Editor's note, Honest Chair, Concordium reopened edition: Master Quill's titles, asides, and self-regard have been preserved unamended, per his will, which was seventeen pages long and rhymed.
Come gather at the garland-field where two crowns came to dance, Where green silk faced the black-and-red and smiled at every lance, Where all the swords of harvest-time rode shining to the play — And a grey blade came from nowhere, and carried the crown away.
(...)
He gave each man his courtesy, he gave each man his hand, He laid the champions in the grass as gentle as the land, And when they asked what house he served, what color and what creed, He said, "My master forbids ornaments" — and the meadow laughed indeed.
(...)
[The final verse exists in two versions. The tavern version:] And none did know the grey blade's name, and none shall know it now, For names are for the gilded men who bind them with a vow — [And the version Master Quill sang only twice, both times far from taverns:] And one man knew the grey blade's name, and kept it like a coal, For a name's a thing you choose yourself, and choosing makes it whole.
Nine sails they sent behind her from the harbors of the west, Nine riders rode above her from the country with no rest, But the Widow's Iron ran for the water none may sail, Where the sea remembers burning, and the charts go pale.
The old man stood at the stern-castle, his blades were in his hands, He called across the boiling sky in the tongue of drowned lands, And out of the storm came answering the debt the sky still owed: The red wing of the morning, down the thunder-road.
Oh, sing the death of Odran, who was older than the gold, Who spent the only secret that his order ever sold — He bought the wing with all his years, he paid and did not grieve: "I have died once already, lads. Watch how the twice-born leave."
She got down off the grey horse, she put her palm to the ground —
[Here the manuscript carries, in the Chronicler's hand: "I have made eleven attempts at the second line across thirty years. The heartbeat will not scan. Some rooms cannot be quoted. Let the lane stand one line long, and let every singer stop there, and let the silence after it be the second line, which is, I promise the future, exactly what it was like."]
Gold tree, cold tree, grew too tall, Kept the summer, kept it all, Burned one winter, gave it back — Now the chestnuts fill the crack. One for you and one for me And one for the ash of the big grey tree, And if the winter bites your thumb, Light the little gold — and spring will come.
[Chronicler's note: I have heard this sung in four regions with local variants. The Duskhalla version replaces the last line with "and pay for nothing — spring will come," which the desert insists is not a variant but a correction.]
The reader will find the War of the Two Crowns so named in every history, and the name is wrong twice. There were three crowns — the third being the horned one that never touched a head, worn eleven years in a cellar by the only member of the family fit for the work — and it was not, in the end, a war about crowns at all. It was a war about a girl's hour of birth, which is to say: about whether a person may be born owing. Every other quarrel of the age was interest on that principal. I have kept the customary name in these volumes because a chronicler who fights his readers over every word loses them by chapter three, and I need them at chapter thirty, where the truth is.
Nine hundred depositions, and mine makes nine hundred and one: for the space of one heartbeat, every soul on the tourney-field was inside the same birth, and the birth was the world's. I have interviewed a green pikeman who deserted that morning and walked home four hundred miles to apologize to his father; a Verdancy dowager who freed every bonded servant of her house by noon; and one of the Balemasks — I will not print which — who took off the mask in the lane and never afterward could explain, or needed to. I asked each of them the same question: what did the Instant say? And each gave me a different sentence, and every sentence meant: nothing that is born owes anything for being born. The Loom spent nine centuries reading the weave, cousins. She published, once, for one heartbeat, to everyone — and the age's owners spent every army they had trying to recall the edition. Too late. It is the only text I know of that its readers became.
Military historians have complained — in review, at length, to my face at a dinner I shall not forgive — that my account of the Threshold gives four stanzas to a thornborn shouting "form a line" and one clause to the entire engagement of the green host's left. This is because the engagement of the green host's left decided nothing, and the shouting decided everything. Six thousand soldiers came up that causeway carrying the old age on their backs, and were met at the door by the man the old age had thrown away first, and he did not fight them so much as administrate at them, and I watched the front rank — men who would have charged a dragon, there were dragons right there — hesitate before the one thing no soldier of the Accord had ever once been trained to face: a lawful authority that wanted nothing from them. You may have your left flank, historians. I was at the door. The door was the battle. The rest was weather with banners.
