Chapter 81: Three Doors Left

The Nation of Sphel met the Black Tithe on the fifty-fourth day, and the Hall of Champions, for the first time in its history, did not know whom to cheer.

The Seven Sorrows had come early. They sat in the Terrace in the pale morning, with their coats buttoned and a flask of Nerissa’s tea passed from hand to hand, and watched the benches fill. It was the first match of the Ember’s round of sixteen, the only match that day, and it had been the talk of the city for a month. The Tithe were the most feared guild on the Roll. The Nation was the one that nobody could explain. And between them, by the luck of a jar, they had been set down to fight one another, on a Trial that the blind dwarf had drawn on the eve of it, with a hand that Fel thought was not quite steady.

It was called The Ledger.

“I’ve never seen it drawn,” said Torren, in a low voice. The old man was sitting very upright, with his big hands on his knees. “There’s a thing in the old books. It’s said that when a guild comes to the Hall that’s owed a very great deal, the Urn will give it, at the last, a Trial that suits it. I don’t know that it’s so. It’s what they say.”

The Floor rose. It did it with a long hushed grinding, and this time it made no maze and no island and no field. It made a room. It was a long, high, narrow chamber of dark wood, in the middle of the sand, lined from floor to ceiling with ledgers, and in the middle of it, under a single hanging lamp, there stood a table with two chairs. The rest of the Floor was empty. It was the only thing that Fel had ever seen the Wheelwrights build that was quite small.

They came in at either end. The Tithe walked in a line, as before, with their hands folded, in their good black clothes, and sat down at the table in an orderly row, with the old silver-whiskered gentleman in the center chair. He had laid his stick across his knees. He had, Fel saw, a very kind face. It was the face of a man who has spent fifty years reading wills. And across the table, in a second row, in a hush so deep that one could hear the lamp sizzle, the grey coats of the Nation came in and stood, all seven, without sitting down. Behind them, borne in by four bearers and set at the end of the room, under the draped cloth, was the chair.

“Mr. Aldous Crake,” breathed somebody in the row behind. “That’s the old one. He’s called in a hundred and eleven debts, they say, and he’s never once missed.”

The rule of the Ledger was read out. It was simple, and it was terrible, and it was said in the Herald’s mildest voice, as one reads a recipe. A guild that had been entered in the Ledger by the other, by the writing of its name in a book of the other’s choosing, and the stroke of a pen, could not lift a hand against it. That was the Trial. A single stroke, a single name, and the thing was done. The first guild to write the seven names of the other into its book would win. And in the middle of the table, on a small silver stand, there lay a book. It was the plainest thing in the room. It was bound in black. It was open at the first page, and across the page there ran a long line of rules, in a small beautiful brown hand, and on the line, in a neat row, seven pens.

It was the oldest and the quietest of the Trials, and the Tithe had won it, Torren said, eleven times.

Mr. Crake took up a pen. He did it with great gentleness. He dipped it, and wrote, in a small round clerk’s hand, with his tongue just showing, a single name at the head of the page, and the lamp over the table dimmed a little, and a cold went out of the book.

Fel felt it. It was like a hand on the back of the neck. It was the sort of cold that a man feels on the stair at midnight, when he knows that there is somebody on the landing. He saw Sister Iselda put up a hand to her face. He saw the tallest of the grey coats, the long thin man Lucan, with a bandage across his nose, put one foot back, and set it down, like a man taking a step in a river. He saw a small white blot, no bigger than a thumbnail, bloom on the sleeve of the nearest of them. It was the first name. It had been entered.

And the woman who spoke for the Nation of Sphel, who had not moved, who had not even looked at it, said, quite pleasantly, in the great stillness:

“Oh, Mr. Crake. You have written it very nicely.”

She said it with real admiration. She stepped to the table. She did not sit. She looked down, with a small mild head-tilted smile, at the book, and the pens, and the neat brown hand, as a lady looks at a child’s drawing. And then she put out one plain, square, work-reddened finger, and laid it flat on the open page.

The ink went out.

It did not smudge. It did not run. It was there, and then it was not, as a breath is on a glass, and the white blot on the sleeve went with it, quite gone. The old man’s pen stopped. He looked at it. He wrote a second name, with the same care, and it was gone before he lifted the nib. He wrote a third. And one by one, quite quietly, in a silence that seemed to thicken with every stroke, the old gentleman of the Tithe wrote the seven names of the Nation of Sphel into the book, and Iselda’s finger lay on the page, and he watched every one of them go out.

It was not that she was fighting. That was the thing that Fel could not get over. She was not. She stood at the table with her round placid face and her grey wool and her hand at rest, like a woman who has leaned for a moment on a gate, and the great black machinery of the Ledger, which had broken lords and levelled cities, went through her as water goes through a sieve. It was not strength. It was simply that there was, in the whole of that small dark chamber, nothing at all for it to hold.

Aldous Crake put down his pen. He sat for some time with his hands upon the table. He had gone a dull dead gray, and all along the row of his company, the young and the old, the notaries at the funeral, there was not a face that was not quite still. And then something began to happen to the lamp.

It was a small thing. It went from a gold to a white, and from a white to a very dim blue, and in the very center of the room, round the draped chair, Fel saw, with an awful and distant clarity, the air close. It did not make a sound. It was like watching a hand close slowly over a bird. There was a sense in the place, on the instant, of a great quiet regard, of an attention that had turned, from a long way off, to look at a small clean room, and had found it interesting. The cloth on the empty chair did not stir. But the ledgers on the walls, all six thousand of them, one by one, in a long rolling whisper, went blank.

And under the Floor of the Hall of Champions, in the pits, among the five hundred great pistons and the beams of dwarven oak, a single dull deep vibration began, like a bell cracking.

It was the Grace.

Everyone in the Hall knew it, in the instant that it went. It was a thing that they had never in their lives thought of, any more than they thought of the floor beneath their feet. It had been laid in the stone ten thousand years before. It had held, through every fight of every Cup, a thin invisible web of old runework over the white sand. And for the space of perhaps three seconds, on the fifty-fourth day, it went out. It went out under forty thousand people. It went, in a single dim chilly shudder, like a lamp in a draught. And the Marshals of the Floor, all thirty-three of them, who were at their posts around the chamber with their long white wands, cried out, as one man, and ran.

It came back. The runes flared. The air eased. A long ragged groan went up from the whole of the bowl, and Mr. Aldous Crake, who had been sitting like a statue, put both hands over his face. And across the table, Sister Iselda took her finger from the book. She looked at it, a moment, and wiped it on her skirt. She looked round at the Marshals, who were staring, and at the thousand pale upturned faces, and she put a hand to her breast, and said, in a tone of the sincerest apology:

“Oh, dear. I am so sorry. That was not intended. My lord is quite particular about the Hall.”

She turned to the old man. “I think that we should call it, Mr. Crake. Don’t you?”

He lowered his hands. He did not look at her. He looked, slowly, down the whole length of the narrow room, past the grey coats, to the end, where the empty chair was standing, with its cloth hanging straight, as it had stood from the beginning. And he rose. He rose with great difficulty, with the help of his stick, and the six behind him rose with him, and they stood in a line, like men in a church.

“The Tithe withdraw,” said the old gentleman. His voice was thin, and quite steady. “We have no claim upon the Nation of Sphel. Let it be written. The account is closed.” He bowed, to the chair. It was a deep bow, and quite sincere, the bow of a man who has seen the end of his trade. “Tell your lord, if you will, that Mr. Crake of Tarn Belgrave presents his compliments. And that in forty years he has not been so relieved.”

