Within the Hollow Crown

by Antoniazzi, Daniel

  So there was Vye, about to go to her feather bed, when a messenger had arrived at Hartstone Castle. Lord Endior had sent two hundred men to kill Lord Rutherford. Over Vye’s strenuous objections, Count Michael Deliem decided to put a stop to this nonsense. He sent his best diplomat, his High Lieutenant Landos, to negotiate a peace. But he also sent Lady Vye to keep the peace.

  It probably sounds strange, sending two people to stop an army of two hundred. In case you’re not a mathematician, those are terrible odds. Even so, Michael trusted Landos to figure something out. The level-headed diplomat could get the best terms out of even his mortal enemies, and make them feel good about those terms.

  And if Landos was sent for his smile, Vye was sent for her right arm. Her right arm was pretty tough, and many men could testify to the hurt it could cause when swung in a bar brawl. But when you combined her right arm with her sword, she was nigh unstoppable. All two hundred soldiers on that battlefield had heard of Vye, and they knew not to fuck with her. She wouldn’t be afraid to take them on. She would lose, no doubt, but the bookmakers would set the over/under on dead Endior soldiers at fifty. You read that right.

  Vye was simply one of the best combatants in the history of the Kingdom. She was gifted and skilled in other areas, but the one thing she had worked on, the one thing she was always great at, was her swordplay. She was at the head of her class until she was thirteen years old.

  Then something happened. Well, two things happened, right on her chest, which changed the way the men in her life treated her. Her father started trying to find her a suitor. Her brothers challenged other men to fights over offhanded insults against her. Her peers stopped asking her to show them that cool maneuver with the sword and starting talking about her beautiful dark hair, her beautiful blue eyes, and other beautiful parts of her she would just as soon they hadn’t mentioned.

  So Vye literally had to go to a class of her own. Most people would have been satisfied with the considerable level of mastery she had achieved, but she knew she could be better. She left. Her father objected, of course, since he had finally found a man that he thought would be appropriate for her. But she would have none of it, and he knew better than to disagree with his brightest, if most female, child.

  So she trained with Tallatos, a reclusive Sword Master in the Hilwera Mountains in Khiransi. Tallatos had trained Kings, Knights, Templars, and entire armies in his youth. And while he obviously noticed those two ever-more-prominent features on Vye’s chest, they didn’t distract him. She wasn’t his type.

  He did not teach Vye a technique, or a series of maneuvers, or tricks, or feints, or how to connect with her totem animal. In fact, when he described his method, he said there was only one lesson, and it took years to learn. And the lesson is this:

  “There is nothing but steel.”

  Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Well, before you open a neighborhood dojo and charge people for that lesson, know that it is deeper than just the words. Vye had strength, agility, focus, perception, speed, and intelligence. But it was this lesson that elevated her to a new echelon of talent.

  “There is nothing but steel.”

  When Vye first heard it, she scoffed. Had she left her Father and her Brothers, abandoned her home, and traveled thousands of miles to hear an old man say that meaningless sentence? It turns out, she had.

  The complexity of the lesson was in its simplicity. Of course, in the end, you practice all those maneuvers, tricks, and feints. Of course you practice holding your sword parallel to the ground for three minutes. Yeah, you wax on and wax off with the best of them when training with Tallatos, but the focus of his instruction was just that simple concept.

  “There is nothing but steel.”

  “What if they have a shield?” Vye protested, a month into her training.

  “It is part of the steel. It is a sword without a point.”

  “What if they’re faster than me?” She inquired, another month into practice.

  “Speed requires movement. Anticipate where the sword will be and hit them where it won’t.”

  “What if they have armor on?” She pressed, now a year after leaving her home.

  “Even a man covered cap-a-pie can be toppled. He has allowed the steel to dictate his movement. Use that against him.”

  “What if I’m outnumbered?” Vye insisted. But Tallatos never lost patience. He had trained the best fighters of the last three decades, and they always had questions.

