Chapter 79: The Wish and the Roll

The year turned in the night, and nobody noticed but the bells.

They had come home from the Pits long after the lamps were lit, eight tired people and a cart and a lump of singing metal wrapped in a cloak, and the house on Lampwick Close had swallowed them whole. There had been soup. There had been a great deal of talk, and a very little sense, and Orrin had sat in the corner of the great hall with the staff across his knees and the silver heart of the Amolite at his feet, humming to the two of them in a voice that was almost not a voice at all, until Nerissa put a quilt over his shoulders and said that they would still be there in the morning. Somewhere around the middle of the night, a long way off across the sleeping city, the great bell of the Rotunda began to toll the turning of the year. Fel heard it in his sleep. It rang twelve, and then, because it was Dun Vurrim and the dwarves do not believe in doing a thing once, it rang them all again.

He woke before the sun, with a stiff neck, and the soft grey feeling of a morning that had not yet decided what it was. He lay for a moment and looked at the rafters. Then it came to him, quite slowly, like a fish rising to a hook, that he was eighteen.

It did not feel like much. He had expected a change, a lurch, a sense of some great door closing and another opening, and instead there was only the quilt, and the cold of the room on his nose, and the faint, far, steady hum from the high room under the bell tower, where a Vessarine had either not gone to bed or had gone and come back. He got up. He put on the coat that Nerissa had let out for him twice. He went down through the sleeping house on his bare feet, past the door of the great hall where Brannoch lay snoring on three benches pushed together, and past the kitchen where a single lamp had been left burning for nobody, and up the narrow back stair, and out through the little door under the eaves onto the roof.

It was cold up there, and clean, and very still. The slate was rimed with white. The whole of Dun Vurrim lay spread beneath him under its great glass vault, in the first thin gold of the false dawn, and the lamps of the Wards were going out one by one like the stars at the end of a night. Behind him the mountain rose, black and enormous, with the little lights of the Hundred Furnaces strung down its flank. Ahead, across the dim gulf, the right mountain stood in its own shadow, and on the very crown of it, so far off that it was only a darker notch against the sky, there lay a long low shape like the rim of a bowl. The Hall of Champions.

He had never looked at it before. He had looked at it a hundred times, and not seen it.

“You are up,” said Veyra.

He did not jump. He had begun, in the last year, to know the sound of her, as one knows the step of a person in one’s own house. She had come out of the little door in her shirt-sleeves with a blanket round her shoulders and her braid over one arm, and she crossed the frosted slate with her bare feet quite silent, and stood a little way off, looking where he looked.

“I thought that I would find you here,” she said. “You have been coming up on the roof since the beginning of the winter. Did you think that I did not know?”

“It’s your roof.”

“It is the company’s roof.” She said it gravely. “It is only that I have been sitting on it longer.” She was quiet for a time. The cold breathed out of her in small clouds. “Eighteen,” she said at last, quite softly. “How does it feel?”

“Cold,” said Fel.

She laughed. It was the low, brief, private laugh that he had come to wait for, the one that happened mostly in the eyes, and it went through him like warm water. “It is a poor answer,” she said. “I will accept it, because you are not awake. But I should like to ask you something, and you will tell me honestly.” She turned. Her violet eyes, in the grey light, were quite steady and very bright. “What do you want?”

“For what?”

“For this. For today.” A small pink color had come up in her face, and she lifted her chin against it. “I have thought for a month what to give you. I am not good at it. I have never been taught how a gift is chosen, in the way that other people seem to know it, by instinct. Nerissa says that I should buy you a sword. Thara says I should buy you a hat. Torren says that a man of eighteen wants only a good horse and a quiet life, and he said it in a way that I did not believe. So I will ask you, because it is the only honest thing that I can think of.” The blanket slipped, and she caught it. “What do you want, Fel? Whatever it is. I will find it.”

He should have said a sword. He knew it afterward. He should have said anything at all that could be carried home in a cart. But he stood there on the frozen slate with the whole city asleep beneath him and a year’s worth of cold dawns in his chest, and the thing that he wanted was so simple, and so enormous, that it came out of him before he could dress it.

“A day,” said Fel.

She blinked. “A day?”

“A whole one.” He was staring very hard at the Hall of Champions. His ears had gone hot. “From the morning to the night. With nobody else. No dungeon, no Torren, no Thara in the chimney, no…” He drew a breath. “Just you. That’s all I want. I don’t want a sword. I’ve got two. I just want one whole day with you, and to not be hurried, and to not have to be anything. That’s it. That’s the whole thing.”

There was a very long silence.

He did not dare look round. The wind went over the roof, and the weathercock gave its small rusty creak, and somewhere far below in the Wards a baker’s shutter went up with a clatter. When at last he risked a glance, he found that Veyra had put one hand over her mouth, and was looking at him over the top of it with an expression that he had never seen on her face before, an expression of such startled and unguarded delight that it frightened him a little.

“Oh,” said Veyra, through her fingers. “That is…” She stopped. She lowered the hand. She seemed to be searching, very hard, for some dignified thing to say, and not finding it, and at last she gave up and simply smiled, a real, wide, shaking, helpless smile, the kind that made her look not eighteen, nor a huntress, nor the captain of anything, but a girl on a roof in the cold. “That is the best thing that anybody has ever asked me for.”

“Is it?”

“It is much the best.” She pulled the blanket close. “And it is very cheap, and I shall be able to afford it, and I cannot imagine why nobody else has ever thought of it. Yes. Yes, of course. A whole day. We will plan something, soon. I will think of the very best place. I will not tell you where.” She drew a long breath. “Not today, because there is the house, and Orrin, and the heart, and Haldor to write to. But soon. As soon as there is a gap. I promise. I shall find us a gap, if I have to dig it with a spade, and we…”

“FEL!”

