The first thing Rowan Vael saw when he pushed through the shattered doors of the Blackthorn throne room was the throne itself. It sat at the far end of the long hall, untouched, draped in moth-eaten velvet the color of old wine. Everything else in the room lay broken, but the throne remained pristine, as if the destruction had flowed around it like water around a stone. He had been taught as a boy that the throne was carved from the heartwood of the first blackthorn tree, and that every king who sat upon it left a piece of himself behind in the grain. Looking at it now, Rowan thought it looked less like a seat of power and more like a mouth waiting to be fed.
The smell reached him before his eyes could adjust to the gloom. Copper and char. He had smelled such things before, on the Salt Bridge, at the siege of Dunmere, in the muddy fields beyond Thornwood where the last true war had ended in fire. This was different. Older. The iron-and-ember tang of a death that had been waiting here for some time, undisturbed, allowed to ripen in the cold air of a hall that had not been opened in decades.
His boots crunched on broken glass as he stepped inside. Ravens had nested in the rafters once; their droppings streaked the cracked mosaic floor in pale rivers. His hand rested on the hilt of the longknife at his hip, not because he expected to draw it, but because the habit had been carved into his spine since he was old enough to hold a blade. He moved forward, eyes sweeping left, right, up to the galleries where pale statues stood with their faces hacked away. Each step raised small clouds of dust that caught the thin grey light filtering through arrow-slit windows.
The great hall had been built to intimidate. Forty feet of vaulted ceiling, stone pillars carved to look like blackthorn trunks in winter, the bark rendered in black marble veined with silver. Now the pillars were scarred with old claw marks. Some deep, some shallow, some running in sets of four that could have only been made by something with too many limbs. A few of the carved branches had been snapped clean off, and the broken stumps jutted from the stone like snapped bones.
Rowan stopped when he reached the foot of the dais.
The body lay slumped at the base of the empty throne, half-propped against the shattered remains of a sword. The blade had been broken near the hilt, and the broken half lay some feet away, black with old blood. Whoever the dead man had been, he had fought. His hands were still curled around the broken hilt, knuckles white even in death. His armor, once fine, was split across the chest in four long parallel gouges, the edges of the steel peeled back like the skin of a fruit. Through the gaps in the plate, the wound beneath was visible: a throat torn open from ear to ear, the flesh ragged, the cartilage of the windpipe jutting white against the dark of the wound.
Rowan knelt. His knees pressed into the cold mosaic, and he felt the chill travel up through his thighs, his hips, the small of his back, until it settled somewhere behind his eyes.
He knew the face. Though it had been a long time since he had seen it, though the last time had been from a distance and through a press of bodies at a funeral that the court had been forbidden to attend, he knew the line of that jaw, the shape of the brow. The narrow chin. The scar across the left temple that had always made the old man's hair grow in white there.
"Grandfather," Rowan said. The word tasted like ash.
His grandfather did not answer. Of course he did not answer. The dead are famously poor conversationalists, and the old captain had always believed that humor was a kind of armor.
Rowan reached out and pressed two fingers to the cold throat, just above the ruin of the wound. There was nothing there. No pulse, no hum of lingering life. The skin was waxy, the color of tallow, and where his fingers touched, the flesh dimpled but did not yield. Rigor had come and gone. Days, then. Perhaps a week.
The great hall was silent except for the faint, distant sound of wind moving through the broken keep above. Somewhere far overhead, a loose shutter banged against stone in a slow, arrhythmic rhythm. It sounded, Rowan thought distantly, like a heartbeat that had forgotten how to keep time.
He sat back on his heels. He did not weep. He had been raised by a father who believed that grief was a private indulgence, like drink or gambling, to be tolerated only behind closed doors and never spoken of in company. His father's father had clearly disagreed. The old man had come here, to this ruin the family had refused to touch for three generations, and he had died on the floor with a broken sword in his hands.
Rowan forced himself to look at the wound again. The four parallel gouges in the armor. The matching pattern in the throat. His mind, trained by long habit to catalogue and assess, began its work without his permission. Four claws. Deep, but not the tearing rending of a great beast. The spacing was narrow. Roughly the width of a human hand, perhaps a little broader. The pattern was wrong, though. The two outer gouges were deeper than the inner pair. Whatever had done this had favored its outer claws, the way a man favors the outer fingers of a gripping hand.
He did not recognize the shape. He had seen bear kills, wolf kills, the savage work of forest cats and the rarer savagery of things out of the deep blackthorn woods. This was none of those.
