Chapter 89: Patrons’ Night

Kharos was built out of the mountain it stood on.

Aren saw it from the last ridge of the road at the end of the fourteenth day, and he completely forgot to keep walking beside the wagon. The city didn’t sit in a valley like Aldermere’s capital, spread lazily along a river; it climbed, straight up the face of a black mountain in terraces, one on top of another, each walled in iron and each higher and narrower than the last, until at the very top, where the mountain ended, a single tower of dark metal stood against the evening sky like a nail driven into the clouds.

"The Iron Throne," Mother Grell announced from the wagon seat. "Seven terraces. Commoners live on the first two, merchants on the third and fourth, nobles on the fifth and sixth." She clicked her tongue at the horse. "And nobody lives on the seventh, except him."

’Subtle. That’s wonderfully subtle!’

They went in through the lowest gate at dusk.

The city was full of soldiers. Aren had known it would be, but knowing was different from actually walking through it: black coats on every corner, lines of young men outside every recruiting hall, and iron banners hanging from the walls, all bearing the same words, IRON ANSWERS MERIT, in letters taller than a man.

And everywhere, without anyone saying a word about it, there were the ranks.

On the second terrace, a Rank C officer came down the street on a grey horse, and the crowd parted around him without anyone actually looking at him. Nobody bowed, because nobody had to. On the fourth terrace, a closed litter carried by eight men came out of a side street, and as it passed, every single person on the street dropped to one knee, merchants and porters and children alike. Mother Grell climbed down off the wagon seat, knelt in the slush, and pulled Aren down beside her by his checkered sleeve.

[Unknown. Rank B.]

The window lasted only as long as the litter was in sight. When it was gone, everyone stood up and went straight back to what they had been doing, and nobody mentioned it again.

"That’s how it works here," Mother Grell muttered quietly, brushing off her knees. "You’ll get used to it."

’I really hope I never do.’

On the wall of the fourth-terrace guardhouse, among a hundred other notices, he saw his own face again: the same charcoal drawing and the same words. To be delivered to Captain Kaela Voss of Kharn, in person.

He kept walking at exactly the same speed, and he didn’t let his head turn even slightly.

The contract that had brought Grell’s Company across half the Empire was for one night only. Patrons’ Night, Mother Grell called it, and when she said it, her voice went flat with a respect she didn’t usually waste on anything.

"It’s the night before the Iron Trial," she explained, while they unloaded the costume trunks in a cold stone yard behind a great hall on the sixth terrace. "Every house that’s sponsoring a candidate brings them here and presents them to the Crown’s examiners. There’s a feast and there’s wine, and there are players, to stop the nobles getting bored and killing each other before the trial even starts." She sniffed. "We’re the players. Sixty silver for one night, the best money I’ll see all year, so don’t embarrass me."

"Me? How could I possibly embarrass you?"

"You’re a fool, it’s your whole job! Just embarrass yourself, not me."

The hall was the largest room Aren had ever been in, bigger even than the Great Hall of the Academy. Its pillars were iron and its floor was black stone polished to a mirror. Long tables ran down both sides, covered in white cloth and crowded with silver and glass, and behind them, on raised benches, sat the noble houses of the Iron Empire in their colors.

At the far end, on a platform, sat the five examiners in plain grey, and nobody was speaking to them.

The troupe played between the courses, cheerfully ignored by almost everyone.

Tibbet threw his knives at a painted board. The twins tumbled down the length of the hall on a strip of carpet, and the nobles clapped for them politely and without much interest. Naught the Fool did exactly what fools do: he fell down and walked into pillars. He chased a servant carrying a tray of wine, tripped, somersaulted neatly over the tray without spilling a drop, and landed flat on his back, looking enormously surprised.

Some of them laughed, at least, which was more than he had expected.

And under the white mask, while he fell down and got up and fell down again, Aren watched them carefully.

He saw Sigrid Varken first. She sat at the Varken table in dark grey, with her short black hair and her straight back, neither eating nor drinking, studying the room with the patience of a sentry on a wall. Faint grey marks still showed on her left wrist, slowly fading. She didn’t laugh at the fool, and she didn’t look at him at all.

[Sigrid Varken. Rank D: Bone.]

Behind her, at the end of the same table, sat Halvard Rusk, who wasn’t watching the fool either, or at least not yet.

At the next table, easily the loudest one, sat a young man in dark colors and gold, with brilliantly white teeth and the easy laugh of someone who had never been told no. He laughed at everything, at the twins and at Tibbet, and loudest of all at the fool. When Naught tripped over his own feet in front of the gold-trimmed table, the young man threw a chicken bone at him, hit him square in the mask, and the whole table roared.

[Cassian Haskel. Rank D: Blood.]

Haskel. That was the lord who had entered his stable boy last year for a joke, the stable boy who had died on the second day, which had apparently been very funny.

’Hello, Haskel. I’ve been really looking forward to meeting you!’

Aren picked up the chicken bone, studied it, bowed deeply to Cassian Haskel, and ate it, bone and all.

The gold-trimmed table went silent, and then Haskel threw back his head and laughed so hard he had to grip the table.

And on the examiners’ platform, the man at the end turned his head.

He was older than the others, perhaps thirty-five, thin, with strikingly pale eyes, and his skin had a faint grey-blue tint, like a lake under ice. He didn’t laugh; instead he watched the fool with no expression at all, and then quietly looked away.

[Ivo Varken. Rank C.]

This was the one who had walked five hundred paces into the White Hollow and come out blue.

After the last course, a herald in black and iron struck the floor three times with a staff, and the hall went quiet.

"The houses will present their candidates!"

They went one by one, strictly in order of rank. The herald called the name of the house, the head of the house or his steward stood up, and the candidates stood beside him and bowed to the examiners while the herald read out their names, and the hall applauded, more or less, according to how much it liked the house.

House Haskel presented Lord Cassian Haskel and three others, and the applause was loud. House Merrow presented a tall girl with a spear and a scar across her mouth, and House Corvane presented twin brothers who looked thoroughly bored.

Then the herald struck his staff again.

"House Varken."

Halvard Rusk stood, and Sigrid rose gracefully beside him.

"House Varken presents Lady Sigrid Varken, heir of the house."

The applause was real this time. People in this room knew what had happened to her. They had heard she was dying, and here she was, standing straight-backed and pale and undeniably alive. Sigrid bowed to the examiners. Her uncle, at the end of the platform, stayed perfectly still, but his pale eyes rested on her a little longer than on the others.

After that the herald went on through the lesser houses, name after name, until almost four hundred candidates had bowed to the platform and the hall had stopped listening.

Then he reached the bottom of his list, a name added at the last moment in a different ink, and he paused. He read it again and frowned, and he actually turned the paper over, as if hoping there might be something on the back.

’Here we go, then! Smile, everyone.’

"And," he said, in a slightly different voice, "also sponsored by House Varken..."

The hall, which had stopped listening long ago, suddenly started again.

"Naught the Fool. Of Grell’s Company."