, and that was enough.
When he climbed back through the gap in the wall onto the street, someone was standing in front of the gate.
An old woman. Small and plump, in a faded brown dress, with a scarf around her head from which grey strands of hair peeked out. She had a basket on her arm, and she was just bending down, with visible effort, to lay something in front of the crooked gate, beneath the sign with the red letters.
A small bunch of flowers. Lavender, dried, tied together with a thread.
Ren stopped.
At the foot of the gatepost lay more of them. He had not noticed them before. Old, withered bunches, brown and crumbling, one on top of the other, like layers in a rock. One for every year.
The old woman straightened up, one hand at the small of her back, and noticed him.
She started. Then she saw where he had come from, and her face hardened.
“You’ve no business in there, young sir,” she said sharply. “There’s nothing left to take. The looters carried everything off in the very first year. Even the door handles.”
Ren could not answer.
He knew the voice.
He knew the hands, rough and red from hot water. The way she held the basket, slanted against her hip. The crease between her eyebrows, which had grown deeper but still sat in exactly the same place. He had watched those hands pull bread from the oven and fetch apples from the garden that were so sour your teeth ached just looking at them.
Agnes.
She was alive.
The door to the storeroom cellar had stood open. He had not looked inside.
For seven years he had not known what had become of her. He had not dared to ask Owen. He had imagined her lying in the cellar, among the potato sacks. He had imagined the flames …
“Young sir?” Agnes looked at him suspiciously. “Are you unwell?”
“No.” His voice sounded hoarse. He cleared his throat. “No. Forgive me. I … I didn’t mean to steal anything. I was only curious. I’m new to the city.”
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“That much is plain.” She studied him, the long coat, the sword, the tousled hair. “Here for the Academy, are you? Half of Eastreach is in the city this year.” Her gaze softened a little. “Well, then don’t let yourself be caught clambering about in that house. If the city watch sees you, you’ll be sticking your neck out further than you’d like. It’s forbidden to set foot on the grounds.”
“I only lay flowers.” She raised her chin. “That’s not forbidden. Not yet.”
Ren looked at the lavender. “For whom?”
Agnes was silent for a moment. She looked up at the sign, at the red letters, and her mouth grew thin.
“For a woman who brought me lavender from the garden at Ravenhold every summer. For the washing.” She shrugged, but her voice was not as indifferent as she wanted it to sound. “And for her husband, who’d never in his life have written a letter to the dwarves to march against the king. Not him. He dictated every letter to his wife because he had such dreadful handwriting. Letters to the dwarves, in his own hand? Don’t make me laugh.”
Ren held his breath.
“I was the cook. That night.” She did not look at him but at the gate. “The boy was supposed to come to me. To the cellar. They’d told him so, I heard it. I waited. All night I waited, behind the potato sacks, and heard everything above me burning.”
She fell silent.
“He never came.”
Ren could not speak. It was as if someone had put a hand around his throat and squeezed.
I promised to go to her. I promised. And then I went to the stairs.
Agnes wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, quickly and roughly, as if it annoyed her. “I expect the captain took him. And then they both drowned in the river. That’s what they say, anyway.” She snorted. “I never believed that captain would drown in any river. He was tougher than the soles of my late husband’s boots.”
Then she looked up. Straight into Ren’s face.
Her gaze caught. On his eyes.
Ren stood very still. He did not dare to move. He did not dare to look away.
For a long moment neither of them said anything. Agnes frowned. Something moved in her face, a question she did not ask. Her lips parted.
Then she shook her head. Briefly, impatiently, the way you shoo away a fly.
“You’ve eyes like someone I once knew. Grey eyes. You don’t often see a grey like that.” She settled her basket. “But at my age you see ghosts everywhere. Fare you well, young sir. And good luck in the trial.”
She turned and walked away, slowly, with a slightly rolling gait, down the street.
Ren watched her go.
Agnes. It’s me. I came. I just came too late.
He did not say it. He was not allowed to say it. He stood before the gate with the red sign and the bunches of lavender and watched her until she had turned the corner.
Then he bent down, picked up one of the dried lavender sprigs that had fallen out of the bunch, and put it in the inside pocket of his coat.
With Odell’s stone.
The Royal Academy lay in the west of the city, on a hill above the Calder, and it was impossible to miss.
