Crownhaven. The day before the Aptitude Trial.
Three times in the night Milo had dreamed that he had slept through the trial, and he told Ren every single dream in every detail.
“And then I woke up,” he said for the third time, as they walked down the steep lane from the inn to the market, “and thought, thank the gods, only a dream. But then I looked at the candle, and the candle had burned right down, and outside it was already noon, and …”
“And then you woke up.”
“And then I woke up! How do you know?”
“Because you’re here.” Ren stepped round a man with a barrel on his shoulder. “And because the trial isn’t until tomorrow.”
“I know that now.” Milo pulled his hat lower over his face. He was still wearing it, although the brim was singed on one side and where the feather had been only a black stub stuck out of the hatband. “I need a new feather. Today. I can’t go to the trial without a feather.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s bad luck.”
“Says who?”
“Me.” Milo looked at him as if the question were utterly absurd. “Just now. I’ve decided.”
Ren opened his mouth. Then he shut it again. Arguing with Milo was like arguing with the wind. You could do it, but at the end you were still standing there with your hair in a mess.
He had trained before sunrise, in the cramped back yard of the inn, between barrels and washing lines, until the landlady chased him off with a broom because the singing of the blade was frightening her hens. By now the dwarven sword lay in his hand as if he had never held another. Lighter than his old one. Faster. He did not have to guide it; it followed him.
Like a bird.
He had lain awake half the night thinking of Silas Merrow. Of the spectacles, the inky fingers and the gaze that had caught on his face for a heartbeat. Silas knew. Silas had recognised him, after seven years, with short hair and scars and a stranger’s name. In a queue of a hundred people.
If Silas could do it, others could too.
Anyone who knew him sees him in you.
Ren turned up the collar of his coat and walked on.
The market at the foot of the Academy hill was smaller than the great market in the middle of the city, but no less loud. Here the traders sold everything a future battle mage needed, in their opinion: leather jerkins and practice swords, talismans against exhaustion, herbal draughts against nerves, books with titles like The Twelve Secrets of Fire or How to Pass Any Trial, Guaranteed. One man was selling little glass phials of supposed dragon’s blood. Another was selling hats.
Milo pounced on the hat stall like a hawk on a mouse.
Ren stayed a few paces back, arms folded, and looked around. Habit. Where are the exits. Who’s carrying a weapon. Who moves differently from the others. A few stalls further on stood a smithy. Not a proper one, only an open stall under a canvas, with a small forge, an anvil and a grindstone where for a few coins you could have your blade sharpened. A short queue had formed in front of it.
A girl was working at the grindstone.
She was about his age, short and strong, with broad shoulders and forearms speckled with soot and little burn scars. She had braided her dark-brown hair into a short, tight plait so that it would not get into the sparks. She worked the wheel with her foot, evenly, without missing a beat, and held the blade a customer had handed her against the stone with a calm that Ren recognised at once. Someone who had done this a thousand times.
Behind her, at the forge, a broad, grey-haired man in a leather apron was hammering a glowing horseshoe. Her father, presumably. They had the same square chin.
Ren would have thought nothing more of it. But then he saw who was standing at the end of the queue.
Not at the end. He was pushing his way to the front. A thin young man with smooth dark-brown hair, in a riding coat of black and red velvet, flanked by two bigger lads who looked as if they had spent their whole lives making people get out of the way by shoving them.
Cedric Valemont.
Ren let his arms drop.
“You.” Cedric stopped in front of the grindstone. He did not look at the girl but over her head, as if she were part of the stock. “My sword. Sharpen it. Now.”
The girl did not look up. She went on working the wheel. Sparks sprayed from the blade she was working on in a fine orange arc.
“There’s a queue.”
Cedric blinked. It was evidently not the answer he had expected. “I beg your pardon?”
“A queue.” She nodded with her chin at the people waiting behind him. An old mercenary with a short sword, two farm boys with rusty daggers, a woman with a kitchen knife. “You’re after the woman with the knife. It won’t take long.”
One of Cedric’s companions laughed in disbelief. The other stepped forward.
“Do you know who you’re talking to, girl?”
“Someone who’s pushing in.” She took the blade off the stone, tested the edge with her thumb and handed it back to the old mercenary. “Two coppers. Thanks.”
The mercenary paid, looked from her to Cedric and back again, and made himself scarce.
“You’re talking to Cedric Valemont.” His voice had grown very calm. Ren knew that tone. He had heard it at the gate of the Academy, just before Milo’s feather went up in flames. “Son of Duke Valemont. And I don’t wait behind peasants and kitchen maids.”
Behind the stall the hammer stopped. The grey-haired smith turned round.
“Nora,” he said quietly. “Just do it.”