It was over in nine minutes. And the Nation of Sphel went out of the Hall as it had come, in a file, without a word, with the chair above them, and in the whole of the stands there was not a sound. It was not respect. It was not fear. It was only that forty thousand people had been shown the size of something, quite calmly, by a woman in a grey coat, and had not yet found a place to put it.

Torren had a hand over his mouth. He took it away, very slowly.

“That’s not a lieutenant,” said Torren. “That’s a door. That’s what’s left when the thing behind it has used the door for a thousand years.” He stopped. “The Grace, lad. She put out the Grace.”

“It wasn’t her,” said Fel.

He had not known that he was going to say it. He was staring at the empty Floor, where the dark wooden room was sinking, board by board, into the sand, and at the place where the chair had been. He had seen, for a moment, in the space of the three seconds, with his eyes shut and the lines all round him, a thing that he did not have a name for. It was not a thread. It was the place that a thread would be, if one pulled it out. A single enormous round dark absence, a mile across, like a well, and the whole Hall hung over it like a leaf on a pool.

“It wasn’t her,” he said again. “It was whoever was looking.”

Nobody answered him. Veyra’s hand had found his, in the dark of the bench, and was holding it very hard. And two rows away, among the benches of the Ember, a tall lean man with a bandaged nose, who had been going out with the rest of the grey file, stopped, and turned his head, and found Fel across the whole breadth of the Terrace. He lifted two fingers to his temple. It was a salute. It was exactly the Peacock’s.

* * *

The house on Lampwick Close was a very quiet house for twenty days after that, and Torren, who had once held the north door against a hundred and thirty men, was found by Nerissa at three in the morning on the roof, looking at the right mountain, and was not mentioned again. They trained. Orrin and Nerissa made a thing, a long soft chord of water and sound that did not hold a blow but turned it, so that when Torren struck it with Maude the hammer rang off into the dust like a stone in a pond. They called it the Lull. They practiced it until they could make it in their sleep.

And on the seventy-fourth day, in a cold bright dawn, they went to the Hall to fight the Brazen Drovers.

* * *

It was a Trial called The Hunt of the Black Boar, and it began, like most of them, with a smell.

It was the smell of a forest. The Floor had made one, in the night, a dense dark oak-wood of bracken and hollow trunks and twisting roots, with a gray sky of tatters over it and a smell of wet leaves, and it had done it very well. The oaks were the size of towers. At either side of the wood there lay a clearing, with a pen of stakes, a rope gate, and a heap of rough hay. And somewhere in the middle of it, in the green shadow, like a barrow in a field, there lay a beast.

No one had seen it. It was in the rules. It was only said, in the Herald’s rolling voice, that the Black Boar of Corvane was a creature of the Floor, a thing of iron and oak and the old dwarvish craft, and that it was to be brought down, by whatever means, and drawn, dead or alive, into a guild’s own pen. The first to do it had the Hunt. It did not say how big it was. It said only that nobody had ever finished a Hunt in less than an hour.

The Drovers were Raskian cattlemen. They were big, brown, easy, red-cheeked men and women in leather and wool, with the huge slow humor of people who have spent their lives shifting beasts three times their own weight, and they were led by a woman who might have been Brannoch’s elder sister. She was a head taller than anyone in her company, with shoulders like a yoke, a great plait of iron-grey hair down her back, and a pair of enormous bare forearms covered with scars. She had a coil of rope over her shoulder, as thick as an arm. She had a laugh like a bullock in a barn. And as the two guilds came out to the edge of the wood, she looked down, from a very great height, at the Seven Sorrows, and grinned from ear to ear.

“Ballast!” cried Hrodna Brazen. “You ugly old ox! They told me you were dead!”

“They told me the same about you,” said Torren, with a growl, and an expression of the most violent happiness. “Hrodna. By the Stone. You’re fat.”

“I’m comfortable,” said Hrodna Brazen. She threw her great arms round him, and lifted him off the ground. “The Drovers are very sorry, lad. I’d have you know it. We’ve the oldest of respects for the Warden of the North Door. But it’s a Hunt. And I do like to win a Hunt.”

“Put me down,” said Torren, with muffled fury.

They went into the wood. It was a thing that Fel was to remember, afterward, with a kind of helpless laughter. It was a hunt for a boar the size of a barn, in a wood the size of a town, and the two guilds went into it as a pair of hounds go after the same hare. They did not fight. They raced. They went in at a dead run, through the bracken, past the great grey boles, with Thara and her lightest of feet scouting the tops of the oaks, and the Drovers, below, tracking by sign, by a slow broad patient method of looking at the ground, and a long slow murmur of cattle-words, that Fel did not understand.

It was Thara who found it. She came down out of a tree in a long rustling dive, and landed with a thump, and said, quite white, and very quietly:

“It’s not a boar. It’s a hill.”

It was breathing. They saw it in a moment, from the lip of a hollow, in the green light. It lay curled in the dell like a thing asleep, a vast dark rounded mass the height of a house, covered from head to rump in a coat of black iron bristles, and its flank rose and fell, rose and fell, with a low rumble like a furnace. It had a snout. It had tusks. They were curved, and grooved, and each as long as a wagon. And as the Seven Sorrows crept to the lip of the hollow, in the dark of the trees, it opened a single small black glass eye and looked at them.

It rose.

It did not charge. It stood. It rose from the dell with a noise of rending, like a house being lifted out of its roots, and an avalanche of leaf-mold and old iron roared down its sides. It was forty feet at the shoulder. It bore its head low. And it gave one long, shrill, squealing scream, which went through the wood like a saw, and came on.

“Scatter!” cried Veyra.

They scattered. It was all that they could do. The great beast came through the wood like a landslide, and the oaks fell before it like corn, and Fel, running sideways with his heart in his teeth, saw Brannoch plant his feet and raise the shield, and be flung twenty feet, and go through a tree, and heard Veyra’s arrows ring from its brow like peas on a drum. Torren was bellowing. Thara was screaming. And from the far side of the dell, sudden and tremendous, over all, there rose the clear deep wild laughing roar of Hrodna Brazen:

“Ropes! Ropes, you great lumps! Throw the ROPES!”

They had them out. They had all of them, the whole seven, from the sling at their backs, a coil of rope as thick as a leg, with a hook, and they hurled them with the practiced slow swing of men who have thrown ropes at bulls. The hooks bit in the bristles. The ropes went taut. And the great boar, with seven lines running to its hide, stopped dead, in the middle of the dell, and swung its head.

It was a very old trick. It was how a bull is taken, in the high pastures, and it would have worked, and Fel saw it in the instant that it must. But the boar was not a bull. It was nine hundred tons of iron, and it turned its whole bulk, with a squeal, and swept the Drovers off their feet like pins. They went, in a row, through the air. They landed in a heap, with their ropes still in their hands, and the beast, with a snort, turned its head toward the Seven Sorrows.

“Brannoch!” shouted Fel.

He was already there. He had come back out of the broken tree, with the shield on his arm, and a long cut on his brow, and he did not say anything. He never did. He planted his feet in the soft earth, wide, in front of the beast, and drove the butt of the great spear into the ground behind him, and braced the shield, and looked up. Fel had never seen him look at anything so. It was a very gentle, steady, patient look, like a man looking at a wave.

“Now,” said Fel. “Brannoch, now! Stand!”

