The Witchwood Crown

  But he had no other choice, except perhaps to shout for help, and much as his arms ached, he was even more frightened by the thought of bringing the whole of the Inner Bailey here to see his wretched foolishness. He tied the rope around his waist in case he missed his target entirely, then gently swung himself back and forth until he dared to take one hand off and reach for the wall. The first time he failed to find purchase, but the second time he found a crack, and when he wedged his fingers into it his swinging stopped. He searched with his toes until he found places to dig in his feet, but already his knot was loosening around his waist and he was beginning to sag farther from the wall.

  He sent another prayer to Elysia, thinking of the Mother of God’s kind, forgiving face, the kind of face that would even find mercy for drunken young idiots, then as he swung again toward the tower, he let go of the rope completely and jabbed his aching fingers into the nearest crevice in the stone facing. The knot unwound and the rope slithered off, swinging back to hang out of his reach behind him. Morgan’s gut went cold. Now he could only move up or down by clinging to the wall as Snenneq had done.

  What followed was a waking nightmare. Morgan did not remember much of it afterward, but every single movement, every release, every risk, every move from one crumbling handhold to another seemed to take hours. He knew it would haunt his dreams for the rest of his life, if he was lucky enough to survive. He did his best to ignore the pain and inch upward, impossibly slowly, crawling the vertical face of the tower like a caterpillar, so tired and agonizingly sore that he did not remember what it felt like to do anything else. The third floor passed, and the fourth went by too, as wretchedly slow as waiting for snow to melt. Morgan could think of nothing except the need to find a handhold, find a foothold, to move up. The weight of his own body began to feel like somebody else’s weight, as if another entire person was dangling from his ankles or plucking at his arms, trying to yank him backward into emptiness and death.

  The fourth floor edged past him, then he was onto the fifth. He could see only what was above him, could do nothing except push his body close to the tower wall and search with his fingers for the next place to grab. One of his shoes fell off but he hardly noticed the difference. Up and up he climbed, except that now it had become something both more and less than climbing. For long moments he imagined himself crawling over a flat surface, belly down, while a great wind tried to blow him away. Later, he thought he was clambering through a tunnel into another country, a land of warmth and rest. But no matter what he thought, or dreamed, always something kept pulling at him, trying to fling him into empty space, some horrible enemy that wanted to smash him to death against the stones.

  • • •

  Morgan came out of another season of darkness to realize he could not find a handhold because there were no more—his free hand was groping in empty space. He looked up for the first time in a long while and saw that he had reached the top. The sight so astonished him that he almost lost his grip, but the quickening of his heart and his blood pushed his thoughts back to the night and the tower again.

  Pulling himself up over the top seemed like the most difficult thing he had ever done. At one point, as he tried to lift his knee high enough to get it up onto the tower roof, he burst into tears. No one came to help him. He called out Snenneq’s name, or thought he did, but no one responded.

  At last he levered the heaviest part of his body over the edge so he could collapse onto the curved, dome-shaped roof, then he scrabbled forward until he felt it beneath his legs as well. He rolled onto his back, gasping, his sinews throbbing with fiery pain. Whether he slept then or merely stopped thinking, he could not tell, but for a while he lay in darkness. When at last he opened his eyes again he saw nothing above him except the stars.

  I don’t know their names, he thought. Someone—Sir Porto? Grandfather?—tried to teach me once, but I didn’t pay attention.

  If these were truly his own stars. If he had not climbed so high he had reached some other world, some land in the sky.

  At last he rolled over and dragged himself up on all fours. There was no sign at all of Snenneq on the roof, although Morgan should have been able to see him. The shallow slope of the dome curved gently upward before him, mounting only a few cubits in height between its edge and its center. It wasn’t a dome of windows and light such as stood above Saint Sutrin’s cathedral, but a dome as solid, stony, and secretive as the rest of Hjeldin’s Tower. Near the top of it the builders had made four great hatchways, one facing each quadrant of the sky. The hatch doors had been chained shut when the tower was abandoned, but now one of the hatches was open and the lid thrown back, the square black opening gaping at the sky like a hungry mouth.

