The messenger had come for Ancin right as the sun rose.

  He’d come at dawn, clad in armor on the back of a great, obsidian palfrey. An unusual messenger, to be sure, and an unusual visit. The reliquary wasn’t used to any visitors at all, much less those fit for war and bearing the green and yellow charge of the royal family. But there he was nonetheless, sparkling in the early morning sunlight, yellow sword on green background draped over his horse. His arrival had frightened a number of the silents, sending them scurrying through the reliquary whispering of war and the knight who had come to conscript them.

  The first voice pointed the messenger towards the library at his request, and he clinked and clanked through the otherwise quiet halls until he found his target, a young man wrapped in a speaker’s red robes hunched over one of the oak tables between the stacks. He didn’t look up at the messenger and turned a page in the tome before him with a hand covered in ornate markings. The messenger’s voice was clear, commanding, and loud, “Speaker Ancin of Gawic. I have come to take you to Kaewold by order of the queen.”

  Ancin was not startled, as his peers had been, by the armored man. Exhaustion insulated him. Instead, he turned to face the messenger, his eyes taking a moment to grasp the three-dimensional man after spending so many hours staring at the glyphs on the pages before him. The sounds crawled across his mind, slowly configuring themselves into words against the pull of fatigue. “I’m sorry, what?”

  The messenger’s face hardened. It dawned on Ancin for the first time that it had never really been soft, and that his question had angered an already irritated man. “The queen herself has requested your presence in Kaewold immediately. You are to depart with me today.”

  More questions bubbled in Ancin’s mind. He was too tired to exert restraint. “The queen? What does she want with me? I’m just—”

  “I am not here to answer your questions, speaker.” The word dripped with venom, and still, Ancin could tell the messenger was holding back. “You are to come with me to meet with the queen of your own will or I will bring you to her by force.”

  Anger sparked in Ancin’s chest. Here on behalf of the queen or not, who was this messenger to come into the reliquary—Ancin’s home—and demand that he drop everything to travel to the capital? To look down on him and refuse to give him any reason as to why? The messenger shifted and the hilt of his blade caught the newly risen sun. With the gleam came a weariness, and Ancin closed the tome in front of him and sighed, rubbing his face. “You’ll need to speak with Master Inghard. I can’t just leave our work without his approval.”

  “You will speak to Master Speaker Inghard. You will inform him that you have been called upon by the royal family to travel to Thetford.”

  “Thetford? I thought I had been called to the capital.”

  The messenger’s face rippled with annoyance. “You will tell him that you have been called to Thetford. You will tell anyone who asks that you have been called to Thetford. Am I understood?”

  Ancin couldn’t help but smile at that, despite the frustration that the messenger continued to stoke. “Master Inghard isn’t the type of person you deceive. He’ll know if you lie to him.”

  The messenger smiled back, a cold and insidious grin coloring what little of his face could be seen underneath his helm. A placed a hand on the hilt of his blade. “Then you best find a way to convince him.”

  A shiver ran down Ancin’s spine, but before he could respond, the messenger spoke again. “I have ridden through the night to find you. My horse is tired, as am I. First Voice Brima has offered to provide me with lodgings for the morning. Take the day to pack your belongings and set your affairs in order. Make sure to take your books. At noon, I will meet you at the south road. If you are not there, I will ride you down and take your body to the queen myself.”

-

  It wasn’t uncommon for speakers to be threatened, to be spoken to like animals. In the early days of magic, when the first glyphs of the Silent Tongue had been found out west, carved into the Monolith of Seley, there had been a rush to wield their power without concern for right and wrong. After all, with the power to reshape the world in one’s hands, what were such petty concepts worth? The glyphs took to flesh better than anything else, and a wave of human sacrifices washed over the entire realm. Blood pooled in every reliquary. Miserable, dark times, whose scars stretched across centuries.

