They burned Edran Sternvale in the godsgrove, because the old blood does not give its dead to the septry.
The grove stood inside the castle's third wall, nine ancient hollywood trees around a spring that had never frozen in ten thousand recorded winters, and the faces carved into their bark were older than the carving of faces. The household stood in rings — family innermost, then sworn swords, then servants, then, alone at the outermost edge in the position custom reserved for gravediggers and moneylenders, one nilcaster. The pyre took slowly in the wet air, and when it finally caught, the flame ran up through the stacked pine and — Veyron watched it happen, and watched the household not watch it happen — burned for the length of three breaths white. Not the honest orange of pine. White, the long color, the color of what keeps. Then the wind turned and the flame remembered itself and the lord of the Thornmarch went up in ordinary fire, and the household exhaled.
The lorewright at Veyron's elbow — a young one, chain still bright, sent up from the Concordium two years past — was writing in a little book with a charcoal stub. Veyron read three words over his shoulder: anomaly, pyre, unrecorded. The young man saw him looking and closed the book with the guilty speed of a boy hiding sweets, and that told Veyron more about the state of the Concordium than a year of letters would have: they were still recording the anomalies. They had stopped publishing them.
Liriene did not weep at the pyre. She stood in the innermost ring in mourning grey with her house's white at the collar, and she held her grief the way her father had held his dying — by main force, in front of witnesses, because the old blood pays for its privileges by never once being seen to break. But Veyron's ears were not human ears, had not been since a stone table sixty years past, and he could hear, under the crackle of the pyre and the murmur of the offices, the smallest sound in the grove: her breath, counted. In fours. In, hold, out, hold. A soldier's trick. Someone had taught the lord's daughter how to stand a wall.
Afterward there was the feast, because the North feeds its grief, and at the feast there was the politics, because grief is a door and doors get used. Veyron ate alone at the low end and watched it happen with the clinical eye of a man watching a wound go bad: the bannermen sorting themselves along the tables, who sat near whom, who drank with whom and who only pretended to drink. Word of the king's failing health in Vel Aurantis had come north with the autumn traders. Every lord in that hall was doing the same arithmetic — if the succession breaks, where does the Thornmarch fall — and doing it over the unburied warmth of a man they had loved, which is to say, doing it ashamed, which is the most dangerous way arithmetic is ever done.
At the high table, Liriene sat beside her uncle. Lord-now-Regent Torvald Sternvale, Edran's younger brother: a wide, capable, sad-eyed man who had wanted nothing his whole life except for nothing to change, and who now wore the chain of a regency he visibly experienced as a slowly tightening snare. Beside him his wife, Lady Marra, in a gown of deep green — southern cut, southern cloth, a small stripe of gold thread and yellow silk at the cuff, a fashion, Veyron happened to know, currently beloved of exactly one faction in the capital — and Lady Marra did not eat, and did not drink, and watched her niece the way a housekeeper watches a cracked jar that is holding, for now, someone else's inheritance.
On the third night, past the mid of it, Liriene came to the tower room they had given him — knocked once, walked in without waiting, sat down across the hearth, and put her boots up on the fender like a woman claiming ground.
"My uncle means to send me south," she said. "To the capital. 'For my protection and education.' The letter's already written; his wife dictated it; I read it in draft because their clerk drinks." Her eyes came up from the fire to him, grey-violet, level. "The blind ones asked for my hour of birth, nilcaster. I've read what I could find in our library about the Loom-Readers, which is little and all of it polite in the way books are polite about things they're afraid of. And a horse that never shied threw my father onto rocks in clear weather, and the huntsmen have stopped riding the high passes at night, and nobody in this castle will tell me one true thing. My father's last hour on earth, he spent it with you." She said it without accusation, which was worse. "So you'll tell me. All of it. Now."
"Your father asked me to take you away and teach you what you are."
"I know. I listened at the door until the fever-women dragged me off." Not a flicker of shame. "What am I?"
