The Witchwood Crown
Snenneq’s eyes opened wide. “The top opens?”
“Part of it. The bad priest used to watch the stars. That’s what I was told. He had . . . machines up there, too. Special mirrors and scrying glasses, I think. Things.” Morgan waved his hand—the specifics were far away, and the spreading warmth of kangkang was here with him right now, making everything less worrisome. “It’s true. I’ve been on the roof. You can look inside and see all the stones.”
“You have been on it, the tower?” Snenneq asked. “But you were saying it is forbidden.”
“Huh.” Morgan waved his hand again. “Do you always do what your elders tell you? It’s not dangerous—not if you can climb, anyway. When I was just a boy I climbed every wall in this castle, every tower.” Which was a bit of an exaggeration, but after a humbling night with the trolls on the frozen lake, then another in the high cold hills of the Grianspog, he wanted them to know that he was not without skills and experience of his own.
Hjeldin’s Tower loomed only a short distance ahead. The crescent moon floated beside the tower’s shoulder like an angel of the Lord whispering to Usires in an old painting. Looking at it now, truly looking at it for the first time in a long while, Morgan was struck again by how different it was from the structures nearby; little surprise the trolls had wondered about it. Even before they were boarded up, the tower’s windows had been weirdly narrow, like squinted eyes. The only large openings, the top-floor windows that had once been filled with leaded red glass, were now just holes dark as the sockets of a skull. Other than those and a few chimneys, the tower was featureless, and its squat, cylindrical form did make it look a bit like—perhaps not a basket, as the trolls had thought, but one of the great tureens from the castle kitchen.
And what happens when you leave the lid on the boiling pot too long? Morgan wondered, then shook his head, trying to free himself from such a strange, unsettling thought. “But you could see for yourself about the stones on top of the tower,” he told the trolls. “I mean, if you wanted to. But probably you wouldn’t. Because of the things people say about it.”
“I do not understand you, friend Morgan,” said Snenneq. “See for myself? How can I? It is night time and we are on the ground.” He looked around. “Do you mean we could climb that other tower tomorrow?” He pointed at the shadowy spire of Holy Tree Tower on the far side of the chapel and of the residence. “And look down on it?”
“No, I meant you could see what’s up there by climbing it,” said Morgan in his most carefully careless voice. “I thought you trolls were good at that.”
“There are none better,” said Snenneq. “Anyone can be telling the truth of that, whether they have been to Yiqanuc or not. Do you not have a saying in your speech, ‘Nimble as a troll on a mountain track’?”
“Yes, but people say lots of things that other people tell them are true, without ever seeing if those people are right.” Morgan felt a momentary twinge; Snenneq meant well, and he was very good at delivering the kangkang, but Morgan had felt an itch all evening, and though he still could not identify it, he was beginning to see a way to scratch it. “I’m not certain I could climb it myself any more, of course. Some of the handholds are fragile, and I’m a bit too heavy now.” He patted his waistline. “I suppose you’re too big for it too, Snenneq.”
The troll gave him a look, half irritation, half suspicion. “What do you mean? It is forbidden by your king and queen to go onto it. That is what you were yourself saying.”
“Oh, yes.” Morgan laughed. “There are rules against it. Don’t want to break any rules.”
Qina said something in the troll language. It sounded brief and to the point. Morgan thought it was like the noise an unhappy pigeon might make. “She says you are sounding like you do want to break rules,” Snenneq explained.
“Never mind,” said Morgan. “It would be too hard, in any case. It’s not the kind of climbing you’re used to.”
Little Snenneq looked up at the smooth bulk of the tower, his face as round as a second moon. “If it were not forbidden,” he said after a moment, “I could be doing it.”
Qina said something else, her voice even sharper this time. Snenneq did not translate it, but looked at Morgan. He shucked off his pack and dropped it on the ground, then began to dig in it. Qina spoke to him again in the troll tongue, but this time Snenneq ignored her. After a moment, he pulled a coil of slender cord from the pack and dropped it on the ground.
“You carry rope with you?” said Morgan, surprised.
“With certainness.” He pulled off his jacket. Underneath he wore a shirt of some simple, homespun cloth that left his thick, dark arms bare. “I carry many things. That is because one day I will be a Singing Man, and such a man must be always preparing for what will happen. But the rope is not for me. If I am climbing up, then when I get to the top, I will let down the rope. Then you can be climbing too, Morgan Prince, and we will discover who is right and who is not.”
Qina had clearly lost her patience for the whole enterprise. She turned her back on them both and began walking back toward the center of the keep.
“Qinananamookta!” Snenneq called, but she did not look around.
Morgan was beginning to feel the smallest bit concerned with how things were going until Little Snenneq threw him the drinking skin. “Only enough to be taking for courage,” the troll warned. “Even with a rope, I am thinking you will not find it an easy climb.”
Morgan wiped his mouth, enjoying the fire in his throat and belly. “You’re really going to climb up the tower?”
Snenneq gave him a look of mixed amusement and disgust. “Words may be things of air, but once they are spoken, they are also things that exist. Do you believe a troll of Yiqanuc is without honor or pride?” He bent down to lace his rawhide boots more tightly, then walked to the base of the tower near the gatehouse and began studying the close-fitting stones.