He gave him, with both hands, the whole of the weight that he had.

He had never done it to a living thing. It was the most dangerous of the laws, and the one that Torren had forbidden, because a man can be crushed by his own gift. But Brannoch was not a man. He was a wall. And Fel took from the boulder, and the oak, and the shattered tree, and the very floor of the wood, through the long gold lines of his own body, as a river is taken through a sluice, and gave it, with a roar, to the great silent grey shape in front of him. He gave him a mountain.

The beast struck. It met the shield, head down, at the full run, with a crash that shook the whole Floor, and the shield did not move. The mountain did not move. Brannoch sank an inch into the earth, with his teeth bared and his eyes shut, and the nine hundred tons of the Black Boar of Corvane stopped, as a wave stops at a rock, with its tusks buried in the ground to the root and a great slow shudder going through its flanks.

“Now!” cried Veyra.

She had been up a tree. She had been up it all the time. She had an arrow on the string with a wooden head, as she always had, and a small thin cord on the arrow, and she loosed it, over the beast’s back, to the Drovers’ side of the dell, where the great grey-plaited woman had got up, and caught the cord, and, quite calmly, pulled. It drew a rope. It drew a second. In a moment, the whole dell was laced with line, a net, from tree to tree, and the Drovers, whooping, ran with it round the boar’s legs, and the Seven Sorrows, from the other side, ran with theirs, and the creature, unable to move, with its snout in the ground, began to scream.

“Together!” bellowed Hrodna Brazen. She had both hands on a rope, and her boots in the leaves. “On the beast! Pull it together, you lazy sons of rams!”

There was a very short pause. And then, for the first time in the history of the Cup, as far as anyone could tell, in the middle of a Trial that was meant to be a race, the two guilds put every rope into one hand, and pulled.

It took the whole of them. It took Torren and Hrodna side by side, shoulder to shoulder, roaring. It took Fel, who took the weight from the beast’s four legs, and passed it into the leaf-mold, one at a time, so that it staggered, and came down on its knees. And it took, at the last, a thing that Fel did not think of, until it was done. It was Orrin. He was standing alone at the edge of the clearing, with the staff, and his eyes shut, and he hummed. It was a very low, deep, quiet note, and it took the thing’s own scream and laid it down, like a child, and the boar, which had lived by its voice, stopped, and swayed, and lay on its side in the wood, with the great black eye half closed.

It was dragged to the pen in an hour and eleven minutes. It was dragged by fourteen. It was a very ugly business, and a long one, and they sang, the Drovers, as they hauled, in a deep rolling cattle-song that Fel did not know. And when at last the huge iron head came through the rope gate, to the stakes of the Seven Sorrows, and the Marshals’ wand fell, Hrodna Brazen sat down in the leaves, quite abruptly, with her hands over her face, and laughed until the tears ran.

“I’ve lost,” said Hrodna. “I’ve lost a Hunt. To a child with a tin of rope. Oh, it’s the best thing. Ballast, you old fraud, I’d not have it any other way.” She wiped her eyes. She looked at Fel, with enormous and affectionate approval, from under a rough brow. “You’ve a thing in that boy, Warden. I’ve not seen it since the old days. I’d not like to be the man that stands in front of it.”

“It’s a Peacock,” said Torren, with a faint, wicked, satisfied smile. “Wait and see.”

* * *

The Order of the Luminous Eyebrow met them in the quarter-final, on the eighty-sixth day, in a room made entirely of glass.

It was a Trial called The Hall of Reflection, and it was, to Fel’s quiet and permanent delight, the one in the Urn that Torren feared least. The Floor made a long gallery, a hundred paces by sixty, floored and walled and roofed with polished mirror, and into the middle of it the two guilds were set down, at either end, in a blaze of light, and told to find one another. The first to touch the other’s captain, with a hand, had the Hall. It could not be done by striking. It could only be done by knowing, and in a gallery of ten thousand mirrors there were a great many people to be known.

The Eyebrow came in a stately file of seven. They were scholars, and looked it. They were long, grave, bespectacled men and women of Dun Vurrim, in gowns of an ink-dark blue, with great stiff white collars and square caps and, in the middle of every brow, a small steady glowing mark like a pearl. They carried books. They were of the oldest college in the city, and for four hundred years they had studied nothing but light, and the way in which it can be told a lie. At their head, with a face like a long white sheep and a pair of immense, grey, silky, luminous eyebrows that went up and down like the wings of a moth, walked a tall stooping man of sixty, with a scroll.

“Ignatius Prattle, Dean of the Luminous Eyebrow,” said the Dean, to the whole Hall, in a high, precise, well-bred bleat. “I am bound, in fairness, to tell the Seven Sorrows that I have read a good deal about them. There is a paper. I do not wish to boast. It is a very thorough paper, and it has footnotes, and it concludes, in the light of the evidence, that your company is fundamentally unserious.” He lowered the scroll. His eyebrows rose, with great sorrow, to his hair. “I regret it. We turned you down, you will recall, in the autumn. We did it in perfect good faith. Our records show that you were, at that time, a rabble.”

“We’re a better rabble now,” said Thara, and stuck out her tongue.

It was not a quick fight. They had expected that. The Dean clapped his hands, and the whole glass hall, in a sudden silent flash, was full of people. There were fourteen of them, and then forty, and then, as the Eyebrow began to chant, a vast crowd, an army, a whole great tide of Seven Sorrows, in every mirror, on every side. They were all of them exact. They had Brannoch’s slow tread, and Orrin’s long stoop, and the little pink flush on Nerissa’s cheek, and they moved, in every glass, in a vast bright terrible mime, and the whole room whirled. Fel put out his hand and touched what he thought was Veyra, and it was cold, and it was glass, and Dean Prattle’s voice, a long way off, bleated: Fundamentally unserious. Please note.

“Everyone stop,” said Fel.

He shut his eyes.

He did not need to shut them. He had found, in the course of the winter, that he could see the lines with them open as well. But it was easier so. And when he looked, in the way that he had learned in the dark, at the vast bright seething crowd of the ten thousand mirrors, he saw the oddest thing. There was nothing there. There was not a thread. There were no golden lines, in any of the figures, in all the room, save seven. They were quite plain. They were as clear to him as the stars. They were scattered through the hall, one by a pillar, one at the far wall, one in the doorway, and every one of them was a person he knew. Every false thing was a bright blank. Every real one was a rope.

“Six o’clock,” he said, in a clear, calm, carrying voice. “Four paces. Brannoch, the one with the book. Veyra, left, behind the pillar, the thin one with the stoop. Torren, there. The one with the line.”

“What?” said Veyra.

“The copies have no lines. The real ones have. The ones that you can see, the copies, there’s nothing in them.” He was laughing. He could not help it. “It’s like a picture of a rope. Look at the one that’s holding the scroll! He’s got one the color of a lamp!”

It was the Dean himself. He stood in the middle of the ring, quite still, with his glowing brows drawn together, and his pearl-bright forehead shining, and for the first time in four hundred years of the Order’s history, a man had seen straight through him. He put his scroll behind his back. It made no difference. Fel went across the hall at a run, with his eyes shut, in a long low light dash through the fake Seven Sorrows, over whole armies of the false, and put out his hand, and touched the old man on the elbow.

“Oh, dear,” said Dean Prattle. He looked at the hand. He looked at the lines of the mirrors, where his creations were going out like sparks in a wind. “It’s not in the paper. It was entirely outside the model.” His eyebrows rose to the very height of the scholarly grief. “I shall have to make a note.”