And because Edran had been right — because you keep promises, it's why he picked you — Veyron told her. The winter line and the violet-eyed guest. The blood of the Dawn kings braided to the blood of the burned east, two royalties the world had spent centuries carefully separating, joined in one girl by an autumn houseguest and a kept secret. What the old texts called such a joining, in the days before the texts were tidied: Emberblood. The coal that remembers the forest. The nature the Harmony has no border for.
She listened the way she stood walls: counted breath, steady eyes. When he finished she was quiet for the length of a log settling.
"The silver in my hair started three years ago," she said at last. "Mother-of-pearl, my aunt calls it, and has my maid pull the strands out." A short, unamused breath. "And sometimes when I'm angry the fire in a room leans at me. It leaned all through the feast tonight, every candle on the high table, toward me, an inch, all night. My aunt watched it do it. She's known longer than I have. That's why she wants me south — she's not selling me, she thinks she's disposing of me before—" and there, at last, one crack ran through the wall, hair-thin, quickly mortared: "—before it's Father all over again. The cold air on the road. They killed him because of what I am. Say it plainly. That's the one part you're softening."
"They killed him because of what you are," Veyron said plainly.
"Good." She stood. Boots off the fender, grief packed back into its case, and something older than twenty-one looking out of her face — the thing that had looked at him across the bier and recognized a door. "Then I'm not staying to get anyone else killed, and I'm not going south to be disposed of. Father claimed me to you. I heard the words. The Law of Claiming cuts both ways, doesn't it? The claimed can invoke the claimant."
"That's not — technically the form is—"
"The forms remember why," said Liriene Sternvale, who had read her library, "even when we don't. We leave before my uncle's letter does. I'll be at the postern an hour before dawn."
She was at the postern an hour before dawn, in traveling leathers the color of wet slate, with a horse, a sword she was not yet good with, her father's hunting knife, and no tears at all — until they crested the pass at midmorning and Winterhold Grey went down out of sight behind the shoulder of the mountain, and then she cried for exactly as long as it stayed hidden, and when the road turned and the towers showed one last time, small and grey and smoking their morning smoke, she stopped, wiped her face with a horsewoman's efficiency, and did not look back again.
Veyron pretended, for both their dignities, to be watching the sky.
He was also actually watching the sky. High up, riding the wind off the glaciers, a burgundy shadow had been circling since dawn, patient as a habit, keeping — he measured it — always the same distance. Not approaching. Escorting.
"That's the third time I've seen that eagle," Liriene said.
"Mm," said Veyron.
The Wheel-Hunt came for her on the ninth night, at a way-shrine in the high passes, and the manner of its coming taught Veyron the true size of what he had claimed.
He felt it before the horses did, and the horses felt it before the fire did: a pressure behind the evening, a heaviness, as though the pass had been picked up and tilted very slightly toward somewhere else. The fire guttered — not in wind; there was suddenly, remarkably, no wind at all — and its light went strange at the edges, and the shadows of the standing stones began to point in a direction that had nothing to do with where the fire was.
"Liriene." He kept his voice conversational. "The shrine. Inside the ring-mark. Now."
To her lasting credit she went without one question, and the questions she swallowed must have weighed pounds.
They rode down out of the dark between one heartbeat and the next, and they did not arrive so much as deepen — a purple-black gathering at the treeline, like a bruise forming on the night, that resolved into riders. Nine of them. Tall past mortal proportion, in armor of a black that did not reflect the fire but ended it, mounted on shapes that had agreed to be called horses the way the sea agrees to be called a road. Where the hooves fell, the frost bloomed outward in slow fans and the grass beneath died without changing color — died white, drained not burned, every stem gone pale as the far end of time.