One more quick draught of kangkang helped to banish the last of Morgan’s reservations. What was there to worry about, after all? Trolls were famous climbers. The king had bragged often enough about his time in the mountains with Binabik and his people. And although Morgan had been a bit more sedentary of late than in his adventurous childhood days—well, what of it? With a rope, he could easily make it. Hadn’t he been the best climber of all his friends?
Qina had disappeared from sight by the time Snenneq began to clamber up the wall, and that gave Morgan another moment of concern: What if she went straight back and reported what they were doing?
No, what Little Snenneq’s doing, he corrected himself. Nobody says I have to follow him up his silly rope. In fact, he thought, what would be just about perfect would be if a party of rescuers arrived just as Snenneq reached the top. Snenneq would be the one to take the blame, and Morgan would be able to honorably avoid climbing.
He took another swallow of kangkang to convince himself. The molten liquid ran down the center of him and into his stomach, filling him with cheerful unconcern. Anyway, what would it signify if they did get into trouble? He was already in so much trouble now that it hardly mattered. What mattered was that the evening had been boring but now it was not.
To Morgan’s surprise, Snenneq did not choose the easy path up onto the wall where Hjeldin’s Tower was set, an assembly of hoary old stones with broad spaces between them to make things easier, but instead began climbing the tower itself just beside the gatehouse. Within a few moments he had lifted himself above the level of the gatehouse roof and was clinging to the tower’s belly like a crawling fly.
Morgan could not help being impressed by the sureness with which Snenneq made his way. The moon was up and the light was good, but he also seemed to have an uncanny ability to guess at which cracks would work best. Once Snenneq placed a foot or a hand, he seldom lifted it until it was time to let go and move up. Still, even a troll could only go so swiftly up a smooth, vertical wall. Once or twice
the facing stones proved unequal to the chore, cracking loose to expose the darker bricks beneath. Once, Little Snenneq even hung by just his hands for long moments, struggling to find a place to stick in his toe, and Morgan grew so anxious watching him that he had to have another long drink.
Within a short time Snenneq reached the second floor windows, little more than arrow slits that had been filled in with stone shards when the tower was sealed. The troll scooped some of the stones out, letting them clatter onto the cobbled roadway below, then stuck both his feet into the hollow he’d made and rested there for a short while.
“A good night for climbing, this is,” he called down. “I can see much of the village from here.”
“City,” Morgan called back, suddenly conscious of how loud they must be. “You know, I’ve been thinking that maybe this is not such a good idea after all.”
“I cannot hear you speaking, Morgan Prince. Not one word.”
Down at St. Sutrin’s in the city, the bell tolled for compline. Morgan started to lift the drinking skin again, then thought better of it. The best part of his mood was beginning to curl a bit at the edges. If Little Snenneq reached the top, Morgan knew he would have to climb, too, or he would never be able to look him in the face again. What if Astrian and the rest heard that Morgan had challenged Snenneq and then turned coward himself? They would never let him hear the end of it. Astrian would make a dozen new names for him, each more humiliating than the last. It would be worse than the night of battle on the North Road, stuck in the camp with the women and old men, knowing that only a few hundred steps away Erkynlandish soldiers were fighting and dying.
He tossed the drinking skin onto Snenneq’s pack. No more tonight, he told himself—or at least not until the climbing was finished. Still, he found himself praying in a most un-Morgan-like way that Snenneq would give up and come back down.
But nothing like that happened. As the prince watched, stomach growing more and more knotted, the little man made his deliberate way higher and higher, past the arrow-slits of the third story and up the moon-silvered facing of the fourth. Sometimes he hunted long moments for his next handhold—once he even dangled himself by his fingers alone until he could find a place to lodge his foot a cubit or more to one side—but no challenge seemed to hold him back for long. In the middle of his own growing concern, Morgan couldn’t help admiring the troll’s skill. Snenneq might look broad across the middle, even a bit fat, but the husky little fellow was strong, too, and matched his strength with a good eye and soft touch.
Morgan swallowed. It had become obvious to him some time earlier that Snenneq was a much better climber than he had ever been. Now it was becoming just as clear that unless something terrible happened, Snenneq was going to reach the top. Morgan’s palms were damp despite the cool of the night.
You’re a fool, Morgan Prince, he told himself. You’re a drunkard and a fool. Everything your grandparents say is right.
At the highest floor, Snenneq veered a little farther from his course than Morgan expected. The prince realized that the little man was using the stone sills of the black, empty windows to begin the last part of his climb. For a moment, as he crabwalked along the lower part of the window, his fingers digging into the stone facing above, something seemed to reach out of the dark space near his legs and grab at him. Morgan gasped, his heart speeding, but it was only a strange shadow caused by the unevenness of the stones filling the window.
Fool, he scolded himself. This is bad enough without making ghosts up out of the thin air.
Still, it was hard to forget all the childhood stories about Pryrates, about the Red Priest’s hairless head and cruel face and the sound of his boots as he walked through the keep at night. Pryrates’ father had been a demon, some of the stories claimed. He could speak to the dead.
