Chapter 1425: Kingship(1)

Though it was still morning, and still winter, the heat had already settled in for the day.

Three children shoved themselves up onto the roof of their home one after another, as they did whenever a triumph came down the roads of the capital. They were all of them too small to get a proper view from the street, so they had built a ladder out of crates and whatever else the alley had been willing to surrender.

The eldest scrambled over the gutter first, then reached down with now soot-stained arms and hauled the other two up after him.

It was a family ritual by now. Short of sprouting wings, the roof was the only perch in the world that offered a view of the grand avenue whenever the realm put on a show. To miss a spectacle in the capital was a crime against one’s own eyes. Though according to their mother, climbing three spans up onto rotten cedar was the only hanging offence under discussion in this household.

But what is a mother’s screeching set beside the glory of towering men in iron plate marching four abreast, with war horns and drums shaking the very shingles beneath your bare feet?

Yet as they tiptoed across the warped, moss-slicked boards that groaned beneath their weight, they saw no gleaming files of the Black Stripes. No bronze trumpets roared. No commoners flung crushed rose petals, and nobody cheered down from the high balconies.

The entire avenue lay plunged in a dead and unnatural silence.

That was the strangest part of it. Yarzat was never silent. Not once, not ever. Even in the dead middle of the night, when usually the cutpurses and the knife-men went about their work in the alleys, the streets rattled with night-watch mail and bobbed with torchlight, for it was a steep silver fine to be caught walking after the third bell without a flame in your hand.

Today, with thousands upon thousands lining the cobbles, the whole world was holding its breath.

It was eerie, and Sinon did not like it at all.

"Where are the banners?" the eldest whispered, his brow knotting in pure bewilderment.

"Where’s Da?" the youngest chirped, bouncing violently on the balls of his bare feet as though two more inches of height would deliver the entire avenue to him. "Is Da marching? Is he?"

Sinon cuffed him across the ear without so much as looking.

The eldest was a lazy lump of dough who would not have blinked if both his brothers had rolled off the pitch and broken their necks in the mud below, which meant the sacred duty of keeping the runt alive had landed squarely on Sinon’s shoulders, as everything else always did.

"Do you want to make Ma right?" Sinon hissed, catching hold of the boy’s collar. "These slats are rotten through. Don’t go testing the Weaver’s thread today of all days."

"The roof never broke before!" the boy whined, rubbing at his reddening ear.

"And we never had a little runt jumping up and down on it before, did we? There’s a first and only time for every broken neck, so plant your arse down and shut your mouth."

Sinon craned his neck out over the edge, squinting hard against the glare off the tiles. The sight of so many thousands of people standing shoulder to shoulder without one single shout among them made the hair rise on his arms.

"There they are," he said, pointing a grubby finger toward the cobbles.

"Where?" the eldest and the runt asked in exactly the same breath.

"Everywhere. All along the curb. They’re making a wall of themselves between the crowd and the middle of the avenue." He squinted harder and shaded his eyes with his palm. "Wait. Who in the hells is that?"

"Who’s what?" the youngest cried, bouncing again.

"Stop bloody jumping!" Sinon snarled.

"Who is it? Who’s down there? Tell me!" The runt was very nearly sobbing with frustration.

"There’s only one man on the whole road," the eldest said, bridging both hands above his brows to cut the sun. "Bare-chested. No mail, no tunic. And barefoot, by the look of it."

He was quiet a moment, working it over.

"Sinon’s right, too. The Black Stripes aren’t marching at all. They’re holding the crowd back with their spear-shafts. Da’s down there somewhere with his shield no doubt."

Sinon remembered seeing his father at dawn. The man had laced his heavy greaves in silence, buckled on his breastplate, and slipped out the door into the grey mist without a single word, the way he always did when he returned to camp.

Da was seldom home. He belonged to the cohort now. Every second moon he would appear for a sennight, smelling of the cheap lye soap he usually brought back with him as a form of payment, though he usually brought only silverii, and then vanish again into the barracks or off on some bloody campaign across the river.

But Sinon was thirteen, old enough to understand what mattered. His father barely spoke a dozen words a visit. Half his legionary silver landed in Mama’s wooden jar every single payday regardless, sometimes out of his own hand, and sometimes delivered by other men wearing the same colours.

They had been eating remarkably well ever since their father took the King’s color three winters ago. There was salted mutton in the pot once a week now, a handful of silver coins nestled safely in Mama’s clay jar beneath the hearthstones, and Sinon even had a pair of real leather boots that kept the water off his toes when it rained.

Yet the price was paid in absence. Sometimes Sinon missed the old days, when the table held nothing but thin grain porridge, stale barley loaf, and whatever bruised turnips Mama could barter for at sundown. Now the bellies were full and the cloth was whole, but Da was never home. Da belonged to the King’s legions now.

"Who’s that down there?" Milleau, the youngest, piped up, hanging out over the gutter again. "Why’s he barefoot with everyone staring at him like that? Is he a thief? Are they walking him up to the square to hang him? Can we watch him dangle?"

It had been near on two moons since the town square had enjoyed a proper hanging. Clearly the runt was hoping for a little theatre out of his morning.

"Nah," Odor muttered, rolling his eyes with great disdain. "Whole bloody lower ward would be hooting and chucking rotten leeks if it were a hanging. He’s no cutpurse."

