What The Crown Knows
She did not put it on. She was not a fool, or not entirely, and she understood that ancient objects of power tended to exact a price for their use — a price stated only in retrospect, after the transaction was complete and the terms could no longer be renegotiated. She wrapped the crown instead in the oilcloth from her pack, laid it in the bottom of her saddlebag, and rode down the mountain in the last light of afternoon with her eyes moving constantly to the treeline.
The crown was iron, or something that resembled iron, cold in a way that went beyond temperature. It was worked in a style she did not recognize — not the knotwork of the Varath peoples, not the geometric precision of the southern academies, not the organic forms of the old coast carvers. The workmanship was extraordinary and entirely foreign, as though it had been made by hands trained in a tradition that no longer existed. There were inscriptions along the inner band that she could not read, in characters that resembled no alphabet she had encountered in fourteen years of service to the crown she had been sworn to protect until the day she was not.
She thought about that as she rode. Sworn to a crown. There was an irony in that which she was not yet ready to find funny.
At the village she collected her possessions from the inn room without stopping for supper. The innkeeper said nothing as she settled the