It came up through the slates like a cannon shot. It came, in fact, from the chimney, a yard to their left, in a hoarse, hollow, carrying roar, and a moment later a small, sooty, wild-eyed head came out of the pot, with a wad of cobweb on one ear and an expression of the purest joy.

“They’re reading it!” cried Thara. “They’re reading the prizes! In the square! Right now! There’s a bell and a scroll and about four thousand people and I think a goat! Oh, get down! Get down! It’s the Cup! It’s the proclamation! It’s today!”

Veyra said something very short in the old language. Fel, who by now knew it, did not repeat it.

“Thara,” she said, with great calm. “Why are you in the chimney?”

“It’s the quickest way,” said Thara, with injured dignity. “I heard you up here. I was going to wait, I was being very tactful, I was right below, but then the bell started, and I thought…” She stopped. Her eyes went from one to the other of them, and round, and round again, and she slowly put both hands over her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said, through them, in a stricken whisper. “Oh, I interrupted. I’ve interrupted, haven’t I. I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I’ll go back up the chimney. I’ll go back up and I’ll die there.”

“Come out of the chimney,” said Veyra, “and put on your boots.”

It was, Fel thought, as they went down the little stair behind Thara’s soot-black elbows, the best morning of his life. He thought it again, a minute later, with his hand hot where hers had brushed it on the narrow step. And he knew, with the odd clear certainty that had been coming to him lately, in the way that the lines did, that there was nothing in the whole city that he was less likely to forget.

* * *

The bell was in the little square at the head of Lampwick Close, and the square was full.

It was the strangest thing. A year ago the Wards had been a hushed and hollow place, a long street of shuttered halls under a glass roof. But somewhere in the last weeks, without anybody quite noticing, they had been filled. Every door along the lane stood open. Every sign was painted. Banners hung from the gables in long bright streamers of crimson and blue, and a woman on a ladder at Number Nine was hanging a lantern the size of a bathtub from a hook. There were wagons in the street, and sedan chairs, and a very large sleepy ox in the traces of something that appeared to be a mobile bathhouse. A small man in a red hat was walking up and down the cobbles selling pastries from a tray on his head, shouting, Cup cakes! Cup cakes! A cup of cake for a cup of Ashaleth! And in the middle of the square, under the dry fountain, on a barrel that someone had rolled there and covered with a green cloth, there stood a very small, very nervous creature in a clerk’s waistcoat, with a handbell in one paw and an enormous scroll in the other, and a look on his face of a man who has been dropped from a great height and is still waiting to land.

It was a mouse. He was a good deal smaller than Marigold, and a good deal younger, and his fur was a pale, anxious grey, and he was holding the scroll so tightly that the ends had begun to crumple.

“Hemlock,” said Brannoch.

He stood at the very back of the crowd, quite motionless, with his arms folded, like a tree that had been told to wait. He had said the name, Fel noticed, with a certain gentleness. They had all met the junior clerk by now. He was the one who minded the Third Cage while Marigold was away, and who ran after her with forms, and who had once, in the autumn, been so frightened by a single large troll with a receipt that he had fainted into a basket.

“Hear ye,” said Hemlock. It was a very small voice. It carried, in the way that very small voices sometimes do, about as far as his own whiskers. “Hear ye, I… that is, hear ye.” He rang the bell. It went off like a dropped tray, and he flinched. “By order of the Rotunda of Dun Vurrim, and the Crown, and the, ah, the Hall of Champions, and with the sanction of the, of the…” He consulted the scroll. “Oh, dear. It is a very long sanction. I shall skip it. It is the first day of the year!”

There was a polite smatter of cheering.

“And it is therefore my pleasant duty,” said Hemlock, “to proclaim, to all the guilds of the Realms, that the Cup of Ashaleth, the thirty-third Cup, in the thirty-third year, shall be held, according to the ancient custom, in the Hall of Champions, upon the right mountain, beginning upon the tenth day of the new year, and lasting, as is the rule, for one hundred and one days.” He took a breath. “Ninety-nine guilds have been admitted to the Roll. The Roll is closed. The Roll is drawn. The ninety-nine are named in the lists at the Rotunda, and will, ah, will be summoned to confirm their entries this day, and sign the Oath before the third bell, in person, with their masters, at the desks of the, of the Third and Fourth Cages. Those who do not come will be struck out.” He rolled the scroll down. His voice had gained a thread of courage, as it always seems to when a man begins to read from a list. “And the prizes of the Cup, as confirmed by the Crown, shall be, as follows.”

The square went silent. Even the man with the pastries stopped.

“First. And as in every Cup since the first.” He said it as one says a prayer. “The winners shall receive a single bottle of Ashaleth. Whole. Full. Authentic. Under the seal of the Crown, and the sight of the Hall.”

A long, low, shuddering sigh went round the square, like the wind in a wheat-field.

“Second. The Crown’s Purse. A cup of brills.”

“Brills,” whispered Thara, in a voice of unholy reverence. She had caught Fel’s sleeve in both hands. “A cup, Fel. A whole cup. Do you know how many that is? Do you? It’s a cup! Of brills!”

“Ten brills,” said Hemlock, as if he had heard, “in the old coin of the Hold, which is to say one million glims, in gold and silver and the stamped plate of the Crown.” He glanced up. “Or, if the winning guild should prefer, and should so declare it before the Hall upon the final day, a ship.”

He had to stop. A noise had risen. It was a deep, startled, ragged noise, like a great many people drawing breath all at once.

“A ship,” said Hemlock, rather loudly, over it. “A new ship. Brand new. Built to the winners’ measure, in the yards of Orvandel, the artisan capital, the, ah, the Tideglass City, on the south-eastern coast, by the, by the very famous shipwrights of the, of that…” He had lost his place. He found it. “Of the five great houses. The ship, I am told, is a, a very large ship.”

“A ship,” said Nerissa, quite faintly.

