Crown of War and Shadow (Kingdoms of the Compass #1)
Chapter One. Demons and Departures.
One
Demons and Departures.
“Where do you think you’re going, Sorrel.”
As Mr. Lewis heaps his rotund frame into my path, I shrink beneath my Pox cloak.
The owner of the Gauntlet Public House is a mountain with a bald summit, and there is no going around, over, or through him, especially not for a barmaid like me.
Keeping my eyes on his scuffed boots, I tuck the satchel of medicine I prepared under the folds of what covers me from aching head to tattered slipper shoe.
“I am to send word to the grain miller—”
A cresting of bawdy laughter and thumping fists cuts off the lie.
In the glow of the lanterns, the pub’s main door is just twenty lengths away, but the maze of rough-hewn tables is a congested landscape of sweaty, drunken clientele and faded-rose working women.
With my employer blocking my escape, I can’t even get to those obstacles.
“I have cleaned the hourly rooms,” I offer by way of a toll to pass. “And I washed the pints for the tender, and the flour sacks have been brought in—”
“What about the stairs?” He pulls up the waistband of his sackcloth pants with the effort worthy of a stump removal. “And the sheets.”
“I have brought the sheets in from the clotheslines and they are folded.”
“The stairs, then.” As another round of laughter explodes, Mr. Lewis points a pudgy finger over my shoulder. “You have to earn your room and board. I don’t run a charity.”
He reminds me of this at every turn, and if I am cast out from this place, I have no family, no money, and no prospects.
“You are very generous, Mr. Lewis—”
“I am too generous.” He sniffs an inhale, as if he disapproves of himself. “Get your broom then. You don’t need to be out and about when things are busy here.”
“But the miller needs to know the order for tomorrow’s flour. It won’t take long—”
“He always comes here after his wife serves him that bad food of hers. Without my ale, his gout would cripple him. You will tell him then.”
“I can be right back—”
“Why are you still talking. And you’ll sweep behind the bar, too.”
I glance across at the tender, a perpetually cross man who is not going to want me back there.
Beneath the folds of my cloak, I fist the satchel in my hand. “Yes, Mr. Lewis.”
Turning away, I reenter the back of house through the archway, and tell myself there’s still time to get to Mare, if I make quick work of the duties.
The elderly woman suffers without what I give her, especially in the cold and the damp of this interminable autumn, and I wasn’t able to get free this morning.
As I picture her in the nest of blankets I’ve made for her, fragile as a baby bird, I pray she’s warm enough.
Bypassing where I sleep under the stairs, I go to the next closet. After I stuff the satchel into a pocket, I grab whatever handle comes to my palm, and mount the worn steps to start at the top—
A young man who’s been lodging with us throws himself into a thundering descent as he pulls on his gray waistcoat. The tails of his untucked shirt bounce, and he’s whistling under his breath, having clearly enjoyed his lusty pursuits.
“You missed a spot,” he mocks as he pushes me aside.
He’s been with us a week, having come down from Prosperitus, the royal seat of the East. His city ways have been the subject of provincial awe, and it’s clear he enjoys the deference. The ladies have certainly enjoyed his coins.
I wonder when he’s leaving so I don’t have to do his sheets.
Arriving up top, I swear that Mr. Lewis lies in wait for me to have an unoccupied moment, and as I draw the broom from balustrade to bare wall, there’s no loose dirt to sweep onto the next lower step.
What there is plenty of is the muffled sounds of coupling.
The grunts and theatrical moans ripple out from the closed doors of the ladies’ rooms, and it’s a relief to make progress so that I can’t hear them anymore.
Sallae Mae, the women’s unofficial madam, appears at the bottom with a charge.
She’s got blond hair that tumbles down her back, but with thirty years and four of hard living, there are lines on her face and a cynical twist to her smile and voice.
The man leads the way, and as he ascends, I stop what I’m doing and try to make space for him to pass.
Though I lower my eyes, I recognize his riding boots.
They’re very fine, with polished spur nubs that shine silver. It’s one of the mayor’s sons—
“Will you get out of the way,” he mutters at me.
I try to become flatter against the wall as I remember attending his wife on the birthing bed last month. The son he’s so proud to have is only alive because of me, and that means he and I have a dangerous, unlawful secret.
I tell myself that’s why he hates me … that’s why so many of the villagers hate me.
In his wake, Sallae Mae wafts past me in a cloud of perfume. Though I help her and the others on the sly with treatments for their various difficulties, none of them ever acknowledge me. But it’s better than the active shunning.
Loneliness is about so much more than solitude.
As I resume my needless duty, the stiff straw head of the broom whisks over boards smoothed like river stones by countless footfalls.
The Gauntlet has been a fixture of my village since before the Great Containment, or so they say, so it’s got to be centuries old.
I certainly feel as though I’ve been here forever, each night and day exactly the same, the grinding repetition a false sense of infinity.
With every step I descend, the time I’m being forced to waste is like someone screaming in my face.
The medicine in the satchel is the last of the root I have prepared, and the pain reliever is more precious than any safety of my own.
