The Uncrowned King Read online

  Probably why she’d died.

  He shook his head to clear it; the sun was hot, and there wasn’t enough wind to carry away the smell of sweat and food and horse manure—someone was going to get it for that—and fire. He held his breath past the worst of it; breathed through his mouth until he’d gotten past the thick of the crowd. The tents, with their limp red-and-blue flags, were at his back. But the swords were closer, he was closer to them; he only wanted to catch a glimpse of them, of them and the men who wielded them.

  They never shouted. They never swore. They never spoke when they held their swords. And they didn’t swing wild when they swung. They seemed to know where to strike, and where the other would strike. Magic, he thought. He’d never seen magic.

  And he wanted to.

  This year, he wanted to.

  He hadn’t eaten today. Wasn’t worth it, to try to come up with something to eat. His father had woken earlier than usual because of the heat, and he was in a foul mood. Heat made some people slower. Not his dad.

  Try to understand him, Aidan, his aunt had said. He lost his livelihood and he lost your mother in the same year.

  What about me? Aidan had shouted back. I lost them both.

  She’d nothing to say to that; that’s what she did when he’d said something true enough that she couldn’t speak over it or past it. In the silence, she’d run her hands through his hair—his white, white hair, that had nothing of either his mother or father in it. And that’s the way he wanted it. Here, in the street, drawing closer and closer to the sound of swordplay, of a magic that neither his mother nor his father had had time to dream of.

  The King’s Challenge was a little over a week away.

  In six years, his aunt told him; in six years, he might be big enough to try; he’d be old enough. To find a sword, and maybe learn how to use it. To impress the men who chose among the hundreds of supplicants, and to be one of the challengers.

  Six years ago, he’d believed her. Six years, one at a time, had taken that belief away in bits and pieces, until the only time he had any of it left at all was now, during the challenge season itself. And he kept it tucked away, behind a still face, the words to express it lost with his mother’s and father’s lives.

  He knew that these men had trainers, teachers, weapons that cost more than his father made—when he’d done real work—in three years. Knew that six years from now the only way he was going to even have a sword was if he was lucky, there was a war, and the army was stupid enough to have him.

  That’s what he wanted. At twelve, it wasn’t going to do him any good. But at eighteen—at eighteen, it could change his whole life. So he waited, and he prayed.

  And during the challenge season, he loitered around the fighters, when he could find them.

  It would have been easy enough to catch a glimpse of them in the streets, but Kalliaris had never made anything in Aidan’s life easy. He was used to having to work around her. Barely noticed it, in fact. Now if something went right, he knew it was time to worry; you paid for the good things with bad, and it was always much worse.

  He was stupid, though—he prayed to Kalliaris, same as anyone. He was probably the only boy in the city trying to find men using swords. But he knew this part of the hundred holdings fairly well—there weren’t many places they could be and still be that loud. He stopped, as if he were testing the sea wind, listening to the blades.

  They stopped, and he froze a moment in bitter disappointment. Even started to trudge back the way he’d come, hands clenched in loose fists, face set into the scowl his aunt hated. But he didn’t get far before he heard them again.

  There.

  They didn’t fight in the streets, but close enough to them; the courtyard of the building that housed so many foreigners was open to the traffic of the large manse. Merchants came with the produce that the kitchens required as well as the fabrics that were to be used in the rooms themselves, as curtains and throws and bed-spreads wore with age and use; carpenters came, masons, women from the poorer holdings who were certain to find work during the Challenge season.

  All those people. And between them, if one were careful, a boy too small for his age might sneak, head bowed like a servant or an obedient extra son. It was best, in Aidan’s experience, to come in with the wagons that carried the food and drink. They were often crowded with people, and the people were the right kind. The cloth merchants were more refined, and no matter how well he washed, his clothing was stretched to the point of breaking and he sounded like—like his father’s son, not his mother’s.

  But he wasn’t expected to speak, and if a flustered merchant cuffed him in the head for getting underfoot—and they did—the blow was a light tap compared to many he’d received and it served to push him closer to the courtyard, to the men with swords. How could he mind it? He cursed, but his heart wasn’t in it, and the merchant, still flustered, was already beyond him.

  The steel was ringing in the early morning air. The courtyard itself was dark with shadow, but the men were forced into the sun when they fought; they squinted against the light. So did Aidan. It was cast by polished steel, and the steel was brighter than sunlight, sharper, quicker. You could look away from the sun, but if you looked away from the swords, you missed the fight.

  He counted twelve men in all, although he saw a couple sitting in the shadows cast by awnings that were unfaded by sun, unstained by years of rainy season. New, Aidan thought, for the Festival. As if it mattered.

  What mattered were the twelve men. Two pairs of six, they seemed to fill the courtyard—and the courtyard here was large enough to house the wedding of two children of large, moneyed families. But those people would be vacant spectators, and these men were things in motion, slick with sweat, shiny with effort and the grace of effort. Some wore armor, some did not; he couldn’t tell if there was rhyme or reason to it. He was certain there was, and that he wouldn’t understand it, and besides, if he asked anyone, they’d notice he was here and kick him out.