She had come up behind them, with a shawl round her silver hair and a loaf under her arm, and she stood looking at the little mouse with her lips parted. Fel did not think that he had ever seen her look so completely, and so helplessly, enchanted. She was a nymph. Her people had lived on the water since the first rain. And she had lived for the last year, he thought, in a house on a mountain, under a roof of glass, a thousand miles from the sea.

“I should like it noted,” she said, in a very small voice, “that I have not mentioned a ship once, in the last year. Not once. Not even in my sleep.”

“You have,” said Thara. “You talked about it at supper. You said, a sloop is a very practical thing.”

“That was a conversation,” said Nerissa, with great dignity.

“And third.” Hemlock’s voice had steadied a little. He lifted the scroll, as though it had grown heavier. “A thing which the Rotunda has not before offered, in the nine hundred and ninety-nine years of its record. A thing which it has not, until this winter, been able to offer, being, until this winter, not in possession of it.” He swallowed. “A map.”

Nobody breathed.

“A chart,” said Hemlock, “of the three lands. All three, upon the one sheet. Drawn, it is said, in the old measure, in a hand that is not known, upon a hide that is not named. It is of very great age, and of a very great, a very great rarity. The Rotunda…” He licked his lips. “The Rotunda wishes it to be known that it makes no claim as to the, as to the detail of the chart. It claims only that it exists. It will be shown to the winners, in the Hall, on the hundred-and-first day, and not before.” He rolled up the scroll, quite quickly, as if it had begun to burn his fingers. “That is all. Long live the Cup. Please do not push.”

The square erupted.

It was a roar that went up from every throat at once, and for a time nothing at all could be heard in the whole of Lampwick Close but the noise, and the ringing of the dropped bell, and the high, thin, indignant voice of the pastry-seller crying, Cup cakes! Cup cakes! in the unbearable din. Hemlock was lifted bodily off his barrel by a very large dwarf with a banner, and passed from hand to hand across the crowd, with the scroll above his head, like a man being carried to a throne by people who were not sure he wanted to go.

Fel did not move.

He stood in the middle of the square, with Thara’s fists in his sleeve, and for a moment he did not hear any of it. He was thinking of a table in a little shop in the Ashen March, a long time ago, and a great flat sheet of yellowed paper that a woman with a grey braid and a pair of spectacles on a chain had unrolled in front of him, with a patient look. This is the whole of the known world, Gwenna Tuck had said. As much of it as anyone has ever paid to draw. He remembered how large it had seemed. He remembered how it had ended, on every side, in a faint brown line, and then in nothing at all, in a blank, like the edge of a plate.

“The three lands,” he said.

“It is a remarkable thing,” said Orrin.

He had come out of the house at last, with the staff in one hand and a blanket round his long blue shoulders and the look of a man who has not slept and does not require to, and he stood beside Fel, peering at the little clerk across the roaring heads, with the gold in his face running up and down in slow ripples. “I would like it noted that I have never seen such a chart. I have heard of them. The Vessarine speak of them, in the singing-cities, the way that people speak of a sea-serpent. A thing that someone once saw.”

“I don’t understand,” said Fel. “A map’s a map. Gwenna Tuck had a hundred. She had maps of the whole of Dun Vurrim, and the March, and the Tarn, and…”

“Of this land,” said Orrin. “Of the one that we stand on. Yes. There are many.” He lowered his voice a little. “But the land is not alone, Fel. You know that. There is a second, across the water, and a third beyond it. And there is, between each, a great deal of sea.”

“A very bad sea,” said Veyra.

She had come up on his other side. The color had gone from her face, and she was looking at the little mouse, and the crowd, and at the faint grey shape of the right mountain beyond the vault, with a thoughtful and a slightly troubled eye. “It is not like the coast. It is not like the Salt Coast, or the Reach. The people who live on the shore call it the Wall. The storms there are not storms in the sense that we mean it. They come out of a clear sky, and they last for a month, and they take a ship from the water as a child takes a toy. And in the water there are things.” She shook her head. “My mother said that no map was ever drawn by a man who came back. She said they were drawn by the ones who were left.”

“She’s right,” said Torren Ballast.

He had come out of the great hall at last, in his shirt-sleeves and his braces, with a rag in his hand and his beard in a state of some disorder, and he stood in the door of Number Thirteen with the air of a man who is rapidly recalling something that he had tried to forget. “It takes a ship, lad. A real one. A big, modern, many-masted ship, with a double hull and a bronze ram and a crew of two hundred who have done it before. And a captain who’s mad. I was on the Salt Coast, once, in the Republic’s service, at the end of the Winter War. We watched one go out.” He stopped. “I won’t say what came back. It’s why nobody goes. Men have tried. Kings have tried. There’s been a great deal of money wasted on it, and a great many good ships, and the charts that do exist, the ones that cover more than the one land, they’re so rare that a man could live out his life without seeing one. A good one, a proper one, drawn to the measure, with the middle land filled in, and the far shore…” He shook his head. “I’d not have thought that the Crown had one. I’d not have thought that anyone had.”

“And it’s the third prize,” said Thara. “After the ship! And the brills!” She looked from face to face with wild eyes. “It’s a map. It’s a map, and the other two are a bottle of wine and a boat, and a pile of money, and they’ve put it last. Why’ve they put it last?”

“Because they do not know what it is,” said Veyra, slowly. “And someone else does.”

It was said very softly. Nobody answered. But Fel, looking round, saw that Torren had turned his head, and was looking, with a very odd expression, at something across the square, at the far corner where the street ran down toward the Rotunda. And there, among all the bright-painted wagons and the gaily-colored banners, a small company of people was passing through the crowd without any colour at all.

There were seven of them. They wore long coats of plain grey wool, to the heel, with the hoods up, and no badges, and no weapons that Fel could see. They did not shout, or laugh, or look at the stalls. They did not seem to be talking. They walked in a close and silent file down the middle of the street, and wherever they went the crowd opened for them. It did it without seeming to. It was only that the shouting dropped, a little, as they passed, as a fire drops when the door is closed, and a hundred faces turned away with the vague, uneasy, studied attention of people who have remembered something that they have to do. On the breast of each grey coat, quite small, in white thread, a single circle was embroidered. It was a plain, empty ring.

