“Aidan, shut up and eat.”
Kalliaris, Aidan thought, in the darkness of a night punctuated by snoring and moonlight. Give my Da his life back, and I’ll give you anything you ask for. Give him back his life. He was the best. He wasn’t what he is now.
Gods were a tricky business. That’s what his mother used to say. Tricky. They were like a combination of powerful men and crazy dogs; they held all the cards and you never knew when they would turn on you—but when they did, that was it.
So you weren’t supposed to ask for anything, because if they felt like giving it to you, they asked for something big in return, and no guarantees that what they asked for wouldn’t make it worse either.
Aidan’s god of choice was Kalliaris because you saw both her faces, and you knew what she was. Knew she’d frown if she felt like it—and she did, gods knew—knew that you could coax a smile from her when things looked darkest. Smile. Frown. Fact of life.
Give him back his life. I’ll give you anything you ask for.
He rolled over on the patchy mattress. It was far too hot for blankets, although the worst of sunlight’s bite had been driven back for a moment by the night’s grip. He felt as if he’d forgotten something, even something important.
Oh. Right. And thanks a lot for letting me find the fighters. For making that old man let me watch. Thanks. I owe you.
He returned to the hotel’s grand courtyard the next day, slipping in once again with harried merchants, and sliding out from their moving mass with the same practiced ease. Better, because this time he didn’t earn a stray swat across the back of the head as he left. He was worried because he didn’t hear the sound of swordplay.
No. He said he’d be here three days. He said I could watch.
He didn’t speak out loud; there wasn’t much point. But he stopped a moment, just a moment, to wonder if this wasn’t an answer to his prayer. Weighed it: Da’s job, and his life, and this day or two of swords and magic.
Wasn’t an easy choice, and he didn’t much like that it was made for him. But gods were gods as his mother had said. He turned around to go back the way he’d come, and because he was looking at his feet—his toes clipping the ground because they’d grown over the worn lips of his sandals—he walked into the old man.
Old man. Not fair, not really. His hair was still dark, although the whites had gotten to it, and his chin didn’t have that sag that some old people’s chins did. His arms were dark, and his face; and both looked hard, like finished, polished wood. And he wore a sword.
“You’re . . . early,” the old man said when he spoke.
Aidan flushed. “I thought—I thought—”
“That they don’t have to eat? That they don’t have to perform other tasks, other exercises? This is the Challenge, boy, not a sword fight.” The words were harsher than his expression. “They run, in the streets of the high city; they will run for the better part of two hours yet. Tomorrow, we will ride.” He smiled then, softly. “But, yes, boy. In the South, in the Dominion, it is the test of the Sword that defines a man. Even here, in the North, where so much else about power is political and effete, the crowning test of the Challenge is always the test of the Sword. They’ll be back, and they’ll spar.” He smiled. “I am, myself, just newly wakened. Would you join me in breaking my fast?” He waited, and then, after a moment, added, “I am not familiar with all of your language. I am going to eat, and I would like your company.”
Aidan nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
The hotel’s rooms were grander than any rooms that Aidan had ever lived in, and this was not the very finest of the hotels that the holdings boasted—although he’d heard, and who hadn’t, that there were hotels on the isle that were finer by far than any in the holdings could ever hope to be.
He couldn’t imagine it. The cloth merchants had found their customers in everything here: the chairs were covered in embroidered fabric, in plush, heavy silks, all of which were vibrantly, brilliantly colored; the curtains that hung about windows taller and wider than even the jeweler’s in the Common; the knotted throws and hangings that adorned the walls. The walls themselves were pale, but that was fine with Aidan; he found the colors so distracting he almost forgot about the food.
Wasn’t actually that hard to do. There was hardly any bread, and what there was of the food was cold and covered in something that looked sort of like sour milk. Tasted all right—he had to eat it, he knew that much about manners—but he wouldn’t have paid for the privilege.
The actual dishes were nice, though, and he thought about pocketing the silver. Thought long and hard about what would happen if he got caught, and reminded himself that to be here at all was so lucky, he was due for a good dose of Kalliaris’ ill-favor. He left the spoons where they were.
“You don’t eat enough,”’ the old man said.
“I ate as much as you did,” Aidan shot back before he could stop himself. He froze, but the man laughed genially.
“Yes, you did. But you are a young almost-man, and I am an old one; I have built the body I live with, you have not. Come; I’ve paid in good coin for the meal, and I would hate to see it wasted.”
Aidan picked up a spoon.
“Do you watch your own fighters as carefully as you watch ours?” The old man asked the question before the spoon had left Aidan’s mouth.
“If I could,” he replied, around a mouthful of something that had probably once been egg. Bread would be nice. And some cheese. Some meat that looked meatlike. He wondered how much money the meal cost. Worried, for a minute, that he might be asked to pay for part of it.
“Ah. But I believe that there are Imperial soldiers who are practicing within the holdings.”
“Probably. Probably all over. But you’ve got to get a permit, and you don’t get one for a place like this without—”
“Money.”