* * *

On the evening before the semi-final, a letter came.

It was brought to the house on Lampwick Close at the second bell, by a young man in white and teal livery, on a silver tray, with a seal of blue wax. It was very short. It had been written in a large flowing hand, on a thick cream paper, with a perfumed edge, and it said, in full:

The Master of the Gilded Peacock Academy presents his compliments to the Seven Sorrows, and wishes it known that, with regard to the Trial of the morrow, the Open Lists, he has been compelled to remark that the Academy’s dignity is of a nature that does not permit it to fence with six children and a Warden, one at a time, in public, for a whole afternoon. He proposes, therefore, in a spirit of the greatest graciousness, to accept the champion of the Sorrows’ own choosing, whichever it may be, and to allow the remainder to remain, in the benches, at their ease. He has no doubt that it will be the boy.

He remains, with every confidence, V. B.

Fel read it twice. He passed it to Veyra. She read it, standing, with her mouth set, and the faint pink in her cheeks deepening to scarlet, and gave it to Torren, who read it aloud, in a voice of enormous, quiet, growing joy.

“It’s allowed,” said Torren, at the end. He put the letter down. He was shaking. “It’s in the Rules. A guild may name a champion. The Peacock may name one. It’s a thing that’s never been done, because no man in his right mind would. They’ve to meet, in the lists, in the sight of the Hall, in turn, one against twelve, or against all. He’s proposing, lad, to put the Academy in the field, every one of ‘em, and let it go on till somebody’s tired. I think…” He broke off. He wiped his eyes. “I think that he thinks it’s an insult.”

“It is,” said Veyra.

“I want to do it,” said Fel.

They all looked at him.

He had not expected to say it. He had not, in fact, known that he meant it, until it was out. He was standing on the hearth-rug with his hands at his sides, in the firelight, and he said it again, quite slowly, and found that there was nothing in him at all that wanted to take it back.

“I’ll do it alone,” he said. “The whole Academy. All of them. I want him to see it.”

“You do not need to,” said Veyra. She said it very gently. She had come close, and her violet eyes were on his face, and there was no scorn in them, and no fear. “We are seven. It is the thing that we have been, from the beginning. I have no wish at all to sit in the Terrace while you fight twenty alone.”

“I know.” He turned. “I know it. It’s not that. It’s, it’s…” He did not have the word. He looked for it, in the fire, in the long pale ghost of a handprint that he had seen on a high cold cheek, in the long walk across the sand with the whole Hall laughing. “It’s him,” he said, at last. “He looked at me, in the Rotunda, the first day. He looked at me like I was a thing on his shoe. He looked at all of us. And I thought, I thought that I’d never be able to put it right. And I can.” He drew a breath. “I don’t want to hurt him. I’d just like him to see.”

There was a long silence. It was broken by Brannoch. He had been sitting in the corner, with his chin on his chest, and he lifted his great grey head, slowly, and said, in the deep slow gentle voice that none of them had heard for a month:

“Go on.”

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

It was all that he said. It was enough. Nerissa, quite silently, had put her hand upon Fel’s arm.

* * *

It was the ninety-second day, and the whole Hall had come.

Torren said afterward that he had never seen the bowl so full. They had sold the standing-places on the very rim. They had put boys on the roofs, and sold the roofs, and in the vast wintry light, the whole of the white Floor was ringed by a living wall of faces. The word had gone round the city. The Peacock had challenged the crumbs. The Master had spoken. And they came, from the pubs and the Wards and the Terraces, and sat in their forty thousands, with their pies and their programmes, to see an arrogant lord, in front of the whole of Dun Vurrim, put a farm-boy in his place.

The Floor made the lists. It made them very handsomely. It was a long, level, grassy field, a hundred paces by forty, with white railings and pavilions, and banners, and at either end a great gaily-striped tent. It was the field of a tournament in a story. It was the very last thing in the world, Fel thought, as he walked out on to it, that he wanted to be in.

He walked alone. He had left them at the barrier. He had two swords at his hip, Falling Star on the right and Krashing Fyr on the left, and a plain grey shirt, and the old green coat, and he was not at all afraid. He found that out, to his surprise. He was cold, and a little sick, and very awake, and every golden line in the whole stadium was singing, like a field of grass in a wind.

They came out of the opposite tent in a double file.

There were twelve duelists in white and teal, with rapiers drawn, and their chins in the air. And behind them, in the glitter of her cuirass, with her cold nose and her long hard black eyes, walked Cassandre Vaunt, with a long straight sword in her hand. And last, in a coat of blue silk shot with gold, so cleverly cut that it seemed to breathe, with a hundred small bells upon his skirts and a train of peacock feathers fanning out behind him in a vast, glittering, trembling circle, Lord Valentin Brightcrest came across the grass at a slow and stately walk.

He stopped at the center of the field. He put up a hand, and the heralds’ trumpets fell silent.

“I will say,” said Lord Valentin, to the whole Hall, in a voice like a golden bell, “that it is a singular pleasure. I have been told, by a number of persons whom I respect, that the Seven Sorrows possess a very remarkable champion. A young man of unusual parts. I have the greatest curiosity.” He turned his head. He looked down, over the long arc of his nose, at Fel, from a distance of ten feet, with an expression of the most exquisite and amused patience. “The boy. Of course. I did not doubt it. I have sent for the finest of the Academy, in the hope that we may make the thing educational.” A little ripple of laughter, in the stands. “I trust that you will not take it ill. We shall go in order, I think. In rank, and in age. It is only civil.”

“My name’s Fel,” said Fel.

“Is it?” said Lord Valentin. He smiled.

The trumpet sounded.

The first of them came at him at the dead run. He was a young man of twenty, very handsome, very tall, and he held his rapier in the Academy’s manner, point up, in a long straight line like a candle. He came on, in three perfect steps, and lunged. It was a beautiful lunge. It came out of the stillness like a snake. And Fel, who had spent a year with Torren Ballast’s maul, and a winter with a wind, saw it, in the clear cold light, as one sees a leaf fall. He did not parry. He put his weight into the grass, and stepped.

It was the Feather. It was a thing he had practiced a thousand times. He went away from the point as a thistle goes from a breath, a long light gliding step to the left, with the rapier passing a hair’s breadth from his ribs, and as the young man came by, overbalanced, with his arm out, Fel laid the flat of Krashing Fyr on the back of his knees, very gently, and gave it a hundred pounds.

The man went down on his face. He did not even cry out. He lay in the grass, and tried to rise, and couldn’t. His knees, for a moment, had simply become too heavy for him to stand. A great shout went up. It was not a laugh. It was the astonished roar of forty thousand people at a thing that they had not seen.

He took the second as he turned. He took the third and the fourth, in the long rushing dance, in a single movement, with Falling Star drawing a line of light behind it, and a duelist went down at every stroke. It was not that they were weak. They were not. They were as fine a company of swordsmen as there was in the Realms, and their blades flashed and wove and sang, and every one of them would have beaten any man in Fel’s village. But they fought a swordsman. And Fel, in the great still white heart of the lists, with the golden lines round him like corn, was not any longer anything so simple. A rapier was a line. It was a thin bright thing of steel and weight and wrist, and he could find it, and touch it, and give it two pounds, or two hundred, in the middle of a lunge. They found their blades dragging. They found them leaping out of their hands. A man who had been drilled since the age of six in the perfect, effortless, instinctive use of a point found, in the space of a breath, that it weighed as much as an anvil, or nothing at all, and that he could not tell which.