His gaze drifted, against his will, to the throne. It watched him from its dais. He thought again of the stories his grandfather used to tell, late at night, when Rowan was supposed to be asleep in the next room. Stories about the thing that had sat on that throne when the world was younger and crueler, and that had been bound beneath it in chains of black iron. The stories his father had forbidden. The stories his father had refused to confirm or deny.
A sound, soft and tentative, made his hand tighten on his knife hilt.
He turned his head.
In the doorway through which he had entered, framed against the pale grey of the outer courtyard, stood a woman. She was slight, wrapped in a patched traveling cloak the color of moss, and she carried a leather satchel at her hip and a bundle of dried herbs slung across her back. Her hair was dark, cut short and practical, and her face was smudged with the road. She looked, Rowan thought, like a sparrow that had wandered into a hawk's nest.
"You must be the grandson," she said. Her voice was warm, with the clipped consonants of the outer provinces and a faint rasp, as though she had been walking in dry air for days.
Rowan did not rise from his kneel. "And you must be lost."
"I am never lost," she said, and stepped inside. Her boots made the same crunching sound on the broken glass that his had made. "Maren. I was sent for." She stopped a few paces from him, her eyes moving past him to the body slumped against the dais. Her expression did not change much, but something shifted behind it. A softening. A recognition. "He is past my help."
"Yes," Rowan said.
She came forward anyway, lowering herself to a crouch at his side. She set down her satchel, opened it, and drew out a pair of thin leather gloves. She pulled them on with practiced fingers, then reached past Rowan and pressed her own fingers to the old man's throat, just above the wound, just where he had pressed his own. The gesture was so like his own that for an absurd moment he felt as though he were watching himself from outside.
Maren was quiet for a long time. Her fingers moved, gentle, along the edge of the ruin in the throat. She did not touch the wound itself, only the margins, reading the shape of it with the pads of her fingers. Then she drew back and looked up at Rowan.
"He is your grandfather."
It was not a question. Rowan nodded once.
"My condolences," Maren said. The words were simple, plain, unadorned by court ceremony. They sounded, to Rowan's ears, more genuine than any he had heard spoken in the throne room at Thornwood in the whole of his life. "Did you find him like this?"
"I did."
"And the killer?"
Rowan's jaw tightened. "I do not know. Yet."
Maren looked at the four gouges in the armor. She looked at the matching pattern in the throat. Her eyes narrowed, and Rowan saw something move behind them. Not fear, exactly. More the look of a woman matching a memory against a thing seen.
"These claw marks," she said. "The spacing is wrong for any beast I know."
Rowan looked at her. He studied her face. The provincial clothes. The satchel of herbs. The gloves she had put on before touching the dead. He catalogued her the way he had been trained to catalogue all strangers: posture, hands, the way she held her weight, the way her eyes kept moving even when she spoke. She was not a soldier. She was not a courtier. She was something else.
"You were sent for," Rowan said. "By whom?"
Maren tilted her head. "By the woman at the gate. The one in the black cloak. She said the captain would come, and that he would need a healer, and that I was to wait until he arrived." A pause. "She did not say his name. She did not say hers. She paid me in silver, and told me to come."
Rowan thought of Ysolde Verne. He had seen her only once, at a distance, at a function where his father had received the envoys from the southern courts. A tall woman in black, with a face that had seemed to Rowan then like a closed door. She had not spoken to him. She had looked at him once, across the hall, and something in her gaze had made the back of his neck prickle. That had been years ago.
"What is your name?" he asked, though she had given it.
"Maren," she said again. "Healer of no fixed abode. Expelled from the guild at Mirewood for the crime of having a conscience." She raised an eyebrow at him. "You may have heard of me. I am infamous in three villages and a small town."
"I have not heard of you," Rowan said. It was the truth.
"Then you are better informed than most," Maren said. "Will you let me look at the wound more closely? I will not touch the flesh. I will only look. There are things I might read in the marks that you cannot, that any sword-trained man cannot. If you wish."
Rowan studied her a moment longer. Then he stepped aside. "Look."
She knelt again at the body's side. Her fingers hovered over the torn throat, not touching. Her lips moved faintly, counting something to herself. Her head tilted, this way and that, the way a bird tilts its head when it is listening for a worm beneath the soil.
After a long moment she sat back on her heels.
"Well?" Rowan said.
Maren drew off her gloves. "The outer claws are deeper than the inner ones," she said. "You saw that too."
"I did."
"It favors its outer claws. Like a man favoring the outer fingers of a hand." She looked at him steadily. "I have heard of one creature in the old tales that does this. The blackthorn hart. The thing the first Vael king bound beneath his throne with chains of black iron."
Rowan's hand, resting on his knife hilt, went very still.