It was smaller than the palace, but not by much. A vast complex of pale stone, with towers and courtyards and long, colonnaded walkways, surrounded by a high wall over which the tops of old trees rose. Above the main gate, a massive arch of white marble, a crest was carved into the stone. A crown. Beneath it four intertwined symbols: a flame, a wave, a mountain, a whirlwind.
In front of the gate stood a queue.
Ren had never seen so many young people in one place. They stood in a long, winding line that stretched from the gate far down the street, farmers’ sons and craftsmen’s daughters and a few who looked as if they had inherited their best clothes from an older brother. At the gate three clerks sat at a long table, with quills and thick ledgers, taking down names.
The nobles did not stand in the queue. Ren noticed it at once. They came in carriages, with crests on the doors, climbed out, nodded to the guards at the gate and simply walked through. A servant carried their luggage after them. No one asked their names. Everyone knew them.
Ren joined the end of the queue.
He had barely stood there for five breaths when someone hugged him from behind so violently that he nearly fell forward.
“You rat!”
Milo. Of course Milo. He hung on Ren like a wet coat, with both long arms, and shook him.
“A note! You leave me a note! Under my blanket! Do you know how frightened I was when I woke up and you were gone and Owen was gone and only this note? I thought the deserters had come back and …” He let go, stepped back and stared at Ren. “What happened to your hair?”
“Owen.”
“Owen cut your hair off?” Milo walked once around him, the way you look over a horse at market. “And the coat! Where did you get the coat? And the sword! That’s not your old sword!” He stopped in front of him, hands on his hips. “You look like someone out of a hero song. One of the gloomy ones where everyone dies at the end.”
“Thanks.”
“That wasn’t a compliment.” Milo grinned. “All right, a bit of one.”
He had his green hat on again. In place of the broken pheasant feather a grey pigeon feather now sat in the hatband, a little crooked.
He had noticed Ren’s look. “Found it on the way. It’s not as nice as the old one. But a hat without a feather is like bread without a crust.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It does. You just don’t understand it.”
Ren faltered. For a heartbeat he was not standing in a queue in front of the Academy but at the edge of a frozen fountain, and a girl with white hair was glaring at him. That makes no sense at all. And he had said: It does. You just don’t understand it.
“What is it?”
“Nothing.” Ren shook his head. “Nothing at all.”
The queue moved slowly. They had perhaps made it halfway when it grew loud behind them.
Hooves on cobbles. Many hooves. And voices laughing, loud and carefree, like people who had never had to wait anywhere in their lives.
Ren turned round.
Five riders were coming up the street. They were not riding slowly, as would have been proper in a street full of people. They were riding at a trot, and the people in the queue had to jump aside so as not to end up under the hooves. A girl stumbled and fell. No one stopped.
The foremost rode a white stallion with golden harness. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with red-gold hair that fell in curls onto his forehead, and a face so pleased with itself that it was almost impressive. He wore the uniform of the Academy, dark blue with silver buttons, but on him it looked like a costume he had thrown on for fun. On his chest gleamed a golden badge in the shape of a crown.
Ren recognised him at once.
He had changed. He had grown, filled out, the round cheeks of the child had given way to angular features. But the expression was the same. The expression of a boy who yawned at his father’s banquet without covering his mouth, because the whole hall belonged to him.
Crown Prince Edmund.
And Ren remembered sticking his tongue out at him across the table. And how outraged the prince had looked.
He’ll never forgive me for that.
He had been right back then, Ren thought. Only not in the way he had meant.
Edmund reined in his horse before the gate, right beside the clerks’ table, so that the stallion stretched its head snorting over the ledgers. The clerks shrank back.
“Master Pellam!” Edmund’s voice rang across the whole square. He had a voice like a fanfare, loud and bright and impossible to ignore. “Are you still not done with the rabble? Lessons for the second years start tomorrow, and I can’t get my own horse through the gate because half of Eastreach is standing around in front of it!”
The eldest clerk, a scrawny man going bald, bowed so low that his nose almost touched the ledgers. “Forgive me, Your Highness. Registration runs until tomorrow evening. If Your Highness would perhaps use the north gate …”
“The north gate is on the other side.” Edmund sounded genuinely outraged. “Am I supposed to ride all the way round?”