“Ummm, well. Yes.” Aidan shrugged, self-conscious. You didn’t talk about money, for two reasons. If you had it and someone who didn’t heard you, you might not have it for long—especially with so many strangers from so many places just waiting around—and if you didn’t have it, and someone who did heard you, they were like as not to look down their nose and treat you like dirt.
The old man laughed again. “You are Northern, boy, and I forget myself. I did not—I did not always occupy my present position, and I have had to learn much to live up to it.” He laughed again. Lifted his hand, picked up a stick on the table, and struck something that Aidan had assumed—until that very moment—was a bowl.
It resonated in the air with the sweet, clear note of a bell, of a perfectly crafted bell.
A man appeared out of nowhere; that he was standing at all was the only thing that made him appear not to be groveling.
“Bring us something Northern. Bread, meat. Your food.”
“At once, sir.” He disappeared.
“How many times have the Northern Imperials taken the Challenge Crown?”
“The wreath, you mean?”
“It is formally called the Challenge Crown,” the old man said soberly, “but, yes, that is what I meant.”
Aidan thought about it for a minute. That was all it took. “Just over three hundred. Three hundred and two times.”
“Can you name all of the men who were so victorious?”
“Not the middle ones. The early ones, yes. There was Eadward Wegnson; he was the first. He was the first of the Challenge Champions, and he won the wreath and gave it—gave it to the King Cormalyn’s wife.”
“Yes. It caused unrest in the court, I believe. He was known for his admiration of her—but young men with swords and brawn often admire women of beauty. It was said she was also known for the fact that she returned that admiration.” He was silent for a long while as he stared across the table at Aidan. At last he said, “
In the Dominion, that would have been her death.”
“What? Because he gave her the wreath?”
“Because she accepted it with cause,” the old man said gravely. “A wife has only one husband, and if the husband rules the land, she must be seen to be both pure and untouched.”
Aidan shrugged. “Doesn’t seem fair. A husband doesn’t have to have only one wife in the South. Not like here.”
The old man was quieter for a much longer time. “No,” he said at last. “In the South it is common for a rich man to have many wives.”
“If you have a lot of wives,” Aidan said, and he said it without thinking, “maybe it doesn’t hurt as much when one of them dies.”
Silence.
He looked up, the old man’s face was like stone, like his father’s face the day that Widow Harris had come in, come running from the Common, to tell him that something bad had happened to his wife. He’d had to hobble, he’d had to cling to walls, just to get around, and he wouldn’t do it in front of “that Harris woman.” So he’d stood there, while she urged him to follow, while she offered help; stood there, being a man. Like that. Stone. Aidan had run, at Widow Harris’ side. Because his mother needed someone. But he’d left his father behind.
What little hunger was left in him died the minute he saw the old man’s face. He dropped the spoon, but it fell into his lap, making no noise.
Twice. Twice he’d opened his mouth, said something stupid. But this time—he knew that expression. “I—it’s my father—he—my mother—”
The old man said nothing at all. Aidan knew he wouldn’t. But Aidan wasn’t made of stone yet.
“She died last year. Over a year ago. An accident in the Common. We couldn’t get her to the Mother’s Daughter in time. I didn’t hurt her—that’s what she said, the Mother’s Daughter—she died quickly, without pain.”
“Then she was fortunate,” the old man said coldly. “To die without pain.”
The silence was awkward. Only when the man, forgotten until this moment, came bearing bread and meat and cheese—and fruit!—did the old man speak again.
“You know a lot about the Challenge for a boy who has never witnessed it. You might as well eat it, boy. It is not food that is overly much to my liking,” But even as he said it, he picked up one of the loaves and broke it, messily, in half.
“I went once,” Aidan said. “When I was younger. With my Da—with my father.”
“A good father, then, to expose you to things that are as important as the Challenge.” He picked up the meat with his hands, ignoring the slender fork that rested on the silver tray for just that purpose. Aidan relaxed then, and did the same.
“I think so.”
“How many men from the free towns have taken the wreath?”
“Harder to say.” Hard to speak, too, around a mouthful the size that Aidan had taken. He chewed as quickly as he could and swallowed. “The free towns are made up mostly of people from other places. Mercs that settle down. People that are too poor here to want to stay. Things like that.”
“Spoken,” the old man replied, “like a boy who has grown up in Averalaan. Still, how many men who have claimed the free towns as their homes have taken the wreath?”
“Eighteen,” Aidan said promptly. “But my Da says—”
“And from the Western Kingdoms, as you call them?”
“Twenty-three, although if you break that down, then most of them have come from just one of the five Kingdoms.”
“Let us not break them down that far. How many men have come to the crown from the central Empire?”
“Seventy-four.” He said that without pause.
“I would not be mistaken, I think, if I assumed you could name them all.”
“There was—”
“And I do not believe I have time to hear about seventy-four such illustrious men.” He smiled. “What of the South?”
“One.”
“One?”