  The messenger’s demeanor wasn’t new to Ancin. In the years he’d studied under Master Inghard, he’d seen his fair share of abuse. All-in-all, the prejudice was fading, and most didn’t care about the spells he had tattooed on his hand, but the clerics refused to change their tune: the Silent Tongue—the Godstongue—wasn’t meant for man, and its use was a perversion; and so still, in most towns and cities there would be a few that wouldn’t look him in the eye. It didn’t help that most of the speakers Ancin met were miserable old crones, recluses obsessed with their work and little else.

  Ancin frequently wondered if that was his fate.

  On his way through the reliquary, he thought, as he often did, of a life elsewhere. He had a few chemora trinkets to sell, all of them worth enough bolts to buy a plot of land. Freeman Ancin of…somewhere. Somewhere else. Maybe he’d go back to Gawic and tend to the gardens. Maybe he would go to Thetford, farming just by the coast. Maybe he’d go all the way to Cayhyrst and live in the mountains and snow. He had always loved the cold. Ancin passed into the reliquary’s courtyard. It was a huge area, unpaved and wild, with only stepping stones from each of the halls surrounding it. The paths all led to the center, where the Ergrove Monolith stood, surrounded by silents and speakers who flocked to its glyphs. A quiet wonder stirred in his chest. The monoliths had once filled him with it—but years, as few of them as there were, in truth—had tempered his awe.

  Perhaps he would leave. Perhaps he wouldn’t. A decision for another day.

  Ancin made his way through the courtyard, passing speakers and silents with quiet recognition. Master Speaker Inghard’s quarters were on the opposite end of the reliquary as the library. It had proven to be an annoying fact of life since he and Ancin had come to Ergrove from Gawic five years earlier. Inghard’s research was intensive, and he had entrusted only his personal apprentice—Ancin—with assisting. Ancin briefly wondered how much time he’d spend going back and forth with this book or that, the wrong notes and then the right ones. How many days, in total, did those trips add up to? As a teenager he’d thought about counting the seconds, once, tracking the number of trips and then one day confronting Inghard with the absurd number to get the old man to stop sending him across the reliquary. He’d given up on counting within the week.

  A small huddle of silents passed him, whispering about the knight who had come to Ergrove, speculating about who it was Erest was at war with. Ancin shuddered at the thought of traveling with him. It was only a day’s ride to Kaewold with haste, but that was still far too long for Ancin to be comfortable. He mulled over the messenger’s words. It had been years since he last saw Jasi. King Thomes had sent Prince Athyew north, to Brewick, to study under the tutelage of Sir Behrito, but he’d sent Princess Jasi to Gawic to study under the bailiff’s wife, Abel. Ancin had been raised in the keep there by Master Inghard, and between their studies, the Silent Ancin and Princess Jasi would steal away into the gardens to talk and read and play dice.

  But she was the queen now, and he had passed the Trials and become a speaker. Surely she had some real reason to call him to the capital beyond an interest in an old friend. And whatever it was, the messenger had insisted on secrecy, refusing to be forthcoming even to Ancin. As he passed back out of the courtyard and back into the halls of the reliquary, Ancin tried to shake the foreboding feeling that had wrapped itself around his heart. He tried to focus on what he would tell Master Inghard. It would be foolish to lie to him. He was a Master Speaker of the Silent Tongue, one of the foremost Augurs in Erest. There was little that escaped him. At least, that’s how it had been. Ancin wondered if he truly might be able to lie to Inghard now, with his condition.

  When he finally arrived at the door to Inghard’s quarters, Ancin still didn’t know what to tell him. He resolved to tell the truth. Who would the old man tell? What would he even say? Ancin nicked and opened the heavy oak door. Inghard’s quarters were small for a man of his rank. The walls, made of the same thick, granite stone blocks as the rest of the reliquary were draped in ornate tapestries, sprawling splotches of color depicting events from the history of the realm. A fireplace burned between two small windows on the far wall, making the already warm room unbearably hot for anyone other than Inghard, who Ancin secretly believed to be cold-blooded. Light poured in from the windows, illuminating a number of manuscripts open and stacked atop each other on a long table across the wall to the left of the door. To the right, a well-kept desk for inscribing spells and tinkering with foci sat unused. In the back right corner, beneath one of the windows, Master Inghard sat up in bed.