The girl, Nora, stopped in the middle of the movement. Ren saw her jaw tense. Saw her hand, already reaching for the next blade, close into a fist.
Then she turned to Cedric and for the first time looked him straight in the face.
“No.”
It was quite still under the canvas. Even the people at the neighbouring stalls had stopped haggling.
“No?” Cedric repeated.
“The trial’s tomorrow. I’m entering too.” Nora wiped her sooty hands on her apron. “If I pass, we’ll be sitting in the same hall. Then I’ll sharpen your sword for you if you ask me nicely. Not before. And now get to the back. Or go to another grinder.”
Cedric’s face went white.
And Ren knew what would come next before Cedric raised his hand.
The flame did not shoot at Nora. Cedric was not stupid. It shot at the canvas above the stall. A glaring red tongue of fire that leapt at the old, dry sailcloth and ate into it at once.
Someone screamed. The people in the queue scattered. The smith swore and grabbed a bucket of water. Nora sprang back, away from the fire, and Ren saw her lower her hands towards the ground, saw the cobbles beneath her feet begin to tremble …
He was already moving. Three steps, four. He did not quite know what he meant to do. Smother the fire, perhaps. Grab the bucket. Something.
He never got to it.
The air turned cold.
Not cool. Cold. Suddenly and bitingly, like a winter morning in Ravenhold when the frost painted patterns on the windows. Ren stopped as if he had walked into a wall. He knew this cold. He had felt it once before, seven years ago, in a garden full of lanterns.
Above him something crackled.
The burning canvas froze solid. The flames on it, red and greedy a heartbeat before, froze in mid-movement. Fine white lines ran through the fire, branched like veins, grew together, and then a roof of ice hung over the stall, with the flames enclosed in it like petals in glass, orange and red and perfectly still.
Then it shattered. Into a thousand glittering splinters that trickled down onto the cobbles like snow and melted there into water.
The fire was gone.
Ren slowly turned his head.
She stood at the edge of the square, between the stalls, her right hand still raised.
She wore a white travelling cloak with a high collar, and beneath it a simple dress of pale blue. Behind her stood two guards in the colours of the House of Winterhall, silver and blue, hands on their swords. But Ren hardly saw the guards.
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White. Not fair and not grey. White as fresh snow, as the towers of the palace in the morning sun. It fell smoothly over her shoulders, held back with a thin silver ribbon, and in the light of the midday sun it shimmered almost blue.
She had grown taller. Of course she had. Slimmer. Her face narrower, the round cheeks of the child gone. But she stood exactly as she had back then. Bolt upright. Chin raised.
And the eyes. Grey-blue. Like water under a thin skin of ice.
Emilia.
Ren could not breathe.
He had known he would see her. Silas had written it. W’s daughter. He had prepared himself, the way he had prepared himself for the residence, for the towers, for everything else. He had thought he knew what he would feel. Anger, perhaps. She was the daughter of the man who had nodded. Coldness. Indifference.
He felt none of it.
He only felt something in his chest suddenly grow very tight, and he did not know what it was.
“Valemont.”
Emilia lowered her hand. She walked across the square, slowly, with small, precise steps, as if every cobble she crossed belonged to her. The meltwater at her feet froze where she touched it and thawed again behind her.
Cedric stared at her. His hand was still smoking. Hoarfrost glittered on his fingertips.
“Lady Winterhall.” He bowed, curtly and stiffly. “What a surprise.”
“For you, certainly.” Emilia stopped in front of him. She was half a head shorter than he was, but she looked at him as if she stood on a staircase and he at the foot of it. “You set fire to a market stall. In broad daylight. The day before the trial, before the eyes of half the city.”
“The girl was insolent.”
“The girl told you to go to the back.” Emilia’s voice was cool and smooth. She sounded almost like her father, Ren thought, and the thought struck him like a cold drop at the back of his neck. “That is not insolence, Valemont. That is a queue.”
Ren nearly laughed. He bit his tongue.
That’s not the same thing.
Cedric’s jaw worked. “You defend common rabble? You? A Winterhall?”
“I am not defending anyone at all.” Emilia raised her chin a little further. “I am defending decency. Which you have apparently left at home. My father would not appreciate a duke’s name being connected with a fire at the market in the same week the princess takes her trial. Nor would yours, incidentally.”
She turned. Not to Nora. Not to the smith. Simply away, as if the matter were settled, as if she had thereby dismissed Cedric.
And Ren saw what she did not see.
He saw it because he always looked behind. Because for seven years he had learned to keep the world beside him and behind him in view. He saw Cedric’s face twist as Emilia turned her back on him. Saw him raise his hand. Not far. Only to his hip, hidden behind his coat, where the guards could not see it.
