Chapter Eight: Trial of Crowns
Two of us left.
Only one walks out.
They give me three days to heal.
The healers come twice a day to change the green paste on my side. It stings less each time. On the second day I can sit up. On the third I can walk, slowly, one hand pressed to the bandage, like an old woman on a cold morning.
Caius comes every night. He doesn’t stay long. The queen is watching him, he says, more closely than ever. We sit by the window in my little room and don’t touch, and we talk in low voices about the Deep Throne and the vow and what we’re going to do when we get there, and neither of us says the thing that’s sitting in the room with us like a third person.
On the second night, I finally say it.
“There has to be a way for both of us to live.”
He doesn’t pretend not to understand. “The Trial of Crowns is older than the tithe itself. It’s bound the same way. One crown returns to the sea. If neither is given, both are taken.” He closes his eyes. “I’ve read every law, every record. I’ve looked, Wren. I’m still looking.”
“Then look harder.”
“I will.” He takes my hand. It’s the first time he’s touched me in two days. “But you need to be ready. In case I don’t find it.”
“Ready to kill a sixteen-year-old boy who pulled me out of a whirlpool?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t need to.
After he leaves, I lie awake and think about all the rules I’ve broken since I walked down that cliff. Don’t make friends with people who are going to die. Don’t trust anyone. Don’t want things you can’t have.
I’ve broken every one. And now I’m going to pay for it.
Tam comes to see me on the third day.
He sits on the end of my bed in a clean shirt the servants gave him, too big in the shoulders, his hair sticking up in six directions. He’s got a new scrape along his jaw from the rocks of the maelstrom, and there’s something older in his face than there was a week ago.
“How’s the side?” he asks.
“Better. How’s everything else?”
He laughs. It isn’t much of a laugh.
We sit there for a while without talking. Then he says, looking at his hands: “I’m not going to fight you. Tomorrow.”
“Tam—”
“I’m not. I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about nothing else for three days.” He looks up. “I’m not a killer. I pulled Maren off a rock and I still dream about it every time I close my eyes. I’m not going to do that to you.”
“Then we’ll both die,” I say. “That’s the rule. If neither crown goes down, both of us go.”
“I know.”
“So one of us has to—”
“I know, Liss.” His voice cracks. “I know.”
I reach over and grab his hand and squeeze it, hard. He squeezes back.
“The prince is looking for another way,” I say. “He’s reading all the old laws. If there’s a loophole, he’ll find it.”
Tam nods. He wants to believe it. I can see him trying.
“He likes you,” he says after a moment. “The prince. A lot.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I do. He looks at you like my dad used to look at my mum. Like she was the only lamp in a dark room.” He smiles, lopsided. “Is it mutual?”
I don’t answer.
“Thought so,” says Tam.
The prince doesn’t find a loophole.
He comes to my door on the morning of the last trial, and I know as soon as I see his face. He’s grey with exhaustion. There are ink stains on his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry.”
I nod. I’ve been expecting it. I’ve been expecting it since Oriel stood in that doorway and said two remain. But hearing it still feels like being stabbed again, in the same place.
“Wren.” He takes my face in his hands. “Whatever happens in there. Whatever you have to do. Come back to me.”
“And if I can’t?”
“Then I’ll go into the Deep Throne alone,” he says, “and find out what happens.”
I think about the vow. About how the door only opens for two. About what the queen would do to him if he tried.
“Don’t you dare,” I say.
The Trial of Crowns is held in the throne hall.
The whole court is there, packed into the tiered galleries, dressed in their finest pearl and silk. More of them than on the first night. They’ve come to see the end of the story.
In the middle of the black marble floor, someone has laid a circle of white sand.
Tam and I stand inside it, facing each other.
On the throne, at the top of the coral stair, sits the queen. Caius stands beside her, as always, a little apart. His face is a mask. His hands are clenched at his sides.
Oriel comes down the stairs carrying two crowns on a cushion of dark velvet. They’re simple things, thin circlets of silver, set with a single pearl each. She places one on Tam’s head. Then one on mine. It’s cold, and heavier than it looks.
“The Trial of Crowns,” she says, her voice carrying through the hall. “When the tide bell tolls, one crown must lie upon the sand. The one who wears it no longer belongs to the sea’s mercy. If both crowns remain, both tithes are forfeit.”
She steps back out of the circle.
“The bell will toll when the sand runs out.”
On the stair beside the throne, a servant turns over a great hourglass. The sand in it isn’t sand at all. It’s tiny, glittering flecks of silver, and it begins to pour.