He took the sixth with a Kiss. It was the first time that he had used it in a public place, and it was a good one. It took the young woman on the shoulder, and sent her, spinning, forty feet through the air, into the straw bales at the barrier, with a soft thump, and a long round oh from the Hall. He took the seventh and eighth together. He took the ninth in a double parry that sent her rapier into the sky, and when it came down, point first, it stuck in the turf in front of the Master’s feet, and quivered. He took the tenth, the eleventh, the twelfth. He did not stop. He did not look up. He heard the Hall, in the dim far distance, like a sea, rising and rising, a vast hoarse tidal wave of sound that he had stopped hearing. And when the twelfth of the young duelists of the Academy sat down in the grass with his blade in his hands, and took off his hat, and began, quite quietly, to cry, Fel looked about him, and saw that the field was empty. There was a woman, in a gleaming cuirass, standing thirty paces off. She had not moved.

He was breathing very hard. He had a cut over his eye. He had lost a button. And the long, hard, black-eyed woman in the cuirass regarded him for a long moment down the length of the field, with her sword at her side, and then, very slowly, raised it, and saluted.

“Cassandre Vaunt,” said the Mistress of Arms, in a low, level, rather beautiful voice. “I have the honor to be the Academy’s sword. I do not hold with insults, and I did not draft the letter. But I am bound by the Master’s word, and I will tell you, Fel of the Seven Sorrows, that I have waited for it for sixteen years.” She took a step. “Defend yourself. I do not wish to be the second to lose to a thing that I do not understand.”

She was the best that he ever fought.

It was a thing that took a very long while, and was seen by no one, in the whole of that great bowl, as it was meant to be. For it was in fact a conversation. It was a long, quiet, courteous, desperate exchange of three hundred strokes, in the sun, between two people who each understood the other’s art, and each saw through it. She came at him in the old Academy form, and her point went through the air like a needle through silk. He gave it nothing. He moved. He found the line of the blade and danced it, and she shifted, and cut, and the point scored a long thin hot stripe across his cheek. He did not feel it. He heard the Hall gasp. And he saw, with a sort of grateful horror, that she was using his own trick. She was reading him. She was listening. She did not fight the blade. She fought the weight, in the hand that held it, and every time he laid a hundred pounds on her rapier, she let the blade fall and went under, and cut, and in a long gliding ring of steel she had him back to the very rail.

He thought, quite coolly: I can’t beat her at her own thing.

It was an odd moment. It lasted perhaps a quarter of a second. He saw himself against the white rail, with his two swords crossed, and the long straight point, steady as a star, a foot from his throat, and the lady behind it, grave and lovely and entirely unafraid, and he knew that he could not do it with the Hang. He could not do it with the Feather. She had them both. And so he did the thing that Torren had said he must not, that no one had ever done.

He took the weight out of the point.

It was not the blade. He had tried the blade. It was the thrust. It was the little bright line of intention that runs from the hand to the end of a sword, in the instant before a stroke, and is, in the end, the only weight that matters. He found it. He laid his hand on it, as he had on the wind. And he drew it out of her, through his crossed swords, into the floor, as a man draws a thorn, and the long straight rapier of the Mistress of Arms, in the middle of a perfect lunge, stopped.

It simply stopped. It hung in the air, a hand’s breadth from his throat, as light as a feather, and no force in the world could have driven it a hair further. She looked at it. She looked at him. And Cassandre Vaunt, who had waited sixteen years, lowered her sword, with a kind of slow wonder, and began, in a voice of the sincerest and deepest delight, to laugh.

“Well,” she said. “I yield. I yield. That’s what he meant.” She tapped her cheek, in a gesture quite unlike her. “Master, I do not think that I can assist you further.” She bowed to Fel, a deep and formal and perfectly sincere bow, and walked off the field, and sat down on the barrier in the sun, and put her face in her hands.

Fel turned.

Lord Valentin Brightcrest was standing exactly where he had stood at the start. He had not moved a foot. The bells at his hem were quite still, and the great shimmering fan of the feathers hung motionless behind him. His face had gone quite white. It was not fear. It was the face of a man to whom something has happened that is not on the list. There was a very long silence, in which forty thousand people drew breath.

“Well?” said Fel.

“This is, of course, an irregularity,” said Lord Valentin. His voice was perfectly steady. It was his eyes that gave him away. “I did not anticipate. The Academy has been, I think, served by a trick. A man of breeding does not engage a mountebank.” He drew his rapier. It was a thing of great beauty, a long blade of blue steel set with sapphires, with a hilt of gold, and he held it before him, in the First Position, with the point toward Fel’s heart, and his chin in the air. “Defend yourself, boy.”

“My name,” said Fel, “is Fel.”

He did not hurry. He walked across the grass. He put Falling Star back in its scabbard, and Krashing Fyr in the other, and he walked, with his hands empty, across the last ten paces of the lists, and Lord Valentin, with a short, sharp, almost frightened lunge, ran him through the middle of the body.

Or tried to. It was a clean thrust, and it was beautifully done. But the point, which had been going at the speed of a swallow, met the green coat, and the plain grey shirt, and slowed, and dragged, as if it had been put into honey, and stopped, a finger’s depth from the skin, with the sapphire hilt going round and round in the Master’s glove. Fel had put out a finger. He had laid it, as lightly as a man lays a hand on the neck of a horse, on the blade.

“It’s a lovely sword,” said Fel.

He let the weight go.

It was a small thing, as these things went. It was no more than a hundred pounds. But it was a hundred pounds, all at once, on the end of an arm that had been trained for sixteen years to hold a feather, and the Master’s wrist went down, and the point went into the turf, and the great silver-and-sapphire blade, with an ugly, and entirely unmusical, clank, lay flat on the grass, and could not be lifted. Lord Valentin pulled. He pulled with both hands. His face was scarlet. He put his foot on the blade. He pulled, and the sword did not so much as quiver, and the little silver bells at his waist began, one at a time, in a long tinkling cascade, to ring.

Because the bells were heavy. All hundred of them. And the coat. And the long shimmering peacock train. And the heavy gold pins in the glossy hair, and the rings on every finger, and the thousand pearls on the cuff. He had put it on them very gently. He had done it in a breath, as he went by, through the long fine golden lines of the silk, one at a time, as a man might lay a hand on every flower in a bed. It was not much. It was only, he supposed, about three hundred pounds, all told, and spread out a little. But it was enough. It was enough to bend a lordly back, and drag a vain man down, by a hundred small insistent cords, to his knees, in front of the whole world.

He went down very slowly. He could not seem to help it. His hand went to the turf, and the other, and the peacock feathers settled, in a vast gleaming fan, over his shoulders, and he knelt, in the dust of the lists, in his blue-and-gold silk, with his nose a foot from the grass, and the whole of the Hall of Champions rose from its seats with a roar that shook the sky.

It was not a cruel sound. It was a great, loud, relieved, delighted bellow, as of a city that has been waiting for a thing for a long time. It went on and on. It went on for a full two minutes. And in the middle of it, in the white stillness of the field, Fel crouched down, so that his face was on a level with the other’s, and said, very quietly, so that no one in the world could hear:

“I’m not going to hurt you. I don’t want to. I only want you to say it.”

“I will not be dictated to,” said Valentin Brightcrest, through his teeth. His voice shook. “I will not be… by a farm-hand, I…”

“The lady,” said Fel.

