The gates of Halvarstone rose from the snow like the ribs of some long-dead leviathan, each bar of black ice thick as a man's torso and twice as tall. They had not opened in seven years, the soldiers whispered behind him, and the frost that sealed them had grown into something closer to stone than water. Aldric Vane sat his horse at the head of the small column and watched the two guards on the parapet above bend to peer down at the banner his outrider carried. The banner showed three ravens on a field of pale grey, the device of Chancellor Olwyn's delegation. A wind came off the mountains to the north, carrying the taste of iron and pine resin, and Aldric's mare shifted beneath him, uneasy at the smell.
"Hold," he said to the rider beside him. The word came out rough, half-swallowed, the way words had been coming out of him since he crossed the Greymarch and saw the first village of empty hearths. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Hold here. Let them see us before we see them."
Maren Solene reined in at his flank, her breath a pale plume. She wore her captain's coat still, though the company it had belonged to was three years ash and rumor by now, and the brass buttons caught what little light bled through the overcast. Her eyes were moving, cataloguing the wall, the angle of the towers, the snow that lay undisturbed across the causeway. Reading the place the way Aldric had seen good officers read ground before a fight.
"They're not answering," she said. Her voice was clipped and quick, the vowels short, the consonants bitten off. "Either they've forgotten how, or they don't want us knowing what kind of folk they are."
Behind them, Eira Solene sat straighter in her saddle than either of them, her hands steady on the reins despite the cold that had already reddened her knuckles. She was the youngest of the delegation by a full decade, a scribe's daughter who should have been counting ledgers in some sheltered counting house, but her family had burned with the rest, and now she rode north on a sealed letter and a promise. Her breath came slow, deliberate, each exhale measured, as if she were rationing warmth the way she rationed words.
"They've answered," Eira said softly. "Look at the gate."
Aldric looked.
The black ice of the gate had begun, very slowly, to move. The sound it made was not the groan of metal nor the crack of shattering glass but something between, a low singing tone, as though the cold itself had learned to speak. Frost peeled away in long curling ribbons. A seam of darker cold opened at the center, and through that seam a breath of the city beyond came rolling out, so cold it burned the soft tissues of Aldric's nostrils and made his eyes water before the tears had time to freeze.
That breath carried no sound. That was the first thing Aldric noticed, and the thing that would not leave him for the rest of that long day. Halvarstone had been, by every account he had read or heard, a city of bells. Its cathedral rang the hours across the frozen harbor. Its guildhouses called the craftsmen to work with hammers on bronze. Its harbor chains clattered when the tide moved beneath the ice, and its watchtowers answered each other across the ridgeline with voices raised against the wind. Now there was nothing. The breath of the city came out silent as the breath of a corpse.
The gates parted, and through the gap a single figure emerged on foot, wearing a long coat of undyed wool and a face that had been a long time without smiling. He bowed, a shallow bow that did not reach his eyes, and spoke.
"Delegation of Chancellor Olwyn. You are expected. The King awaits in the Hall of Speaking Stones, though I am to tell you that the Hall has been, of late, less inclined to speak."
He said this without any change of expression, and Aldric found he could not tell whether it was a joke, a warning, or a piece of information delivered with the same flatness as the weather.
Maren leaned toward Aldric, her voice pitched for his ear alone. "Did he say the Hall speaks, or that it doesn't?"
"Both," Aldric said. He dismounted, and the crunch of his boots on the packed snow was the loudest sound he had heard since they topped the last ridge. "That was the point."
He handed his reins to the outrider and walked forward alone. The gates of black ice towered above him, and as he passed beneath them he felt their cold settle across his shoulders like a second cloak. Eira and Maren fell in at his heels without being told. Maren walked with the loose-hipped ease of someone who had once crossed a battlefield without raising her pulse. Eira walked with the careful, contained grace of a woman who had learned early that the world punished anything that looked like softness.
The city beyond the gates was white and grey and blue. White snow on the cobbles, packed and trampled by feet that had not walked there in years. Grey walls of granite and basalt, sweating a thin rime of meltwater in the lee of the sun that would never reach them. Blue shadows in the alleys and the deeper doorways, shadows that looked as though they had been there longer than the buildings that cast them. Aldric had seen cities before, and he had seen dead cities, and he had seen cities that lived but did not know it. This was none of those. This was a city that had been switched off, like a lamp whose wick had been trimmed too close. The shapes of life were still there. A broom leaned against a wall outside a baker's door. A child's wooden horse sat on a windowsill, frost gathering in its mane. A market stall held a row of empty baskets, the weave stiff with ice. But the people were gone, and with them the small sounds that would have told Aldric they had ever been here at all.