  “There are only so many blades that can reach you at one time. Do not count your enemies. Count the steel that is within thrusting distance. That is your only concern.”

  A big part of Tallatos’ instruction was that the steel, that is, Vye’s sword, had a limited amount of use before it became ineffective. How many times could she swing her blade before the motion was noticeably slowed? Vye learned to keep track of her swings throughout her sparring sessions. Tallatos could stop a dual at any time and ask for a tally. As Vye got better, he wouldn’t stop fighting when he started asking.

  The idea was to know your limits and strategize accordingly. If Vye could swing her sword sixty-six times before her arm fatigued, then she should press her attack at fifty-one to try and finish the combat, and she should retreat at fifty-six and use her last good swings to cover her escape.

  After three years of training, Vye got her swing count up to one hundred, seventy-one.

  So Vye returned to Deliem as a Sword Master, a title that meant nothing to the locals. And she didn’t understand, at her age, how much more advanced she was than her peers. She had assumed that her former peers had trained only slightly less than her. She was confident she could beat almost anyone, but she thought it would be close.

  It wasn’t. Vye was superior to every opponent she faced. And she had plenty of opponents to deal with. A feud between the Vyes and the Staffords had become bloody, and her father and two older brothers were dead. She returned just in time, rescuing her younger brother, Luke, from a terrible siege and rallying Stafford’s forces back to the borders.

  The skirmish on the border raged on for two days before Lord Lagos Stafford himself charged to the front lines. It was two days, or so the legend goes, because that’s how long it took Stafford to get his armor on. His armorer was largely inspired by the armadillo.

  So there was Lady Vye, on foot, facing down Lagos Stafford and his heavily barded Clydesdale. A lesser fighter would quit the field. Any other general in any other battle would have surrendered and saved his hide. But Vye knew something nobody else knew. She realized what nobody else noticed.

  There is nothing but steel.

  Horse in full barding plus a knight in plated armor plus a shield plus a sword. That’s a lot of steel. But it was all heading in the same direction. Despite the sheer volume of steel, it was, in the end, one very clumsy attack. Vye spun aside, a matador against the charging steed. She finished the spin with a hard tap on the underside of the horse. Not enough to kill it, but enough to spook it.

  The horse reared, almost throwing its rider. Stafford was an expert horseman, so he managed to keep his seat. But he learned his lesson. Vye wasn’t going to fall under the charge, and his horse was uneasy from the cut. He dismounted, stomping up to Vye, every step a low-grade earthquake under his metallic boots.

  They engaged in a melee. Stafford was confident he would outlast Vye. After all, his armor was far superior to her skullcap and chainmail. But Vye was confident she would win the day. Because she knew the guy who made his armor. Stafford’s armor allowed for a wide stance. This was both to facilitate riding a horse, but also so that his legs could support a lunge during a fight on the ground. Vye played him like a fiddle. She teased him into a lunge, letting him stretch his right leg all the way out.

  And that’s when she feinted left, dove right, and slipped her sword up into his exposed crotch. There is nothing but steel. Unless your armorer didn’t give you a codpiece.

  If you ever want to see an entire army run away with their
balls between their legs, have them watch their Lord fall to the ground while a woman pulls a bloody sword from his manzone. No fight has ever ended faster. It took Lord Stafford a couple of hours to bleed out. In theory, she didn’t like that every man in the Kingdom crossed his legs when she entered the room. In public, Vye took umbrage at the insults calling her a castrator. But secretly, she relished the title.

  So, Vye and the surviving Staffords called their overlord, Count Michael Deliem. And Michael dispatched Landos to negotiate the terms of the peace. Luke Vye, Lady Vye’s brother, became Lord of the House of Vye. Maybe that seems unfair, but these weren’t the most enlightened of times. However, there was one man who recognized the injustice in that promotion.

