You smell Vel Aurantis before you see its walls, and what you smell is roses and rot arguing.
The city was built in nine rings, ring within ring like the grain of a cut bough, each wall higher and each gate older as you went in, until at the very heart the ninth wall enclosed not a district but a single tree — though tree, at that distance, at that scale, was a word that embarrassed itself. The Aurvane's trunk was a cliff of gold-barked immensity; its lowest boughs roofed the palace precinct like a sky that had opted in; and its light — Liriene kept turning her face up into it and then away, the way you do with sun on snow — its light fell through the streets of the inner rings in a soft perpetual afternoon that made every face beautiful and every argument sound reasonable and every peeling shopfront look, until you touched it, freshly painted.
That was the inner rings.
They entered by the north gate into the seventh ring, and the seventh ring was where the age was keeping its truth. The famous roses of the garland-district ran along the avenues in walls of bloom, and every tenth bush was blighted — not wilted: drained, flowers gone the pale of old paper while still holding their perfect shape, as if the color had been called away for more important work. The gutters of the artisan streets ran with dye-water from the clothiers, and Veyron marked what colors the city was buying that season: bolts of deep green going by the cartload to the hill mansions; bolts of black and crimson to the river mansions; and everywhere, on the better sort of tunic, the little capital flourish Perrin had been wearing when they met him — a thin stripe of silver and yellow at the cuff or collar. Perrin saw him notice it.
"Started two years ago with the young lords who find the Harmony stifling," the skald murmured. "Silver for change, yellow for — well. They think it means freedom. They'd faint if you told them what it means."
"What does it mean?" Liriene asked.
"It means the fashionable are bored," Odran said flatly. "And boredom in a golden city is a lamp-spark in a hay barn."
They took rooms in the sixth ring at an inn Perrin swore by, called the Gilded Goose ("the sign's genius — no one admits to staying at a place called that, so no one asks after the guests"), and for three days they did the work of arriving quietly. Perrin went out and up, into the halls and salons, and came back each night with the capital's bloodstream in a bottle: the king was dying behind the ninth wall and had been dying for a year; the succession stood exactly balanced on a blade. Queen-in-waiting Maerwyn, the old king's daughter, named heir twelve years ago before the whole peerage — oaths sworn, knees bent — but the oaths had been sworn to a healthy king's whim, said the green salons, and a woman on the Cinder Throne, said the septry pulpits, was a nature outside its border. Prince Aldric, the king's son by the second marriage, was twenty-six, glorious, devout, beloved of the Septry of the Sevenfold Light, and had never in his life been heard to want the throne, which everyone agreed made him perfect for it, the wanting being handled by professionals: his mother's family, half the small council, and — this Perrin brought home on the third night, lowered voice, genuine unease under the wine — the Loom-Readers.
"They've left the tower," he said. "First time in a generation. Blind procession through the fifth ring two nights back, white robes, red cords, going from the Loom to the prince's palace. The street went quiet as a held breath, and — here's the thing, here's what my flesh is still crawling from — the torches bent. Along the whole route. Flames leaning after them like grass after sheep." He drank. "The fire in this city is interested in something, friends. I make my living on metaphors and I want you to know that wasn't one."
Veyron went out and down. Down was his errand: the under-city. Vel Aurantis had been rebuilding itself upon itself for nine hundred years, and beneath the sixth ring the old streets ran on in the dark, roofed over, forgotten by everyone who could afford to forget. The Harmony's writ thinned down there — grace-lamps browning to useless, gold going grey — and in the thinning, the city kept everything it had disowned. He walked the buried avenues with a coin of gravemark held loose in his palm and felt it tremble, once, twice, like a compass needle near a lodestone: thornborn. Somewhere under the palace precinct itself, the disowned natures of the golden city were alive, and numerous, and — the needle steadied and pointed, which gravemark did in the presence of will, of intention, of a mind — organized.