I am asked, by correspondents of a certain temperament, why these volumes contain no account of the Champion's grief — for the master, for the mother whose letter he never read, for the thirty allotted years he spends so publicly and mentions so little. I refer such correspondents to the practice of the man himself, who taught a fen-wraith's grief to an entire age: the trapped dead want listening, not narration. Some of the living do too. I have listened for thirty years. It is in the Chronicle the way the second line is in the lane-ballad. Move along, cousins. There are chestnuts at the market and the exhibits are numbered.
(drafted by Maerwyn, called the Quill-Queen, amended by the assembly of the estates, Year 1; the finest administrative prose of the age, and I do not intend the description as faint praise — P.Q.)
WHEREAS the light we were promised was purchased, and the purchase was hidden, and the hiding was called harmony; and
WHEREAS no nature is outside its border save by another's decree, and no border holds well that is not kept by those who live along it; and
WHEREAS the keeping of a world is not a crown but a chore, recurring, and the chore is the title, and the title expires nightly and is renewed by the doing;
NOW THEREFORE the estates, regions, orders, and free peoples of Cirvahana, being none of them sovereign and all of them party, do covenant:
FIRST, that no person shall be born owing; and the hour, blood, form, horn, hue, or nature of any birth shall confer neither debt nor dominion; and any instrument to the contrary is void where it stands;
SECOND, that every border — of land, of law, of life and death — shall be kept by its neighbors, reviewed by its neighbors, and altered only by its neighbors; and no keeper shall hold a border they do not live along;
THIRD, that the lights of the commons shall be tended in shifts, by any hand, and no light shall be sovereign, and no tending shall be tithed;
FOURTH, that the office of Champion shall walk the borders no keeper can hold, and listen there, and carry what is given, and set it down when it is time; and the office shall never be a throne, and shall always take students;
FIFTH, that an unfairness reported shall be heard before all other business — this article being the price of the First Keeper's assent, and cheap;
AND LASTLY, that this Concord binds no one forever; it is relit each generation by those who find it worth the keeping, or it goes honestly out; for the estates have had nine hundred years of an eternal instrument, and record here, for whoever comes after, the sum of what that taught them: distrust every fire that promises you will never have to carry it.
(abridged from the Champion's own contract-notes, with the Chronicler's improvements, over the Champion's objections)
Fen-wraith. The angry dead, held at the border by grief, wrong burial, or white cloth. Sweet-smelling; sweetness is the tell. Fire works; listening works better and keeps. Do not dress the angry dead in white. (Champion's marginal note: "Do not dress anyone in white without asking them.")
Drowner. Border-vermin of the old Threading; nests in slow water. Steel, in numbers, at dawn when they're gorged. Pays forty threns and always has, in defiance of every law of coin.
Hollowkind. The frost-things of the far north. They do not hate; they collect, on an instrument nobody living signed, which should sound familiar by now. Gravemark, fire, and kept wards. Since the Unsealing they take only the unburied dead, which the Watch calls an improvement and the Champion calls a renegotiation pending.
Rimewight. What the Hollowkind send back. Walks in patrol formation; smells sweet, like the wraith, like all things held past their hour. Burn with witnesses, then hold the funeral properly, again — the second funeral is not superstition, it is the ward.
Thornborn. Not monsters; citizens. Listed here in the old bestiaries, retained in mine under protest as a monument: this entry is what a bestiary looks like when the sorters write it. See how easy it was? Turn the page.
Coil-congregant. Survivor of the serpent-doctrine; identifiable by shed-skin pallor and a hunger held in perfect courtesy. Cannot be fought usefully — the doctrine is the monster, and the doctrine dies of one thing only: a world that stops rewarding swallowing. Feed them, employ them, bore them. Recovery takes years and happens.
Grave-hag. EXTINCT — struck through by the Concord's own reviewers, Year 6, upon the discovery of two in the Undervein margins, alive, elderly, and extremely annoyed at nine centuries of being called extinct. They tend the old burial-borders and know more wraith-craft than the whole nilcaster order. The Champion apologized on behalf of the age. They charged him for the visit. The office now consults them twice a year, and pays.
Dragon. Not a monster and never was; the oldest citizens of the counter-proposal. A dragon's obedience is a memory of a promise, and runs to the old blood and its students. Since the Kindling, ten thousand and rising. Do not feed them "for luck"; they find it patronizing. They keep their own bestiary; the Champion has seen the entry for men; he declines to summarize it beyond "fair."