  Michael knew that Lady Vye wasn’t some berserk, perpetually PMSing witch. She was a skilled warrior. And she was smart. And Michael needed a Military Advisor. Yeah, a couple of eyebrows went up when he appointed a woman to that traditionally testosterony position. But nobody was foolish enough to say it to her face. And Michael didn’t care. He wanted the best person for the job. And Vye respected Michael. While she was sure he had taken a peek from time to time, she never managed to catch him staring at her cleavage.

  Which is why, when a messenger arrives and says Lord Endior is about to kill Lord Rutherford, the Count sends Landos to negotiate, and Vye to make sure Landos comes back alive. Vye was relieved to see Landos finishing his conversation with Endior’s Captain.

  “They’ve agreed to leave,” Landos said, just as Endior’s men filed for the gate. “They’re going to march to Hartstone, and we’re going to put them up for the night.”

  “What did he do?” Vye asked, looking at the silhouette of Lord Rutherford standing at one of his third story windows.

  “He tried to sleep with Endior’s daughter,” Landos said, and sighed. Before Vye could say what he knew she was going to say, Landos continued, “Look, I just had to promote Lord Endior’s cousin to Magistrate of Merrick.”

  “What about the current Magistrate of Merrick?” Vye asked.

  “He’s going to become Steward of Fort Lockmey,” Landos said.

  “What about the-“

  “Don’t worry about it,” Landos said, waving his hand around. “I’m having enough trouble keeping it straight in my mind.”

  “He always gets us into this kind of trouble.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you think we should do something about it?”

  “Like what? We can’t have him killed for being an idiot.”

  “I’ve killed people for less.”

  “I’m going to bring it up with Michael. We’ll see if he has any ideas.”

  “Well, I’m going to knock on the door and see if Lord Rutherford has enough wits about him to get me a hot tea.”

  Lady Vye turned her horse and headed for the main gate. Landos sighed, looked at the departing army, and followed her.

  Chapter 3: A Glorious Quest Worthy of a Librarian

  Jareld and Thor dismounted outside the cave as the sun glinted over the watery horizon.

  It was the seventh cave they had stopped at that morning, the first six having nothing but a lot of turcle, red dirt, worm-glue, splishle, and glipp. They had started looking in caves from the first light of dawn, even though they had arrived in the area at sundown.

  “I don’t want to go into caves at night,” Jareld had said. “There might be a sleeping bear.”

  “Better a sleeping bear than a waking one,” Thor had argued.

  But in the end, they had decided against it. The drizzle had ruined most of their torches, and they were tired. As they entered the seventh cave this morning, however, they were getting frustrated. There was no sign of Sir Dorn or the League of the Owl. For Jareld, even the possibility of finding a relic of the League of the Owl…

  It was Jareld’s favorite story, because it was sad and because it was true. More than a hundred years ago, King James II, easily everyone’s favorite historical King, ruled the land. King James believed that the wealth of a country could be measured by the prosperity of its common people, not its nobles. Many had spoken this sort of rhetoric before, but few knew how to do anything about it.

  Count Wallace, in the third century of Rone, gave away all the gold in his castle to the poor. But the gold just ended up being collected by various gangs of bandits who ran amuck around the land. When Wallace tried to get things under control, he found that the soldiers wouldn’t do what he told them to. Not if he couldn’t pay them.

  In another instance, a generous Baron tried to build a house for every family in his land. He started the greatest wood excavation in history, and organized dozens of carpenters, architects, and masons to build good homes for everyone. Unfortunately, he chose to chop down a forest that was inhabited by the Great Spiders, a group of six-foot-tall arachnids. These spiders didn’t so much build webs and capture their prey as they did bite people’s heads off. After the death toll reached three hundred, the Baron abandoned his silly idea about generosity.

  But King James II knew how to do it. He knew how to control the import-export ratio, how to use tariffs to ensure domestic growth, how to levy taxes as a means of supporting the farmers, and how to promote the arts, including traveling circuses, acting troupes, and small bands of musicians. Nothing sexy. Just good, clean governing.