And the world around them dragged. That was the thing no ballad had prepared him for. Near the riders, falling things fell slower. The sparks of the dying fire hung in air like insects in honey. Veyron's own pulse sounded in his ears at a distance, delayed, like a drum heard across a valley. They carried the deep purple weight of the border between worlds with them, wore it as their climate, and inside that weight, time itself was a suggestion that could be overruled.
The foremost rider looked at the shrine, and at the girl inside the ring-mark, and Veyron understood that everything up to now — the cold patch on Edran's road, the trackless snow, the patience — had been leisure. Sport. The unhurried shopping of something that has crossed nine worlds and never once been made to hurry.
The coal that remembers the forest, said a voice. It did not come through the air. It came through the waiting — arrived in the mind like a thing remembered rather than heard, in a tone of vast, courteous entitlement. We have gathered the old blood in nine spheres, little kindling. The tree drinks the worlds dry and the worlds must be repaid. You are owed to the dark between. Come, and the debt of your line is settled.
"She's claimed," Veyron said, aloud, into the waiting. His voice sounded absurd to him, small and warm-blooded and local. He drew both swords anyway, steel in the right hand, gravemark in the left, and stepped between the riders and the ring-mark, and set his feet. "Witnessed by stone and stated plain. You want the debt, talk to the holder."
What came off the nine riders then was not anger. It was amusement, which was worse, the way a glacier might be amused by a fence. The foremost rider dismounted — the whole night bent to accommodate the movement — and drew a blade of frozen dusk, and came on, and Veyron had time to think, with the cold clarity of the twice-born, I cannot win this and there is no door behind me, and then to think, absurdly, of Odran on a stone table sixty years gone — you have died once already; everything after is smaller — and then there was no more time for thinking, because the dusk-blade fell, and he was fighting the border of the world with two swords and a heartbeat.
He landed one blow in the first exchange — the gravemark edge, full force, into the joint of neck and shoulder — and the black armor rang like a bell in a drowned city and took no mark at all, and the counterstroke he did not fully escape opened his coat, his shirt, and eight inches of his chest with a cold that felt less like cutting than like subtraction. He fell back against the ring-stones. The rider came on with the deliberateness of weather.
And the shrine behind him lit.
He would sort the order of it out later, in the retellings, and never be certain. What he knew: Liriene screamed — not fear; refusal, a sound with the whole winter line in it and the whole burned east under that — and put her bare hand flat against the shrine's altar stone, and every carved face on that altar, faces worn blind by ten thousand years of weather, opened their eyes gold. The ring-mark in the turf ignited like a poured line of dawn. And out of the girl came — he had no other word for it, then or ever — morning. A single pulse of gold-white light with a core of ember-red, silent, total, that passed through Veyron like warmth through a starved man and struck the nine riders like the one thing in nine worlds they had never learned to be patient with: time, moving.
The frost fans reversed. The hanging sparks of the fire fell, all at once, like a held breath released. The foremost rider was flung — not thrown; repealed — back across the clearing to the treeline, where the nine of them held one moment at the border of the light, purple-black and seething, and the voice arrived once more in the waiting, and there was no amusement left in it. Only appetite, and an ancient bookkeeper's certainty:
The debt stands. The tree falls, the accounts open, and we will be paid before the yellow comes. Keep her lit, holder. It saves us the finding.
The night unclenched. The wind returned, apologetically, as though it had only stepped out for a moment. The riders were gone, and the grass where they had stood lay in nine long fans of white — dead the pale way, the drained way — that never grew back, Veyron heard years later; the pass-shepherds fence it and call it the Combs.
Liriene stood swaying at the altar, her hand still on the stone, silver spread a finger's width further through her hair than it had been at sunset. She looked at the light dying out of the carved faces, and at the blood soaking Veyron's shirt, and her own arms, faintly, unmistakably, giving off a warmth-shimmer like a road in summer.
"That," she said, in the flattened voice of the newly enormous, "has never happened before."
