The Hidden Coronet Read Free Page B

his face unreadable. Finally he asked, “Will he come here?”
    “Unlikely. Not while the fair is on. He’ll want to see the hangings.”
    Galen nodded. “Then listen to me. Tonight, if I can, I will break your house of its spell. But in return, if I survive, I want your help. Your son has a spare uniform, insignia, papers. I want them.”
    “What!” Raffi grasped the keeper’s arm. “Why?”
    Galen shook him off ferociously. “Because if we do nothing, there are ten people who’ll hang on those gallows. And one of them is a keeper. I intend to get him out.”
    Chilled, Raffi stared at him in despair.
    And instantly, from behind them in the house, an eerie, throaty cry rose up, as if it were his own fear given voice, an echoing howl from some creature trapped in unendurable darkness and pain, so terrifying that Raffi’s hands went cold and all his sense-lines stirred in a web of dizzying sickness.
    It lasted long seconds. When it had ebbed, all three of them were still, shadows among shadows.
    Then the woman nodded, white-faced.
    “All right,” she said. “Anything.”

3
    One day Soren was walking in the Fields of Eldaman when she saw a tiny flower under her foot. “What are you called?” she asked. The flower said it had no name. Soren picked it and wove it into a crown. She took it to Flain. “In our work,” she said, “we have overlooked the least and smallest of lives.”
    Flain ran his fingers over the flowers. “From now on,” he said, “all men will know you. You will teach the highest how to be humble.”
    Book of the Seven Moons

    T HE ROOM WAS VERY DARK. Galen would have only one lamp, and that was standing in the middle of the floor. Its yellow glow threw a great shadow over the keeper’s shoulder, edging his face with slants of light. Around it he was arranging the awen-beads, seven circles of green and jet, a peculiar formation new to Raffi.
    Squeezed into the corner, his back against the dusty paneling, Raffi sat hugging his knees, then laid his forehead on them wearily.
    The woman had fed them. A good meal—soup, mutton, and cheese, the best he’d had since they left Sarres, and despite his worry he had been hungry for it. She’d cooked it in the old kitchen below, where broken spits hung askew under the vast sooty throats of the chimneys, and she’d waited while they’d eaten it. But even Raffi had sensed the stifled fear in her, heard the small, impatient creaks her chair had made. She was desperate to get out.
    At last Galen had cut a slice of cheese with deliberate care and said, “When you go, lock the doors from the outside. Whatever sounds you hear, whatever strange sights you may see, you stay away. Neither you nor anyone else is to come back to this house until full daylight. Do you understand that?”
    Relieved, she had nodded, but at the door had turned and said, hesitating, “I could take the boy with me. Is it right to put the boy in danger?”
    Galen hadn’t even looked up. “The boy is a scholar of the Order. How else will he learn?”
    When she’d gone, they’d come up here, to the highest rooms; Galen had taken his time choosing this one. Raffi broke mud-clots off his boots nervously. He wished he were back on Sarres, or anywhere, even at the fair. At least that had been out in the open; he could breathe or run. Here he felt as if the ancient house was stifling him, all its shutters tight, the carpet of dust, the webs, the mildewed walls. It was quiet, all the sense-lines were still, but there was something wrong with them, bizarrely wrong—they were warped, as if something else was here inside them, bulging them out.
    He wondered if Galen could feel it too.
    Now the Relic Master sat back on his heels, the hook of his nose shadowed. Without looking at Raffi he said, “You knew a keeper was among the prisoners, didn’t you?”
    Raffi clenched his fists. He’d been waiting for this.
    “I heard something,” he muttered.
    “And you didn’t tell me.”
    “I