He stood in the dark of a drowned street with the coin pointing at the heart of the world, and he thought about the stories the capital told of its sewers — a horned monster, a ghost-king below, nurse-tales — and he thought: every nurse-tale in this city is a filing error. Somebody down here is real.
He did not go further. Not yet. You do not walk into a king's secret with a claimed girl asleep three rings up.
That night Liriene woke at the deep of it with her heart slamming and the room's candle burning, though she had snuffed it — burning tall and utterly still, a flame like a held note, and by its unmoving light she saw her own hands shimmering with summer-road heat, and she sat there in the golden city inside the golden light and understood, for the first time all the way down, that she had walked into the one place on earth most interested in what she was. She did not wake the others. She counted her breath in fours until dawn, and the candle burned without consuming, and in the morning the wax stood exactly as tall as it had at midnight.
She told Odran. Odran looked at her for a long moment, and then began, that same hour, on the roof among the chimneys, her second education: not the sword — Veyron had the sword — but the stillness. "Your blood is a bonfire in a city of lamps," he said. "We cannot make it smaller. We can teach it manners. Sit. Breathe. You are going to learn to bank a fire no one has ever banked before, and you are going to learn it before the blind ones smell smoke."
It was Perrin who secured the thing they had come for — Perrin, and a story, because the best key in the world is a better story.
The king, dying, had one unfulfilled famous wish: he had been, in health, a collector of the north — northern songs, northern hounds, the old cold poetry of the Dawn kings — and the word in the salons was that His Radiance in his shrinking world asked nightly for music no one in the gilded city could play. So Perrin Quill presented himself at the ninth-ring gate as what he genuinely was — the only skald south of the Duskwater who had the true Thornmarch cycle by heart — and was examined, and was passed, and sang for a dying king behind the ninth wall, and came back white as the roses.
But that was the third day of it. Before the palace heard him, the palace processed him, and his companions — "my copyist, my swordsmen; a skald travels with his household or he is a busker" — with him, and so all four of them passed a day and a night in the precinct where the Harmony maintained its living machinery, and saw the two faces of the mending arts.
The Veilmenders' hall stood against the ninth wall like a chapel to competence: cool air threaded with a hundred disciplined scents, rows of glass vessels in every color of the law — crimson tinctures for the body's fire, blue for the mind's weather, green syrups for the moving humors, purple oils, tiny stoppered vials of a gold so pure it hummed. The menders themselves moved like liturgy, aproned, chained at the wrist to their oath-books, and they were kind; that was the thing Liriene kept snagging on. A mender took one look at Veyron's half-healed chest, tutted at the field-dressing, unwrapped it, and dressed it properly with a crimson salve that took the ache out like a hand lifting away — and asked no single question about what manner of blade leaves a wound cold at the edges nine days on. Professional incuriosity, perfected over centuries. Kindness with a door in the back of it.
Through that door: the other face. It happened in a lamplit side-court as they were being walked to the guest cells, a thing they were not meant to see and could not unsee. A mender and two men in thick aprons of boiled leather, masked — and the masks were the wrongness, horned, leering, carved into expressions of glee their stillness made obscene — standing over a barrow, and in the barrow, chained, a boy. Perhaps twelve. Horn-buds at the temples, cat-slit eyes gone huge with a terror that had exhausted itself into silence. Thornborn. The mender was doing the talking, low and gentle, the tone of a man easing a patient toward a procedure, and one of the masked men was testing the edge of a cleaver with his thumb, and the entire scene was conducted with the unhurried administrative calm of a thing done ten thousand times under lawful warrant.