No voices in the alleys. No footsteps but their own. No dogs barking, no children crying, no merchants calling out the day's prices. The harbor chains did not clatter. The cathedral bells did not ring. Somewhere far off, a shutter tapped against a wall in a wind that had found its way down a chimney, and that was all.
"Where are they?" Eira murmured. Her voice had a slight catch in it, a fracture in the careful silver of her diction, and she did not try to hide it. "The courier's brief said a hundred thousand souls."
"The brief is nine months old," Aldric said.
"Nine months does this." Maren gestured without breaking stride. "Nine months does not silence a cathedral."
They followed the man in the undyed coat through a square that might once have been the heart of the merchant quarter. A fountain stood at its center, the bronze figure atop it so thickly crusted with frost that the original shape was lost. Icicles hung from the figure's outstretched hand like frozen tears, and from somewhere beneath the ice came the faint suggestion of water still running, somewhere, down in the dark where no one could hear it. The cobbles underfoot glittered, each one rimmed with a thin meniscus of clear ice that caught what little light there was and threw it back in pale splinters. Aldric's breath did not plume in this square. It was too cold for breath to plume. The moisture of it crystallized in the air in front of his lips and fell as a fine dust onto his collar.
"The curse," Eira said, very low, as if to say it louder would be to invite it closer. "The courier's brief called it the Greymarch. Said it passed over the northern provinces like a shadow, and where it passed, the people forgot how to speak."
"Orchards," Maren said, cutting across her. "Aye. I read the same brief. Forgot how to speak, forgot how to sow, forgot how to come in out of the cold. Forgot how to do anything but stand in the road and wait for the snow to bury them."
"You make it sound ordinary."
"I make it sound like what it is," Maren said. Her eyes were still moving. "A thing that happens to bodies, not to stories. The stories come after, when there's someone left to tell them."
The man in the undyed coat turned down a side street so narrow that Aldric had to walk sideways to avoid brushing the walls, and the rime that came off those walls transferred itself to the wool of his cloak and the leather of his gloves. He flexed his fingers inside the gloves and felt the cold reach through the lining and settle into the small bones of his hand, and he thought, for no reason he could name, of his father's study at Vane Hold, and the fire that had always burned there even in summer.
They came out at last onto a broader avenue, and at the end of that avenue stood a building of such scale that Aldric stopped and did not move for the space of three breaths. It was the cathedral, though no cathedral he had ever seen had been built like this. Its walls were of a stone so dark it was nearly black, and the stone was not dressed but left rough, as though the masons had wanted the building to look half-dug out of the mountain that rose behind it. Its windows were not glazed. They were filled instead with sheets of ice so thick and so clear that the light passed through them and lay on the floor of the nave in long pale rectangles, the color of bone. Above the doors a single word had been carved into the lintel, and though Aldric could not read the language, he recognized the shape of it, a shape he had seen once in a manuscript that Chancellor Olwyn had shown him and immediately taken back.
"SPEAKING," Eira read aloud, though he had not asked her to. "It says Speaking, in the old stone-script. The cathedral is the Hall. This is where the King receives."
The man in the undyed coat turned and bowed again, and this time the bow went a little deeper, as though he had only just remembered that he was in the presence of strangers who might yet be offended.
"The King awaits within," he said. "He has not, of late, been able to leave."
Aldric looked at the doors, which were closed. He looked at the square, which was empty. He looked at Maren, who was looking at the windows, and at Eira, who was looking at the ground, and at his own hands, which were cold, and at the sky, which was the color of an old bruise and showed no sign of changing.
He thought of the sealed letter in the inner pocket of his coat, the one that could unmake a throne if it were opened and read in the wrong room by the wrong ears. He thought of his brother, who had taken the inheritance Aldric had refused, and who had written the letter of betrayal that had driven him north in the first place. He thought of the woman he had loved once, who had died in a fire that may or may not have been an accident, and whose name he had not spoken aloud in three years.
He thought of all of these things, and none of them were enough to make him move.
"Well," Maren said, and her voice was very dry, "we didn't ride three months to stand outside."