"My grandfather used to tell me that story," Rowan said, after a pause.
"Yes," Maren said. "So did mine."
For a long moment the two of them crouched there, on the cold mosaic floor of a throne room that had not seen living visitors in three generations, beside the body of a man who had died fighting something he had perhaps once sworn to guard.
Above them, the loose shutter banged once more against stone, and somewhere in the broken keep, a raven gave a single, throaty call.
From the deeper shadows of the ruined hall, a voice answered.
"The steward Maren speaks true."
The figure that stepped from behind the broken pillar was older, and slower, and wore the dust of three days' riding on the hem of his coat. He was small and thin, with a long, sallow face and ink-stained fingers, and he moved with the careful gait of a man who had not slept in a bed for some weeks.
"I am Maren's senior," the steward said, and bowed low to Rowan. "By the old compact, the steward of the Blackthorn Court is bound to the heir-presumptive, and to the heir-presumptive's household. I am that steward. I have ridden from the summer house at Highmere, and from there I rode to the old keep at Whitestone, and from there I crossed the Ashran in the dark, and at last I have come here. I have a great deal to tell you, my lord, and most of it will not please you."
Rowan rose. He did not offer his hand.
"Then tell it."
The steward Maren looked once at the younger Maren. Something passed between them, old and complicated, and then the steward turned back to Rowan.
"The Blackthorn Crown has been in the Hall of the First Stone since the death of your great-grandfather. It has been sealed there, in the iron chest, with the wards that the first Vael king laid upon it. It has not been opened. It has not been worn. Every heir of your line has refused it, for reasons that were good reasons, and have been written down, and have been passed from steward to heir. Until you."
He let that hang in the cold air for a moment.
"But the wards on the chest are failing. I have watched them for three generations. They have been fading, the way a candle's wax shrinks as it burns. The last of the binding is gone, my lord. The crown is awake now, in the way that such things are awake. And the thing that was bound beneath your throne has felt it. The shadowmancer in the wood felt it too. He came to claim it, and he failed, but he was not the first to come, and he will not be the last."
"The thing that was bound beneath my throne," Rowan said, very quietly.
"Yes."
"With chains of black iron."
"Yes."
"And the shadowmancer in the wood," Rowan said. "Where did he come from?"
"I do not know, my lord. But I know who sent him."
Rowan's face did not change. He waited.
"Your father."
The word fell into the silence and lay there.
The steward Maren had been speaking in the dry, careful tone of a man who has rehearsed a thing many times. Now he stopped, and took a slow breath through his nose, and his shoulders settled, the way a man's shoulders settle when he has come to the worst part of what he has to say and means to say it without flinching.
"Your father, King Aldric Vael, in the twenty-third year of his reign, commissioned the murder of his brother, the former king, by way of a shadowmancer hired from the deep wood. The price was paid in gold, and in a vial of the king's own blood, which the shadowmancer required for the binding of the spell. The former king died in his study. There were no witnesses, except me. I was a page, then. I was in the next room, behind the tapestry. I saw the shadowmancer come out."
The steward Maren raised his ink-stained hands and held them, palms out, for Rowan to see.
"I have carried the proof of this in a sealed packet on my body for forty years, my lord. It is here. It has always been here. And I have been waiting for the heir of the Vael line who could bear to see it."
He reached into the breast of his coat and drew out a small leather case, long and flat, and held it in both hands, the way a man holds a relic.
Rowan looked at it.
"My lord," the steward said, and his voice was quieter now, and very tired. "Before I give you this, I must tell you what is inside it, and what it will cost you to know. There is a confession, in the king's own hand. There is the testimony of the shadowmancer, written before he died. There is a list of names of the lords who paid the gold, and the men who carried it. There is a small lock of the former king's hair, which was cut from his head after the spell was done, and which the shadowmancer kept as his fee."
"And when you have seen it," the younger Maren said, from where she still knelt by the body, "you cannot unsee it. You will know the truth of your father's crime. You will know the truth of the curse. You will know the truth of the crown."
"And I will be bound to act," Rowan said.
"Yes," the steward said. "By the old compact, the heir of the Vael line who learns this truth must do one of two things. He must either take up the Blackthorn Crown and renew the binding, or he must denounce his father before the assembled lords of the realm, and renounce the throne, and walk out of the Blackthorn Court alone, with no sword and no name. There is no third choice. There has never been a third choice."
Rowan looked at the leather case. He looked at the body on the floor. He looked at the broken shutter above, through which the wind still came and went, and through which the sky was beginning to lighten, very faintly, at the eastern edge.
"How long," he said, "do I have to choose?"