“Who are they?” said Fel.

Nobody answered at once.

“Those are Sphel’s,” said Torren, at last, very quietly. “The Nation. I’ve seen the sign in the March, on the banners, on the road. I’d not thought to see it in Dun Vurrim.” He shifted the rag in his hand. “Hm. Well. It’s the Cup, I suppose. They’ll have come for it.”

“They did not come for a bottle,” said Veyra.

The last of the grey coats went round the corner. The noise rose again behind it, like a tide coming in over the sand, and the smell of the pastries came back, and the bell was found and rung, and the little mouse was set down at last on the steps of the fountain, quite dazed, and was given a cup of something hot. And Torren Ballast, with a long and rather careful breath, pushed the rag into his pocket and said in a voice that was much too cheerful:

“Well! There’s a morning. Third bell, she said. And there’s the Rotunda to get to, and a queue, I’d not wonder, round the whole of the Gallery. If we’re to be on the Roll we’d best go and sign, before the goat gets there first.”

“We can sign?” said Fel. “We’re on it?”

The old man looked at him, and for a moment the great weathered face went quite blank, and then slowly, inexorably, from the beard upward, a smile spread across it.

“Lad,” he said. “Did nobody tell you?”

* * *

Nobody had told him.

It came out on the road, in bits and pieces, in the long slow shuffle down the hill toward the Rotunda, in a crush so thick that Brannoch had to go in front with his shield turned sideways and cut a path like a plow through snow. The Seven Sorrows were on the Roll. They had been on it since the autumn. Marigold had put them there herself, with her own small ink-stained paw, on a night in the Month of Falling Leaves, on the day that the guild had logged its fortieth floor, under a heading in the Rotunda’s own records that was called, with a grim and charming precision, Hopeful. She had told nobody. She had said, to Veyra only, when she thought nobody else was near, that it was very bad luck to speak of it, and that it was only a form.

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“I thought that it was a joke,” said Veyra, with her chin high. “I thought that she was being kind.”

“She was,” said Nerissa, “being kind. It is the cruellest sort of kindness. A woman who writes your name on a list, and says nothing, and goes on, for three months, to give you tea.”

They came to the Rotunda at the second bell, and Fel stopped dead on the steps.

He had thought that he knew it. He had been there, God knew, a hundred times; he had stood under the great bell on his first morning with his mouth open; he had sat for hours on the bench by the Third Cage, with a form on his knee, waiting for the weights to be read. It had always been big. It had always been loud. But it had never, in all that year, been anything like this.

It was packed.

The Hall of a Hundred Guilds was a great round room, a quarter of a mile in compass, with a vault so high that the canisters in their brass tubes shot back and forth across it like a school of silver fish. It was packed, now, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, with every kind of living thing that Fel had ever heard of, and some that he had not. There were dwarves in their thousands, in leather and in plate, with their beards in braids and bells and bright bands of cloth. There were Raskians, huge and bronze and broad as wardrobes, who stood a head above everybody and were pushed about like barges. There were gnomes in tall hats, who stood on each others’ shoulders to see. There were beastkin of every sort, foxes and wolves and long sleek cats, a heron in a duelist’s coat, a pair of small brown bats in a very formal sling. There were Ilvari, tall and horned and quiet, who moved through the crowd in a clear space of their own, and a troll in a sailor’s cap who was eating a pie, and a company of pale, slender, faintly glowing people with long ears and the cool aloof faces of the Vessarine, who were looking at the whole scene with an air of intense and melancholy amusement. There was a woman as tall as Brannoch’s shoulder with a complexion like wet slate and a necklace of what appeared to be small teeth. There was a man made entirely of what looked to be stitched leather and brass, with a mournful, creaking, courteous air. There was, in a corner, quite alone, on a cushion, a very small old woman with a very large hat who was knitting, and who was, according to a card tied round her neck, the Third Terror of Delvishion.

And on every one of them, on a sleeve, a collar, a belt, a pin, there was a rank. Fel had learned them in the year. Copper, Iron, Silver, Gold: they shone, on the shoulders of the crowd, like scattered coins. But there was more than that, now. There were the thin, cold, pearl-white bands of the Platinum, and the clear gleam of the Diamond, which one saw only seldom, and now, in this room, a dozen at once. And in the middle of the floor, with the crowd drawing back from them in a ring, there stood a trio of tall, hard, unsmiling men in black, with a band of blue-green fire about each sleeve, which Fel knew from his lessons to be the colour of Mythril. And behind them, so quiet that he almost did not see him, in a plain brown coat, a slight grey man with a very old face, who wore on his lapel a small plain disc of a metal that had no color at all.

“Sovereign,” said Veyra, in his ear, with her mouth hardly moving. “There are eight in all the Realms, and I have heard that three are in the city. Do not stare.”

He did not. But he was a good while recovering.

The line began at the door. It ran in a long, thick, shuffling snake across the great marble floor, round the fountain of the Directory, under the pillar of the guilds, and back and forth in a tangle of ropes and stanchions and indignant clerks toward the two far brass cages at the back of the hall, where a dozen runners in the green livery of the Rotunda ran to and fro with forms. It moved at the speed of a glacier. It was the best-natured crowd, Fel thought, that he had ever been in; and it was, too, the most watchful. All round them, as they stood, they were conscious of being looked at, quickly, in passing, by a hundred pairs of eyes, with the quick, measuring, curious glance of a people who are sizing up their enemies.

“That’s them,” said somebody behind, in a stage whisper. “That’s the lot that did the fiftieth.”

“In a year?”

“In a year and a day, they say. Seven of ‘em. With a boy.”

“Never. That’s a Gold-guild job, that.”