She took a step forward, and the sound of her boot on the ice rang out across the empty square and did not come back. The cathedral did not answer. The city did not answer. Somewhere behind the doors, in the Hall of Speaking Stones, something that was not a voice waited for them to enter, and Aldric Vane straightened his shoulders, and they went in.
The doors opened inward on hinges that did not creak, which was the first wrong thing. Every door Aldric had ever known creaked. The hinges of farm gates, of tavern doors, of the heavy oak gates of his father's hall had all groaned in some register of complaint at being moved. These hinges made no sound at all, and the silence of them felt like a held breath.
The Hall of Speaking Stones was not a room he had expected. He had expected a throne room, with banners and tapestries and the usual apparatus of power displayed for the awe of supplicants. Instead the space opened before them like the nave of a cathedral, but longer, narrower, and lit by something that was not entirely fire. Sconces burned along the walls at intervals of perhaps thirty paces, but the light they cast was pale and bluish, and it did not behave as firelight should. It fell upon the floor without throwing shadows upward, and it caught the stones of the walls in such a way that Aldric could not tell, at first glance, whether the stones were carved or merely worn.
They were carved. He realized it as his eyes adjusted. Every stone of the long hall had been incised with marks that might have been letters or might have been the tracks of small animals or might have been nothing at all. The marks ran in horizontal lines along the walls at four heights: floor, waist, shoulder, ceiling. At the far end of the hall, where a throne of some grey mineral sat upon a dais of three shallow steps, the marks thickened and overlapped until the stone looked like the surface of a frozen river after a long thaw.
There was no one on the throne.
Eira Solene stood at the foot of the dais, her hands folded before her, her face arranged into an expression of such careful neutrality that Aldric understood at once she was furious about something. She wore a gown of deep blue wool, plainly cut, without embroidery or ornament except a single pin at her throat in the shape of a sprig of rowan. Her hair was bound back in a net of dark thread. She looked, Aldric thought, like a woman who had dressed for a funeral she was not yet attending.
Maren, beside him, made a small sound in the back of her throat that might have been acknowledgment or might have been the beginning of a curse. Eira's eyes flicked to her sister, held for a heartbeat, then returned to Aldric. The silence between the two women was the silence of sisters who had agreed to disagree in public.
"You may approach," Eira said. Her voice carried in the hall without effort, as if the stones themselves were lending it weight. "But not all of you. The terms I have been given to offer are for the Vane heir alone. If there are others with him, they may wait at the threshold until he has heard me."
"That's not how we rode," Maren said, very quietly.
"It is how I receive." Eira did not look at her sister again. "You may take it up with the Chancellor later, Captain. For now, the Vane heir and I will speak as the King cannot."
Aldric felt Maren's shoulder against his own, a pressure that meant he could refuse, that she would back whatever he chose. He thought of the letter in his coat. He thought of three months on the road, of the men they had buried in the high pass, of the woman they had left in a village two weeks south of here, alive but no longer trusting him.
"Let them stand where they can see us," Aldric said. His voice came out rougher than he intended, the cold of the hall settling in his throat. "If we are to speak of treaties, I would have witnesses."
Something moved at the corner of Eira's mouth. It might have been the beginning of a smile. It might have been a flinch.
"As you wish," she said. "Witnesses at the threshold, then. The Vane heir before me. There is a step at the third paving stone from the dais. You will find it when you reach it."
He walked forward. The stones beneath his boots were uneven, slightly warmer than the air, and he understood after six paces why the hall was named as it was. The marks on the walls were not silent. They were a low hum, just at the edge of hearing, a vibration that came up through the soles of his feet and settled in his teeth. Speaking stones. He had heard of such things in the old songs but had never believed in them. He believed in them now.
He counted the paving stones. The third one from the dais was slightly raised, perhaps the height of a finger's breadth, but his boot found it precisely. He stopped.
Eira had not moved. She stood with her hands still folded, and her eyes on his were the pale grey of river ice in late spring, when the surface has begun to melt but not yet given way.
"You are the Vane heir," she said. It was not a question. "You carry the seal of your father's house, though you have renounced the house. You carry a letter that was not written by you. You have ridden three months with my sister and my sister's sword, and you have come to this hall to ask the King for a treaty that the King, in his present state, cannot grant or refuse. I am told that you believe this letter will change the terms."
Aldric said nothing. There was nothing to say that she had not already said.
