Three Gold Crowns

They burned Pell Rook on the hill above Sallow on the Sunday, the way the Company burned its dead, with his spear across his chest and the Lantern's brass badge on his tongue for the ferryman. Maud Ferris spoke the words. Tamsin did not speak at all. When the fire had gone down to coals she walked back to the bunkhouse alone, and nobody followed her, because nobody knew what to say to a sister who had held her brother while his eyes went out.

Corwen followed her an hour later, with the fang in his hand.

She was sitting on Pell's bunk. The boy's second boots were still under it. Corwen sat down on the bench opposite and laid the Hollow Wyrm fang on the blanket between them, a forearm's length of grey tooth with the root still bloody.

"I cut this out of the one that killed him," he said. "The Guild would give me a silver mark for it, maybe two. I don't want a silver mark for it. Pell got his spear up before any of us. The wyrm had its throat on his point when I reached it. That's the only reason I got under its jaw. He died for this fang, Tamsin, not me, and so it's yours."

She looked at it for a long time. Then she picked it up and turned it over in her hands, and the first tear she had shed since the twelfth floor ran down beside her nose and she did not wipe it.

"Grind it," she said. "He'd have wanted it used."

"It's yours. Do what you like."

"I'll grind it for your father's sword, then. When you get it back."

He did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing, which seemed to be the right thing. After a while she put the fang under her pillow, where the Company kept the things it did not want stolen, and lay down with her back to him, and he went out.

He got the sword back on the Tuesday.

The Guild paid two gold crowns for a Hollow Wyrm hide, as it had promised, and the Company had brought up two. Maud took the Company's share and split the rest eleven ways, and Corwen's part came to one gold crown and four silver marks, and he had eighteen pennies of his own, and the three remaining fangs from the second wyrm went to the Guild's whetstone man for two silver marks each. He stood in the Guild hall while Ilya Marsh counted it out, and when she was done she wrote the total in her ledger in her small square hand and said, without looking up, "Two gold crowns. Ten silver marks. Eighteen copper pennies. You are still short."

"I know."

"Marsk will not take short."

"I know that too."

He had known it on the twelfth floor. He had known it when Maud said eleven ways. He went out of the Guild hall and up the Wellmouth road to the Warden's gatehouse, and asked Captain Tallow for a word.

"The second wyrm's head," Corwen said. "The one with no fangs. The Guild doesn't want it. The Marquis's son does. I saw him looking at it on the cart. I want you to tell him it's for sale, and I want ten silver marks for it, and I want you to take two of them for your trouble."

Tallow looked at him for a long moment with his tally-stick across his knee. "You've changed, Ashe."

"I buried a friend."

"That isn't what I meant." But the Warden sent a boy up to the Vane house, and the boy came back with Aldous Vane's steward and ten silver marks in a leather purse, and by noon Corwen Ashe was standing in the pawnshop under the three brass balls with three gold crowns on the counter in silver and gold and copper, and Ilya Marsk was counting it with his jeweller's glass for a third time.

"Three gold crowns," Marsk said at last. He sounded almost disappointed. "Sixty marks. Six thousand pennies. I never thought I'd see it." He took Greyhallow down from the wall between the lute and the owl and laid it on the counter, and pushed it across. "Your father's debt is paid, boy. She's yours."

Corwen drew the sword an inch and looked at the three stacked bars on the ricasso, and sheathed it, and buckled it on, and walked out of the shop of Ilya Marsk with his father's blade on his hip for the first time in either life. The debt was done. He had thought it would feel like more.

He was not halfway back to the bunkhouse when the Marquis's son found him.

Aldous Vane was on foot, with two of his father's guard behind him and the wyrm's fangless head in a sack over one of their shoulders, and he stopped in the middle of the Wellmouth road with his hand on his sword-knot and said, "You're Ashe. You sold me a skull."

"You bought one, my lord."

"Don't 'my lord' me, I'm not the Marquis. My father is the Marquis. I'm a Journeyman Blade, the same as you, and I'm told you killed a Level 20 wyrm with a borrowed sword on your first Deep delve, and I don't believe it. My mother says you're a liar. The Marquis's wife is very seldom wrong." He smiled, and it was not a bad smile. "Fight me. Practice blades, in the Vane courtyard, now. If you win I'll say in front of my father that the story is true. If I win, you give the skull back and keep the silver."

It was, Corwen thought, exactly the kind of thing Aldous Vane would have done in the first life too, if the first life had given him the chance. He had led the Marquis's guard down the Wellmouth stair at eighteen because nobody had ever told him no.

"Done," said Corwen.

The Vane courtyard was flagged in grey stone and watched from the gallery above by the Marquis himself and by his wife. Lady Sabine Vane sat with the falcon on her wrist and her face doing nothing, and the Marquis sat beside her with his chin on his fist, and their son came out onto the flags with a practice blade and bowed to them both and then to Corwen.

Aldous was good. He was a Journeyman and he had been trained by Vaelmere masters and he was quick, with a grade-A talent behind him and a Level 15 body that had never been hungry. Corwen was Level 18 and had been a Master Blade for six years in a life nobody here remembered, and he let the boy come, and turned him, and turned him, and on the ninth pass put the practice blade against Aldous Vane's throat so gently it did not even mark the skin.

The courtyard was very quiet.

Aldous stepped back. He looked at the blade, and up at the gallery, and back at Corwen, and then he laughed, a short surprised bark. "My mother was wrong," he said. "I'll say it. Father, the story's true. He's better than me." He held out his hand and Corwen took it. "Keep the skull. Keep the silver. Teach me that turn."

"Some other day, my lord."

"I told you. My father's the Marquis."

In the gallery the Marquis's wife had not moved. But when Corwen bowed to the lord and lady of Sallow and turned to go, Lady Sabine Vane spoke for the first time, in a clear cold voice that carried over the flags.

"Blade. The Warden says two wyrms nested together on the twelfth floor. In my father's march, when beasts crowd upward out of a deep place, it is because something below them has made the deep place worse than the shallow one." She looked at him as she had looked at the Wellmouth. "What is driving them up from the Deep?"

"I don't know, my lady," Corwen said, which was true, and which he intended to stop being true.

He walked back to the bunkhouse with Greyhallow on his hip and the Marquis's wife's question in his head, and it was the same question Tallow had failed to answer on the Warden's steps, and the same question Corwen had been asking himself since the thaw, and he did not have an answer for her any more than he had for himself.