Chapter 79: The Oath

He was back in the camp an hour before dawn.

The cook fires were cold and the tents were dark. Somewhere a horse stamped and blew, and a sentry on the wall coughed quietly into his glove. Aren slipped between the rows of canvas without a sound and knelt beside Varro’s woodpile, where three logs at the bottom had never been moved by anyone but him. He slid the mask into the gap behind them and carefully pushed the logs back.

Then he picked up his buckets and went to the well.

He had carried these buckets for twelve days, and he knew their weight as well as his own hands. Full, with the pole across his shoulders, they pulled his back into a curve and made his legs burn by the third trip up the iron stair. That was how a water boy walked: bent, slow, and a little sideways.

He filled them both to the brim and lifted the pole, and it felt exactly like lifting a broom.

’Oh. Oh, that’s a real problem!’

He stood by the well with two full buckets hanging from his shoulders and nothing pulling on him at all, and for the first time since the mine he understood what four hundred and thirteen actually meant, not as a number but as a danger. Every soldier in this camp had watched Ren of Aldermere stagger up the stair a hundred times. If Ren suddenly walked up it straight-backed this morning, someone would notice, and Kaela would certainly notice.

So he let his shoulders drop and bent his knees a little. He took short, careful steps and made himself pant at the top of the slope, and it was harder work than carrying the water had ever been.

’Who knew pretending to be weak would be the hardest training of all?’

Under his ribs the Familiar slept, heavy and full, and around his heart he could feel the thin grey ring of the Ward, cold and patient.

[Ward of Zero. Charges: 1/1. Cooldown: 30 days after use.]

One charge only. He would have to choose very carefully who got it.

The Imperial side held its muster at first light, in the great yard behind the iron gate.

Aren was there because the muster needed water. Two hundred of the Prince’s riders, the garrison of Kharn, the chapel and the officers would all stand in the cold for an hour while their names were read, and every one of them would want a cup afterward. He set his buckets down by the wall with the other water boys and kept his head low.

The Crown Prince stood on the steps of the iron tower, tall and straight in black and gold. His chaplain stood one step below him, old and white-haired, with a silver chain over his robes, and behind the chaplain, in a short line, stood the four priests in grey.

The third one had grey eyes, and he held a box wrapped in grey cloth tightly against his chest.

Kaela came out of the tower last.

She was in full armor for the first time since the Prince had arrived, with her dark hair pulled back tight and the dead iron heart hanging on its chain outside her breastplate, where everyone could see it. She didn’t look at her brother, or the chaplain, or anyone else. She walked straight across the yard, through the lines of her own soldiers, to the great iron gate of Kharn, and slowly took off her right gauntlet.

The whole yard went quiet.

Everyone knew what she was doing. They had all heard about the deep pool, and about what the Prince had said to her in front of the garrison, and that the treaty was at noon. Two hundred riders and four hundred soldiers stood frozen and watched her lay her bare palm flat on the iron.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened at all.

Then the gate answered.

It began as a sound below hearing, a hum in the stones under Aren’s feet. Then the great chains on either side of the gate drew tight, link by link, with a groan that rolled across the whole yard, and the gate of Kharn, which usually took twelve men and a winch to open, swung back on its own.

The soldiers of Kharn roared.

It was louder and rougher than a cheer, the sound of men who had stood beside her for six years, watched her get slapped in public, and said nothing. They beat their spears on their shields, and some of them were shouting her name over and over. The Prince’s riders didn’t shout, but a few of them were openly smiling.

’Go on, Captain. Enjoy it. You earned every bit of it!’

Kaela put her gauntlet back on, and her face hadn’t changed at all.

The Prince came down the steps and stopped in front of his sister. He only looked at her at first, and Aren saw something cross his face that might have been relief.

"Which pool?" he asked.

"The deep one. It’s alive."

That was all. She didn’t say how, or who. She turned and walked back toward the tower, and her soldiers made a path for her without being told.