"The road teaches fast." He said it lightly. His hands were not entirely steady, and not from the wound. The tree drinks the worlds dry and the worlds must be repaid. He filed the sentence in the deep place where he kept things too large to look at directly, next to the arithmetic of a night sixty years old — the east burning, the gold brightening, as though it had been fed.
She tore strips from her spare shirt and bound his chest with field-competence — the fever-women of Winterhold had taught her wound-work, it emerged, along with the counted breathing; the North educates its daughters for the world it actually lives in — and as she tied the last knot she said, not looking up: "You stepped in front of me. You'd met me nine days ago."
"You were claimed nine days ago."
"Is that all it is? The form?"
Veyron considered lying to her, which he was very good at, and found the machinery unaccountably out of order. "The forms remember why," he said. "Even when we don't. Get some sleep. We ride before light."
High overhead in the dark, something enormous turned in slow circles above the pass, all night, where the cold things would see it. In the morning there were three sheep missing from a fold two valleys over, and a shepherd with a story about a shadow like a cathedral, and Liriene looked at Veyron over the cold breakfast and said, "That is no eagle," and Veyron said, "No," and gave her nothing else, because some introductions cannot be rushed.
They came down out of the passes into the low Thornmarch, where the pine gives way to barley and the barley that year had come up the tired gold, and at a river-town called Dunmere two pieces of Veyron's past attached themselves to his present within a single hour, which he should have taken for the omen it was.
The first was in the tavern, standing on a table, in a doublet of oxblood silk with a small stripe of silver and yellow at the sleeve — the capital's newest fashion, worn eight hundred miles north of anyone who could appreciate it — performing, to a room of rivermen, the Ballad of the Graverider. All hundred verses. With gestures.
Perrin Quill was fifty and looked thirty-five, which he attributed to art and everyone else attributed to a diet of other people's wine. He had been witness, chronicler, parasite, and — the word still embarrassed them both — friend to Veyron for two decades, and he finished the verse (the widow's verse, sung with a tremolo of ghoulish relish, and down she went in her woolen white / who'd smiled upon the square) before registering that the room had gone tavern-quiet, inventory-quiet, and turning, and finding the ballad's subject leaning in the doorway with his arms crossed.
"You," said Perrin, with enormous dignity, from the table, "have ruined the key change."
"You've ruined my reputation. A hundred verses and not one of them true."
"Not one of them false either, which is the art of it." He hopped down, embraced Veyron without the slightest permission — the only man alive who did — and then saw, over the nilcaster's shoulder, the girl in slate-grey leathers with silver threading her hair and a shrine-light steadiness in her eyes, and Veyron watched the skald's face do the thing that made him, under the silk and the wine, dangerous: the flicker of a mind filing everything at speed. The Sternvale mourning cut of the collar. The hunting knife with the direwolf-tree pommel. The week-old news from the north, a lord dead, a daughter sent south for her education — and no household, no escort, no colors.
"Perrin Quill," he said, bowing exactly deep enough for a merchant's daughter, which was his way of announcing he knew she wasn't one. "Skald of the open road, witness of the age. And you would be traveling to see your aunt. In the south. I have already begun forgetting your face; by dinner it will be gone entire, along with the both of you, whom I never met."
"He talks like this always?" Liriene asked.
"He gets worse," Veyron said. "He's coming with us."
"I am?" said Perrin, already signaling for his account.
He was; Veyron had decided it between the door and the embrace. Not for the sword — Perrin fought like an offended goose — but because the roads south ran through a country sliding toward a war of colors, and a skald could walk into any hall in Cirvahana and be welcome, and hear everything, and because a man who makes legends for a living can, at need, unmake a trail: seed three taverns with a white-haired nilcaster seen riding west, a Sternvale girl seen taking ship north. The best veil-cant in the world, Odran used to say, is a better story.
The second piece of the past was waiting at the stable, sitting on a mounting block in the rain with the patience of a mountain, and Veyron stopped dead in the yard when he saw him.