  “Ancin, my boy!” His unkempt mane of grey would have made him a vagabond anywhere other than the reliquary. “I overslept, I am sorry.”

  In a single sentence, Ancin knew Inghard wasn’t himself. He wondered how long the episode would last. Ancin gave him a weak smile and closed the door behind him. “Don’t worry, master. I was up all night, so it’s only right you get to sleep for the both of us.”

  Far too gracefully for a man of his age and appearance, Inghard climbed out of the bed and stretched. He grunted at Ancin and made his way over to the small looking glass just above the table. “How was the moon, boy?”

  “Stingy. She kept her insights from me.” It wasn’t a lie, not entirely. Perhaps it was easier to deceive the old man than he thought. It weighed heavily in his stomach regardless. How would he say that he had to leave? Inghard couldn’t complete his research without him, and he was an aging man without much time to wait.

  “She always does, that bastard.” Inghard moved across the room and began to pull his robes over the tunic he had slept in. “I have a meeting with Master Dradar this afternoon, the miserable little man. He’s been keeping the best of the new references for himself. And then I’ll have to meet with Master Frada myself, since you won’t be around.”

  Ancin had turned away to flip through the books on Inghard’s table, but the comment caught him off guard and his head snapped to look at the master speaker. Simply knowing things had always been Inghard’s game, but his condition had made it even more of a common occurrence. Ancin swore to himself. All the stress, and for what? He should have known. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you myself, master.”

  “No to worry, Liamond wouldn’t have liked to have given you the extra time. And besides, you heard the queen, it’s dangerous to be open about these things.”

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  Inghard continued on with preparing for his day, but the worry in Ancin’s stomach shifted. It was nice to not have to tell Inghard about having to leave Ergrove, but it was a reminder of how poor of a state the old man was in. He was talking gibberish, rambling on about things that hadn’t happened yet, or might happen, or could have happened. It’d been a while since Ancin last tried to make sense of the things Inghard said. He moved over to help his master get ready. How would the old man survive without him here? Ancin’s parents had brought him to Ergrove as an infant, as poor parents often do. A mouth they couldn’t feed, but one the reliquary could. Stories about speakers killing babies to power their spells still whispered their way through the realm, but sometimes it was better to not know than to watch your other children starve. Inghard had been a father to him instead. He took the young boy under his wing when the bailiff of Gawic had called for an agur to help with poor crop yields, and Ancin had been with him since.

  It was hard to watch him wither away. Harder still, he thought, to leave.

  When Inghard finished dressing, he turned to Ancin. “Can’t leave yet. You’ll need some things.” He scurried over to the desk, where a marble box, inlaid with ornate gold swirls and frays, gleamed in the light. He lifted the cover and produced from within it a large crystal, opaque white and shimmering with wavy lines of color in the sunlight. Dozens of the boxy, intricate glyphs of the Silent Tongue were engraved on it. Ancin knew it well. It was a divination focus, a chemora crystal with parts of a divination spell carved into it, so that a speaker wouldn’t have to write the most complicated part of a spell over and over again every time they cast it. As part of his studies, Inghard had made Ancin copy the glyphs on the crystal over and over again until his replications were perfect.

  Inghard handed it to Ancin, the backs of his old, wrinkled hands covered in tattoos. “Take it, take it. You know you need it.”

  Ancin took the crystal, if only to get Inghard to shop shoving it at him. “Master, I can’t take this. I’m already packing references, and this is too valuable. I don’t know what I’d do with myself if I lost it on the road.”

  Inghard waved him away and turned back to the desk. “Nonsense. Weren’t you paying attention? You need it. Here.” He reached behind the desk, pulling a long walking stick from the small gap between it and the wall. The greatwood was pale in the sunlight, but its own deeply-carved runes were clear to see. This too, Inghard handed to Ancin. “You need this too.”