The Yellow. Not a beast; a border-failure that argues. It arrives in your own voice, in grief's hour, and everything it says will be true and the ledger incomplete. There is no blade. Carry-work is the ward: what it cannot survive is a carried weight set down on purpose, at the time of your own choosing. If you meet it, find a fire with another person at it. That is the entire remedy and it has never once failed anyone who managed it, which is the cruelty of the thing, and the mercy.
House Sternvale of Winterhold Grey. The old winter blood; kept the north through the war of three enemies. Lord-Regent Torvald survived, aged a decade in three years, and greeted his niece's homecoming, the histories record, with the words "your room is as you left it," which the north considers the most emotional public statement in Sternvale history. Lady Marra's green treason was punished in the northern manner: she was neither exiled nor executed, but retired, comprehensively, to a comfortable estate with no roads, where she writes memoirs nobody prints.
The Cinder Throne. Vacant, permanently, by the Concord's first act. The throne itself — forged of the swords of the Night of Glass, warm to the touch for nine hundred years — went cold, witnesses swear, on the morning of the Unsealing, and is now the centerpiece of the Museum of the Purchase in the old river palace, where school-children are taken to touch it, and do, and go quiet.
Maerwyn, called the Quill-Queen. Never crowned; never needed to be. First Moderator of the Concord of Keepers, thirty-one years. Her bargain with the cold was entered into the record by her own instruction, unsoftened, under the heading What Despair Signs, "so that the next despairing sovereign has one document the white ones cannot phrase better."
Aldric, called the Late-Answered. Took the green host north; became, to his own bafflement and everyone's eventual lack of surprise, the finest Marshal-Commander the Ashveil Watch has recorded. The wall's log for his arrival reads, in the old Marshal's hand: reinforcements, eighteen years delayed, apologized on arrival. Accepted.
Cardogh. Survived the Threshold — the histories always pause here, and so shall I: the age's one unbudgeted mercy — and refused every title on the grounds stated in Part VIII. He keeps, by his own election, the smallest office in the new arrangement: Keeper of the Under-city, warden of the root-roads and the memorial ledger, resident of the same cellar rooms, by preference. The unreadable script of his private ledger was deciphered after all, by Anouel, in her ninetieth year, at his invitation. She reported only one detail, and the age has decided it suffices: the heading over the account of the annual warrants — the costliest column of his stewardship — read, all those years, not "colleagues." It read "debts, payable when the door opens." The door opened. He has spent his every year since paying: the Balemask commission's survivors answer to him now, unmasked, retrained as the under-city's wardens of the vulnerable, and the histories note that he is, to the boy from the barrow — found, grown, horned, and this year elected to the Concord from the ninth ring — neither king nor keeper, but simply, at the boy's own insistence, uncle.
The Loom. Ground floor: the Threadneedle Market, the busiest in the capital. Upstairs: one white chair, empty, dusted weekly, per the fourteenth deposition. The tower's silver-eyed survivors dispersed into the age; a striking number became, of all things, listeners in the Champion's school — the trade, as the fourteenth chair observed at the inquiry, being adjacent, "once the direction is reversed."
The Emberwaste. Unbowed, as ever; party to the Concord by treaty, as equals, the desert's nine-hundred-year politics — we were not party — having been vindicated so completely that Princess Yshara's successors have had to develop, for the first time in their history, a diplomatic vocabulary for winning. Sereth Duskhalla holds the Champion's southern circuit. The Coilfather has not been seen in nine years. The skins get smaller.
The Shattercoast. The Scale still hangs over Grimhaven harbor, and beneath it, by Ghorm's bequest, hangs a second, smaller scale, empty-panned, with the inscription the Brinelord dictated on his deathbed between bargains: "Some cargo outweighs the kingdom. Ask the freak's girl. — G. H-A., party."
Ircrys Vahal. Rebuilt, replanted, plural, strange, and singing at midsummer. The Forge of Days burns. The door stands open. Over the door, the lintel says what it always said. All are party. All are welcome. One must knock.
— P.Q., the Honest Chair, who was there, and wrote it down, and is finished, except that no chronicler is ever finished, and the market is open, and somewhere north of everything a horn is sounding one blast, for returning.
— END —