The steward Maren glanced at the younger Maren.
"The next moon," the steward said. "Three weeks from yesterday. The wards fail on the night of the new moon. After that, the crown is awake, and unbound, and the thing beneath the throne is no longer held. And your father has already sent one shadowmancer. He will send another, and another, until the crown is his, or until you are dead."
Rowan was silent for a long time. The loose shutter banged against stone. The raven called once more from the broken keep.
Then he held out his hand, palm up, and the steward Maren laid the leather case in it.
It was lighter than he had expected.
He did not open it. He put it inside his coat, against his ribs, where it sat like a cold stone.
"Three weeks," he said. "Then we ride for Highmere. We gather the lords who are not in my father's pay. We tell them the truth. And then I will decide what the crown costs."
"My lord," the steward Maren said, very softly, "your father will know within the day that his shadowmancer has failed. He will send the next one within the hour. He will know before the sun is up that you have been in this hall."
"Yes," Rowan said. "He will."
He turned to the younger Maren.
"Can you ride?"
She looked at him, her face unreadable.
"I can ride," she said. "I am a herbalist from the outer provinces. I have ridden all my life."
"Then ride with me. I will not command you. But I will have need of someone who can read the marks on a body, and who knows the old tales."
"And who knows the price of a cure," she said, half to herself.
"Yes."
She looked at the body of the shadowmancer on the floor. She looked at the leather case under Rowan's coat. She looked at the steward Maren, who was watching her with the careful, blank face of a man who has learned not to hope.
"Very well," she said, and rose, and dusted off her knees. "I will ride with you. But I will not touch the crown, when it comes to that. I will not be bound to it. I am only an herbalist."
"That will be enough," Rowan said.
He turned to the steward Maren.
"Stay here. Keep the hall sealed. Tell no one that we have come. If my father's men arrive before we are clear of the Ashran, tell them that the shadowmancer killed me, and that you buried me in the inner courtyard, and that you have sealed the doors against the curse."
The steward Maren bowed.
"Yes, my lord."
"And when I have read what is in this case, I will send word. By the old ways, by the raven, by the old signs. You will know me by them."
"I will wait," the steward Maren said.
Rowan walked past him, and past the broken pillar, and toward the low arch through which the dawn was beginning to show. The younger Maren followed, her gloves still in her hand, her herb-bag over her shoulder.
Above them, the loose shutter banged once more against stone, and somewhere in the broken keep, a raven gave a single, throaty call.
They had not gone a hundred paces from the broken keep when the second ambush fell.
Maren heard it before she saw it. A soft scrape of boot on gravel, the whisper of a cloak drawn back from a blade, the click of a crossbow being cocked. She had been walking just behind Rowan, his broad back between her and the pale morning, when the sound came from the low wall to their left, and she saw his shoulders shift, and she understood in the same instant that he had heard it too.
"Down," he said.
She did not argue. She dropped to one knee behind a fallen slab of masonry and pulled the herb-bag from her shoulder and unrolled it on the stone between her hands. Her fingers found the stopper of the small glass vial of blackthorn sap by touch. She pulled it free. She had only one dose. She had carried it for three years against a wound that had never come.
Three men rose from behind the wall.
They wore the king's colors. They wore no badges. They wore the kind of faces that belonged to men who had been told to do a thing and who meant to do it well.
The first came over the wall on the left. The second stepped out from the doorway of a ruined smithy on the right. The third simply stood up from behind the slab where Maren was crouching, so close that she felt the brush of his cloak against her sleeve, and she did not turn her head because turning her head would have been the last thing she did.
Rowan moved faster than any man she had ever seen move.
He did not draw the long sword from his back. He did not have time. He drew the short blade from his belt and stepped forward into the first attacker and took him in the throat with a sound like a wet branch snapping, and the man went down on his knees and then on his face. Rowan spun and threw the short blade at the second man across the width of the ruined yard, and the blade took the man in the mouth and he fell backward into the smithy doorway with a clatter of armor.
The third man was behind Maren.
He had a knife. He had his hand in her hair. He had the point of the blade against the soft place beneath her jaw.
"Hold," he said, and his voice was calm, and his breath smelled of garlic and bad wine, and his hand in her hair was very steady. "Hold, lord, or I open her."
Rowan stopped.
He was six paces away. He had no weapon. The short blade was in the second man. The long sword was still in the sheath on his back. The first man was choking on the floor. The morning light was coming up over the broken wall and turning the wet stone the color of weak tea.
"Let her go," Rowan said.
"Drop the case," the man said.