“They’re not Gold. They’re not anything. They’re nothing. They’ve not got the rank for it. That’s what my brother says, he’s a clerk, he saw the logs. He says they did it unranked.”

“We are unranked,” said Thara, over her shoulder, with great satisfaction. “It’s much more impressive.”

It took an hour to reach the desks. And in the course of that hour, between the third pillar and the second, with the ropes creaking and the little clock above the Directory ticking away the minutes, Fel met a man, and a woman, and a peacock.

The woman was first. She was standing in the line just ahead, in a ragged blue coat that had once been very fine, with a tall black hat on her head and a cutlass at her hip, and she was talking, in a voice that carried, to a very large Raskian with a hook for a hand, about the price of tar. She was perhaps thirty. She was brown, and lean, and her face was weathered like a good boot, with a nose that had been broken at least once, and she wore a wide, white, crooked smile that Fel had seen, he thought, on a cat. She turned, as they came up, and ran a bright dark eye over the seven of them, from Brannoch to Orrin, with open and unembarrassed interest, and it came to rest on Nerissa.

“A nymph,” she said. “Well, shiver my timbers. A river one, by the look. Are you the water of this outfit, love?”

“I am,” said Nerissa, after a pause.

“Thought so. You’ve the look.” The woman swept off the black hat with a flourish, and a great crown of salt-bleached braids fell about her shoulders, and Fel saw that her ears had been pierced, at some time, a dozen times, and hung with small copper rings. “Captain Ysolde Brine, of the Salt-Crown Corsairs, out of the Drowned Reach, at your command and nobody else’s. We’ve never lost a fight on the water, my girls and I, in nine years. We’ve lost a good few on land. It’s why we don’t go there.” She grinned. “Just so you know. If we ever meet in the Hall, and it’s wet, I’ll give you a thing or two to think about. And if it’s dry, you’ll give me two hundred, and I’ll count myself lucky to get out alive.”

“That is a very candid thing to say to a rival,” said Nerissa.

“It’s a very long Cup, love.” The pirate winked. “I like to be friendly at the beginning. There’s hardly any time for it later.”

She went back to her hook-handed friend. Nerissa stood a moment, very straight, with a small pink spot on each cheek, and then said in a low voice to nobody that it was a deplorable woman, and that she would not be taking any lessons in how to be friendly from a pirate. But she had been smiling, Fel thought, when she said it, and the smile did not entirely stop.

The man came next. He was very tall, and very old, and he came down the aisle from the Directory like a ship under sail, with a robe the color of old gold and a white beard that ran to his belt, and a long ebony staff that struck the marble with a ring at each pace. The crowd moved aside for him. He did not seem to notice. He was looking, with a kind of mild and genial vagueness, at the vault, and a small child, in the arms of a mother, was following him with its eyes, in awe.

“That’s him,” whispered somebody, with reverence. “That’s the Herald.”

It was an old man with a horn. Fel almost laughed. For there was the horn, indeed, hung at his hip on a cord, a long, curved, battered, brass-bound thing, as old as a mountain, and the man himself was so enormously, serenely, venerably ancient that it seemed to Fel that if one pushed him gently he would simply fall over in a heap of dust and beard. He paused as he came level with them. He stopped. And he looked, with a pair of very mild, pale, rheumy blue eyes, straight at Torren Ballast.

“Warden,” said the Herald, in a rich, slow, rolling voice, like an organ in a cathedral. “I know your face.”

“It’s been a good while,” said Torren, and there was a roughness in it.

“Thirty-three years.” The old man nodded, slowly, several times. “The north gate. You held the doors. You held them against the Red Company, on the sixty-first day, when they came with a ram, and the mob behind them, and did not let a single one of them through to the stand until the Crown’s own guard arrived. A hundred and thirty men.” He smiled, rather vaguely, and the beard moved. “I have told that story to my grandson. He doesn’t believe it. He says that nobody can be so big. Is it still all your own?”

“Mostly,” said Torren. “A bit’s gone to Nerissa’s cooking.”

“Splendid. Splendid.” The Herald patted his shoulder, which was about as far as he could reach, with great kindness, and moved on, tapping with his staff. And as he went, over his shoulder, in a placid and ringing voice that carried the length of the hall, he said, to nobody, to the whole room: “I shall be pleased to see you in the Hall again. It was an excellent door.”

Torren stood quite still. He had gone a dull dark red, and Brek, who had come along at the back of the party with the guild’s papers in a satchel, put his large hand on the old man’s arm, quite lightly, as one steadies a horse.

“Pops,” said Brek. “You’re pleased.”

“I’m not,” said Torren, in a thick voice, and blew his nose.

And then, a little before the second pillar, they came to the peacock.

He did not come to them. That was perhaps the thing that Fel remembered. They would have missed him, almost, in the press, if it had not been for the sound. It was the faint sweet silvery clink of a hundred small jeweled bells, as of a great many tiny bright things shaken together in a glass, and it came across the heads of the crowd with a rush and a ripple, and a space opened.

He came through it at a stately pace, with a train of twelve behind him. He was dressed in blue silk shot with gold, and a long coat so perfect that it seemed to be breathing, and his hair was blue-black and brushed back from his brow in a single clean sweep, and on the narrow aristocratic face, upon the left cheek, quite faint now, a little paler than the rest, there still lingered something that might have been the ghost of a handprint. Behind him, in the white and teal of the Academy, stepped twelve young duelists in two exact lines, with their rapiers sheathed and their chins in the air. And over the whole bright company, in a vast, shimmering, jewel-eyed fan that took up the best part of the aisle, rose the train of peacock feathers, trembling slightly, in the draft.

Lord Valentin Brightcrest was looking at nobody. He was looking, with a faint and mournful distaste, at the ceiling.

Then he stopped. It was a very small stop. A man who had not been watching would have thought that he had merely paused to adjust a cuff. But the long blue-black lashes went down, and came up, and his eyes, which were large and dark and extraordinarily clear, passed across the party, from Brannoch to Thara, and from Thara to Orrin, and found Veyra.