Aren wasn’t watching her.

He was watching the old chaplain with the silver chain on the steps of the tower, because he had expected to see a man watching his plan fall apart. He had been waiting for that face since the cistern.

The chaplain was smiling.

It wasn’t a polite smile, or the thin smile of a courtier hiding a bad morning. He was smiling like a man who has just seen something difficult turn simple, and he turned his head and said something quietly to the priest behind him.

The grey-eyed priest wasn’t smiling, and he wasn’t looking at Kaela’s face either. He was looking at her right hand, the one she had put on the gate, and he kept looking at it until she had gone inside.

’Why are you happy? Why on earth are you happy?’

Aren poured water for two hundred riders and couldn’t taste any of it.

The treaty was signed at noon in the middle yard, the strip of open ground where the iron wall and the stone wall of Kharn met.

They had been building the platform for three days. It stood in the center of the yard, waist-high, with a long table covered in white cloth, and on the table lay the treaty, three sheets of thick paper, beside a silver bowl. On one side stood the Prince’s riders in black, and on the other the King’s soldiers in grey and gold, under the banners of Aldermere and Ashgrave.

Duke Ashgrave would sign for the King. Aren saw him on the platform, tall and grey, with the same cold face he had worn in the gallery of the Great Hall on the morning of the Awakening. Vivienne stood at his left shoulder in white, her silver hair bound up, with Luna sitting very straight at her feet.

Aren stood at the edge of the King’s side with the other servants, a bucket and a ladle at his feet, because the sun was strong and the speeches would be long.

They were very long, and he barely heard them. He was watching the bowl.

In the end, the chaplain explained it himself. He stepped forward when the speeches were done and lifted the silver bowl in both hands so the whole yard could see it.

"In the old days," he said, in his warm, kind voice, "Kharn was held by blood, and so it is sealed by blood. His Grace the Duke will give his, for the King. His Highness will give his, for the Throne." He turned slightly and bowed his white head. "And Captain Voss will give hers, as the Blooded holder of Kharn, so that the iron and the stone may know who keeps them."

Aren’s breath stopped.

The mine answers to Blooded blood.

That was why it had to be today, and why she had to be Blooded by the signing and not a day later. It had never been about her name or her command. It was about this: a few drops of her blood in a silver bowl, in front of two armies, freely given and blessed by a priest.

If she fails, it answers to his.

The chaplain had never needed her to fail. He had never really cared which of them it was, her blood or her brother’s, as long as some of it ended up in his bowl.

And Aren had spent two weeks making sure it would be hers.

’Two weeks of work, and I delivered it to him on a plate.’

The Duke cut his palm with a small silver knife and let three drops fall, and the Prince did the same. Then Kaela stepped up onto the platform in her armor, took off her gauntlet for the second time that day, and held out her hand.

The knife touched her palm.

Aren watched the drops fall into the bowl. He couldn’t see what color they were, and he never would again. To him they were only dark, darker than the Duke’s and darker than the Prince’s, heavy as iron.

Somewhere far below the yard, under the stones and the platform and the feet of a thousand men, he felt the mountain shift.

Nobody else seemed to feel it, and maybe it was only his imagination. The chaplain lifted the bowl high above his head and began the blessing, and behind him the four priests in grey bowed their heads and began to hum along, low and soft, as priests often do.

The Familiar woke under Aren’s ribs as if it had been burned.

He knew that hum. He had heard it every night for most of his life, from the bed beside his own, when his sister read by lamplight and hummed without knowing she was doing it. He had heard it again on the night of the Festival, rising out of a black seam in the sand of the arena.

Nell’s tune. The Choir’s song.

Across the yard, in the front rank of the Prince’s riders, a soldier’s hand drifted slowly down to the hilt of his sword. Then another’s, and then, on the King’s side, a third.

None of them seemed to know they were doing it.