"Then we understand one another," Eira said. "And because we understand one another, I will speak plainly. You have not yet earned the right to be named in this hall. Your house burned ours. Your brother wrote the letter of betrayal that ruined my family. Your presence here is an insult to the stones under your feet, and the only reason you stand upright is that the King, in his mercy, has chosen to receive you at all."
She paused. The hum of the stones seemed to deepen, though that may have been his imagination or the cold.
"You will kneel," she said. "At the threshold of this hall, before the dais, you will kneel and ask the King's pardon for the offense of your name. Only then will I speak the terms the Chancellor has set. Until you kneel, you are no one in this room, and I will not use the name your mother gave you, because to use it would be to pretend you are a person, and you are not yet a person in this hall. You are a debt. Kneel, and I will call you by the name you have chosen. Refuse, and I will call you the Vane heir until the sun falls out of the sky."
The hall was very quiet. Even the hum had faded, or his hearing had narrowed to the sound of his own breath and hers. Behind him, at the threshold, Maren had gone still in the way that meant she was calculating whether she could cross the distance between them in three seconds and put herself between Eira and whatever came next. He did not turn to look at her. He did not turn to look at Eira either. He looked at the dais, and at the empty throne above it, and at the rowan pin at Eira's throat, and at the marks on the stones that ran in lines like the bars of a cage or like the rules of a game he had not been taught.
He thought of the letter.
He thought of kneeling.
The cold in the hall had found the joints of his knees.
"I will not kneel," he said.
The words came out before he had fully decided them, but once they were out he found he meant them. He was aware, as he said them, of the cost. He was aware of Maren's sharp intake of breath behind him, and of Eira's hands, which had not unfolded but whose knuckles had gone white against the blue wool of her gown.
"Then we are at an end before we have begun," Eira said, and her voice did not crack, though something in it had tightened, like a rope under strain. "The Vane heir may withdraw from the hall. The Vane heir may take his letter and his sister's sword and ride the three months home again. The King will grieve, I am sure, that the Vane heir found it in him to come so far and not in him to kneel."
"You misunderstand," Aldric said. "I will not kneel because I have not yet earned the right to ask pardon. You have named the offenses of my house. They are true. My brother wrote a letter that burned your holdings. I did not stop him. I did not know he had written it until the smoke was in my own throat. I am here because the letter I carry is the same letter, and I am here to put it into the King's hand and let him decide what is to be done with it. If I kneel now, before he has read it, the kneeling is for you, and I will not kneel for you."
He stopped. The hall listened. The stones, if they had been listening before, were listening now in a different way, and the hum beneath his boots had shifted to a frequency that made his sternum ache.
Eira's mouth thinned. "Then for whom would you kneel?"
"For the King," Aldric said. "If the King asks it. Not for the Chancellor's terms, and not for the sister of the woman whose name I have not spoken in three years. The King may ask what he likes of me when I have put the letter in his hand. Until then I am a man carrying a sealed letter, and I will stand."
Something passed across Eira's face that he could not read. It might have been anger. It might have been recognition. It might have been grief, for a sister whose name Aldric had not spoken, and whose death he had not caused and could not have prevented, and which sat between them now like a third presence in the hall.
"The King cannot ask," Eira said, more quietly. "That is the mercy of which I spoke. The King cannot ask anything of anyone, and has not been able to for three months. That is why I receive in his place. That is why the Chancellor has set terms. That is why you kneel, the Vane heir, or you do not leave this hall with a treaty in your hand."
"Then I do not leave with a treaty," Aldric said. "I leave with the letter still in my coat, and the King still unasked, and the terms still unset, and the three months not entirely wasted because at least we will all know where we stand."
Maren, at the threshold, laughed. It was a short, hard sound, and Eira's head turned toward it for the first time since the interview had begun.
"Captain," Eira said.
"He has you there, sister," Maren said. "He has had you since he walked in. You set the terms for a man who would kneel. He is not that man. You may as well have set them for the weather."
Eira's hands unfolded at last. They fell to her sides, and her fingers curled once, then straightened.
"Then we will see what the Chancellor makes of it," she said, and her voice had lost none of its cold but had gained something else, a thin edge of something that was not quite admiration and not quite fear. "The Vane heir will wait in the anteroom to the left of the dais. The letter will remain sealed until the King has been consulted. If the King cannot be consulted, the Chancellor will decide, and the Chancellor is a colder woman than I am."