He did not smile this time. He looked at her for a very long moment, with an expression that Fel could not read at all. And then, very slowly, he looked at Fel.

It was the same look. It began at the boots, and climbed, and did not stop at the swords. It went up, and up, over the length of the coat, and the shoulders, and the great scarred hands, and the face, a good deal further than it had gone the first time, and a very faint crease appeared between the sculpted brows, like a man who has been handed a coin that was lighter than he remembered.

“Oh,” said Lord Valentin. “The boy.”

“His name,” said Veyra, quite pleasantly, “is Fel.”

“Of course it is.” The Master of the Peacock Academy gave a little wave of the hand, as at a fly. He had recovered his voice. It was a brass voice, rich and cool and effortlessly carrying, and all round them heads were beginning to turn. “It is the Roll, I suppose? One hears that there are, this year, rather more of the, of the entered than is customary. A great many new names. The Rotunda has grown, I think, a little democratic.” He lifted a ringed hand, and examined it. “I must confess that I am, ah, surprised. I had not thought that you would have the means. One does not, of course, forbid it. Anybody may enter. It is a noble thing. It gives the public so much pleasure to see them lose.”

“Does it?”

“Immensely.” He smiled, at last. It was a thin smile, and it did not reach the dark eyes. “We shall be in different brackets, I do not doubt. The Rotunda is very careful. They will have put you at the bottom of some other, ah, basement. Where you will no doubt do very bravely.” He drew himself up, and his feathers spread. “It has been a great pleasure. I wish you, of course, luck. And Lady Veyra…”

He bowed. It was a perfect one, a small, deep, exquisite bow, with a flourish of the hand, and when he straightened he looked at her for the space of a heartbeat quite directly, with something in his face, a flicker, a thing quickly put away, that was very nearly not contempt at all.

“The offer,” said Valentin Brightcrest, “stands.”

He went on, with his train, in a long bright silent ripple. And Veyra stood perfectly still, with her hands at her sides, and looked after him with a slight, thoughtful, dangerous smile.

“Can I hit him?” said Thara, in a whisper.

“No,” said Veyra.

“Can you hit him?”

“I have done it,” said Veyra. “It was very satisfying. I do not wish to cheapen it.” She turned her head. Her violet eyes found Fel’s, and rested there, and there was in them a spark of such bright, fierce, private amusement that it put the whole of the great gold room in the shade. “Besides. I think that we will not need to. I think that the Cup will see to it for us.”

Fel said nothing. He was looking after the blue and gold, and the long shining train of feathers going away through the crowd. But something had gone through his chest, at the sight of that thin smile. It was neither anger nor fear. It was something quite quiet and level, and very cold, like the smooth black water in the bottom of a well.

Anybody may enter, he thought. It gives the public so much pleasure to see them lose.

He put his hand, very lightly, on the pommel of the black sword, and kept it there until they reached the desks.

* * *

The desk was the same, and so was the clerk.

It was a long, high, polished brass counter, in the Third Cage, under a lamp with a green glass shade, with a rack of pens and a great stamp and a stack of forms as tall as a man’s knee. And behind it, on her stool, in her russet fur and her waistcoat and her spectacles, with her ears flat against her skull and her nose a little pink and a smear of ink on her chin, Marigold Tufton was crying.

She was not making a fuss of it. She was doing it, in fact, with a certain quiet efficiency, between forms, with a small stamped handkerchief, in the manner of a woman who has been crying, off and on, since the first bell of the morning and does not propose to let it hold up the line. She looked up as they came. The round dark eyes went to Fel, and then to the others, and she blew her nose with a great honk, and her whole small face crumpled up and re-formed in a shining, trembling, ecstatic smile.

“Oh, you came,” said Marigold. “You came! I did not think that you would, I thought you’d be asleep, I thought that you’d forget, and I had Hemlock all ready to run, he was going to run to the house, he’d got his shoes on…” She pushed up her spectacles. “Oh, my dears. Oh, look at you. You’re all so tall. And so very dirty. You’ve been to the fiftieth.”

“Yesterday,” said Veyra.

“I know.” Marigold clasped her paws. “I had the sergeant’s tablet this morning, with the stamp on it. The same day, it said. The Amolite, and the boss, the same day. I have it in a frame. I am going to put it in the Directory.” She leaned forward, and her voice dropped to a hiss of pure emotion. “Do you know how close it was?”

“How close what was?” said Fel.

“The Roll.” She was whispering, now, and her whiskers shook. “Oh, I should not tell you. I will tell you. It’s not in the rules, it is only a thing that the Crown’s counting-house does, in the dark, and I have it on very good authority. There are ninety-nine places. That is all. It has always been ninety-nine, in the three brackets of thirty-three, because it was a very neat number, and the kings were fond of it. And there are, this year, something over three hundred guilds who wish to be on the Roll. It is an absolute crush. You cannot imagine the letters.” She drew breath. “So there is a rule. A very old one. The ninety-nine are chosen, first of all, by the floors. By the lowest floor that each guild has cleared, in a recognized dungeon, and set down under the Crown’s stamp. The deeper you have gone, the higher you stand. And when two guilds are tied, by the date, the one that got there first.” She put one paw on her chest. “We had a guild from Tarn Belgrave, last evening, at the ninth bell, that had cleared the forty-seventh floor of the Pits. They were the ninety-ninth. And you had the fortieth, as of the autumn, and a good deal behind, and I had put you down as a hope, and no more. And at the sixth bell last night…”

She paused. She looked, with immense significance, at Veyra.

“The sergeant’s tablet came up,” said Marigold, “from the right mountain, by runner. Fiftieth floor. Clear. Seven Sorrows. With the stamp. And a quarter of an hour before the Roll was sealed, I pushed it, with my own two paws, across the Counting-House desk, in front of a very cross man with a very large ledger, and he looked at it, and he looked at me, and he said that it was quite irregular.” Her ears quivered. “And I said so is the Cup. And he struck out the Tarn Belgrave guild, and wrote you in.”