For a long moment, Tam and I just look at each other.
The court leans forward. I can feel it, a hundred people holding their breath.
“So,” Tam says, his voice wobbling. “How do you want to do this?”
“I’ve got an idea,” I say.
I take a breath. Then I lift my hands to the silver crown on my head.
I’ve thought about this for three days, too. I’m the killer. He’s the boy who thought the tithe was a story to keep kids off the rocks. I’ve got a knife in my boot and a contract in my pocket and a prince who’s going to walk into the Deep Throne alone and die if I don’t come back. And I’ve got a twelve-year-old brother in a cell in Harrow.
But Tam’s got a mother, standing on a doorstep somewhere, waiting.
And I’m so tired of other people dying so that I can live.
I start to lift the crown off my head.
“Don’t!“
Tam lunges.
He crosses the circle in two strides and slams into me, knocking my hands away, pushing the crown back down on my head so hard it scrapes my scalp. I stagger back. The court gasps.
“No,” he says. “No, no, no. You don’t get to do that.”
“Tam—”
“You’ve got a brother. I heard you say it, that first night. When you were half asleep. You said his name.” He’s breathing hard, his hands on my shoulders, holding me still. “Pip. That’s a stupid name. I bet he’s brilliant.”
“Tam, please—”
“And the prince. He needs you. I don’t know what for, but it’s something big, isn’t it? You two whisper about it all the time. You think I don’t notice.” He almost laughs. “I notice everything. I just don’t say anything. That’s my trick.”
The silver sand is running low.
“I can’t let you,” I say. “I can’t.”
“You’re not letting me.” He steps back, and he’s smiling, crooked and scared and brave all at once. “I’m doing it. It’s mine. Let me have one brave thing, Liss. Please.”
And before I can stop him, before I can move, he takes the crown off his own head and lets it fall.
It drifts down through the water, turning slowly, catching the light. It lands on the white sand without a sound.
The tide bell tolls.
It’s quick. I’ll say that for the sea. It’s quick.
The breath-shell on Tam’s throat comes loose. It just falls away, the way a scab does, drifting down to lie beside the crown on the sand. There’s nothing left under it but smooth pale skin.
He puts a hand to his neck. His eyes go wide. His mouth opens, and a stream of silver bubbles pours out of it and rises up toward the ceiling of the hall.
I catch him as he falls.
I go down to my knees in the sand with him in my arms, and I press my hand over his mouth and nose, as if I can hold the breath in, as if that will help, and it won’t, and I know it won’t, and I do it anyway.
“No,” I’m saying. “No, no, no. Tam. Tam, please—”
He grabs my wrist. His grip is still strong. He pulls my hand away from his face, and he pulls me down, close, until my ear is right next to his mouth.
He has one breath left. I can feel him using it.
“Wren,” he whispers.
My real name. I don’t know how he knows it. Maybe he heard Caius say it. Maybe he just noticed, the way he noticed everything.
“In the pools,” he breathes. “I saw—something else. Not just my mum. A girl. In a wedding dress. With all of us on the floor around her.” His fingers tighten. “It was her. The queen. She was the first bride.”
The last of the bubbles slips out of him.
“Don’t let her have you,” Tam says, without any breath at all.
Then his hand goes slack on my wrist, and his eyes go still, and he’s just a boy lying on the sand in a shirt that’s too big for him.
I don’t know how long I kneel there.
Somewhere a long way off, the court is applauding. That soft rain-on-water sound. Somebody is saying something. Oriel’s voice, formal and cold: the tithe is paid, the bride is chosen. Hands on my shoulders, trying to lift me. I shrug them off.
I hold Tam, and I look up.
I look up the coral stair at the throne, because I want to see her face. I want to remember it. I want to know what the woman who did this looks like, in the moment she’s won.
And what I see stops the breath in my borrowed lungs.
The queen is sitting forward on her throne, her lips parted, her hands gripping the arms of her seat. There’s a light in her. That’s the only way I can describe it. A faint silver glow, rising up under her skin like moonlight under water. The fine lines at the corners of her eyes, the ones I noticed in the mirror room, are gone. Her cheeks are fuller. Her hair is darker, glossier, spilling over her shoulders.
She looks twenty years younger than she did when this trial started.
She looks like the girl in the mosaic.
Nine of us walked into the sea. Nine of us are dead.
And Nerissa, Queen of Veyl, looks down at me over the body of my friend, and she smiles.
See next: Chapter Nine: The Wedding Night