He did not look round. But he did not need to. For a shadow had fallen across them both, and there was a faint cool scent in the air, of rain and pine, and a pair of small, steady, well-polished boots stopped on the grass an arm’s length from the Master’s nose.

Veyra had come out onto the field. She had come in the middle of the uproar, in her sea-green coat, with her bow in her hand and her braid over her shoulder, and no one had stopped her, because no one, in that moment, would have dared. She stood looking down. She looked at the peacock train. She looked at the sapphire sword. And Lord Valentin, with his face on the ground and his nose in the dust, did not lift it.

“My lord,” said Veyra, very softly. “You will recall that at our last meeting I struck you. I regretted it for some time. It was not, I think, a proper thing. I am told that it is not the done thing to hit a man in the face, however much he may have asked for it.” She paused. “I should therefore like to offer, in all courtesy, to not do it again. If you will say, now, in your own voice, in the hearing of this Hall, that the Seven Sorrows are a guild of honest people. And that I am a lady. And that his name is Fel.”

There was a pause as long as a held breath.

The bells rang, very faintly, as the Master shook.

“The Seven Sorrows,” said Lord Valentin Brightcrest, into the grass, in a small, clear, horrible, strangled voice, “are a guild of honest people. The lady Veyra is a lady.” He swallowed. “And the, and his name…”

“Go on,” said Veyra.

“His name is Fel,” said the Master of the Gilded Peacock Academy. He lifted his face. It was streaked with dust and tears. And for the first time in all the time that Fel had known him, there was nothing in it at all that he could dislike. It was only a white, narrow, bewildered face, that of a man of thirty-five who has been told for his whole life that he was very fine, and has just found out what it cost. “I yield the Academy. The Academy yields. Oh, by the Stone, will someone please take off my coat.”

The Marshal’s wand fell.

He did not hear the rest. He was lifted, at that moment, by a hundred hands. They were Torren’s hands, and Brannoch’s, and Thara’s, who was shrieking, and Orrin’s, which were shaking, and Nerissa’s, which were cool and tender and wet with tears, and they bore him up, off the grass, over the heads of the Marshals, and out of the lists. And in the whole great round white stadium, in the shining light, forty thousand people on their feet were roaring one word. It was not the name of a guild. It was not the Seven Sorrows. It was a name that nobody, except a woman in a village on the edge of the world, had ever said much, in the whole of his life.

Fel! Fel! Fel! Fel!

He thought, in the middle of it, that it was an extremely odd sound, and that he would not mind hearing it again. And then, quite suddenly, with a hand locked in his, and a violet-eyed girl walking beside him, with her chin up and her cheeks scarlet and her eyes shining, he found that he was laughing, and could not stop.

“You were magnificent,” said Veyra, in his ear. “I should not say it. It will make you impossible. But you were. And I should like it recorded, at some point, that I am very much obliged.”

* * *

It was a week before anyone could walk down the Wards without being stopped.

They were stopped by bakers, who pressed on them loaves in the shape of two swords. They were stopped by small boys, who followed them in a long delighted line, bearing wooden sticks and calling each other Valentin. A tailor in the Sill Road hung a sign in his window that read, in letters a foot high, Heavy coats a specialty. A bard of Orvandel wrote a ballad that rhymed peacock with shock, and Thara sang it at all hours until Veyra locked her in the cellar. And the Master of the Gilded Peacock Academy, who had not been seen since the evening of the semi-final, was said to have left the city by night in a closed coach, with the blinds drawn, and a very large box of feathers.

It was not, however, the end of him. On the third day after, a tall lean woman in a cuirass rang at the door of Lampwick Close, and stood in the rain, and would not come in. She was Cassandre Vaunt. She held out a long bundle in old white leather, and when Fel unwrapped it there lay a plain rapier of fine blue steel, with a hilt of black iron and no jewels at all.

“It was mine at nineteen,” said Cassandre Vaunt. “It is the sword with which I beat a very large Warden of the North Door in a friendly bout, and I have wondered for sixteen years how I did it.” The cold black eyes went past Fel to the old man in the hall. “He let me. I saw it, in the lists. It is what a man does for a young person who may come to something. Win your Cup.”

She was gone into the rain, with the long swinging stride of a person who has finally put down a stone.

* * *

They met the Salt-Crown Corsairs on the ninety-fifth day, for the Brass, in what Torren called the wettest Trial in the history of the Cup.

It was The Tide Hall. The Floor, which had been so many things, flooded. It took a quarter of an hour. It filled the whole disc of white stone, with a long drumming roar, with a dark green sea, thirty feet deep at the center, shoaling to a beach at either end, and in the middle, rocking, crested, white-capped, it raised two ships. They were small ships, a pair of racing sloops, brand new, bare of cannon, with a single mast each, a pennant at the truck, and a long plank run out from the gunwale. The Corsairs’ was black, with a skull-and-crown on the sail. The Seven Sorrows’ was white. And between them, in the rolling surge, lay a hundred yards of open sea, and in the middle of it, a bell on a buoy.

The Trial was to board the other’s ship, and strike the colors. It was an old Reach game, the oldest in the Drowned Reach, and the Corsairs, who had never lost a fight on the water in nine years, came out on their deck to the music of a fiddle, in the full bright joyful insolence of a company that has been born in a boat.

There were seven of them. There was a huge Raskian, with a hook for a hand, that Fel had seen in the line, and a thin brown boy of fifteen with a crossbow, and two women with cutlasses, and an enormous bald man who was said to be a sort of cook. And at the wheel, with her great black hat on the back of her head and her salt-white braids flying in the wind, in her ragged blue coat, with a cutlass over her shoulder and a wide white crooked grin, stood Ysolde Brine. She raised the hat. She swept it, in a long, theatrical, mocking circle, to the white ship across the water. She shouted, in a ringing voice, that carried to the benches:

“Ahoy, the Sorrows! Mind your feet, my loves, it’s wet!”

And the sea answered her. Fel saw it, in the first minute, with a long cold throb of dismay. The water came up. It rose in a long green mountainous swell, with a hundred fathoms of weight behind it, from the back of the Floor, at the Corsairs’ end, and bore the black sloop forward on a hill of foam, with all her canvas set, as a champion rides a horse. And the white ship, at the other end, in a trough, as the whole roaring wave came down, lay dead.

It had been Ysolde’s way for nine years. She had no magic. It was said that she hated it. She had only a thing that the Reach folk call the Set, the long trained knowledge of the sea, in the hands and the feet and the marrow, that tells a skipper the next wave before it comes, and the next, and the one beyond that. She had read the Floor. She had read the Wheelwrights. She knew, as a man knows his own hand, which of five hundred pistons would lift, and when, and by how much, and she rode them, with her fine-boned sunburnt hands light on the wheel, like a woman playing a harp.

“Nerissa,” said Fel.

“I know,” said Nerissa.

She had gone up the mast. She did it very quietly, in her long grey dress, with her hair about her shoulders, and she stood in the white sloop’s crosstrees, thirty feet above the deck, with her bare feet on the spar, and put out her two hands, and closed her eyes.

He had never seen her do it in the open. She was a river nymph. She had spent her life in the long green dark of streams, and she had said to him once, in the kitchen, that she was not much good at the sea, that it was too big, and too salt, and had too many opinions. But she was a thing of water. And as the black ship came down the hill, with a roaring gale at its back and its crew along the rail with cutlasses drawn, the whole of the wild green sea, in the sight of forty thousand, turned its head.