Liriene stopped walking. Veyron's hand closed on her shoulder — not restraint; ballast — and he felt through the leather the furnace of her come up all at once, felt the lamps down the whole colonnade lean in toward them like an audience, and he bent to her ear and said the hardest sentence of his year:
"Not here. Not tonight. We are one girl and three swords inside nine walls, and that boy is one of hundreds, and the thing that saves hundreds is not a rescue." Her shoulder shook under his hand with the effort of obedience. The lamps, slowly, straightened. The procession of aprons and masks passed through a further gate, and the boy's eyes found Liriene's for one instant over the barrow's rim — and Veyron watched her receive that look, and watched her file it, and knew that the age had just acquired one of those debts that get repaid with interest at the worst possible moment, because the girl did not do what he did with unbearable things. She did not put them in the deep place. She kept them on her person, like whetstones.
"There is a face under this city's face," she said that night, toneless, at the window, watching the Aurvane's light gild the roofs of the precinct where the barrow had gone. "The gold isn't a lie. You were right, both of you. It's worse than a lie. It's a frame. It holds the picture so everyone looks at the picture." She turned from the window. "Someone rules this. Not the dying man. Dying men don't administer calm. Someone who never appears has been holding all of this exactly steady for years — the succession balanced, the menders funded, the masks warranted, the under-city sealed. I felt — " she touched her own sternum, uncertain, " — down through the stones, all day, I don't have words that fit it yet. A pressure. Like a hand on the whole city's shoulder. Patient. Sad. Enormous."
Veyron thought of a gravemark coin in a drowned street, trembling and then pointing.
"The Veiled Regent," Perrin said from the corner, and for once there was no performance in him at all. "Every salon jokes about it. The king dies for a year and nothing falls over — who signs? The jest is that it's the king's old chamberlain's ghost. They laugh, and then they always, always change the subject." He looked up. "Nobody in this city wants that riddle answered. Which is how I know it has an answer."
The king asked for the northern songs again on the third night, and this time the summons named the whole household of the skald, because His Radiance, said the equerry with a courtier's blankness, wished to hear the choral settings.
There were no choral settings. Someone behind the ninth wall wanted a look at all four of them.
They went in past whitecloaks — the Whitecloak Concord in full plate the color of first snow, and Veyron marked the one commanding the inner door: young, black-haired, beautiful in the way of a drawn blade, with the Sevenfold star enameled on his sword-hilt and eyes that performed devotion while doing inventory. Ser Cristav Dale. Perrin's salon-gossip had reached even this man: common-born, risen on pure skill at the great tourney six years back, the queen-in-waiting's own favorite once, now colder to her — the arc of a man, Perrin had said, who wanted one impossible thing, was refused it, and has been looking for a grievance large enough to wear ever since.
The king's chamber was the highest room beneath the lowest bough, and the bough came through the wall. That was the famous wonder Veyron had heard of all his life: the chamber of kings built around a living branch of the Aurvane itself, gold bark running through the marble like a vein of morning. What the tales did not say was what he saw the moment he entered, what his paid-for eyes could not politely unsee: where the bough met the wall, the gold was flaking. A scatter of dulled leaves — from the inside bough, the most blessed wood in creation — lay on the marble beneath it, and no servant had swept them, because to sweep them would be to have seen them.
Vael the Second, eighty-first monarch of the Gilded Accord, lay in the bed like the suggestion of a king. He had been a big man; the frame remained; the rest had been called away for more important work, like the color of the roses. But the eyes that turned to them were awake — terribly, completely awake, the eyes of a man who has had a year of dying to think in and no one safe to think aloud to.
They played. Perrin sang the Thornmarch cycle and was, Veyron admitted, magnificent — he sang the cold poetry plainly, no tremolo, the way it is sung at actual northern firesides, and the dying king wept without sound or shame. And when the last of it faded, Vael II lifted two fingers, and the room emptied of everyone whose salary required them to pretend they hadn't been dismissed, until there remained the four travelers, the king — and, arriving through a side door without footsteps, three Loom-Readers.
White robes, red cords. Eyes not blindfolded, as the north told it, but blank — smooth silver from lid to lid, like coins polished faceless. They did not look at anyone, having nothing to look with, and yet the attention that came off them was the most directional thing in the room, and it was aimed, all of it, like three lamps, at Liriene.
