CHAPTER 24 #2
“—might be a good thing,” someone was saying. “It’s terrible, but . . . perhaps the Outsiders will understand now why we can’t let them cross.”
There were nine clans, and nine clan heads. Avelyn was a little shocked to find he recognised all of them. In his head, he had been away for a lifetime, but of course it had only been twelve years.
“They aren’t going to understand,” said Lady Teksa.
She was one of the youngest, maybe in her thirties; Ras’s older sister.
“I sent my bard and my witch to explain, but they think we’re telling them fairy tales and they’re seeing some sort of illusion in the air.
More of them will try to cross. I’m astonished they haven’t already.
Their women have barely any hold on their sons, and I’ve seen the boys talking. ”
Lady Wolkvos sat forward, nodding. She was, like most of them, in her seventies or so, but seventy looked different in Hreodwater to the Outside.
She was broad and strong. The black paint stripe covered her eyes.
It made her look like she was about to punch someone, though she had a light voice.
“They don’t understand shame our way, either.
If they were Hreod we could embarrass them into not going, but no matter what we say to them .
. . I don’t think they’re going to understand anything but the stocks or a cell. ”
“We can’t do that; they aren’t criminals.
As Lady Teksa says, they’ll go one way or another.
” Lord Harkta. There had been a Lady Harkta years ago, but she had been a nasty, violent drunk and nobody liked her, and everyone had agreed it was best not to look into it too closely when Lord Harkta said that she’d drowned in the fen.
“If they all go at once, and they all really do believe Caer Halen is only a story . . . that might be enough. How many of them are there; sixty?”
There was a calculating, charged quiet. Avelyn looked at Ras, confused. Ras, though, was watching the Witan, eyes sharp.
“Do they believe it enough?” Lady Teksa said.
“It only takes two hundred at An El, to keep the King asleep,” Lady Balen said, and everyone except Avelyn seemed to know exactly what that meant, because there were thoughtful nods.
It was typical. You could understand every single word of Hreod coming at you, and still have no idea what was going on.
“There will be trouble from the Outside if they vanish,” Lady Teksa said.
“If there is trouble, we can always remind Whitehall of their debts to us. They borrowed significantly during the pandemic. We can increase our interest rates,” Lady Balen said, dry as an accounting ledger.
“Or mention their default to their other creditors. The London mortgage market hinges on our goodwill.”
Avelyn had to give himself a shake. Of course they were that rich. You didn’t stay a tiny, independent state in the middle of what had used to be an empire unless you had some money tricks.
He thought again of what Annunciata had said to him. The language was the same, down thousands of years. The people, the culture . . . extraordinarily lucky, however much you factored in the farsightedness of the Witan.
“Well, that’s sensible,” Lady Wolkvos said. “How many aye?”
Everyone raised a hand.
“Get a herald to phrase that carefully,” Lady Balen said to someone behind her chair, perhaps her husband. He was young, eighteen or nineteen. “Stressing that they are of course right, it is all fairy tales and they’ve persuaded us of the error of our ways.”
Which was . . . not what had happened. At some point, listening to Hreod conversations was going to stop feeling like bashing his face into a wall, and Avelyn was very ready for that to be now, but he was feeling less and less optimistic.
“What’s next?” Lady Hringen said, surfacing from what had looked like a trance.
She was exactly the same as Avelyn remembered.
She had that deep glamour sea captains did, the kind who knew their ships and the water so well that nothing would sink them.
Her hair was still dark, in a long braid over her shoulder, and her silver sleeves were like mercury.
After a lifetime of hauling salt carts up and down the mine, she still looked like she would be able to pick Avelyn up and throw him across the room. He hoped she wasn’t going to.
“You are,” Ras murmured to Avelyn, and ghosted up to her chair to speak against her ear.
Lady Hringen sharpened. “We have a petition from Avelyn tua-Brocken.”
Everyone looked around. If Ras had brought a giraffe into the room, they would have been less interested.
Avelyn bowed, acutely aware that he looked like nothing to these people: just a drab little cat of a witch washed in from some unfortunate place that didn’t matter.
The heads of the clans were dressed in fur and exquisite velvet and silk-silver from the Clan Teksa looms. In London, Avelyn knew, there was a beautiful shop on Bond Street that, to the clients who reached the top of a long, carefully curated waiting list, sold Teksa coats like these.