“Marigold,” said Nerissa.

“I’m so sorry for the Tarn Belgrave guild, they were very nice.” The little clerk dashed at her eyes. “You’re the ninety-ninth. The very last. By the width of a stamp. If you had come up the stair at the tenth bell, instead of the sixth, you would be sitting in the gallery today with a pie.” She gave a long, shaking sigh. “It is the best thing that I have ever done. I may never be as proud again.”

Nobody said anything for a time.

It was Thara who broke it. She had been, for a very long moment, perfectly silent, which was in itself a thing to remark, and then she vaulted up onto the end of the brass counter, quite without leave, and sat there with her boots swinging and both hands pressed to her heart.

“Ninety-nine,” said Thara. “We’re ninety-nine. We got in by being last. Oh, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard. We’re the worst of the best! We’re the crumbs!” She turned, with blazing eyes, to the others. “It’s perfect. Nobody’s going to take us seriously. They’re all going to think we’re a joke. We’re going to walk all over them!”

“They will certainly think so,” said Marigold, with a wavering and conspiratorial smile. “You will have noticed, I think, that you have already been looked at.”

“We noticed,” said Veyra.

“Well!” Marigold wiped her nose, and pulled the great stack of forms toward her, and became in an instant a clerk. “We must be quick, I have a line. There are a number of things to sign. There is the Oath, there is the Waiver, there is the Waiver of the Waiver, which is a very old one, and a form for the next of kin. Do not be alarmed by the next of kin. It is only a form. Everyone has to do it. It is the same as for the Pits, only longer, and it has a picture.” She set a pen in Fel’s hand. “Seven names. In ink. Brek, dear, you will stand there. The staff do not sign, it is only the seven, but you will be in the gallery, and you will have a seat, and a cushion, and I have saved you a pie.”

They signed. It took a very long time, and a great deal of ink, and was made no quicker by the fact that all seven of them read every line, which Marigold said was extremely irregular. And while Fel was bent over the last of the papers, with his tongue between his teeth, the little clerk, who could not bear a silence, began, in a low, rapid, happy undertone, to talk.

“You will want to know about the others,” she said. “Everyone does. I do not like to gossip. I am a very serious clerk. But if it were, say, a thing that I had happened to observe, over a very long and honorable career, with no malice at all…” She turned over a form. “Well. First of all there is the oldest.”

“The oldest guild?” said Orrin.

“In the Realms. The Wardens of the First Furnace.” The name seemed to settle over the desk like a hand. “They are Dun Vurrim. They are as old as the Forge, which is to say very, very old, and they claim, with some reason, that there has not been a Cup since the first at which a Warden did not stand in the Hall. They are dwarves. All of them. They are not many, and they are not quick, and they do not talk, and they have won the Cup, I think, four times in the thirty-three. Which is not a great many.” She sniffed. “But they have never been beaten. Do you understand me? They have lost, but they have never been beaten. It is a difference that the dwarves are very careful of. The master is a Grandwarden called Durgan Emberfast, who is six hundred years of age, and has been, they say, in every Cup since the sixteenth, and who is rumored to have a coal in his chest instead of a heart.” She dropped her voice. “I think that it is probably true. I once handed him a form, and the pen smoked.”

“Who else?” said Thara, with shining eyes.

“The most famous.” Marigold gave a small helpless wriggle. “I do not know why I enjoy it so. The Sunlit Court. Of Orvandel. Oh, they are beautiful, they are all so beautiful, the whole company, and so very kind, and they do it all with such grace. They have a song. They have a portrait on every card in every tobacconist from here to the Salt Coast. Lady Aurelia Sunmere, the master, she has never lost a bout in the open, not once, and half of Dun Vurrim is in love with her, and the other half would like to be her.” She sighed. “She sent me a note, last year. With violets.”

“And the dangerous?” said Torren.

He had been standing at the edge of the desk, quite silent, with his arms folded across his chest. He said it lightly. But Marigold glanced up at him, and the pen stopped.

“The Black Tithe,” she said.

It was a very small voice. It had lost all its sparkle, and the little face under the spectacles had gone quite plain and grave. “They are Tarn Belgrave. They collect, Master Ballast. That is what they do. It is a trade. A lord, a king, a city, a plague, if it owes, and has not paid, then a letter comes, and then, in a month, a very quiet man. They have never failed to be paid, and they have never been known to be paid in coin.” She wet her lips. “I do not like to say. It is not fair. They are on the Roll, and so they are a guild like any other, and they will be at the Cup as we all are. But I have been a clerk for forty years, and the Black Tithe have signed their name at this desk nine times. And I have never once seen the same clerk for them, twice.”

There was a small pause.

“I think,” said Nerissa gently, “that it is time for the one that you are not saying.”

Marigold looked at her. And a sudden flash of something passed across her face, relief, perhaps, or surrender, as of a person who has been holding something heavy for a long time and has been quietly told that she may put it down.

“The Ninefold Road,” said Marigold.

Her ears had folded down. “You will not have heard. It is not a famous thing, it is only a thing that the old clerks know. It is a company from Tarn Belgrave. Nine people. They have been together, the very same nine, for I think seventy years, and they have entered the Cup twice, and they have never won it. They have been beaten, each time, in the final, by a hair. A single bout. And it has been, I think, a sort of…” She groped. “A sort of wound. To them. They are very old now. Their master, Mother Ceridwen, was already grey when I was a girl, and she is a good deal greyer, and I am told that she has a thing in her chest that the healers cannot cure. She has said it to the whole of the Rotunda, in a letter, in her own hand. She is not coming back.” She took a long breath. “It is the last time. This Cup. They are here one last time, and they will not be here again, and everyone in the Hall knows it. I think that, of all the guilds, they are the ones that the crowd would like to see win. And I think that they will not.”