"Your Radiance," the foremost said, and its voice was mild and woven, several voices speaking just off-unison, "the guests are received. The weave is confirmed. She is the confluence."
"I know what she is." The king's voice was a ruin with a man inside it. His awake eyes went to Liriene, and what was in them stopped Veyron's hand a half-inch from his sword: not appetite. Apology. "Child. Sternvale's girl. Closer." She went, chin first. "I knew your grandmother," the king said. "The old blood. Winter that keeps its word. And now they tell me — " the ruined voice bent under something, " — they tell me the weave has confirmed what my grandfather's grandfather feared enough to order the east watched, and my fathers feared enough to keep the watching secret even from their heirs. That the two royalties are one flesh. That the coal remembers the forest." His breath ran out; he gathered it back with visible bookkeeping. "They have been in my ear for a season, the white ones. They say the gold browns because the Harmony's anchor fails — that the tree was fixed to the world through a mortal line, in the Dawn, at the first bargain, and the line is spent, and the light dies with it. They say the weave shows one nature in nine spheres that can be made the new anchor." The awake eyes did not leave her. "They ask me to sign an instrument, girl. It has your hour of birth on it. It is on that table. I have not signed it."
The room was perfectly still. One gold leaf detached itself from the bough in the wall and clicked, very lightly, onto the marble.
"What happens to the anchor?" Liriene asked. Her voice was steady. On the sideboard, the candles began, slowly, to lean.
"It is honored," said the woven voice of the Loom-Readers, "eternally," and the mildness of it was the exact mildness of the mender talking a boy toward a cleaver.
"The last anchor," the king said, and now the ruin in his voice was total, "was honored for nine hundred years, and the honoring is why my house has kept the east watched, and why no lorewright may publish what steams on the Sundered Spur, and why, when I ask my own tree what it is fed on, my own tree drops its leaves rather than answer. I am the eighty-first steward of a bargain I was never shown." The awake eyes closed once, opened. "I am dying out of the only chair from which the instrument can be signed, and my daughter will not sign it, which is why the white ones have spent this season teaching my son's mother's family that my daughter is a nature outside its border. Do you understand me, northerners? I am telling you the shape of the war before it happens. I am doing it because it is the only kingly act left in my inventory."
He raised himself an inch off the pillows — the whole remaining man spent on it — and said, to Veyron directly, king to nilcaster, the words no throne had spoken to the fallen blood in two hundred years:
"Get her out of my city. Get her east, where my watchers stopped daring to go. And when you learn what the gold is anchored to — " the awake eyes went, one last time, to the flaking bough, and the apology in them widened to take in the whole lit world, " — decide better than my house did. We knew enough to be ashamed, and we called the shame stewardship, and we have spent nine hundred years sweeping the leaves before anyone could see. Now. Play the third song again, Master Quill, the one about the ice keeping the dead safe until spring. And then run."
The bells of Vel Aurantis did not ring the next morning, and the not-ringing was the loudest thing Veyron had ever heard a city do.
Vael II died an hour before dawn. The travelers knew because Liriene sat up in the dark of the Gilded Goose with her hand at her sternum and said, "The hand just came off the city's shoulder" — and then, in the grey of morning, the bells did not ring, and did not ring, and went on not ringing with a totality that emptied the streets more surely than any tolling. The palace announced nothing. The gates of the ninth ring closed. The gates of the eighth closed at noon.
The city knew anyway, the way a body knows. By evening the price of bread had tripled and the price of green dye and crimson dye had done something obscene, and the whitecloaks were doubled on every wall, and Perrin came back from the salons at a dead run with his silk askew.