It was a very slow thing. It began as a ripple. A long dim glimmering shiver, about the white ship’s keel, and the water, which had been heaping up, with its great gray crest on the point of breaking, paused. It was a river’s pause. It was the pause of a deep slow pool at the turn of a stream. And the whole wave, a hundred yards across, curled gently away from the white sloop, with a long grave sigh, as a dog curls round a person it knows, and passed, and ran away to the back of the Floor.

“Well, shiver me,” said Ysolde Brine, from the black ship, in genuine admiration.

It was the first she had ever been answered. They had a long minute of it, those two. It was a duel of seas. Ysolde gave her a swell, and Nerissa a lull, and Ysolde a roller, and Nerissa a ripple, and the two ships swung about each other over the green floor in a long slow dance, with their pennants cracking, the white sloop at rest in a circle of glass, and the black one, in the surf, careering round, like a hawk about a tower. It could not have been won. It was only, Fel saw, the fact that one of them was a pirate, and the other a river, and that the sea, in the end, does what rivers ask.

“Orrin,” said Fel. “Now.”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, from the deck, with his two long hands about the staff, and his voice a little faint, “that I have, as of this minute, not been seasick once.”

He hummed.

It was the Lull. It rose from the white ship, in a wide soft spreading chord, and the water took it up. It took it as a bell takes a note, and carried it, out and out, in a ring, to the farthest edge of the Floor, and where the chord went, the sea settled. The great swells sank. The whitecaps fell. The wind, which had been roaring in the black ship’s sails, died to a whisper, and the proud sloop, with her canvas hanging empty, drifted, a hundred feet from the white, in a sea as flat as a plate.

Ysolde Brine looked at her slack sail. She looked at the green glass of the water, and the small, tired, shivering nymph on the mast of the white ship, and the tall blue singer at her feet, and she began, very slowly, to smile.

“Oh, you clever little things,” she said. “All right. If it’s to be that. Boarders, my hearties! Over the side!”

They came across the water in a long raking charge. They did not swim. They ran. They had cork on their boots, and a little iron lantern at their belts, with a coal in it, that hissed on the surface, and they came skimming over the glassy sea in seven long flying strides, light and quick as water-boatmen, with the huge Raskian leading, hook high, and the crossbow-boy behind. It was a sailor’s trick. It had been taught to them, by the old Reach men, a hundred years ago. And no one had ever got through it.

But Fel had been waiting.

He stood alone on the deck, at the foot of the mast. He had Falling Star drawn. He did not look at the boarders. He looked at the sea. And he said, in a clear low voice, to the long grey shapes that were running at him through the light:

“I’d stop.”

They did not stop. He had not thought they would. He bent, and laid the point of his sword on the rail, and shut his eyes, and gave the sea a weight.

He did not give it to all of it. He gave it to a thin broad circle, forty feet wide, round the white ship, a skin of water no thicker than a coin. It was the same thing that he had done to the stone of the Painted Ring. He gave it, in an instant, all that he had. And the thin skin of the sea, which a corsair’s cork boot could have walked upon, grew so heavy, in the course of a breath, that it was no longer water at all. It was lead. It was a ring of liquid iron, and the boots of the Corsairs went through it as a spoon goes through a jelly, and they stopped, in a line, with a long, deep, round, bubbling oh, up to their waists, and hung, and could not be pulled out.

Ysolde Brine, the last of them, came skimming over the crest of it at a run, with her sword held high, in a leap, as a gull comes at a fish. She landed lightly on the white ship’s rail. She stood there, one boot on the wood, one in the air, with the cutlass at his throat, and the other hand on the mast, and it was only by about a finger-breadth that she had missed.

“Aye,” said Ysolde Brine. She was looking down at the hooked and sinking figure of her crew, and the water in a ring, and the very small, dishevelled, dripping boy at the foot of the mast, with a sword on his shoulder and a look of faint apology. “Never lost a fight on the water in nine years, I said. I did say that, didn’t I, love?”

“You did,” said Nerissa, from the crosstrees.

“I did.” The pirate lowered the cutlass. She took off her hat. She looked up at the white mast, and the nymph, with her hair in the wind, and a very wide, crooked, honest grin, that Fel had last seen on a cat, spread over the brown face. “It’s a marvelous thing, to lose. I’d quite forgotten. It’s like a bath.” She put out her hand. “The colors are yours, my loves. Take ‘em. And I’ll tell you what, to the little water-witch. You’ve a lesson to give me on the sea. I’ll give you a hundred if you’ll teach me to ask.”

She jumped. She went over the rail, with a whoop, into the ring of lead, and was fished out, laughing, in a net.

* * *

The Nation of Sphel played its final on the ninety-sixth day, against the Glass Bishops of Tarn Belgrave, on a Trial called The Last Candle. Fel did not see it.

He had meant to. But as the Floor rose, and the grey file came onto the sand, and the empty chair was carried in, he found that he could not look. He sat with his eyes on the sky and listened. There was a long, dull, hushed groan from the Hall. There was the sound of seven great windows breaking, which the Glass Bishops, it appeared, had been, and the faint dry clear voice of Sister Iselda, saying Oh, my dear. And when it was over, he found that his hands were wet.

The Ash was on the ninety-seventh.

It was the Wardens of the First Furnace against the Company of the Ninefold Road, and the Floor made a hearth. It was a great circular stone room, with a vaulted roof, and a single fire in a black iron grate the size of a house, and round it seven chairs to a side. The Trial was called The Long Watch, and it was the oldest of all, the one that the dwarves had made for themselves. It was a trial of who could sit, longest, in a room with a fire, and give it nothing.

It lasted eleven hours.

They sat. It was all that they did. The seven of the Ninefold Road, in their worn blue coats, with the old woman, Mother Ceridwen, in her cart beside them, and the seven Wardens, with Durgan Emberfast upright in his chair and the glow of the coal in his chest turned to a dull glare, and the whole Hall sat with them. Nobody left. As the fire sank, and rose, and the shadows crept round the pillars, a thing began to go out of the old woman in the cart, slowly, like sand. Her hands trembled. Her white head sank. And at the ninth hour, in the great stillness, somebody on the Raskian benches began, very low, to hum, and it was taken up, and passed, from bench to bench, across the whole of that vast bowl, in forty thousand voices, a slow old hymn of the hills, that was sung, it was said, to the dying.

She did not lose by a hair. She did not lose at all. At the eleventh hour, by the great clock over the dais, the old lady Ceridwen, of the Ninefold Road, lifted her head. She looked across the fire, with her clear pale ancient eyes, at the small bent dwarf in his chair. And she said, in a voice that carried to the roof, in the complete stillness: Durgan. I am so tired.

He rose. He rose with the greatest difficulty, with his hands on the arms of the chair, and he went across the hearth, and he knelt. It was a thing that Fel had not thought a dwarf could do. He knelt in the ashes, before the cart, with his great red beard on his chest, and the glow of the coal in him burning like a sunset, and put his forehead against her knee. They said something. No one heard it. And then he stood. And he took her thin hand, very gently, in his two hard black ones, and turned, and lifted it, to the Hall.

“The Ninefold Road yields,” said Durgan Emberfast. His voice was deep, and slow, and rough as a file. “It is not a loss. It is not a defeat. It is a retirement, and the Wardens will see it written so.” He drew a breath. “I have fought her for seventy years. I have beaten her twice in the final, by a hair, and I have gone home ashamed of it both times. I will not take a third. I will only be there.”

