The Hollow Crown

Caerlan was the capital of Aldmere and it did not look like anything Tamsin had imagined.

She had expected towers. There were towers, but what she noticed first was the lamps: thousands of them, on every wall and bridge and gatepost, and not one of them lit by a cantrip. They burned on the old current, the deep channel that ran under the city from the river to the keep, and they had burned that way for four hundred years. Then she looked up at the keep itself and saw that the great lamp over the King's gate, the one that should have been visible from the hills, was dark. It had been dark for twelve years. The whole city lived in the light of a thousand small lamps because the one large one had gone out with the crown.

"Nobody looks up," Hesper Quill said beside her. The Guildmaster had come after all, three days behind the Duke's party, on a borrowed mule, saying the Lantern Guild could run itself for a fortnight and that she was not sending her only Third Circle mage to the capital alone. "They've stopped looking. That's what twelve years does."

They rode in with the Duke's household and the Count's, who had kept to opposite sides of the road the whole way from Harrow and had, somewhere around Thistlecombe, started speaking to each other through Soren Haldane, since Soren was the only one both of them could stand. Wren rode with the Duchess, which surprised everyone, and Cedric rode between the two of them on his pony and asked questions about everything. Edran Vale rode at the back with his ledger case and said nothing for six days.

They were taken before the King that evening.

King Osric Thane was older than Tamsin had expected and smaller. He sat in a plain chair in a hall that could have held the whole of Harrow, and on a cushion on a stand beside him, where everyone could see it, lay the crown of Aldmere.

It was a circlet of pale gold, and it was broken. Not bent. Broken clean across, the two halves lying a finger's width apart on the velvet, and the metal of the break had gone dull and grey the way the beacon-stone at the ford had gone grey. The Hollow Crown, the court called it, and the court had stopped lowering its voice to do so. Tamsin, who was Third Circle now and had learned in the last week what a dead current felt like, could feel the nothing coming off it from across the hall.

"Rennard," said the King. "You've been gone a month. Tell me you have brought me a mage."

"I have brought you a Count, Majesty, which I did not expect, and a mage, which I did." Duke Rennard Ashcombe, the Greater Duke of Westmarch and the King's Hand, bowed and stepped aside, and the whole court looked past him at Tamsin Rook, nineteen years old, hedge-mage of the Lantern Guild of Harrow, Third Circle, with a brass token on her neck and the Harrow Lantern in her arms.

Somebody at the back laughed. Somebody else said, not quietly, "Circle Three. He has brought the King a Circle Three." Tamsin found that she did not mind. A week ago she had been Circle Two.

"She relit the Harrow ford beacon," the Duke said, "when the current under it died, and kept it lit through the Mirefold storms, and the Lantern Guild raised her to the Third Circle for it before my eyes. She is not the mage who will wake the crown. I know that. I do not think any mage below the Seventh Circle will do it. But she is the only mage I have met in twelve years who has found a dead current and made it run again, and I want her to look at the crown and tell me what she feels, because every court mage of the fourth circle and above who has looked at it has told me it is dead, and I have stopped believing them."

The King looked at Tamsin for a long moment. "Well, hedge-mage?"

She went up to the stand. She set the Harrow Lantern down beside the cushion, because her arms were tired, and the glass lit the broken gold. Then she put her hand over the crown without touching it, the way she had put her hand on the beacon-stone, and reached.

Dead. The current was dead. That was what every mage had said, and it was true.

But at the ford the current had been dead too, and the river had still been there, pinched behind a stone. She reached further. Past the break, under it, the way she had followed the channel along the riverbed, and found... something. Not a flow. A pressure. Something on the far side of the break that was pushing and could not get through.

"It isn't dead," she said. "It's pinched. There's a break and the current is on the other side of it and it can't get across. At the ford it was a boulder. I don't know what it is here. I can feel it, Majesty, but I can't move it. That would be a greater working at least. Maybe a royal one."

"A royal spell," said the King softly, "can only be worked through the crown."

"Yes, Majesty."

"Which is broken."

"Yes."

The hall was very quiet. Then Duchess Isolde Ashcombe, who had been standing with her son at her husband's side and who had not said a word since Harrow, said, "She's right."

Everyone turned. The Duchess did not look at the court. She looked at the crown, and her face was the face Tamsin had seen in the ford hut with the storm on the roof.

"I was in this hall the night it broke," Isolde said. "I have never said what I saw, and I will not say it tonight, because I am not sure yet that I understand it. But I will say this much. The crown did not die. Something was put in front of it. The hedge-mage has felt what I saw." She stopped. The Duke was staring at his wife as if he had never met her. "Osric. You have until Midwinter. Give her the Seventh Circle mages and let her show them where the break is. They have been looking at the wrong side of it for twelve years."

Count Varro Haldane, from the far side of the hall, said, "House Haldane will hold to the treaty until Midwinter and not an hour past it. But if the crown lights, Majesty, House Haldane will kneel, and I will say so in front of my son and my daughter so they can hold me to it."

"Noted," said the King dryly. "Rennard, you asked me for a Knight of the Ford."

"I did, Majesty. The ford is empty. Sir Aldous Crane held it nine years and died on it, with a Mire Hound's teeth in his throat, walking my wife and my son across. The mage who lit his beacon stood over his body till dawn. She can hold a title up to Count. I ask for a Knight."

"A Third Circle hedge-mage, nineteen years old, Knight of the Harrow Ford." The King considered her. "The law allows it. The court will hate it. Guildmaster Quill, is she yours?"

"She is the Lantern Guild's, Majesty, and I am the Lantern Guild's master, and I will be until they carry me out of the guildhall feet first. She is mine to lend and not to give. Knight her if you like. She still owes me a lantern."

"Then she may be both." The King rose, slowly. "Tamsin Rook. Kneel."

She knelt. The Harrow Lantern burned beside the broken crown. Somewhere at the back of the hall Edran Vale opened his ledger case and began, in his small tidy hand, to write it down.

She was thinking, as the flat of the King's sword touched her shoulder, that she had not yet asked anyone the thing that had been in her sleeve since the ford. A Mire Hound tooth sold in Vesk for three crowns as a charm against drowning. It was a hand long and did not rot, and it had come from the jaw of a thing that had walked out of a bog in a storm and gone straight for a hut with a Duchess in it. Beasts did not do that. Dogs did not do that. Something had sent the Hound to the ford on the same night someone had meant to leave a Duke's ring in the beacon pillar for collecting, and the beacon had died a week early, and she had been there, and now she was here.

She rose a Knight, and did not feel like one, and the crown lay broken on its cushion a foot from her hand, and Midwinter was seven weeks away.