Sixty years had not so much aged Odran as concentrated him. The master of Kaer Ondral was past his hundred-and-thirtieth year; the amber eyes had paled toward a color like weak tea and winter sun; but the shoulders under the road-cloak still looked load-bearing, and the two swords on his back sat with the ease of things grown into the bone.
"Your wards," Odran said, without greeting, nodding at the bandage-line visible at Veyron's collar, "were always lazy on the left side."
"Master."
"Don't master me, I resigned. Jorec keeps the keep now; I got old enough to become an inconvenience and young enough in the legs to do something about it." The pale amber eyes went past him to the girl, and stayed, and Veyron watched the oldest nilcaster in the world do his own filing — the silver hair, the shrine-steadiness, the shimmer that came off her, faint as memory, when the rain hit her shoulders and dried too fast. Something moved in the old face that Veyron had seen there only once before, sixty years ago, over a stone table: awe, wearing the mask of assessment. "So the letters were true," Odran said quietly. "Winter and fire in one vessel."
"You knew?" Liriene stepped forward, past Veyron, chin first — he was coming to know that motion. "What letters? Who writes letters about me?"
"Child, half the powers of the world have written letters about you, which is why the other half are riding," Odran said, standing off the block, and to her visible surprise he bowed — not a courtier's bow; the short bow of the training yard, sword-master to prospect. "And someone must make you fit to be written about. He" — a nod at Veyron — "will die for you, which is necessary but not sufficient. I will make you difficult to die for. We start tomorrow, before light. You'll hate me by the new moon."
"I don't hate people on schedule."
"You'll adapt," said Odran. "The talented always do."
That night the four of them ate in the tavern's back room — the beginnings of the company that the songs, Perrin's songs, would one day make golden and simple and doomed — and it was the skald, two bottles in, who asked the question the rest of them had been carrying unopened. He asked it lightly, which was how he asked everything that mattered.
"Here's what the ballads don't cover. Nine cold gentlemen out of the space between worlds, blind oracles collecting horoscopes, and the entire browning gold of the age with a bill coming due — going by everything, someone will collect our miss Aunt-Visitor eventually. So, professionally speaking, as the man who'll have to rhyme it: to where, precisely, are we running?"
The silence had the fire in it, and the rain.
"East," Veyron said. He had known it since the shrine, the way you know a tooth has cracked: long before you can bear to touch it. "Eventually. Where the last things that outrank the gold still nest. But first south, through the capital." He met Odran's paling eyes across the table, and the old man's face confirmed what the old man's presence had already told him: that the master of Kaer Ondral had drawn the same map, and had ridden down from his mountain to walk it with them. "There's a king dying at the foot of the tree. I intend to reach him before the people who plan to be there when he stops."
Perrin refilled every cup but his own, which was his tell of true fear, and raised the bottle to the room.
"To the grey road," he said. "May the songs about it be inaccurate, and may we all be alive to resent them."
Two days south of Dunmere, at the fortress-town of Hartsgate where the Thornmarch does its arguing, they crossed paths with the last honest man of the north, and watched the age decline to hear him.
Regent Torvald had called a moot — banner-lords in from every valley, ostensibly to swear the interregnum peace, actually to argue about the succession crisis boiling south of them, and Veyron would have ridden wide around the whole affair had the road allowed. It did not; the Hartsgate bridge was the only crossing of the Duskwater for sixty miles. So they entered the town as anyone enters an occupied town, with a story — Perrin's: a skald, his hired blades, and his copyist's-girl niece, bound for the southern tourney circuit — and it held, because Perrin conducted it like an orchestra, and because every eye in Hartsgate was aimed at the castle hall.
Where a Watchman was speaking. They heard it from the yard, through the open shutters, because he had the kind of voice the Rimewall breeds: built to carry over wind that kills.