Maren did not look at the man. She looked at the wall beside her, at the broken capstone, at the small hollow beneath it where the mortar had crumbled away. She had hidden things in such hollows as a child, when her brothers had played at raiders and she had played at being clever.
She did not move.
"Drop it," the man said.
"Give me your word," Rowan said, "that you will let her walk away, and I will give you the case."
"I give no word to traitors."
"Then we have nothing to say."
The man pressed the blade a little. Maren felt the skin tighten. She did not feel the cut yet. She would feel it soon.
"You could end this, lord," the man said. "You could end this very simply."
"I could," Rowan said. "I will not."
The man behind Maren made a small sound of disgust. He began to pull her back toward the doorway of the smithy, thinking perhaps that he could use her as a shield. He did not see Rowan's hand go to the small of his back. He did not see the thin blade that came out of the sheath at Rowan's hip. He did not see Rowan throw.
The blade took him in the eye.
He fell. Maren felt the hand go slack in her hair and the weight of him go past her shoulder, and she rolled sideways on the stone, and the vial of blackthorn sap was still in her hand, uncorked, the dark resin gleaming like a beetle's wing in the early light.
Rowan crossed the yard in three long strides, picked up the long sword from where it had fallen when he had rolled, drew it, and stood over her with the blade bare.
The first attacker was dead. The second was making a small bubbling sound in the smithy doorway. The third was on the stone beside her, and the thin blade stood out of his eye like a quill from a sheaf of letters.
"Come," Rowan said. He put the long sword under his arm and took her elbow and lifted her to her feet. "There is a passage. Under the old chapel. It comes out beyond the wall."
"I have the sap," she said.
"Good."
"I had thought to use it on you."
"I am glad you did not."
She almost laughed. The laugh turned into a cough, and the cough brought up a little blood, and she saw that the skin beneath her jaw had been opened after all, just a little, just enough to bleed.
Rowan saw it too. He stopped in the shadow of the broken chapel and took her face in his hand, turning it gently to the light, and she let him, and she watched his face while he looked at the cut.
"It is shallow," he said.
"I know."
"It will need a stitch."
"I know."
He had a needle and thread in his belt, because he was the kind of man who had needle and thread in his belt. He threaded it in the shadow without looking down, and he put three stitches into the cut beneath her jaw with the same hand that had just killed three men, and his hand did not shake, and she held still because she had been taught to hold still by a village healer who believed that the body would heal if the mind would let it.
When he had tied the last knot and cut the thread with his belt knife, he put the knife away and pressed a clean square of linen into her hand.
"Hold that," he said. "And come."
He led her under the broken altar, through a gap in the floor that she would never have seen if he had not shown her, down a flight of stone steps that smelled of cold water and old iron, into a tunnel so low that she had to duck her head and so narrow that her shoulders brushed both walls.
She followed him by the sound of his breathing and the faint rattle of the case under his coat. She held the linen to her jaw. She felt the blood soak through it and run cold down her throat. She tasted it. She did not think about the men in the yard. She thought about the pattern on the floor of the keep, and about the shape of the word that she had drawn in the air with her finger, and about the answer that was waiting in the case under his coat.
They walked for what felt like an hour. The tunnel went down, then level, then down again. Twice they passed through chambers that had been sealed with rubble and broken open again, and once they came to a place where the roof had fallen and they had to crawl on their bellies through the dust, and Maren thought of the bones of the mountain and the bones of the kings, and she thought that there was very little difference between the two.
Then Rowan stopped.
"There is light," he said.
She looked past his shoulder. There was a thin line of grey at the end of the tunnel, where a stone had been fitted into a frame and left slightly loose. He put his hand to it and pushed. The stone slid. A breath of cold air came in, carrying the smell of wet bracken and pine resin and the first faint stir of the autumn wind.
He went out first, to be sure. She heard him draw the long sword and then she heard him slide it back, and she heard him say, very softly, "Clear."
She crawled out after him.
They were at the foot of a small cliff, under an overhang of rock that hid the entrance from anyone on the ridge above. The trees began a few paces away. The sun was up. The sky was the color of a scraped knife. Somewhere high above, a raven was calling.
Rowan sat down on a stone and laid the long sword across his knees and looked at her.
"Sit," he said.
She sat.
He unrolled the leather case across his knees. The inner lining parted like the pages of a book. The Blackthorn Signet lay in its hollow, black and heavy, the sigil of the thorned crown raised against the grain of the metal. He did not pick it up. He laid his hands flat on either side of it and looked at it as if he were looking at a sleeping animal that might wake.
He took a breath. He held it. He let it go.
"Now," he said. "Read it."
She leaned forward and began to read.