Behind him the other riders laughed. Four young men, all with crests on their saddlecloths, three of them in Academy uniform. The fourth steered his horse up beside the prince’s. He wore no uniform but a riding coat in black and red. Not yet a student, then, but obviously already one of Edmund’s people. He was thinner than Edmund, with smooth dark-brown hair and a narrow, pale face that might have been handsome if the eyes in it had not been so cold. On his saddlecloth blazed a red crest. A tower in flames.
“Let them get out of the way, Edmund,” he said. His voice was quiet and a little bored. “They’re used to making room. That’s what they’re for.”
“Quite right, Cedric.” Edmund turned in the saddle and regarded the queue as if seeing it for the first time. His gaze wandered over the farmers’ sons, the craftsmen’s daughters, the patched shirts. And came to rest on Milo.
On Milo’s hat.
“What’s that, then?” Edmund jerked his chin at it. “Is that a pigeon feather? Do you stick pigeon feathers in your hat, boy? Are there no proper birds where you come from?”
His companions laughed. Milo went red to the roots of his hair.
“The pheasant feather broke. In a raid. On the road.”
“In a raid!” Edmund threw back his head and laughed, a loud, ringing laugh. “Did you hear that? The farm boy was raided and lost his feather! How tragic!” He leaned forward in the saddle. “What else did they take from you? Your wits?”
Cedric did not smile. He only raised his hand, casually, as if to wave away a fly.
The pigeon feather on Milo’s hat caught fire.
It was only a small flame. It devoured the feather in a single breath, until only a black, curled stub was left, and then went out by itself. But Milo cried out and tore the hat from his head, and there was a smell of burnt quill, and the people in the queue shrank back.
Edmund laughed so hard that he had to hold on to the pommel of his saddle.
He stood beside Milo, hands at his sides, and looked up at Cedric. He felt the fire in his chest. Warm. Patient. He felt beneath it, deeper, the other thing. The crackle. The scratching in the scars under the new leather bracer.
No lightning. Not when they insult you. And not when they insult your friends.
Owen had not said that. Not exactly. But he would have.
“That was unnecessary,” said Ren.
He did not say it loudly. He said it quite calmly, in the tone in which Owen had talked about the weather by the fire. But the square had suddenly grown so quiet that everyone heard it.
Edmund stopped laughing. Cedric slowly turned his head.
His eyes were grey. Not like Ren’s. A pale, watery grey, like ice on a puddle. He looked at Ren, from above, from horseback, and studied him. The long dark coat. The tousled hair. The scar on his chin. The sword on his back.
“And who are you?”
“Nobody.”
“So I see.” Cedric smiled for the first time. It was not a pleasant smile. “A nobody with a sword. How sweet. Do you know who I am, nobody?”
“No.”
“Cedric Valemont. Son of Duke Valemont. Fire mage.” He raised his hand, and a flame danced above his palm. Big and red and very, very hot. Ren felt the heat from down here. “And you’re in the way.”
Ren looked at the flame. Then back at Cedric’s face.
“I’m standing in a queue. That’s not the same thing.”
Somewhere behind him someone drew a sharp breath.
Cedric’s smile froze. The flame above his hand grew larger.
And Edmund laughed. Suddenly, loudly, as if someone had told a particularly good joke.
“Did you hear that, Cedric? That’s not the same thing.” He slapped his thigh. “He’s got nerve, the nobody. I like people with nerve.” He leaned forward, and his eyes narrowed. “Right up to the day I beat the nerve out of them. What’s your name, nobody? So I can remember it when you’re lying in the dirt at the trial.”
Ren looked up at him. At the boy who had once stuck his tongue out at him across a banquet table, on the evening his father died.
“Ren. Ren Harlow. From Fernwick.”
“Fernwick.” Edmund pulled a face. “Never heard of it. Sounds like sheep.”
“There are a lot of sheep.”
“Of course there are.” Edmund straightened in the saddle. He raised his hand, and Ren saw the iron fittings on the clerks’ table bend. Very slowly. Like wax in the sun. The clerks leapt up. The ledgers slid to the ground. The metal curled, creaked, screeched and twisted itself into a knot.
Metal. Ren had known Edmund could do earth. Everyone knew that. But metal …
“Remember this, Ren Harlow from Fernwick,” Edmund said pleasantly. “That’s the difference between you and me. You have a sword. I can tie it in a knot.”