  “Snenneq?” Morgan tested the dome, which felt more solid than the walls themselves. It still held some of the day’s heat, even in the dark. He began to climb toward the open hatch. Why would the troll break it open and go inside the infamous tower? Did Snenneq really have so little fear of other peoples’ phantoms?

  What if he didn’t open it? Morgan thought suddenly. What if someone else did? What if he was just standing there, and it opened behind him like the lid of a spider’s den . . . and then something came out and took him?

  The picture in his head was too horrifying to be endured. Morgan crept forward in unwitting imitation of his climb up, stomach dragging on the lead roof, until he reached the open hatch. But he truly, truly did not want to look inside.

  He’s here because of you, a voice told him, almost as if someone else spoke straight into his ear—someone honorable. Someone different. He’s here because of you. If he’s in there, you have to find him.

  But Morgan did not want to look inside the hatch, let alone go in. Who knew what a dangerous shambles it must be, closed up for twenty years or more, empty for all this time?

  But what if it isn’t empty? Again he imagined the hatch opening silently behind the troll, the shadowy shape emerging . . .

  He pushed his head out beyond the edge of the hatch. The top chamber of the tower was full of large, loose rocks as he had expected, but there were dark places among them that almost looked like some monstrously huge mole or rat had been tunneling between the piled stones. Morgan was wishing harder than he had ever wished in his life that he had a torch—no, that he had a torch and a sword and three or four stout friends—when he saw something move. Something was alive in the chamber below him, down in the darkness of the tower’s top floor, down in the shadows.

  “Snenneq?” he called quietly, but his blood was drumming and the cracked voice that came from his lips scarcely sounded like his own. Then the shape turned to look up at him. Morgan had only an instant to see the hairless face catch the moonlight, the empty black eyes, the rags of a hood that might once have been red, then the hammerblows of his own heartbeats filled his head as he gasped and pushed himself away from the hatch. Trying to scramble to his feet, Morgan missed his footing and fell forward instead, cracking his jaw against the edge of the hatch. A sudden, bright shouting of stars overwhelmed him for an instant, then the black swallowed him up.

  32

  Rosewater and Balsam

  The Chancelry was part of a long building in the Middle Bailey that in King John’s day had been the castle mews. They had been destroyed in the fall of Green Angel Tower and the new stables erected in the outermost ring of the keep. It was not so much a sign that horses and royal carriages had become less important, Pasevalles reflected, as that counting and keeping money had grown even more so.

  The Chancelry building had the shape of a long bone, something that two dogs might fight over, pulling at each end. This was appropriate, because while one end belonged to Pasevalles as Lord Chancellor, the other end belonged to Archbishop Gervis, the Lord Treasurer, and Pasevalles had to admit the relationship between the two occasionally came down to something like the contendings of a couple of mastiffs under the royal supper table.
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  Still, it was a relief for the Lord Chancellor to be able to sink back into his own labors without having to do Count Eolair’s most important work as well. Many of the issues closest to his heart had been all but ignored while the royal couple were traveling, and he was anxious to catch up.

  Clerks hurried back and forth down the long hall like bees in clover, bearing piles of documents—ledger rolls, pleading letters, and tax records, each with its own complicated history. Pasevalles could not help being sourly amused by the misunderstanding most of the kingdom’s subjects had about power—that the king and queen merely sat on their thrones and decided what should be done next, then their eager minions hurried out and turned these whims into fact. In truth, ruling anything, let alone the largest kingdom in the history of Osten Ard, was a process of learning about and reacting to hundreds upon hundreds of small problems, some of which would quickly become larger problems if left unsolved, and then persisting with them until they had been solved or at least reduced from crisis to mere irritation. And standing between a ruler and these solutions was not a horde of loyal subjects waiting only to be told what to do, but thousands of individuals, each with his own plans and wants, most of them quite willing to break the rules if they could get away with it, and yet each of them also furious at any idea their own rights might be somehow abrogated. And of these plaintiffs, the nobles were the worst, prickly and full of righteous demands.

