“He don’t look like much.”
“And there’s a lesson for all three of you. Not looking much, not saying much, not seeming much, that’s a good first step in being dangerous, eh, Ninefingers? Then when you let the devil go free it’s twice the shock for whatever poor bastard’s on the end of it. Shock and surprise, my little beauties, and quickness to strike, and lack of pity. These are the things that make a killer. Size, and strength, and a big loud voice are alright in their place, but they’re nothing to that murderous, monstrous, merciless speed, eh, Bloody-Nine?”
It was a hard lesson for children, but Logen’s father had taught it to him young, and he’d kept it in mind all these years. “It’s a sorry fact. He who strikes first often strikes last.”
“That he does!” shouted Crummock, slapping his great thigh. “Well said! But it’s a happy fact, not a sorry one. You remember old Wilum, don’t you, my children?”
“Thunder got him!” shouted the boy with the shield, “in a storm, up in the High Places!”
“That it did! One moment he’s standing there, the next there’s a noise like the world falling and a flash like the sun, and Wilum’s dead as my boots!”
“His feet was on fire!” laughed the girl.
“That they were, Isern. You saw how fast he died, how much the shock, how little the mercy that the lightning showed, well.” And Crummock’s eyes slid across to Logen. “That’s what it’d be to cross that man there. One moment you’d say your hard word, the next?” He clapped his hands together with a crack and made the three children jump. “He’d send you back to the mud. Faster than the sky killed Wilum, and with no more regret. Your life hangs on a thread, every moment you stand within two strides of that nothing-looking bastard there, does it not, Bloody-Nine?”
“Well…” Logen wasn’t much enjoying this.
“How many men you killed then?” the girl shouted at him, sticking her chin out.
Crummock laughed and rubbed his hand in her hair. “The numbers aren’t made to count that high, Isern! He’s the king of killers! No man made more deadly, not anywhere under the moon.”
“What about that Feared?” asked the boy with the spear.
“Ohhhhhh,” cooed Crummock, smiling right across his face. “He’s not a man, Scofen. He’s something else. But I wonder. Fenris the Feared and the Bloody-Nine, setting to kill one another?” He rubbed his hands together. “Now that is a thing I would like to see. That is a thing the moon would love to shine upon.” His eyes rolled up towards the sky and Logen followed them with his own. The moon was up there, sitting in the black heavens, big and white, glowing like new fire.
Horrible Old Men
The tall windows stood open, allowing a merciful breeze to wash through the wide salon, to give the occasional cooling kiss to Jezal’s sweating face, to make the vast, antique hangings flap and rustle. Everything in the chamber was outsized—the cavernous doorways were three times as high as a man, and the ceiling, painted with the peoples of the world bowing down before an enormous golden sun, was twice as high again. The immense canvases on the walls featured life-size figures in assorted majestic poses, whose warlike expressions would give Jezal uncomfortable shocks whenever he turned around.
It seemed a space for great men, for wise men, for epic heroes or mighty villains. A space for giants. Jezal felt a tiny, meagre, stupid fool in it.
“Your arm, if it please your Majesty,” murmured one of the tailors, managing to give Jezal orders while remaining crushingly sycophantic.
“Yes, of course… I’m sorry.” Jezal raised his arm a little higher, inwardly cursing at having apologised yet again. He was a king now, as Bayaz was constantly telling him. If he had shoved one of the tailors out of the window, no apology would have been necessary. The man would probably have thanked him profusely for the attention as he plummeted to the ground. As it was he merely gave a wooden smile, and smoothly unravelled his measuring tape. His colleague was crawling below, doing something similar around Jezal’s knees. The third was punctiliously recording their observations in a marbled ledger.
Jezal took a long breath, and frowned into the mirror. An uncertain-seeming young idiot with a scar on his chin gazed back at him from the glass, draped with swatches of glittering cloth as though he were a tailor’s dummy. He looked, and certainly felt, more like a clown than a king. He looked a joke, and undoubtedly would have laughed, had he not himself been the ridiculous punch-line.
“Perhaps something after the Osprian fashion, then?” The Royal Jeweller placed another wooden nonsense carefully on Jezal’s head and examined the results. It was far from an improvement. The damn thing looked like nothing so much as an inverted chandelier.
“No, no!” snapped Bayaz, with some irritation. “Far too fancy, far too clever, far too big. He will scarcely be able to stand in the damn thing! It needs to be simple, to be honest, to be light. Something a man could fight in!”
The Royal Jeweller blinked. “He will be fighting in the crown?”
“No, dolt! But he must look as if he might!” Bayaz came up behind Jezal, snatched the wooden contraption from his head and tossed it rattling on the polished floor. Then he seized Jezal by the arms and stared grimly at his reflection from over his shoulder. “This is a warrior king in the finest tradition! The natural heir to the Kingdom of Harod the Great! A peerless swordsman, who has dealt wounds and received them, who has led armies to victory, who has killed men by the score!”
“Score?” murmured Jezal, uncertainly.
Bayaz ignored him. “A man as comfortable with saddle and sword as with throne and sceptre! His crown must go with armour. It must go with weapons. It must go with steel. Now do you understand?”
The Jeweller nodded slowly. “I believe so, my Lord.”
“Good. And one more thing.”
“My Lord has but to name it.”
“Give it a big-arsed diamond.”
The Jeweller humbly inclined his head. “That goes without saying.”
“Now out. Out, all of you! His Majesty has affairs of state to attend to.”
The ledger was snapped shut, the tapes were rolled up in a moment, the swatches of cloth were whisked away. The tailors and the Royal Jeweller bowed their way backwards from the room with a range of servile mutterings, whisking the huge, gilt-encrusted doors silently shut. Jezal had to stop himself from leaving with them. He kept forgetting that he was now his Majesty.
“I have business?” he asked, turning from the mirror and trying his best to sound offhand and masterful.
Bayaz ushered him out into the great hallway outside, its walls covered in beautifully rendered maps of the Union. “You have business with your Closed Council.”
Jezal swallowed. The very name of the institution was daunting. Standing in marble chambers, being measured for new clothes, being called your Majesty, all of this was bemusing, but hardly required a great effort on his part. Now he was expected to sit at the very heart of government. Jezal dan Luthar, once widely celebrated for his towering ignorance, would be sharing a room with the twelve most powerful men in the Union. He would be expected to make decisions that would affect the lives of thousands. To hold his own in the arenas of politics, and law, and diplomacy, when his only areas of true expertise were fencing, drink, and women, and he was forced to concede that, in that last area at least, he did not seem to be quite the expert he had once reckoned himself.
“The Closed Council?” His voice shot up to a register more girlish than kingly, and he was forced to clear his throat. “Is there some particular matter of importance?” he growled in an unconvincing bass.
“Some momentous news arrived from the North earlier today.”
“It did?”
“I am afraid that Lord Marshal Burr is dead. The army needs a new commander. Argument on that issue will probably take up a good few hours. Down here, your Majesty.”