“Prince Edmund.”
The voice came from the gate. It was not loud. It was dry and a little tired, like that of a man who had had to say the same sentence too many times.
Everyone turned.
In the archway stood a man. Of middling height, gaunt, with thin grey hair and round spectacles perched on a long, narrow nose. He wore the dark grey robe of the masters, and his fingers were covered in ink stains. Under his arm he held a thick book.
“Master Merrow.” Edmund suddenly sounded a good deal less like a fanfare.
“You are bending Academy property, Your Highness.” The man adjusted his spectacles. “Again. If I recall correctly, last autumn it was the iron railing in the east wing. Your father paid the bill. I am sure he would be delighted to pay this one too.”
Edmund opened his mouth. Then he shut it again.
“The north gate is open for the second years,” the man went on, without raising his voice. “I suggest you use it. And you, young Valemont, kindly put out that flame before you singe a clerk’s eyebrows off. There are only three of them, and we need them all.”
Cedric closed his hand. The flame went out. His face was pale with fury, but he said nothing.
Edmund turned his horse. He did it with a grand gesture, so that the white stallion pranced round once on its hind legs. As he rode off he threw Ren one more look over his shoulder.
“Until the trial, Fernwick,” he called. “I’m looking forward to it.”
The riders trotted off. Cedric last. He did not look round. But Ren saw his shoulders tense, and he knew that Cedric Valemont would not forget him.
On the square a hundred people breathed out at once.
The master in the archway turned. He had already taken a step back into the Academy when his gaze slid over the queue. Over Milo, clutching his charred hat to his chest. Over the clerks, gathering their ledgers from the ground.
Over Ren.
It was only a moment. A single heartbeat. Silas Merrow’s gaze caught on Ren’s face, the way Agnes’s gaze had caught on his eyes.
Then it moved on. Indifferent. A master who had looked at one applicant out of a hundred and already forgotten him.
But in passing, as he came by Ren to pick up a fallen book for one of the clerks, he stopped for a moment. He did not look up. He leafed through the book as if looking for a particular page.
“A piece of advice, young man,” he said quietly, so quietly that only Ren could hear it. “For the trial.”
Ren waited.
“Don’t hold your sword too tight.” Silas Merrow closed the book. “Like a bird.”
Then he handed the book to the clerk, adjusted his spectacles and went back through the gate without turning round again.
Ren stood rooted to the spot.
Like a bird. Firm enough that it can’t fly away. Loose enough that it can’t suffocate.
“What did he say?” asked Milo. He was turning the charred hat in his hands and looking after him. “The master. Did he say something to you?”
“He said I should hold my sword loosely.”
“Hm.” Milo thought about it. “Strange advice. But he looked clever. With the spectacles.”
Up ahead one of the clerks called: “Next!”
The queue moved again.
By the time they finally stood at the table, it was late afternoon. The scrawny, balding clerk did not look up. He had opened a fresh page in his ledger and was dipping his quill in the inkwell.
“Name?”
“Milo Fairweather. From Harlby, Eastreach.”
“Element?”
“Wind.”
The scratch of the quill. “Next.”
Ren stepped forward.
“Name?”
He had thought he would hesitate. He had thought the word would stick in his throat, like the laugh at the fountain. But it came quite calmly, quite easily, as if he had said it a thousand times.
“Ren Harlow. From Fernwick, Eastreach.”
“Element?”
“Fire.”
The scratch of the quill. The clerk blew on the ink.
“The Aptitude Trial begins in three days, at the first bell of the Blossom Moon. Great Court. Whoever comes late will not be admitted. Whoever does not pass will not be admitted. Whoever dies will likewise not be admitted.” For the first time he looked up, with tired, watery eyes. “Don’t be late. Next.”
Ren stepped aside.
He looked at the page in the ledger, at the fresh, still-glistening letters. Ren Harlow. Fernwick. Fire.
Somewhere in another book like this one, thirty years ago, stood another name. In dreadful handwriting perhaps, or dictated. Aldwyn Ravenmoor. Ravenhold. Fire.
And somewhere in this book, or in a finer one, stood one more name. Entered by a servant who had not waited in the queue.
Emilia Winterhall.
Ren turned and followed Milo down the street, into the city that did not recognise him.