"Then who is he?"

Sinon squinted down at the lone figure. "That’s the King. Today’s the grand coronation, isn’t it? They wouldn’t clear the avenue and line up three cohorts for some tavern brawler.They would keep the hanging for after."

"Then why in the Five hells is he being punished?" Odor asked, scratching at his greasy mop. "Isn’t he the King? Since when do we punish the fellow wearing the crown? Isn’t that sacrilege or something?"

"Maybe it isn’t a punishment," Sinon offered

"Since when is getting your soles shredded on cold river stone a prize?" Odor scoffed.

"Maybe it’s a holy rite."

"What holy rite? Since when do we make our masters walk barefoot through horse droppings?" Odor barked out a laugh. "What comes next, once his feet are raw and bleeding? Neck in the pillory? Or a penitent stroll down to the docks to visit the brothel in the Weaver’s holy name?"

"Since when did we start having kings at all?" Sinon snapped back. "Everything’s new this year. Shut up."

"What’s a brothel?" Milleau asked, looking between his two older brothers with eyes like saucers.

"A house where fools go to empty their purses," Sinon said, shooting Odor a venomous glare. "Our idiot brother here among them."

Odor’s face went the colour of a boiled beet on the instant. "I never went near one!"

"You think I didn’t see you rummaging in Ma’s spice jar? One small coin every week, regular as the bells." Sinon kept his voice down so that only the roof would hear it. "Stealing silver out of our own bread just to get your trousers off. Is that what you are? Has Ma been raising a thief up here all along?"

"Don’t tell Ma, Sinon. Please. Don’t tell Da." All of Odor’s swagger drained away into frantic, abashed terror.

At least the fool had wit enough left to look ashamed about it.

"I’m counting the coppers every sennight from now," Sinon growled, driving an elbow hard into his brother’s ribs. "If I find one bronze piece short, I’m walking straight up to the barracks gate myself. Don’t care if they whip me for it either. Da isn’t out there taking arrows in the guts to put meat in our stew so you can spend his blood on a dockside whore."

"Why would anybody pay coin for a girl?" Milleau asked, wrinkling his nose in supreme disgust. "They’re slimy and they screech like gulls."

"Because your eldest brother’s brain has rotted down into his breeches," Sinon said. He reached over, trapped Milleau’s head in a rough brotherly lock and gave the boy’s curls a vicious ruffle. "Don’t you go growing up a degenerate like him. And don’t breathe a word of any of this to Ma, or we’ll tell her you were the one who broke the neighbour’s pots."

"All right! All right! Mouth’s barred!" Milleau gasped, wriggling free and resuming his frantic hopping immediately.

"So that’s really our King?"

Both older brothers winced as the rotten cedar shingles let out a long dry groan beneath them.

Sinon caught the runt about the waist and hoisted him up onto his shoulders, locking the boy’s ankles tight under his arms. "There. Can your royal eyes see him now?"

Down upon the wide blue-grey causeway, flanked on both sides by an unmoving wall of thousands of armoured legionaries, the lone man walked in absolute silence toward the high citadel, his bare feet treading cold stones that princes and lords usually crossed from the back of an armoured destrier.

Milleau tilted his head, his whole face knotting with disappointment.

"That’s him? I thought he’d be ten feet tall. Like the giants in Da’s stories."

"I expected fewer scars," Sinon murmured instead.

His gaze had locked onto the King’s bare back. The flesh across Alpheo’s shoulders was crossed and scored like a length of rough timber Milleau had been at with a dull chisel, dozens of raised chalk-white lines running over one another, and puckered brand marks among them where steel and iron had bitten in and stayed a while.

Why would a sovereign, carry a back that looked like an old butcher’s chopping block?

"So that’s the man Da is dying for?" Milleau asked innocently from atop Sinon’s shoulders.

"Da isn’t dying for him," Sinon answered instantly, the words sharp as flint. "Da is fighting for him."

"Vic says all soldiers die for their king," Milleau piped up, confused. "He said that’s the whole point of a soldier."

"Vic doesn’t know his heel from his arsehole, seeing as he talks out of both," Sinon retorted, though a cold, hollow knot tightened in his belly at the thought. "Da isn’t dying for any man. He’s going to finish his term, take his pension land from the Crown, and come home for good. We’re going to have an orchard one day. Da promised ma."

He banished the dreadful thought the moment it touched his mind. Da was too massive, too iron-hard to be felled by some spear. It was impossible.

Sinon rested his hands on his little brother’s shins and stared down into the avenue, watching the lone, sunburnt figure march steadily up the incline.

It was a strange, unsettling thing to behold. This was the man who had conjured the silver that filled their clay jar, the man who bought the leather boots upon Sinon’s feet and the fat mutton roasting in their pot. Yet down on the stones, stripped of velvet, silk, and steel plate, the King looked shockingly, terrifyingly mortal. He was just a man, flesh, bone, and scars, sweating under the southern sun like a dock laborer.

Watching him disappear past the road young Sinon felt only a quiet, bewildered awe, never once imagining that the years ahead would drag him into that very same iron machine, nor that one day, upon a far bloodier field, he would discover firsthand just how fragile, and made of mortal flesh, their King truly was.

He had yet to know of the winter that was to come.