  Pasevalles had been born the nephew of an important Nabbanai border lord, Baron Seriddan of Metessa, and his childhood in the baron’s castle had also been the last time he was satisfied with his lot in life. Though his own father, Brindalles, had been a quiet and scholarly sort, young Pasevalles had always had his own eye set on a life of valor. He had even taken it upon himself to care for the family collection of arms and armor, because no one else in Metessa seemed to care about the greatness of the past—at least not the way Pasevalles did. All the years of his childhood the great armor hall and the foundry where armor was built and repaired had been his true homes; he had been nearly a stranger to his father’s study. He had learned to read and write and do sums, of course, as any young man in a noble family was expected to do, but had considered every hour spent beneath his tutors’ watchful gazes to be an hour wasted, time when he could have been out watching the men at arms practicing or performing the tasks he had allotted to himself in the armor hall, preserving the glory of his ancestors’ warlike ways and dreaming that a similar glory would one day be his.

  But dreams change, he told himself. Especially those of children.

  Pasevalles’s dreams had changed for good on the day that Prince Josua, brother of King Elias and son of Prester John, had arrived in Metessa seeking help in his struggle against his brother and his brother’s terrifying ally, Ineluki the Storm King. Pasevalles had been too young to understand all of it, of course—he was a mere eight years old—but he had been thrilled to learn that the legendary Sir Camaris, greatest warrior of his age, was alive and fighting for Josua. And when Josua’s siege of the Hayholt began, Pasevalles would have been even more thrilled that his own scholar father had joined the fighting, going so far as to volunteer for a masquerade, pretending to be Josua while the prince led a group of men and Sithi into the castle by other means.

  But Pasevalles had not been there. He did not see the glory of his father’s charge, riding the prince’s horse in through the very gates of the Hayholt. Neither was he there to see the terrible ending when King Elias’ trap was revealed, and his father was cut down and hacked to pieces by defenders in the castle courtyard.

  Pasevalles had instead found all this out when the messengers had reached Metessa a fortnight later, just a day ahead of the bodies of Pasevalles’ father and his uncle Seriddan, who had died of his wounds a few days after the battle.

  The weeks and months after hardly existed in his memory now, a black vortex of time, days and nights in seemingly endless succession where all he felt was pain and disbelief. It was not until his aunt decided to remarry a year later that Pasevalles had begun to take notice of his surroundings again.

  None of that went well, either. His mother died from one of the fevers that scourged Nabban after the Storm King’s Wars. His aunt, who had married the widower who owned the adjoining barony, also died from that same fever. And his aunt’s new husband had promptly turned Pasevalles out, sending him to live with poor relatives along Nabban’s northern coast in a house so cold and damp that he might as well have been living in the marshes themselves. Bitter, chilly days . . .

  No. Anger is a distraction, he reminded himself. Anger is the enemy of success. He had plans, he had a purpose, he had responsibilities and should not let himself be weighed down by bad, old memories. At this very moment he had a huge pile of bills waiting to be approved and taken to the king and queen, as well as dozens of other payments waiting to be examined one last time before being dispersed to the crown’s various creditors, because rebuilding castles was expensive work. All these years later, the Erkynland was still paying for the Storm King’s War. And, just to make the need to avoid wallowing in the past even more obvious, here came Father Wibert with another pile of petitions.

  “Where does your Lordship want these?” his secretary asked. “On the floor? In your lap?” Wibert was not a young man, but age had made him thinner rather than heavier. He had something like a sense of humor, but that was all it was—something like it. In fact, the most interesting thing about Wibert was his complete disinterest in anything other than himself. Pasevalles found him extremely useful, but nobody in the castle thought of him as a charming companion.