I tell myself that Mr. Lewis will soon get tied up with the other villagers, and that’s when I can—
A resounding clap cuts through the pub’s din, and I jerk my head up.
In the entry, standing in the pouring rain, the milkman, Mr. Cavenish, is holding up a cowbell that’s covered in blood. In his other hand, a fistful of animal innards drips a gruesome stew down his pant leg and onto his knee-high boots.
“Demons!” he yells as he comes inside. “The Fulcrum is failing and they are coming for us!”
People duck as he swings the gore around and stumbles over to a table. In the yellow light of the oil lanterns, his face is a grotesque distortion—but worse is what he’s saying, our collective, unspoken fears made manifest.
“Hunting in the gloaming, stalking us at night! She was snatched from the herd, her stomach clawed open—”
Villagers gasp and recoil as they’re speckled in the face with blood, and he wheels on another group who have traded forced joviality for the very sincere horror that’s been under all our awareness lately.
“The demons are out of the Fulcrum and they’re hunting us—the Dark King returns!
It is his star that has appeared in the sky! ”
I trip down the stairs, called by the confirmation of what we’ve all been worried about since the first of his herd was killed. But I make sure that I stay on the fringes as the alarmed hush that follows is broken with someone speaking up.
“There are wild animals in the forest. Many things will attack a—”
“The carcass was set at the south,” Mr. Cavenish spits. “What animal slaughters cows at exactly the north, the east … and now the south! I warned you when this started two weeks ago! I told all of you! The wall that surrounds us will not hold—”
“Enough!” Mr. Lewis barks.
In the silence, clues tie together around a reality that surely will sink us—the slaughtered cows, the strange footprints … the pall of darkness that’s all around our village. The others are thinking the same thing, I can tell by the hunched shoulders, the lowered heads.
This is probably the only accord I will have with them, not that they’d care I’m scared, too. Probably more than they are.
“Magic is in use,” Mr. Cavenish lashes out. “The Fulcrum has weakened because of it, and the demons are harbingers of what is to come! The Dark King rises!”
Shrinking beneath my cloak, I step out of the lantern light. Not that anyone has noticed me.
Not that any one of them could point a finger at me without incriminating themselves.
“Get him out of here,” Mr. Lewis says with exhaustion.
As he sweeps his hand toward the exit, a couple of men jump up from their frozen stupors, and Mr. Cavenish returns to his ranting as he’s taken by the elbow and dragged back out into the cold rain.
“Magic has been used in violation of the law and all of Anathos will die because of it! You know this—”
Mr. Lewis himself closes the door and puts his boulder body against it. Though I’m careful to stay out of sight, it’s clear he’s looking around for something. I pray this is not the night I’ve always dreaded, the night when I’m banished, finally.
“We could go to the Sooths,” someone suggests. “They’ll know—”
“I already went,” somebody else cuts in. “They will not speak of—”
“G’on now,” Mr. Lewis interrupts. “Finish your ales. Next order’s on the house.”
This revives the mood a little, but he’s got to make them stay or he’ll lose the profit for the rest of the night—as opposed to them bolting home to their wives and children and securing their windows and doors.
As Mr. Lewis waddles from table to table calming nervous chatter, I seize the opportunity.
I scuttle off, shove the broom into the closet, and disappear through the empty kitchen and the rear exit.
Outside, the rain falls from the churning, restless sky, and the night feels like it’s not just come early this evening, but is a season in and of itself. When I hear talk and a clanging, I whisper down the back of the Gauntlet and peer around the corner.
Mr. Cavenish is being walked along the main street, and the men with him are not being rough.
The innards are no longer in his hand, but the bell remains.
The soulful sound it makes is like a countdown, and I think of the deteriorating wall that surrounds my village.
Even in its decline, the mortared stone bulwark is tall as the Gauntlet’s thatched roof and thick as a mead barrel.
Still, I find myself wondering if those creatures whose faces and teeth have yet to be seen can climb. Or fly like dragons.
Maybe the balas in the moat will give us some protection.
For my two decades of life, I have stayed cloistered inside Greensward’s wall, only venturing out to gather the plants and roots I need.
Otherwise, I don’t even leave the pub unless I have to.
I’ve never felt safe, even within our village, and as I think about what’s stalking us?
The news from the other territories on Anathos seem like forest fires of danger ready to consume me: There’s been talk of animals, and even people, being attacked in the settlements that ring the various royal courts.
I’ve heard so many fearful whispers at the end of the night, travelers sharing that which they refuse to acknowledge in the light of day.
The milkman is right. We are being hunted here, the wall that protects us both a defense and a target.
But he’s wrong that the Fulcrum has been weakened because of magic.
I’ve been wielding a sliver of that sacred energy my whole life, and I refuse to believe there’s been any bad repercussions—and everybody in this pub who ignores me feels the same way, too. Even Mr. Cavenish.
They hate that they’ve had to rely on me, but though I am a shunned orphan, I have learned one solid truth: There’s nothing people will not do for their family.
No, the cause is something else.
And that’s what we need to fear, even more than the demons, which are but the preamble to a much more deadly enemy.