Saw heat gather between his fingers. Red. Small. Concentrated.
Not a fire you threw at a canvas. A fire you drove into someone’s back.
Ren did not think.
Three steps. He was beside Cedric before either of his companions could so much as twitch. His hand closed around Cedric’s wrist. Firmly. Not too firmly. Just firmly enough.
The flame in Cedric’s hand went out as if someone had blown on it.
“From behind?” Ren said quietly. “Really?”
Cedric whirled round. For a heartbeat his face was very close to Ren’s, and Ren saw something in it he had not seen in Edmund. Edmund was loud and cruel, like a big child who had never learned that other people felt pain too. In Cedric’s face there was something else. Something cold and hungry.
“You,” Cedric hissed. “The nobody.”
“We’ve done this already.” Ren let go of his wrist. Slowly. “I’m just standing in a queue again.”
Behind him it had gone completely silent.
Cedric rubbed his wrist. He looked from Ren to Emilia, who had turned round and was regarding the scene with a face Ren could not read. Then at the Winterhall guards, who both had their swords half drawn now. Then at the people in the market, all of whom were looking. Dozens of them.
He spat on the cobbles in front of Ren.
“There’s a combat part in the trial tomorrow, nobody. I very much hope they put us together.”
He left without looking round again. His two companions followed him, though not without throwing Ren a look that was presumably meant to frighten him.
Ren watched them until they had disappeared into the crowd. Then he turned round.
And stood face to face with Emilia Winterhall.
She had come closer without his hearing it. She stood two paces in front of him, hands folded in front of her cloak, and studied him.
From head to foot. The long dark coat with the leather buckles, the tousled hair, the scar on his chin, the sword on his back, the muddy boots. She looked at the boots longest.
Ren stood still and let it happen. He had the feeling that his heart was beating so loudly that she must be able to hear it.
Do you recognise me?
She had no reason to. He knew that. Owen had cut his hair so that no one would see Aldwyn in him. He was seven years older, a head taller, his face harder and narrower. He bore a different name. She had seen him only once, for half an hour, in lantern light, when they were both ten.
And still he stood there waiting for something in her face to change.
Nothing changed.
“I had that under control.”
Her voice was no longer a girl’s. It was deeper, cooler. But the tone was exactly the same. Exactly. Dignified and a little offended, as if he had taken something away from her.
“Of course.”
“I mean it. I would have felt him. He would not have reached me.”
“I believe you.”
“No, you don’t.”
Ren said nothing. He could not. It was as if he were standing at the edge of a frozen fountain again. I believe you. No, you don’t.
Emilia raised her chin.
“I’m a Winterhall,” she said. “I don’t need help.” She studied him once more, and her gaze caught on the muddy boots. “Least of all from a vagabond with a sword that is too big for him.”
There it was.
He had known she would say it. Somehow he had known it since he saw her hair between the stalls. And still it struck him so hard that for a moment he heard nothing but the rushing in his ears.
I’m a Winterhall. I don’t need help.
It was her. It really was her. Seven years, and she still stood there with her chin raised saying the same sentence, as if someone had carved it into her in stone.
Something in his chest tightened, and something else, deeper down, wanted to laugh.
The words were already on his tongue. Then I’ll just hold my hand out here. By chance. Because I’m bored. He felt them. He wanted to say them. He wanted to see what happened in her face when he said them.
He did not say them.
If you say it, she’ll remember. And if she remembers, Ren is dead. And Lucian a few days later too.
“Fine,” he said instead. He raised one shoulder. “Then it was chance. I just happened to be standing next to him. I was bored.”
Emilia blinked.
It was only the tiniest moment. A single heartbeat in which something flitted across her face, too fast to grasp. Her eyes narrowed a little. Her lips parted, as if she wanted to ask something. New chapters come out on novelping . com first.
Then it was gone.
She frowned. “You are strange.”
“People tell me that a lot.”
“I can well believe it.” She regarded him a moment longer, frowning slightly, the way you look at a riddle you cannot solve and that annoys you for that reason. “What is your name?”
“Ren. Ren Harlow.”
“Harlow.” She repeated it as if testing how it tasted. “I do not know the name.”
“That’s because nobody knows it.”
“Where are you from?”
“Fernwick.”
“I do not know that name either.”
“There are a lot of sheep there.”
Behind him someone snorted. Ren did not need to turn round to know it was Milo.
The corner of Emilia’s mouth twitched. Very briefly, so briefly that Ren was not sure whether he had imagined it. Just like back then, when she had walked past the maid in her wet dress and back into the hall.
Then her face was smooth again.
“The trial is tomorrow, Ren Harlow from Fernwick. I advise you to clean your boots beforehand. The examiners notice such things.”