  “Master—”

  “Silence, boy!” The almost dream-like state Inghard had been operating in until that point seemed to vanish. All the nonsense he’d spoken about seemed to go up in smoke as the strict, authoritative, master speaker that had raised Ancin seemed to return in an instant. “I have told you what you need, and given it to you. Don’t question me until you can See as I do.”

  A boy again, Ancin bowed his head in respect. “Yes, master.”

  Inghard returned to the looking glass. “Pack your things. You only have so much time before Liamond will decide you’ve tried to run.”

  “I will, master. Thank you again for being so understanding.”

  “Who am I to question the will of the king?”

  Ancin winced. “I don’t know when I’ll be back, but I’ll ensure that it is as soon as I can be.”

  “Take your time, boy.” He adjusted his hair as best he could in the mirror. “Monarchs are fickle creatures. Take the time to double check your inscriptions. Get it right the first time. Don’t let them think you aren’t what they think you are, or you might pay dearly for it.”

  His chest tightened as the foreboding feeling there swelled. It was one thing to worry about himself, it was another for a Master Speaker trained in augury to tell you to be worried. Suddenly the hefty weights of both the crystal and the staff became comforting. The fear of losing either valuable talisman seemed to vanish in the face of what they might protect him from. His grip tightened on both, and he gave his mentor another slight bow. “I will. Thank you again, master.”

  The old man grunted and gave him an approving nod in turn, and Ancin departed from Inghard’s quarters, headed for his own.

-

  However heavy the staff and crystal were, the reference books weighed more. It’d been years since Ancin had last needed to travel any significant distance with books on his person, and he’d forgotten how miserable the experience had been. His bags tugged aggressively on his shoulders. The messenger was perched by the south road, waiting for him. His horse’s color shone under the midday sun, no longer hidden by the caparison that bore the royal family’s crest. The messenger himself had doffed his armor, saddled in just a lightweight blue tunic and trousers. Without the helmet, he was far less intimidating—far more a man than an iron golem. Where once there had been a sharp, angled helm, there were now soft handsome features and a well-maintained tail of blonde hair. His clear disdain for Ancin and the Silent Tongue had not left his face, though.

  Beside him was another horse, one less impressive than his own, but clearly one from the reliquary’s own stables, and very likely their best. As Ancin approached, the messenger spoke. “Do you have what you need?”

  Words slipped between Ancin’s teeth as he hoisted his bags up and over the unclaimed palfrey. “I’ve taken all I could think to take.” When done, he turned to face the messenger. “It was hard to prepare when I don’t know what I’m preparing for.”

  The messenger ignored his complaint and looked away. “The first voice said his name is Bori. Get on. We’ll be riding hard until dusk, and then again at dawn.”

  Ancin glared at the man for a moment before climbing onto the riderless horse. “And what’s your name?”

  Still the messenger did not look at him, instead beginning to ride away. “I am Liamond of Lastow.”

  Ancin’s stomach twisted. The knot held, even as they departed, through the few miles of open meadow between the reliquary and Ergrove proper, the small village that it was. Trees dotted the landscape around them, dark emerald splotches running in lines through viridescent fields. They passed through Ergrove’s eponymous grove, riding over streams and brooks through the little wood before emerging into the little village. They passed through it, sun still high overhead, though it bustled with bondsmen and animals and children. It was there they met the main road, Kaewold Road, which ran across the kingdom from its eastern border to its west.

  From there, the Ancin and Liamond traveled east, simply following the road. They emerged from Ergrove and watched the landscape around them shift; turn to long but narrow tracts of field, small and curated thickets, mild and sloping hills. Neither man said a word to the other, Liamond clearly unwilling to speak to the blasphemer he had in tow unless necessary and Ancin too gripped with worry about what was ahead of him to be willing to put up casual conversation, especially given the demeanor of his traveling companion. Other travelers, pilgrims and merchants and freemen in search of land passed them on the road, but neither spoke to any of them more than brief niceties. Near dusk, they crossed the Berden River and could see Cheybrook on the horizon. Another hour or so of riding at the pace they had would bring them to the town’s outskirts, where they could find an inn and rest for the night.

