But Morgan did not want to look inside the hatch, let alone go in. Who knew what a dangerous shambles it must be, closed up for twenty years or more, empty for all this time?

But what if it isn’t empty? Again he imagined the hatch opening silently behind the troll, the shadowy shape emerging . . .

He pushed his head out beyond the edge of the hatch. The top chamber of the tower was full of large, loose rocks as he had expected, but there were dark places among them that almost looked like some monstrously huge mole or rat had been tunneling between the piled stones. Morgan was wishing harder than he had ever wished in his life that he had a torch—no, that he had a torch and a sword and three or four stout friends—when he saw something move. Something was alive in the chamber below him, down in the darkness of the tower’s top floor, down in the shadows.

“Snenneq?” he called quietly, but his blood was drumming and the cracked voice that came from his lips scarcely sounded like his own. Then the shape turned to look up at him. Morgan had only an instant to see the hairless face catch the moonlight, the empty black eyes, the rags of a hood that might once have been red, then the hammerblows of his own heartbeats filled his head as he gasped and pushed himself away from the hatch. Trying to scramble to his feet, Morgan missed his footing and fell forward instead, cracking his jaw against the edge of the hatch. A sudden, bright shouting of stars overwhelmed him for an instant, then the black swallowed him up.

32 Rosewater and Balsam

The Chancelry was part of a long building in the Middle Bailey that in King John’s day had been the castle mews. They had been destroyed in the fall of Green Angel Tower and the new stables erected in the outermost ring of the keep. It was not so much a sign that horses and royal carriages had become less important, Pasevalles reflected, as that counting and keeping money had grown even more so.

The Chancelry building had the shape of a long bone, something that two dogs might fight over, pulling at each end. This was appropriate, because while one end belonged to Pasevalles as Lord Chancellor, the other end belonged to Archbishop Gervis, the Lord Treasurer, and Pasevalles had to admit the relationship between the two occasionally came down to something like the contendings of a couple of mastiffs under the royal supper table.

Still, it was a relief for the Lord Chancellor to be able to sink back into his own labors without having to do Count Eolair’s most important work as well. Many of the issues closest to his heart had been all but ignored while the royal couple were traveling, and he was anxious to catch up.

Clerks hurried back and forth down the long hall like bees in clover, bearing piles of documents—ledger rolls, pleading letters, and tax records, each with its own complicated history. Pasevalles could not help being sourly amused by the misunderstanding most of the kingdom’s subjects had about power—that the king and queen merely sat on their thrones and decided what should be done next, then their eager minions hurried out and turned these whims into fact. In truth, ruling anything, let alone the largest kingdom in the history of Osten Ard, was a process of learning about and reacting to hundreds upon hundreds of small problems, some of which would quickly become larger problems if left unsolved, and then persisting with them until they had been solved or at least reduced from crisis to mere irritation. And standing between a ruler and these solutions was not a horde of loyal subjects waiting only to be told what to do, but thousands of individuals, each with his own plans and wants, most of them quite willing to break the rules if they could get away with it, and yet each of them also furious at any idea their own rights might be somehow abrogated. And of these plaintiffs, the nobles were the worst, prickly and full of righteous demands.

Pasevalles had been born the nephew of an important Nabbanai border lord, Baron Seriddan of Metessa, and his childhood in the baron’s castle had also been the last time he was satisfied with his lot in life. Though his own father, Brindalles, had been a quiet and scholarly sort, young Pasevalles had always had his own eye set on a life of valor. He had even taken it upon himself to care for the family collection of arms and armor, because no one else in Metessa seemed to care about the greatness of the past—at least not the way Pasevalles did. All the years of his childhood the great armor hall and the foundry where armor was built and repaired had been his true homes; he had been nearly a stranger to his father’s study. He had learned to read and write and do sums, of course, as any young man in a noble family was expected to do, but had considered every hour spent beneath his tutors’ watchful gazes to be an hour wasted, time when he could have been out watching the men at arms practicing or performing the tasks he had allotted to himself in the armor hall, preserving the glory of his ancestors’ warlike ways and dreaming that a similar glory would one day be his.

But dreams change, he told himself. Especially those of children.

Pasevalles’s dreams had changed for good on the day that Prince Josua, brother of King Elias and son of Prester John, had arrived in Metessa seeking help in his struggle against his brother and his brother’s terrifying ally, Ineluki the Storm King. Pasevalles had been too young to understand all of it, of course—he was a mere eight years old—but he had been thrilled to learn that the legendary Sir Camaris, greatest warrior of his age, was alive and fighting for Josua. And when Josua’s siege of the Hayholt began, Pasevalles would have been even more thrilled that his own scholar father had joined the fighting, going so far as to volunteer for a masquerade, pretending to be Josua while the prince led a group of men and Sithi into the castle by other means.

But Pasevalles had not been there. He did not see the glory of his father’s charge, riding the prince’s horse in through the very gates of the Hayholt. Neither was he there to see the terrible ending when King Elias’ trap was revealed, and his father was cut down and hacked to pieces by defenders in the castle courtyard.

Pasevalles had instead found all this out when the messengers had reached Metessa a fortnight later, just a day ahead of the bodies of Pasevalles’ father and his uncle Seriddan, who had died of his wounds a few days after the battle.

The weeks and months after hardly existed in his memory now, a black vortex of time, days and nights in seemingly endless succession where all he felt was pain and disbelief. It was not until his aunt decided to remarry a year later that Pasevalles had begun to take notice of his surroundings again.

None of that went well, either. His mother died from one of the fevers that scourged Nabban after the Storm King’s Wars. His aunt, who had married the widower who owned the adjoining barony, also died from that same fever. And his aunt’s new husband had promptly turned Pasevalles out, sending him to live with poor relatives along Nabban’s northern coast in a house so cold and damp that he might as well have been living in the marshes themselves. Bitter, chilly days . . .

No. Anger is a distraction, he reminded himself. Anger is the enemy of success. He had plans, he had a purpose, he had responsibilities and should not let himself be weighed down by bad, old memories. At this very moment he had a huge pile of bills waiting to be approved and taken to the king and queen, as well as dozens of other payments waiting to be examined one last time before being dispersed to the crown’s various creditors, because rebuilding castles was expensive work. All these years later, the Erkynland was still paying for the Storm King’s War. And, just to make the need to avoid wallowing in the past even more obvious, here came Father Wibert with another pile of petitions.