She turned. Her guards fell in behind her. She walked across the square, very upright and very dignified, and the crowd parted before her as if she were made of ice and the people of water.
Ren watched her go.
He would have laughed. And then he’d have told you to clean your boots.
He looked at his boots. They were muddy. Of course they were.
“Thanks.”
Nora stood beside him. She had her hands wrapped in her apron, and her face was still red with anger, but her voice was calm.
“For what? She put out the fire. Not me.”
“For afterwards.” Nora nodded in the direction in which Cedric had disappeared. “I saw what he was going to do. Too late. You didn’t.” She studied him with the same appraising look she had given the mercenary’s blade. “You’re always looking around. I noticed it earlier, when you were standing over there by the hat stall. Like a watchdog.”
“It’s a habit.”
“A good one.” She held out her hand. It was rough and callused and covered in little healed burn scars. “Nora Callan. My father owns the stall. Well, owned. Now it’s a stall without a roof.”
Ren shook her hand. She had a grip like a vice.
“Ren.”
“I know. I heard. Ren Harlow from Fernwick, where there are a lot of sheep.” Something that was almost a grin flitted across her face. “You’re entering tomorrow too?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then we’ll see each other.” She glanced over her shoulder at her father, who was cursing as he tore the charred remains of the canvas from the frame. “I have to help. But if you want your sword sharpened tomorrow, before the combat part …” She hesitated. “Then I’ll do it for free. And I won’t even ask why a farm boy from Fernwick carries dwarven steel on his back.”
Ren froze.
Nora raised an eyebrow. “I’m a smith’s daughter, Harlow. I know dwarven steel when I see it. Even through a leather scabbard. The way it hangs. How it moves when you walk.” She shrugged. “None of my business. I’m only saying so you know people notice.”
She turned and went back to the stall, and Ren stood there watching her go, and thought that Crownhaven was a city full of eyes.
“That,” said Milo, suddenly appearing beside him, “was the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.”
He had a new hat on. Not the green one. A brown one, with a long, blue-shimmering jay feather that bobbed with every movement.
“I thought you only wanted a feather.”
“I did. But the trader only had hats with feathers on them, and I can’t wear a feather without a hat, and I can’t wear the green one any more because it’s singed, so …” Milo waved it away. “Not important! What’s important is that you just rescued the Winterhall girl from that Valemont fellow and she called you a vagabond! And you said there are a lot of sheep! I thought I’d die!”
“I didn’t rescue her.”
“You held his wrist!”
“She would have felt him. He wouldn’t have reached her.”
Milo stared at him. “Do you believe that?”
Ren did not answer. He looked across the square, in the direction in which Emilia had disappeared. Between the stalls, between the people, there was nothing more to be seen of her. No white cloak. No white hair. Only the meltwater still gleaming on the cobbles where her ice had been.
“Ren?”
“Hm.”
“Do you know her?”
Ren was silent so long that Milo thought he would not answer.
“No,” Ren said at last. “Not any more.”
Milo looked at him sideways. He opened his mouth as if to ask something, then shut it again. He adjusted his new hat. The blue feather bobbed.
“Not today,” he said quietly. “I know.”
That night Ren lay awake in the narrow bed at the inn, under the roof, listening to Milo snore in the bed opposite.
Through the little window he could see a patch of sky. A few stars. And right at the edge, if he turned his head, the tip of one of the white towers, silver in the moonlight.
He thought of the fountain. Of a ten-year-old girl sitting on the ice with a trembling lower lip, refusing to take his hand. And then taking it after all.
He thought of the seventeen-year-old in the market, who had frozen a burning canvas as if it were nothing. Who had put Cedric Valemont in his place, with a voice like her father’s. Who had looked at him without recognising him.
Almost without recognising him.
I was bored. And that one heartbeat in which something had flitted across her face.
She was the daughter of the man who had nodded. Of the man who now sat in Ravenhold, in his father’s castle. Perhaps she even slept in his old room. He ought to hate her. He had had seven years to get used to hating her.
He had never managed it.
Ren turned onto his side. Under his shirt lay his father’s ring, warm on his chest. At the foot of the bed leaned the dwarven sword with its blessing. Come home. In the inside pocket of his coat, over the chair, lay a hagstone from a stream in Fernwick and a dried sprig of lavender.
Tomorrow the trial began.
Tomorrow he would see Edmund again, and Cedric, who had sworn revenge on him. And Silas, who would act as if he did not know him.
And Emilia Winterhall, who did not recognise him.
Not yet, Ren thought.
He closed his eyes. Outside, the cathedral bell struck midnight, and with the last stroke the Blossom Moon began.