  “On the floor, I suppose.” Pasevalles noticed something that did not look like the other documents. “What’s that on the top?”

  “A letter from Princess Idela,” said Wibert with a mirthless grin. “Scented. She wants a favor, I’m betting.” He set down the tipping pile of documents, gave them a cursory straightening, then plucked the folded sheet off the top and handed it to Pasevalles. “The good Lord grant us all patience. Why He thought of women is more than I can understand.”

  I don’t doubt that’s true, Pasevalles thought. People in the Hayholt sometimes suggested Wibert had been born a priest. Pasevalles knew it was nearly true: Wibert had arrived from St. Sutrin’s orphanage when he was still a young boy, to work as an acolyte in the cathedral. Pasevalles doubted the monk had ever had a moment in his life free of Mother Church looking over his shoulder.

  “Are you going to open it?”

  Pasevalles felt an unpleasant remark rise to his but did not indulge himself. Wibert had all the social grace of a plowhorse let loose in the royal chapel, but he was a useful man, hard-working, incurious, and, best of all, absolutely predictable.

  “I will look at it later, thank you. Just set it there on the table.”

  Father Wibert hung about for a few moments, clearly hoping that the Lord Chancellor would change his mind and open the princess dowager’s letter—like so many of the clergy, Pasevalles had found, Wibert lived for gossip—but eventually he gave up and went out. Pasevalles thought that with his bony elbows and knees, his secretary looked more like a string-puppet than a man of God.

  And that is my curse, he thought to himself. To see what truly is instead of what others would prefer me to see. It was a curse, beyond doubt, but he sometimes thought it was also a glory, to be less blind than others, who hid themselves from that which they did not want to know.

  He picked up the letter from the princess with a certain caution, as if the folded paper itself might have a blade-sharp edge. That was what he thought of sometimes when he saw the princess—a knife, something that could lie unused and unnoticed for a long time, and then suddenly emerge to change everything in a dreadful moment. He wondered if it were actually true of Prince John Josua’s widow or if, for once, he was fooling himself. In any case, he feared the complications she could bring, but he was also not blind to the
advantages her friendship could gain him. He sniffed the letter. Scented, as Wibert had noted—rosewater and balsam, the profane and the sacred mixed, earth and spirit. A message? Or just her ordinary scent? Pasevalles studied the seal, and when he was certain it was unbroken, he opened and unfolded the letter.

  My dearest Lord,

  I know that the absence of our beloved king and queen kept you most busy in recent months. In truth, we all are in debt to you for your hard, selfless work. I am certain that some day your value to this kingdom will be noticed and you will be rewarded as you deserve.

  Subtle as a slaughterer’s hammer, he thought. Come now, my lady, you can do better.

  Still, I must chide you just a little, dear Pasevalles. It was most kind of you to send that sweet Brother Etan to examine poor John Josua’s books, but I must be honest and say that I had hoped you would do the job yourself, not simply because I trust your eye and your discretion, but because I had selfishly hoped to spend some time in your company.

  “Dear Pasevalles,” too. The princess was not bothering to work up to her point slowly. He wondered why she was so determined to make him an ally. Had something happened on the royal trip north, something that Pasevalles himself had not heard, that caused her to worry about her position at court? It was hard to imagine anything that could change her situation. She was the widow of the prince and mother of the heir-apparent. Surely nothing could undo either of those two facts.

  To that end, perhaps you and I could put aside an evening after supper when you might lay aside the heavy cares of your high station and come join me for a glass of Comis wine. My ladies will be present, so you need not fear for your reputation or mine.

  He could not help smiling at that. She was a sly woman, the princess. Quite different from her bluff, practical father.

  There is much I would like to discuss with you, most certainly including the library that will bear my husband’s name and the books of his still in my possession. Perhaps we could meet after the church service St. Dinan’s day. Say you will come.