“Well, yeah. But he won twice. He was called Anton Guivera.”
“In the South, I believe it would be styled Anton di’Guivera.”
“Oh.” He chewed on that, and on the meat, thinking he should probably tell his father that, and then thinking better of it. “Well, he came from the South, and he won the wreath. Shocked everybody. No one was expecting it. I say, good for him. The North gets too complacent.”
“Your father’s words?”
“Well, yeah, but I agree with him. Anyway, when Guivera took the wreath, he didn’t give it to anyone there—he said it was for Marianna en’Guivera. I think that was his wife. But she wasn’t with him, you know,” he added. “She died in a bandit raid a couple of years before. He hated bandits forever after that. They say, on the way here, he cleared a path between Raverra and Averda all by himself.”
“I believe,” the old man said wryly, “that anyone from the South knows full well the story of Anton di’Guivera. He achieved some fame there for his effort.”
“Here too.” They ate together in a companionable, if delicate silence. “Do you think you’ve got another Guivera here? Di’Guivera, I mean?”
“Here? A master does not discuss his students and their capabilities with any but them.” The old man’s eyes narrowed ever so slightly. “You, however, are no such master. Tell me what you think.”
Aidan hated to be tested, and he was being tested. But the old man had paid for the meal, and besides, Aidan had a sense that he’d know a lie, even a polite one. “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“How can you judge if you haven’t seen the rest of the field?”
Aidan shrugged. “I don’t know. I think that two of ’em are really good, but I don’t think it’s a sure thing. If a man can win the Challenge two years in a row, it’s a sure thing. I mean—that is—I think.”
“Good enough. I don’t know who you are, boy. You don’t know who I am. But we have an interest in common, and I am in a foreign land, far from the comforts and familiarity of my home and my family.
“The testing begins this afternoon, after the midday meal. We will, of course, eat early and late around that test.”
Aidan was silent; he hoped that his lips weren’t moving in time to the fierce, desperate prayer he was repeating over and over.
“You, no doubt, know that this set of tests, incomplete though it is, will result in the choosing of the hundred men deemed most suitable as candidates and allowed to pass over to the isle as competitors.”
Aidan nodded.
“There are probably a thousand, possibly two; most will be passed over instantly.”
He nodded again; his hands had found their way to his lap where he was now wringing them.
“I would be most amused if you would care to travel with my party when we attempt to gain entrance to the Challenge itself.”
AIDAN: II
9th of Lattan, 427 AA
Averalaan, Merchant Holdings
There were some things you didn’t need language for.
Aidan couldn’t understand a word the old man’s students spoke—but he knew from the widening and the narrowing of their eyes that they weren’t much pleased that he was to come along with them. There was even an argument or two among some of the men—but that died the minute the old man came into earshot. At least that’s what Aidan would have thought—but judging from what followed, all of it in words that were completely foreign to him, the old man’s earshot was a damned sight better than any of theirs.
They were humbled.
They shut up.
They ignored Aidan entirely. And he’d learned, with time, that to be ignored by the bigger and the stronger was at worst a mixed blessing. At worst. Today it was just a blessing.
The only uncomfortable moment ca
me when they left the grand building—because instead of walking into the streets themselves, they headed toward the stables.
“What—what are you doing?”
The old man looked down his shoulder at Aidan. “We are retrieving our horses.”
“Why?”
The corners of the man’s mouth lifted a moment. “Because we are riding to combat, be it limited, unsatisfying, or unchallenging; we treat it with the respect combat is due, and therefore go as men.”
“But there are—there are more than ten of you!”
“There are, I believe, thirteen at the moment.”
“You—the streets are really crowded—you—”
The old man’s smile deepened. “Have you never been on the back of a horse?”
Aidan went mute. He wasn’t going to look like a complete fool in front of everyone.
But the man’s voice softened slightly. “Boy, you are young. There is no crime, there is never a crime, in being what you are, in being true to what you were born to. Some struggle and strive to surpass that, and there is no crime or shame in ambition—but to be what you are is the test of any man, be he seraf or clansman, warrior or no.
“You come from the North. Your traditions are not our traditions. Your bravery is not our bravery—but I have seen the Northern warriors, and I have seen them exercise their control and their prowess defending those things that are considered a matter of men in the Empire. I am not a fool; I respect the respectworthy, and I know it when I see it.”
“Wish I did,” Aidan muttered.
“You have good instinct,” was the old man’s reply. “Trust it.”
The horses were brought. They were huge. Far larger than the carriage horses that the rich used, or the wagon horses and mules that the merchants did. One of them, big and black and sharphooved, snapped at Aidan, his teeth closing on the air an inch in front of Aidan’s face.
Aidan leaped behind the old man.
The old man’s students burst into unpleasant laughter.
He spoke sharply, the old man, and one of the men sauntered forward to grab at the horse’s reins. Aidan dearly hoped the huge beast would snap at the closest hand, but no such luck; the demon beast snorted and allowed himself to be led away.
The Uncrowned King Page 3