She turned and walked toward a low arch at the side of the dais, her boots making no more sound on the stones than the hinges of the doors had made, and the rowan pin at her throat caught the bluish light and held it for a moment before she passed through the arch and was gone.
Aldric stood where he was. The hum of the stones had not stopped. It had settled into a register he could feel in his back teeth, and he understood, with the part of his mind that was still capable of understanding, that the hall had heard everything, and that the stones would remember.
Maren came to stand beside him. She did not touch him. She looked at the empty arch where her sister had disappeared, and then at him, and the corner of her mouth twitched in a way that might, in another woman, have been tenderness.
"Well," she said. "That could have gone worse."
have known worse," Aldric said, and was not certain it was true until he had said it, and then it was true enough, the way a wound becomes true after you have stopped pressing on it.
Maren huffed a breath that was almost a laugh. The sound caught in the hall and faded slowly, swallowed by the hum of the stones. She turned away from the arch where Eira had vanished, and her gaze lifted, as Aldric's own was lifting, toward the high throne that stood at the far end of the long hall, beneath the tall narrow windows where the bluish light of the river sky fell in pale slabs across the floor.
"The King," Maren said quietly, and the word was not a title. It was a warning.
Aldric had not, until that moment, understood that the throne was occupied. He had looked at it as one looks at a fixture, a piece of the architecture, the way you look at a fireplace in a room you have entered for other reasons. But there was a man in it. There was a man who had been sitting in it, Aldric suspected, for longer than the throne had been built to hold anyone, and the throne had not been built for comfort.
King Harald Solene sat very still. He sat the way a man sits when he is afraid that if he moves, something inside him will come loose. His hands lay along the arms of the throne, the long fingers curled loosely over the carved stone, and the skin of those hands was the color of tallow, with a faint blue undertone that Aldric had seen only once before, in a camp follower along the northern passes who had been bitten by something she would not name. The veins stood out like cords beneath the skin of his wrists, and where they met the backs of his hands there were marks, fine lines of a darker hue that branched like rivers on a map or like frost on a window, and they were moving. Aldric watched, and the marks moved, a slow capillary crawl, and he understood with a cold certainty that they were not marks at all but something alive.
The King's face was worse. The cheekbones stood out so sharply that the skin seemed to have been laid over the bone with a trowel, and along those bones the same fine lines traced themselves, climbing from the jaw toward the temples, disappearing beneath the thinning hair at the sides. His eyes were open. They were the color of slate and they were not focused on anything in the room. They were focused, Aldric thought, on a point somewhere beyond the walls, beyond the roof, beyond anything that could be reached by asking. The King's lips were cracked. The breath that moved in and out of him was audible, a thin whistle, and it came at intervals that were not quite regular, as if the body had to remind itself to keep going.
"How long," Aldric said. He did not look at Maren. He could not look away from the throne.
"Since the autumn," Maren said. "It was a little thing then. A tremor in the hand. A night sweat. The court physicians spoke of humors, of the winter, of overwork. My father had been King for thirty-one years. They said he was tired."
She did not say it cruelly. She said it the way she might have said the weather had been poor, and the flatness of her voice was worse than anger would have been.
Aldric took a step forward. The hum of the stones shifted, a slight rise in pitch, and he understood that the hall was aware of him, the way a dog is aware of a stranger in the room. He stopped. He did not feel that the throne was a place he had any right to approach unbidden. He stood where he was, at the foot of the long dais, and he looked up at the man who had been, he now saw, the reason for everything.
The sealed letter sat against his ribs like a coal.
He had carried it for seven months. He had carried it through the mud of the lowland roads and across the frozen shoulders of the northern passes and into the fetid warmth of the river towns where men asked no questions because questions cost money. He had carried it past the burned farmsteads of the Solene holdings, where the ash was still so recent that it came up on his boots and stayed there for days. He had carried it past the place where his own brother's seal had been affixed to a document that had named Aldric a traitor and stripped him of the only name he had ever rightly possessed. He had carried it past his own doubts, which were many and well-rehearsed. He had carried it because the woman who had pressed it into his hands in a stable yard in the rain had said only one thing to him, and that thing had been true.
You will know when it is time.
He had not known. He had walked into this hall believing that time was a matter of politics, of careful approach, of the right word spoken to the right ear. He had not understood that time, in the Solene court, was something being eaten.