"They're both moving tonight. Maerwyn's people hold the river palace and the treasury ring; she's summoning the peerage to renew the oaths over her father's body — which she does not have, because the Septry took custody of the body, citing the offices of the dead, and the Septry is Aldric's mother's uncle. The green lords are gathering at the Sevenfold Basilica. The Loom-Readers walked in procession — daylight, all of them, the whole Loom empty, first time in nine hundred years — to the Basilica an hour ago. And the seventh-ring gate captains have stopped honoring the old passes as of sundown; new passes only." He put his hands on his knees, breathing. "New passes signed by whom, you ask, the king being dead and no crown yet given? That's the detail that should frighten us, friends — the gate-captains weren't confused. Somebody signs, and they all already knew whose mark to honor. The Regent's mark. The city's been sealed by a person who does not exist."
"How long to the north gate?" Odran was already rolling steel into oilcloth.
"That's the rest of it. The north gate's shut. All gates. Nothing leaves Vel Aurantis until a crown sits."
Veyron stood at the window. Below, the sixth ring simmered; above, the Aurvane poured its endless afternoon over a city cocking itself like a crossbow; and in his palm the gravemark coin trembled, and steadied, and pointed — down, and inward, toward the heart of the world.
"The gates are shut," he said. "The under-city isn't. Nothing that old is ever entirely shut; it's why they built the new city on top of it instead of through it — the old streets wouldn't die." He turned. "And there's someone down there I intend to meet regardless. If the person who signs is the person I think it is, then the sealed city is his move on the board, and I want to see his face when he learns what slipped his seal."
They went down at midnight, through a drowned chapel Veyron had marked on the third day, into the buried avenues — and found the dark already lit.
Grace-lamps, browned and dead for centuries, were burning along the old street at intervals: not gold. A deep ember-orange, the color of banked fire, renewed — Odran touched one sconce and his paled eyes went wide — recently. The under-city was inhabited, provisioned, patrolled; they saw the patrols within the first mile and the patrols saw them: figures in dark leathers with horn-crowned silhouettes, moving in disciplined pairs, who did not challenge but escorted, at a fixed distance, closing gently from behind like a hand.
The old avenue ran inward and down, beneath the ninth ring's foundations, and gave at last onto a vaulted square that had been the first city's heart — and there, among the roots.
The roots of the Aurvane filled the cavern like a frozen sea, gold gone deep amber in the dark, and among them stood a court. Hundreds of thornborn — horned, tusked, taloned, the disowned natures of nine centuries, in mended clothes and good order, around fires that burned that same banked ember-orange; children among them; a forge; a school-circle with a slate. Liriene made a sound low in her throat. It was not a court of monsters. It was a town — the tidiest, most patiently governed town they had passed through since Winterhold — built in the dark on the roots of the tree that had thrown every soul in it away.
And rising from a plain chair at the center, unfolding and unfolding to a height that turned the escort-patrols into children, a figure in robes that had been ceremonially rich a very long time ago and had been mended a thousand times since, with a crown of horns no smith had made — grey-skinned, one eye crowded half-shut by an old amputation's scars, the other eye clear, and amber, and unbearably tired, and unbearably kind.
"The Graverider of Bleakhollow," said the Veiled Regent of Vel Aurantis, in a voice like a mountain being polite, "the last master of Kaer Ondral, the honest skald — a rarity, that — and the confluence of the two royalties." The clear eye rested on Liriene, and the enormous patient sad pressure she had felt through the city's stones all week was suddenly a presence in the room, unhooded, and it bent toward her like the flames did. "I have signed this city's instruments for eleven years so that it would not fall over while its betters raced each other to the pyre. I sealed the gates tonight to keep the war from starting in the streets. And I have known you were inside my walls since the candle in the Gilded Goose declined to gutter — I have a mender's bill for the room, little fire; you frightened the chambermaid." Something moved behind the ruin of the face that might, in a kinder cosmos, have become a smile. "Sit. All of you. My name is Cardogh, first-born of the eighty-first king, elder brother of both claimants now purchasing dye — the heir of the Cinder Throne, as the forms would have it, and the forms remember why even when the ninth ring prays they won't. We have until the bells ring to decide, together, what my family's tree is to be fed."
End of Part III.