They only increased in value. Not long ago, one had made the news: it had been made two hundred years ago, and it had just sold for one and a half million pounds sterling at Southeby’s.
Lady Teksa, Avelyn suspected, had about twenty that she kept for emergency pocket money.
“What can we do for you, tua-Brocken?” Lord Harkta asked.
“I’ve come to ask a favour of Lady Hringen,” he said carefully.
Nobody made a sound—the Hreod Witan was far more restrained than the roaring, jeering mess that was the House of Commons in Westminster—but there was a stir, humming with expectation.
A few of the ladies settled back, ready to enjoy the blood sport.
Behind them, the young lords caught each others’ eyes, making silent, amused bets.
“Your memory is short if you think I owe you a favour,” Lady Hringen said. “The last I knew of you, you broke a contract with me.”
Everybody looked at Avelyn. Avelyn had a nasty feeling that he was the midmorning entertainment. Behind Lady Hringen’s chair, Ras was watching him, expressionless. It was impossible to tell if he had set this up to help, or to have Avelyn publically humiliated.
“I can’t apologise for that enough, my lady, although . . . I see it’s worked out by far for the best. The current Lord Hringen is performing his duty much better than I would have done.”
She tipped her head and seemed to accept the compliment, more or less, but her expression said it wasn’t enough.
“I went halfway mad, after everything. I didn’t truly know what I was doing, and by the time I did—I was a long way away from here.” He didn’t mean it exactly geographically.
Lady Hringen sat forward. “And now, behind false eyes, with your clan tattoos hidden, you come to ask me for a favour. You, who were once all but consecrated as a witch for the King, but have turned apostate for the nailed god. You want to be an Outsider: why shouldn’t I treat you as one?”
Be polite. Be respectful. Eyes down. There was a Hreod word, ranweth; it meant “elegant and composed, with a kind of soul-deep stillness.” A good man was a ranweth man. Like Ras. “My Witan southeast in Rome sent me to understand what happened to our witch who turned to salt—”
She spoke straight over him. “The King happened to him, boy. You can tell them that.”
“My lady, they don’t understand—”
“That’s more their problem than mine—”
Fuck it.
“They do not know the Salt King,” Avelyn said over her, and there was a renewed prickle of interest through everyone else.
“They think he is a story told on a marsh somewhere. Just like,” he said across the annoyed murmuring, “you think the Vatican is a kingdom based on a collection of incoherent nonsense from a desert. It would be helpful if you would allow me to go down the mine and see where the light is bright. At least that would prove for them that something is down there.”
The depth of the silence made him think he didn’t understand what he was asking for. He wished he could guess what they could possibly be keeping a secret. It was a salt mine, for Christ’s sake, not the Pentagon.
Something that could bite.
“It’s too dangerous now, especially for a young man.”
Avelyn didn’t know what to say to that. Snapping wouldn’t help: the opposite.
Hreodwater treated its young men a lot like Outside people treated expensive pedigree dogs.
You wanted your dog to be happy because you loved it, but it was universally agreed that letting the dog wander off by itself too much was a terrible idea, because it would get flustered and bite someone, or become startled, and you would have a migraine of a time persuading it that barking maniacally wasn’t going to solve anything.
Unless, like Lord Harkta, you were known to be an extremely quiet, wise dog who had never bitten anybody who didn’t bloody deserve it, you could forget it.
Ras leaned down to murmur to his wife again. The beads of black salt in his hair glowed, starry.
Avelyn felt several pairs of eyes move from Ras to him and back to Ras again, and he knew what they were thinking.
In a choice between an accomplished ranweth gentleman and a mouthy little cock who had betrayed the King for the insane triplet gods of the Outside, everyone knew Lady Hringen had married the right one.
“My lord reminds me that you were bred a miner,” Lady Hringen said slowly, “and that Lord Harkta’s seams were once Lady Brocken’s.”
“From,” said Lord Harkta, “the same clan as the first witches, long ago.” He smiled slightly at Avelyn, as though they both knew a joke nobody else did. “The last of the Brocken, come back to us at the King’s first stirring in a thousand years. Interesting, isn’t it?”
Avelyn hadn’t the faintest idea what the joke was supposed to be. He wanted to demand that everyone just say what they bloody meant, preferably in clear bullet points and helpful footnotes.