He was a Marshal of the Ashveil Watch, ridden south on dying horses with an escort of four — four, from a brotherhood that had once been forty thousand — and he stood in his patched black before the assembled color of the Thornmarch and he did not plead. The Watch has not pled in nine hundred years. He reported.
The Pallid Reach was moving. Not raiders — the wild folk beyond the wall were themselves fleeing south, hammering at the Watch's gates begging to be let through, which had never happened in the memory of memory. The glaciers were calving shapes that walked. Patrols beyond the wall no longer came back, and the last one that did come back came back wrong — frost-eyed, sweet-smelling, dead men walking in patrol formation right up to the gate, as though something with a long memory and no understanding of hearts had sent them home as a message it believed was courteous. The wall's old wards — dawn-laid, gold-laid, sunk in ice and black stone by the Harmony's own first architects — were browning. Failing exactly as fast, said the Marshal, as the light behind the southern horizon.
"The cold does not come because the gold is failing," he finished, into the hall's silence. "The cold was always coming. The gold was the fence. I am not here to frighten your lordships. I am here for men, stone, and grain, and I will take them in that order."
And the hall — Veyron listened to it happen through the shutters, with Liriene rigid beside him and Odran's face a carving — the hall managed him. Voices warm with regret. The uncertain times. The succession, the treasury, the harvest. Assurances. A committee. Lady Marra's southern-smooth tones proposing that the petition be conveyed to the capital for the new reign's earliest attention — the exact phrase, gilded and hollow, in which a civilization files its own doom for later.
The Marshal came out through the yard afterward, escort around him, face like the wall he served. And passing the strangers by the well he stopped — because a Watchman's eyes are built for reading weather, and whatever he read in the pale man and the silver-haired girl made him detour three steps — and he looked at Veyron, nilcaster to Watchman, discarded order to discarded order, and said, quietly, the sentence Veyron would carry east like a stone in the boot:
"They'll believe me at the third horn-blast. We sound one for rangers returning. Two for wildlings. Three has not been sounded in living memory." He gathered his reins. "When you hear of three, friend, wherever you are — that is the sound of everyone becoming very sorry, all at once."
He rode north with his four men into the failing light, back toward the ice, unthanked, and the moot inside moved on to the seating precedence of the lower valleys.
They crossed the Duskwater at dawn. South of the bridge the country changed its mind: the pines let go, the land opened into the great rolling gold of the Gildenvale's approaches, and there — Liriene reined up without meaning to, and even Odran, who had seen it a hundred years of times, stopped — there on the southern horizon stood the Aurvane.
At eighty miles it was already impossible: a tree tall enough to wear weather, gold enough to shame the barley, its crown a soft blaze that the eye accepted before the mind could refuse. The light of it lay over the whole vale like a blessing with an accent, and you could see — this was the thing, this was what no painting sold in the north ever showed — you could see that it was beautiful, and you could see, if you had the sort of eyes that had been paid for on a stone table, that the gold of its uppermost boughs went at the edges into brown, like gilt on an old frame worn down to the gesso, and that the blessing lay a little thin on the farther fields, and lay not at all on certain long stripes of grey where the Dimmet had already quietly taken title.
"It's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Liriene said, and her voice was strange, and Veyron looked and saw that her eyes had gone bright with an emotion she clearly resented. "Why am I — I hate it. It killed your people. It's eating the world. Why do I want to weep at it?"
"Because it's true gold," Odran said, before Veyron could. The old man's paled eyes were fixed south, and in them was the whole complication of a man beholding the thing that had unmade him and finding it still, unforgivably, glorious. "That's the trap of the whole age, girl. Nobody serves a lie because it looks like a lie. The tree is actually beautiful. The Harmony actually worked — nine hundred years, no famine at the center, no plague inside the light, every nature in its border. Everything they say about it is true." He clicked his horse forward, down toward the vale, toward the gold. "Everything they don't say is also true. Ride. You'll want to see the roses before they're bought."
End of Part II.