  He was also the first to organize the law of the land. “One Standard for Every Man,” he said, establishing an edict of all the laws that everyone was beholden to. It was called the King James Standard. There were two hundred, thirteen laws in the first part of the document, which ran for seventeen pages. The second part of the document, which lasted another eighty-eight pages, described the rules for settling disputes. The law was established in a hierarchy, from local magistrates all the way to the King himself. Certain decisions could be appealed. Certain ones couldn’t. The law could not get involved in certain situations, but was mandatory in others. Barristers were appointed to every court to ensure that the rules were followed.

  But James didn’t want the hierarchy to be so strict that the King’s ear couldn’t reach the far lands. And so he formed the League of the Owl.

  They were the elite knights. The best of the best. They were practiced in martial skill, were pure of heart, charitable, defenders of the weak, champions of the poor, and chaste.

  But the skill they needed above all else was an ability to understand and enforce the law. They were sent out to represent the King in all matters of the law, and if they happened to get little Timmy out of the well and chase off the ruffians that were attacking the town, all the better.

  The trials and triumphs of the League are well documented, but Jareld couldn’t help but obsess over their tragic end. As James’ reign brought prosperity to the Kingdom, the Queen was kidnapped. In the ensuing chaos, the King and the League chased after the kidnappers, and ended up fighting the Great Wyrm Devesant in the Caves of Drentar.

  Only one Knight survived, Sir Dorn of Arwall. He was a young knight. Unproven. But he was the only one who returned to the Kingdom of Rone, though it was without the bodies of the King, the Queen, any of his fellow League members, or the King’s Sword, the Saintskeep. In the century since, many have tried to find the Saintskeep. Most of these treasure hunters would go to the Caves of Drentar and try to find the Dragon’s lair. Those that survived long enough to encounter the Dragon did not live long enough to tell anyone about it.

  Jareld was not a treasure hunter. He was a historian. He would have been perfectly happy discovering the location of the missing sword on a map and then calling it a day. Unfortunately, the only credit he hadn’t earned from the Towers of Seneca was his field study. Things started going wrong about three weeks ago.

  “Master Gallar!” he had called, “Master Gallar, come see what I’ve found!”

  Gallar was the Master of the Towers, the head instructor at Seneca. He was in the middle of teaching some students about the Battle at Cliffhaven when Jareld had burst into th
e classroom.

  “Jareld,” Gallar said, “I am in the middle of a class.”

  “I know,” Jareld said, pausing to gasp for air, “But this is important.”

  Jareld collapsed his hands onto his knees, panting heavily. He was good at many things, but those things all required him to sit at a desk, so he was not inclined to run up three flights of stairs as quickly as he just had.

  “A great many things are important,” Gallar said, “Like the Battle at Cliffhaven.”

  Gallar waved at the maps on the wall, which he had been using to demonstrate the movements of the armies involved. Jareld caught some semblance of his breath.

  “The Battle of Cliffhaven,” Jareld said, “Is rubbish. General Williams used the high tide to corner Avonshire’s men.”

  Gallar threw his arms in the air. “You just ruined the best part.”

  “This is about the Saintskeep,” Jareld said, in a loud whisper. He wasn’t trying to be secretive. He was just catching his breath. Nonetheless, the students in Gallar’s classroom did their requisite murmuring and whispering in response to Jareld’s statement. Gallar immediately pulled Jareld outside the classroom.

  “What are you talking about?” Gallar demanded, once they were in the ground floor library.

  “The Saintskeep,” Jareld said. “I’ve found something. Look.”

  Jareld pointed to some open texts on his workstation. “This is an account of Prince John’s, a copy of his journal that we recently acquired from Anuen. Now, we’ve looked this over before, when we visited the King last summer, but we finally have our own copy. Look at this.”

  Jareld opened to a marked page and began to read, “’Tonight, finally, we might have some answers. The East Tower rang early in the night, and I was summoned to the Royal Chambers.’ See?”