The King lifted one hand. The motion was slow, effortful, and the marks on the skin rippled with it like the surface of a pond when a stone is dropped. He did not speak. His mouth opened, and the breath that came out of it was thin and carried a smell that Aldric recognized with a lurch in his stomach, the sweetish, faintly rotten scent of a body consuming itself.
"Father," Maren said, and the word broke something in her voice that she had been keeping very carefully whole. She moved up the steps of the dais. Her boots rang on the stone. She knelt beside the throne, and she took one of those marked hands in both of hers, and she held it as if she could warm it back into something that belonged to a living man.
Aldric watched the marks on the King's hand. Where Maren's fingers touched the skin, the lines recoiled. They drew back from her warmth like roots from frost, and then, slowly, they crept forward again, tasting the new ground.
Maren did not see it. Or she saw it and had decided not to.
Aldric saw it, and he understood, finally, what the sealed letter was. It was not a claim. It was not a piece of leverage. It was a key to a door that was being bricked up around a man who was still alive inside it, and the bricklayer was something that had no name in any of the languages he spoke, and it was patient, and it was thorough, and it had been at its work for a season and a half.
The curse was not a punishment. It was a digestion.
He thought of his brother, who had signed the document that had unmade him. He thought of the woman in the stable yard. He thought of Eira Solene, who had walked through the arch with the rowan pin at her throat, and he understood, with the part of his mind that was still capable of understanding, that she had known. That Eira had known what the King looked like, and had sent him in anyway, because the letter was the only lever left, and a lever is useless unless there is something left to pry.
He thought of Maren kneeling with her father's hand in hers, and he thought of the words he had spoken in the long hall, that he was a man who would not kneel. That was still true. But it was also true, he saw now, that there were other postures a man could take, and one of them was to stand very still at the foot of a throne and watch a king be eaten, and not look away.
The King turned his head. The movement was small, a tilt of the chin, and his eyes, which had been fixed on something beyond the walls, drifted down and found Aldric. They held there. The slate of them was filmed, but somewhere behind the film there was a man still, and the man looked at Aldric with an expression that Aldric could not at first read, and then could, and then wished he could not.
It was recognition.
Not of Aldric's face. Of the letter.
The King's lips moved. The sound that came out was not a word. It was the shape of a word, formed and released into the thin whistling breath, and the hall heard it, and the stones recorded it in their long patient hum, and Aldric heard it too, though he could not have repeated it to another living soul.
Maren looked up at Aldric. Her face was set in the way that faces are set when the person wearing them has decided that feeling is a luxury that will be reclaimed later, in private, at a cost she has already agreed to pay.
"You see it now," she said. It was not a question.
"I see it," Aldric said.
"Then you know why the Chancellor sent for you. And you know why my sister would not let you kneel. And you know why my father is still sitting in that chair instead of lying in a bed where the physicians could pretend to do something useful."
She stood. She did not release her father's hand, and the marks continued their slow crawl along the skin, patient and thorough, and the King continued to breathe, and the hall continued to hum, and the bluish light from the high windows fell across all of them without favor.
"What does the letter say," Maren said. "Aldric. I am asking you as a daughter. Not as a captain. Not as a Solene. What is in the letter my father will not let be opened and my sister will not let be burned and the Chancellor will not let be ignored."
Aldric looked at her. He looked at the King. He looked at the arch through which Eira had gone, and at the sealed square of vellum that lay against his ribs, and he understood that the time the woman in the stable yard had spoken of had not been a matter of season or of road. It had been a matter of how much of a man could be eaten before what remained was no longer a man at all.
He put his hand inside his coat. He felt the wax of the seal, cracked but unbroken. He felt the weight of it, which was not the weight of paper.
"It says," he said, and his voice came out low and unhurried, and rationed, as if he had been saving the words for exactly this, "that the throne of the Solene line was never meant to be held by one house alone. It says that there is a second claim, older and colder, and that the men who burned your holdings knew of it, and that the man who signed my brother's name knew of it, and that the thing eating your father is not a curse at all but a contract, and that someone, somewhere, has been signing it in his name for thirty years."
Maren's hand tightened on the King's. The marks on the King's skin paused in their crawl, as if they, too, were listening.
"Whose name," Maren said.
Aldric drew the letter out. He held it between two fingers, the way a man holds a coal he has decided to carry all the way to the fire.
"That," he said, "is what we are going to find out."