The palace of Crownhaven. Shortly after midnight.
The crown was heavier than it looked.
Alaric III took the narrow golden circlet from his head and laid it on the desk, beside the letter from Orvundar that the dwarf had had delivered to him after the banquet. He had not opened it. He knew what it said. Help. Troops. Gold. The same words with which the dwarves had been pressing his envoys for years, only this time written in blood instead of ink.
He rubbed his temple, where the circlet had left a red mark.
The king’s study lay in the highest tower of the palace, and from its window you could see the whole city. Crownhaven was still celebrating. The lanterns glowed in the lanes like scattered embers, and music drifted up from the great square, thin and cheerful. Somewhere down there people were dancing, drinking to his health and calling his name.
Or another one.
He had heard it on the way to the palace. The cheers as the carriage with the raven had passed. Louder than for any other carriage. Louder, if he was honest, than for his own.
There was a knock.
“Come in.”
Duke Gerald Winterhall entered and closed the door behind him without needing a servant to do it for him. He still wore his festival clothes, pale blue and silver, and his face was as smooth and expressionless as it had been in the throne room. Alaric had never seen it any other way. There were rumours at court that Winterhall looked like that even in his sleep.
“Your Majesty.”
“Gerald. Sit down.”
Winterhall did not sit. He remained standing before the desk, hands clasped behind his back, and waited. That was one of the qualities Alaric valued in him: he never spoke first.
The king poured two cups of wine. He pushed one across the table. Winterhall did not touch it.
“You saw it.”
“I saw it.”
“Four dukes stood up tonight. Four. For a dwarf none of them had ever seen before, and for a war in mountains none of them will ever set foot in.” Alaric took a sip. The wine was good. He tasted nothing of it all the same. “They did not stand up for the dwarves, Gerald. They stood up for him.”
“Ravenmoor has a talent for making people follow him.”
“Ravenmoor has a talent for making people stop following me.” The king set down his cup, a little too hard. Wine slopped over the rim and left a dark stain on the letter from Orvundar. “Do you know what he did today? In front of the whole court, on my name day, he told me that I do not listen. And half the hall nodded.”
“A third.”
“A third today. Half next year. And the year after that?” Alaric rose and went to the window. Below him the city glowed. “My grandfather held Arvendal together with the sword. My father with gold. I hold it with nothing but the people’s habit of bowing to this circlet.” He gestured behind him, at the desk. “Habits change, Gerald. And when they change, the people look for a new name to call.”
Winterhall was silent.
After a while he raised his eyes. “Ravenmoor does not want a throne. That is what makes him dangerous. He truly does not want it.”
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“I know.” Alaric smiled without turning round. “And that is exactly why they would give it to him.”
For a while there was only the music drifting up from the square.
Winterhall broke the silence first. “The dwarves. Ravenmoor will speak of them again tomorrow in council. And the day after. He will not stop.”
“No. He will not.”
“And if he is right? If someone in the east really has united the orcs?”
The king turned round. For the first time that evening the smile had vanished from his face entirely, and beneath it lay something that looked very old and very tired.
“Then the dwarves will bleed. For a few years. And when they have bled long enough, they will no longer ask for help but for mercy. And for every soldier I send them, they will pay in iron and gold instead of letters.” He shrugged. “A weak Orvundar is a grateful Orvundar, Gerald. A strong Ravenmoor, on the other hand …”
He left the sentence hanging in the air.
Winterhall nodded slowly. He had expected that sentence. Alaric could see it in him. They had spoken of it often enough in recent months, in this room, behind closed doors, in hints and half-sentences that could have been passed off as a joke if need be.
Tonight there was no joke left.
Winterhall smoothed an invisible crease from his sleeve. “Everything is prepared. As discussed.”
“Tonight?”
“They leave at sunrise. My man in his household reported it an hour ago.” A tiny twitch at the corners of his mouth that in any other man would have been a smile. “His captain has doubled the guards. Two of the new men are ours.”
“And afterwards?”
“Afterwards, letters will be found in his chambers. Letters to King Kaldrun, in his hand, with his seal. Letters in which he promises the dwarves land in the east if they help him march on Crownhaven.” Winterhall spoke as calmly as if he were reporting the price of grain. “The people will learn that their beloved duke was a traitor. That he only defended the dwarves so loudly because he wanted them as an army for himself. And that his crown stopped him in time.”
Alaric regarded him for a long time.
“You are a dangerous man, Gerald.”
“I am a useful man, Your Majesty. That is not the same thing.”
“And your price?”
“As discussed. The lands of Ravenmoor. The castle at Ravenhold. The ore mines on the border.” Winterhall inclined his head slightly. “Someone must govern the east, after all, when its duke is no more.”
“And the dwarves Ravenmoor so likes to trade with? They will trade with you then.”
“If they still have anyone left who can trade.”
The king laughed. It was a short, dry sound, with no joy in it. He picked up his cup again and drained it.
“The wife?”
“She will be with him.”
“Regrettable. She was always very kind to my queen.” Alaric set down the empty cup. “And the boy?”
For the first time that evening Winterhall hesitated. It was only a heartbeat. A moment in which his gaze slid from the king to the window, out into the night, towards the garden that could not be seen from up here.
Alaric noticed it all the same.
“Gerald?”
“My daughter spoke with him tonight. In the garden. She came back with her gown soaked, and her mother was beside herself.” He said it without the slightest emotion, as a statement of fact. “She called him an impudent boy. And then she spent the rest of the evening looking out of the window.”
The king raised an eyebrow. “And?”
“Nothing.” Winterhall looked away from the window. His face was smooth as wax again. “It is nothing.”
“Good.” Alaric leaned forward and laid both hands flat on the desk, to the right and left of the stained letter. His voice did not grow louder. It grew quieter. “Then listen to me carefully, Gerald. A raven hatches ravens. I do not want to sit on my throne in ten years and hear the same name in the streets. Not the father. Not the son. None of them.”
“Understood, Your Majesty.”
“No one leaves that house tonight.”
“No one.”
The king straightened. The smile returned, warm and friendly, the way the whole court knew it. “Then I wish you good night, Duke. And tell your daughter to leave my grandfather’s fountain alone. The gardeners needed an hour to thaw it out.”
Winterhall bowed. Then he left, and the door closed behind him, almost without a sound.
Alaric remained alone.
He did not put the circlet back on. He only looked at it, lying there on the desk, golden in the candlelight, beside the wine stain on the letter of a dwarf king who had asked for help and would not get any.
Then he felt the draught.
He turned his head. The door to the adjoining room, the little reading room where his mother had once done her embroidery and which no one used any more, stood open a crack. Only a finger’s breadth. Just enough for the candle flames to tremble in his direction.
Alaric stood, went over and stopped in front of the door for a moment.
The reading room was dark. The curtains were drawn. He saw the outlines of the old armchair, the embroidery frame, the shelf of yellowed books. Nothing moved.
A servant, he thought. A draught. A lock that doesn’t close properly.
He shut the door. Completely, this time.
And behind the heavy curtain of the reading room, so still that she barely dared to breathe, sat a ten-year-old girl with fair hair, both hands pressed over her mouth.