  The swords were loud here, louder than they had been on the city streets. And no wonder. Twelve men. His head darted side to side, like a bee near a cluster of flowers, and like that bee, his gaze eventually came to rest upon two of the twelve.

  He lost the courtyard, the open sky, the sunlight; what remained was shadow, sharp reflection, and the way the swords spoke where no words could.

  “They’re foreigners, you know,” someone said.

  He ducked his chin into the hollow between his collarbones. He’d learned not to be angry, or at least not to show it; he didn’t have the size to get away with it. But he was angry. He wanted to be left alone. Just that: to be left alone to watch. The Challenge would start soon enough, and then the fighters would vanish across the bridge to the isle itself, where no one without money or cause was allowed to go.

  Certainly not Aidan, the wheelwright’s son.

  Not no one, the treacherous little voice said. Remember, the witnesses. They each choose one witness, from the streets, on the first day.

  Right. A handful out of the whole city. He hated to dream. More than that, he hated that he couldn’t stop it, because he never got what he wanted, he knew he wasn’t going to get what he wanted, and it still hurt when even the chance slowly slipped away, champion by champion.

  This, this sitting, was as close as he was going to get to the real fight. It was closer than he had gotten in far, far too long. He had this, and he didn’t want to lose it.

  But his tormentor wouldn’t take the hint.

  “Why do you come to watch them? If they win, they’ll bring honor to the Dominion, not to the Empire.”

  Aidan shrugged, staring at the swords. At the men. At this man’s shadow.

  The shadow shrugged in reply, the movement more elegant than Aidan’s, perhaps because it held no anger. When he spoke, he spoke loudly, the wo
rds meant to carry across the courtyard’s width. And the language he spoke was only familiar to Aidan because he heard it in the holdings, spoken by the dark-haired, dark-skinned Southerners who somehow escaped the Dominion’s net.

  The two men he was watching so intently froze at once.

  It took him a moment to understand the connection between foreign words and foreign swordsmen; the utter conviction the cessation of all movement held. The two stopped in mid-swing, frozen in place more completely than the statues along the courtyard’s wide, rectangular walk.

  He scrambled to his feet, then, trying to take back his sullen silence, his terrible lack of words. Because the two men looked past him to—to the man who had asked the question. The man he had ignored.

  In a rush, the words came, and he felt his cheeks darken. It almost stopped him from speaking at all. But not quite. Not quite.

  “It doesn’t matter who wins and loses,” he told the man, who appeared to be ignoring him as completely as Aidan had done in his turn. “I won’t see it anyway. It doesn’t matter if they say the South won. Or the North. Or the Northern wolves, and they win most of ’em.”

  Without looking down, the man—and he was old, Aidan saw, older than his Da, older than his aunt, and yet somehow whole and stronger than either of them—said, “Yes, the far North carries the wreath most often. The Queen, Siodonay the Fair, is from the North.” He spoke with an accent. Aidan had heard stronger in the crowded stalls of the Common. But there was something about the words themselves that was different. Better.

  “The South almost never wins,” he said, and then cursed himself. Good. Insult him. Get yourself thrown out, idiot. Kalliaris’ curse. “I—I just like to see them,” Aidan said. “The ones that come—the ones that are chosen—they don’t fight because they’re angry. They don’t get bloody. They just—they just use the swords as if that’s all they know.”

  “Yes.” There seemed to be a question in the dark eyes, and Aidan knew he was being tested. He hated that; he almost always failed tests. But he’d already offended the man once, and he knew that if he didn’t pass this one, he was back out in the streets again. This man, this man, was the trainer. The teacher. He would’ve known if he’d looked up. If he’d just bloody looked.

  “And sometimes—sometimes they get that look in their eyes, on their faces, and you just know—you know who the best ones are. You know the ones that won’t break. They mean it.”

  “Mean what? I’m sorry; my understanding of your language is perhaps imperfect.”

  “I—” He looked away. “I don’t know. They just look like they have it.”

  “You see the fire,” the older man said softly. “We call it Lord’s light. Some men will burn with it, and will be extinguished by the flame they carry. Some will burn, but instead of guttering, they will be tempered. You cannot tell when you first see that flame whether you deal with wood or steel, but it becomes clear, with time.”

  “You—you’re teaching them.”

  “I try,” the man said, a smile turning up just the corner of his lips, and only for a second.

  “Do you—do you teach a lot?”

  “I? In the Dominion, I am not called a teacher,” he said. “I am called a master. I do not teach, as you put it, but rather, I find.” His smile broadened; their eyes met for a moment, and Aidan felt his shoulders straighten out, as if a burden had fallen from them.

  He spoke again, in the foreign tongue, and one of the two men looked, quite deliberately, at Aidan.

  Who cursed every minute he’d listened to Torra and ignored it as foreign babble. “What—what did you say?”

