The Forgotten Crown

The road to the monastery had not been maintained in a generation. Ser Mira Ashvale picked her way through the collapsed archway on foot, her horse left tethered at the village below, where the innkeeper had refused to meet her eyes when she mentioned her destination. The stones of the outer wall had dissolved back into the hillside, indistinguishable now from the grey limestone that formed the spine of the Varath range, as though the mountain were slowly reclaiming what had been carved from it.

She had ridden three days to reach this place on the strength of a half-rotted letter, unsigned, that had found her in the capital at the precise moment she had nothing left to lose. The seal had been broken already — or perhaps it had never been sealed. The handwriting was cramped and difficult, the ink brown with age, and the message was only a map reference and eight words: What was buried here should not stay buried.

The inner courtyard was choked with vegetation. Elder saplings had forced their roots between the flagstones; moss had colonized the fountain at the centre and turned the water black. Mira stood in the silence that belongs only to abandoned places, a silence that is not the absence of sound but the presence of something held very still, and she felt the back of her neck prickle in the way it had in the old days, before everything.

She found the cellar door beneaththe refectory, half-concealed by a fall of stones that had not fallen naturally. Someone had arranged the rubble. Someone had wanted to make the entrance look like an accident of collapse while leaving it, she now saw, entirely passable. In the cellar, beneath three feet of soil she moved with the camp spade from her pack, the blade struck something that rang like a bell — and the sound filled the underground chamber and did not stop when the blow did, but continued, diminishing slowly, as though the note were travelling somewhere far away to report her arrival.