“Why not?” said Fel.

“Because of the last,” said Marigold, and she lowered her voice until it was a thread. “Because of Sphel.”

She said it quite clearly. It lay on the counter between them, like a stone.

“I do not know what to say about them,” she said. “There is no rule. The Rotunda has no word. They call themselves a Nation, you see, and it is not a guild at all, it is a, a banner, it is a crowd of people who have sworn to a single name, and the Crown does not know what to do with such a thing, and so, as a convenience, it has been written down as a guild. The Nation of Sphel. It is two years old. Less. It was nothing. It was a rumor in the Ashen Hills. And now it has…” She made a small helpless gesture. “They have entered the Cup. They have come to the Hall, with three hundred fighters, and have, I believe, chosen the best ones. They are on the Roll, in the Ember. And their master is not with them.”

“The master?” said Veyra.

“Sphelorius.” The little clerk’s whiskers trembled. “They say that he has not come to Dun Vurrim. They say that he has never come, to any city. The lieutenants sign for him. They are very polite. They bring the papers, in a grey coat, in the evening, and they say that their lord is not able, at present, to attend. And they say it with a look.” She shivered. “And there is a rumor. I do not repeat it. But it is, perhaps, a thing that you ought to know. They say that he will come. They say that he will come in his own person, before the end, to the Hall, because of the prize. Not the bottle. Not the Purse.” She looked, slowly, at the three of them, at Fel and Veyra and the old man, with her great dark eyes quite round. “The map.”

Nobody spoke.

“I don’t know why,” whispered Marigold. “I do not know what is on it. I have never seen it. I have never even been told. But the Nation of Sphel was written on the Roll for one reason. They have said so. It is the only guild, in the whole history of the Cup, that has ever named, before the Hall, a single prize, and said that it was the only one it wanted.” She shook herself, rather sharply, like a wet creature, and pushed the last of the forms across the counter. “And that is quite enough. I have a line. Sign there. And there. There. And there is one more thing.”

She reached under the counter. She drew out, with both paws, a long roll of stiff pale paper, tied with a green ribbon and stamped with the wax seal of the Rotunda, and laid it on the brass between them, and for a moment she did not let go.

“It is the Roll,” said Marigold. “The full one. It was drawn at dawn, by seven clerks, with the urn, in the vault, and a man with a very big sword to see that nobody cheated. I have had it printed all night. There are only five hundred, and I have kept you one.” She smiled, tremulously, with her eyes full. “I thought that you would like to see where you are.”

Fel took it. The paper was cool and thick, and the seal crumbled under his thumb, and he drew the ribbon, and unrolled the long, heavy, whispering sheet across the brass.

He looked at it for a very long time.

“Well,” said Torren Ballast, very slowly, at his shoulder. “I’ll be damned.”

“Where?” said Thara, who could not read upside down. “Where are we? Which one’s us? Is it the last? It’s the last, isn’t it? We’re at the bottom!” She had her chin on Fel’s arm, and she gave a small shrill scream. “We’re in the play-in! We’re in the play-in, Veyra, we’re on the very last line, we’ve got to fight a fight just to be in the fight!”

“And whom do we fight?” said Veyra.

Fel found the name. It was two lines above his own. The Mudlark Brigade, the Drowned Reach. He read it aloud, and nobody knew it, and he went on, quite slowly, up the page, up the long ladder of names, with his finger moving, past a Kettle, and a Drover, and a Thief; and stopped.

“There,” said Fel.

It was a long way up. It was nineteen names above his own, and in the same bracket, on the same great branching tree of lines, a good way off, and he looked at it for some time without speaking. He did not feel anything very much. He felt only that something very old and very patient, at the back of his mind, had quietly turned over in its sleep.

The Gilded Peacock Academy.

“He said that we would be in other brackets,” said Veyra, in a voice of the most perfect innocence.

“We’d meet them,” said Torren slowly, with his thick finger moving down the page, “if we won. Four times. And then them. In the, in the semi.” He stopped. A great slow grin was spreading, from ear to ear, through the beard. “In the semi-final. We’d meet the peacock in the semi-final. If we got that far. If he got that far.”

“I would like it noted,” said Orrin, with a small tremor, “that the Quiet Kettle is on the list. And the Order of the Luminous Eyebrow. Both of them. In our bracket.” He had his long blue finger on the page. “We are to meet the three, I think, of the guilds that said no.”

Fel looked up.

He looked round the ring of faces. Nerissa, with her lips parted. Brannoch, enormous and silent, with a faint light in the deep-set eyes. Thara, who had begun to laugh, very softly, helplessly, into the crook of her arm. Veyra, with her chin up and her violet eyes bright. The old man, grinning like a boy. And Marigold, in the middle of it all, on her stool, with her handkerchief to her face and the little stamp in her fist, who had never in her whole long life, Fel thought, looked so completely and so fiercely happy.

“And Sphel?” he said.

Torren’s finger moved. It went across the page, along the foot, and up into the second of the three great trees, to the top of the Ember, to the very first name on the line. It stopped. He did not read it aloud. He did not need to.

“Not till the end,” said the old man, quite gently. “Not till the very last day. They’re in the other bracket. And so’s the third.” He lifted his finger, and held it over the sheet, over the three high branches that all, at last, ran together in a single line. “If we win ours, and they win theirs, and the Wardens win the Ash, as they’ve a way of doing…” He looked up. “Then there’s three of us, lad. In the Hall. On the hundred-and-first day. One Cup. And only one door.”

There was a very long silence in the Third Cage, and the canisters whistled overhead, and the great bell began to toll the third hour. And Fel stood with the Roll spread out under his hands, with ninety-nine names upon it, and three trees, and a single line, and thought, quite calmly, and without any fear at all, of a man in blue silk, and a smile.

Let them come, he thought.