  “I told them,” was the serene reply, “that you have good sight. Vision. You understand what you see. It is . . . rare. They will spar for a while longer,” the old man said. “You may watch as you like.” He turned, and then turned again. “But I must ask a single question. There are almost twelve men gathered here—why are you watching these two? Not any of the others?”

  “Because,” Aidan said, settling back down into bent knees and the known safety of a wall at his back. “They’re the ones who get that look the most. They just—you know that they’re both the best, if you watch’ em.”

  The old man smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I do.” He turned away. “They are unused to the humidity of this city. I would prefer that they fight unobserved; the younger man—not much younger in age, but younger in carriage and bearing—is too aware of his audience if it is large.”

  Aidan said nothing at all.

  “And I explain myself to you, a boy of Averalaan’s many streets.” The words were not said unkindly. “We will be here for three days; after that, I’m afraid there will be no further opportunity for you to bear witness.”

  Aidan nodded, pressing his lips together as tightly as possible in case something stupid came out. He wasn’t good at speaking.

  “I make warriors,” the man continued, “the way some men craft sculptures. And perhaps I, like that young man, still desire an audience that appreciates that work. Even be they,” he added with a slight smile, “as young and untutored as you appear to be. You see well.

  “Come, if you will, and watch.”

  Aidan nodded. And he stayed, shifting position only to catch the shade the walls made. The old man did not speak to him again that day.

  “Where in the Hells have you been, boy?”

  His father’s voice.

  His father’s rooms. He stood, a shadow in the door, a boy looking in on a life that he both wanted and loathed. “The Common,” he said at last. Took too long to say it, too; he could see his father shift in his chair. “I brought food.” It was true. He’d helped Widow Harris with her cart and her mule—and that mule was as difficult as his father—got himself a bruise that was already turning both purple and black, and had been offered food as recompense. She knew.

  “Tell him he’s hiding behind his leg, same as some men hide behind their wives’ skirts,” she said, salty as the sea. “You tell him I said that—tell him it’s a shame to make his boy beg when he’s still got strength and a brain. Well, maybe half a brain, but it’s better than nothing.”

  He thanked her profusely for the bread and the cheese, and her frown got considerably sharper. “Never you mind,” she said. “I’ll just tell him myself.”

  And she probably would, too. That was Widow Harris. But she was busy, and would be until the threeday after the Challenge had been won and lost. She was also pretty noisy, so he’d probably have time to get out of his father’s way and stay out after her visit.

  “Well, don’t just stand there. Bring it in.” He stood, bracing himself against the table, a broadly built man with a back so bent that he looked a foot shorter than his height. He didn’t like the crutch he’d been given by his friends and his dead wife’s family, and it had cost—Aidan knew it, even if his father couldn’t acknowledge the truth—so he hobbled around the house, leaving handprints on the walls, loping like a one-footed giant. Like, Aidan thought, although he never said it, a monster that’s been injured by a hero who can’t be bothered to finish him off.

  In the old house, his mother would have chased him around with a broom, swatting him, which would have been easy. She’d make him laugh, which wouldn’t. Then she’d’ve made him use the crutch. At least she’d’ve made him clean up the handprints and the dirt on the wall.

  But he didn’t want to think about it now; he thought about it every other day of the year.

  Aidan scurried into the room, set the food down on the table. He got a knife that looked like a knife unless you examined its edge and cut the loaf in half. Cut the cheese as well; it was a hard cheese, so it took a bit of work.

  His father sat down, dragging the chair across the floor. They’d had complaints about that in the old place—but it had been a long time since they’d been able to afford a
real home. Here, it didn’t matter much. He went from wall to chair, settling down with a thud, and he sat there for a moment, staring at the bread, the knife, and his son.

  What his father said next nearly killed Aidan.

  “Got some work.”

  Tricky situation, that.

  He almost believed his father. He did believe his father. But he didn’t trust his own beliefs anymore. He wanted to walk a little closer to his dad to see if he’d been drinking. Probably had, but it wasn’t so bad if he had to walk by to check on it, and Aidan was grateful for the little things life offered. Especially today, when it had offered so much.

  “Doing what?” he asked, before the silence got uncomfortable. His dad liked to take silence and build accusations out of it. Especially when he’d been drinking.

  His father shrugged, deflated. “Wainwright needs some help. Merchants are coming in from all over the continent—and they’ve wagons that need repair, wheels that need either righting or outright replacement.”

  Which wainwright?

  “What’s the matter? You don’t think your old man can be useful around wheels?” Large hands slapped flat out against the kitchen table; it teetered. The floor was sloped beneath one of its legs, and no one was going to fix it; a wobbly table was just another fact of life. Like weather. Or anger.

  “No, Da, I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t say anything.” His father picked up the bread as if it were a weapon. On the other hand, it was a pretty hard loaf.

  “I was waiting for you. To finish,” Aidan added. “To finish telling me about it.”

  “Not much to tell. There’s work, and I’ve got experience.” He grimaced. “Not much but experience. It’ll do for now.”

  “What—what happens after?”

  His father shrugged. It was the single gesture that Aidan least liked.

  “Maybe if you do a really good job—maybe if—”