Veyra was crying. She did not make any sound about it. Her hand was in Fel’s, and the tears ran down her face, in the golden light, and she looked at the old man, and the old woman in the cart, and the great red glow on the stones, and said, so low that he almost missed it:

“That is how I should like to be old.”

* * *

There were three days of rest.

They were the quietest of all. The Floor lay under a long white cloth, and the city, which had been shouting for ninety-seven days, fell into a strange vast hush, like the hush after the last guest has left a party.

It was a very simple thing, and everyone knew it. There were three guilds left. There was the Wardens of the First Furnace, who were the oldest, and who had beaten the Ninefold Road, and who would, Marigold said, with a face of the most profound unhappiness, be a very hard stone to move. There was the Nation of Sphel, who had beaten the Tithe, and the Chorus, and the Bishops, and had not so much as been touched, and whose master had not shown his face. And there was a guild of seven that had come in ninety-ninth.

They did not talk about it. Nerissa cooked. Orrin sat on the roof. Thara, who had been given a brilliant new knife by Dolly Pike, in a velvet bag, sat on the stair and sharpened it. And on the afternoon of the ninety-ninth day, Fel found himself, without having meant to, on the roof of the house in Lampwick Close, in the thin gold light, with his back against the chimney and Veyra’s head on his shoulder, looking at the right mountain.

It stood in the late sun, black and enormous, with the little dark rim on its crown.

“Do you think we’ll win?” he said.

“I do not know,” said Veyra.

He had not expected her to say it. She had said, in a hundred other places, that of course they would. She did not move. Her hair was against his cheek, and the wind stirred it, and she was quite warm.

“I have thought about it,” she said. “I have thought about very little else. I have never been afraid of the Pits. They had a floor, and a bottom, and a thing at the end. This is not that.” She was silent a moment. “I saw the Grace go out, Fel. I have been thinking of it for forty days. I have not told anyone. I stood in that Hall and I thought: There is a person who can put out the thing that keeps us all from dying. And he did not come. He sent a woman in a grey coat, with a finger. And she did not even use her hand.” She turned her head. Her eyes were quite steady. “I do not know if we shall win. I only know that I should rather be in that Hall with you, on a bad day, than anywhere else on a good one.”

He did not say anything. He did not know what there was to say.

And across the city, from the Rotunda, a long way off, the great bell began to toll the sixth hour of the evening.

* * *

They drew the last Trial in the dusk.

It was done on the eve, as every one had been, in the Hall. The bowl was full. It was full to the roof, and not a voice in it, and the great white Floor lay empty in the evening light, as smooth as an egg, with the three chairs set upon it, in a line, for the three masters.

Two of them were filled. In the first sat the little bent dwarf in his iron, with his beard on his knees, and his coal glowing, patient and quite alone. In the second sat Fel, who had been told to, in the old green coat, with Falling Star across his knees and Veyra standing at his shoulder. She was, as usual, the only one of them who was not afraid to be looked at. In the third, at the far end, in the place of the Nation, at the foot of a grey-draped dais, there was a plain wooden chair. It was empty. It was perfectly empty, with the long grey cloth hanging from its arms. But about it, on the floor, in a wide shining ring, lay seven grey figures, kneeling, with their foreheads to the sand. They did not rise. They did not look up. And behind them, round the ring, as if by some agreement that no one had made, a space of perhaps forty paces had been left clear. No bench stood nearer.

The old Herald came out, on his stick. He looked much older. He did not blow the horn. He carried a plain brass ball in his hand, and when he got to the middle of the Floor, he stopped, and held it up, and the silence was like a hand held over the mouth of a bell.

“Three guilds,” said the Herald. His voice was quite small, and quite clear, and it went to the end of the Hall without trying. “One Cup. I have blown this horn, for four Cups, and I have never in all my life stood in this place with such a fear in me.” He lifted his rheumy blue eyes to the last of the three chairs. “I would say a thing to the Hall. It is not in the rule, and it is not in my gift. I would say that whatever is done upon this Floor, tomorrow, by whatever hand, whether it be of the Furnace, or the Nation, or the Sorrows, is done in the name of the Cup. And the Cup does not belong to any of them. It belongs to the city.” He stopped. “I thank you for hearing an old man.”

He cracked the ball with his thumbnail. He read it, and for a very long moment, he did not speak.

“The Trial,” said the Herald, at last, “for the final of the Cup, on the hundred and first day, between the Wardens of the First Furnace, the Nation of Sphel, and the Seven Sorrows, is The Last Door.”

Nobody moved. Nobody breathed. Fel had no idea what it was. He looked at Torren, and found the old man white to the lips, with his big hands clenched on his knees, and a look on his face that he had worn, once, in a dark passage in the Pits, with a bell tolling overhead.

“It’s not in the Urn,” whispered Torren. He was looking at the plain brass ball. “Lad. It’s not in the Urn. I’ve read the list. I’ve read every Trial that’s ever been made. There’s a hundred and nine. There’s not a one called that.”

And on the far side of the white Floor, in the dusk, from the foot of the grey-draped dais, there rose a single quiet voice. It was the voice of a small, round, mild, neat woman, kneeling in the sand, and it was perfectly pleasant, and quite audible, and it was the only sound in all the world.

“Our lord thanks the Hall,” said Sister Iselda. “It is the one that he asked for.”

The Herald’s hand shook. The brass ball fell. It rolled across the Floor, with a thin small ringing, in the dark, and stopped at the edge of the grey cloth.

Fel did not say anything. He looked at the empty chair. He looked at it for a long time, as the lamps began to be lit, and the stars came out over the opened roof, one by one, very cold and very clear, and thought, for the first and the last time in all that hundred days, without any pride at all, of the thing that a boy from a village at the end of the world had said to a Warden in a cellar, over a bowl of soup, in a place that seemed a hundred years away.

I’d like to know what’s behind the door.

He took Veyra’s hand. It was warm. It was holding his very hard.

Tomorrow, he thought. Tomorrow, then.

He did not think that he was afraid. He was only waiting, as one waits at the foot of a stair, with a lamp, for a step on the landing above.

* * *

They did not sleep much, that last night. They sat up in the great hall at Lampwick Close, all seven, and Brek, and Marigold, who had come with a pie under a cloth and could not say a word, and the fire burned down to a red eye. Torren poured seven cups of the thin sour wine of the Wards, and an eighth, a small one, for a boy of eleven, and held up his own, and looked round the ring of faces for a long time, and said only, “Well. Here’s to the crumbs.”

They drank. Thara fell asleep with her head on Brannoch’s knee, and Fel sat with his back to the warm hearth and Veyra’s shoulder against his own, and thought of a village, and a cow, and a hole in a roof, and could not have said how a year could be so long and so short at once.

They went up in the Bucket at dawn.

It was the hundred-and-first day. The sky over the right mountain was the color of a pearl, and the whole city had come out into its streets and stood in the cold, quite silent, with its hats in its hands, to watch seven people go by. Nobody cheered. And as the gondola groaned out over the gulf, and the Hall of Champions rose before them, vast and pale on the crown of the mountain, with its great doors standing open and the white Floor shining beyond, Fel put his hand on the hilt of Falling Star, and found that it was quite steady.

Behind the doors, in the dark, somebody was waiting. He had waited a very long time. He could wait a little longer.

End of Saga One: The Weeping Crown

Stay tuned for the next saga, and the continuation of the series.