Snenneq had reached the edge of the roof, nothing above him but the shallow dome that covered the top of the tower. The troll pulled himself over the edge—for a moment his legs kicked in the air, like a frog jumping into the water—and then vanished. Morgan stood and stared upward, his heart beating fast again.
Snenneq’s head appeared a few instants later along the edge of the roof, a dark knot silhouetted by moonlight. “I have been tying the rope!” he called down, voice muffled by distance. A moment later Morgan saw a flash of silvery-gray as the coils spun down. The end bounced, swung, and stopped to hang just about the height of the wall. Snenneq called down something else, but this time Morgan could not make it out before the troll disappeared behind the edge of the tower roof.
What had he said? For Morgan to climb up and join him? Or could it have been something else? Perhaps he had said, “It’s not safe. Stay there. I’m coming down.” But if that was the case, where was he?
Morgan waited. And waited. And waited.
The moon slipped into a nest of clouds and hid itself. The kangkang skin, so near, seemed to call to him with a voice of sweet solace. A few more drinks, and he wouldn’t care about any of it. He could stay down here and have a little nap, and eventually someone else would come and take care of things. Snenneq would climb back down, or Qina would return with the guards, or with her father.
Or with my grandparents . . .
He began to pace, and the night seemed to suck much of the drunkenness from his veins, leaving only a sickened chill. How could he sit waiting for someone else to come? He had given his word, the promise of a prince. He had goaded—yes, goaded—the troll into climbing the dangerous tower. Perhaps even now Snenneq was lying there, having slipped or tripped in the dark and hurt himself badly. And what if little Qina had got herself lost in the complicated maze of passageways and alleys at the heart of the ancient keep? Then nobody would be coming, and nobody was going to do anything except Morgan himself. He would have to climb.
Is that what Snenneq’s fortune-telling bones meant, his Black Crevice and his Unnatural Birth? That I’ll never be king because I’m going to fall off a tower and die?
The rope hung down in the moonlight, a line of silver against the dark stone, swaying in an occasional breeze.
Morgan wiped his hands on his clothing, then bent and got some dirt on his palms from between the cobbles and rubbed them until they were mostly dry. It was going to be hard enough to climb without sweaty hands.
• • •
Getting to the place where the rope dangled was not as bad as Morgan had feared. The wall had not been refaced in years and the spaces between its stones were wide. Once or twice he had to pull his knife from his belt and scrape out some of the old mortar so that he could dig his fingers or toes in deep enough, but it was not until he reached the top of the wall that he began to understand how much trouble he was in.
The rope hung just a few inches beyond his grasp, but in such a way that he would have to jump slightly outward from the base of the wall to reach it. That meant that if he failed to hang on, he would go straight down to the cobbles below. He was only at the tower’s second story, which was probably not far enough to kill him, but from where he clung beside the tower, the distance looked quite enough to break a leg or an arm or even a pair of each.
Morgan was now deeply regretting the whole foolish adventure. The first part of the climb, easy as it had been, had burned all the jolly kangkang out of his head. That was how it felt, in any case, although when he looked down and the cobbles below him wavered and swam like stones at the bottom of a rippling stream, he wasn’t quite so certain.
At last he found a foothold on the tower itself and swung out on one foot and one handhold as far as he could, so that the rope was only a handspan beyond his reach. He dried his hands, said a prayer to Saint Rhiappa, another to Saint Sutrin, then added one last prayer to Elysia, the mother of the Aedon, wanting all the sympathetic help he could get. Before he could think about it too much, he dug in his toe for leverage, then sprang up and out, grabbing for the rope.
He caught it an
d held on, but just as his heart thrilled with relief, the rope swung back from where his leap had carried it, Morgan dangling at the end of it like a plumb bob, and smashed him hard against the tower’s stony side. It was all he could do not to let go, and for moments he just hung on the rope like a sick ape clinging to a tree branch.
After a bit, his grip began to loosen, so he scrabbled with his feet until he found a place to put his toes in the cracks between facing blocks. He had some purchase with his feet now, but was hanging at an angle away from the tower wall with nearly all his weight on his arms. He did his best to inch up that way, a little bit at a time, and at first felt a small renewal of confidence as he managed to spider his way up the outside of the second story, bracing with his feet when he had to change his grip to a higher part of the rope. When he missed a foothold he swung out alarmingly, but managed to find a grip in the cracks of the wall on his backswing, then to cling there until he found his breath.
Within a short while he had climbed high enough that he felt sure he would not survive a fall. He also began to believe that he was not going to be able to use the rope all the way to the top, since his shoulders were already burning with the strain and his fingers were beginning to cramp. He cursed himself, a silent string of panicky epithets that would have made his tutors’ eyes bulge in shock and sent them scurrying to chapel.
Only one thing to do, he realized at last. Have to do it like the troll. That meant giving up the rope, but at least then his legs would take an equal share of the load. Sweet Aedon preserve me, if I die, what will people think? They’ll think I was an idiot. Of course they will. And they’ll be right.