  “We’ll ride closer to the town and set up a small camp in that copse there.” He pointed to a small gathering of trees on the northern side of the road just before Cheybrook.

  “Camp?” Ancin furrowed his brows. “Cheybrook’s right there. We can get lodgings for the evening.”

  Perhaps he was weary from the road, or perhaps he simply did not wish for Ancin to make a scene. Either way, Liamond was forthcoming with his response. “We are not to be seen together, especially this close to Kaewold. We will camp for thee night outside Cheybrook and pass through, but we will spend no longer there than the time it takes to do so.” He rode off, ending the discussion.

  Still running on day-old sleep, Ancin’s aggravation bloomed into anger as he followed the messenger. He was tired, sore from the journey, and unwilling to spend the night in the dirt when a bed and hot meal were just up the road. When the two reached the small grove, they slowed, Liamond dismounting. Ancin did not. “I’m going into town. I’ll meet you at the eastern road at dawn.”

  Without waiting for a response, he rode towards the town. A part of his mind whined that it was foolish, but indignation overcame him. Liamond had shown up to his home, torn him from his work and the people who needed him, refused to give him reason, and now demanded he deny himself basic comfort. He had seen men like Liamond before, men who thought themselves extensions of lords and rulers, who insisted that men bend to them the same way they—

  A powerful force tore Ancin from his horse. It slammed into his back in a flash of pain that promised to hurt more later and sent him spiraling to the ground. Bori whinnied somewhere far away, the sound barely registering over the ringing in his ears. He could feel cool soil, damp with nighttime dew on his face and hands. His nose was overwhelmed with earthy smells. The world spun in his eyes for a moment, stabilizing slowly as he tried to pull himself up onto his knees. Before Ancin could stand, an arm wrapped around his neck and pulled him up straight.

  “I told you what would happen if you ran, filth.” Liamond’s voice seemed to come from the sky itself. “I lead the queen’s personal guard. I won the melee in the prince’s tourney in Brewick. Did you think I could not run down a miserable iconoclast like you?”

  Ancin grabbed the arm around his neck with both hands. The pressure was brutal. Almost without thinking, Ancin pressed his left index and middle fingers together, running his thumb across them both. The glyphs tattooed onto each finger hummed in his bones, and he poured will into them, into the glyphs of creation on his thumb, of flame on his index finger, both bound by the control glyphs on his middle finger. The air popped at the tip of his thumb and burst into flame. The fire was small, no larger than on a candle, but it was enough. He pressed his flame into Liamond’s forearm.

  The messenger let out a bark of pain and released Ancin, pushing the speaker away from him. He cradled his armas Ancin gasped for breath. “If the queen did not need you,” he spat, “I would cut you down where you stand.”

  Ancin struggled to collect himself, managing to stand and sway only slightly, while glaring at Liamond. He did not have words to say, and wasn’t sure if his throat would let him say any regardless.

  Whatever his glare may have been, Liamond’s surely surpassed it. “Get your horse. We are camping here for the night. Try to leave again and I’ll take a limb.”

-

  It was a cold and uncomfortable night, made worse by the growing bruises on Ancin’s back and shoulders, but it was over soon enough. The moment the sky began to lighten, Liamond demanded they get back on the road. They passed through Cheybrook without problem, passing the locals as they began their day. Ancin glanced at Cheybrook Keep as the two moved by, remembering how he looked on it as a child when Inghard took him to Gawic. It was the first castle he’d ever seen, the first building larger than the reliquary he’d ever seen, until they arrived in Kaewold the next day and the Tower, high above the Shorough River, had made the world seem small.

  All these years later, it still had that effect on him. It was the first thing they saw of Kaewold, rising high above the horizon, even when it was still far enough away to be a thin line in the sky. He wondered of how it had been built, of how centuries ago Great King Helmond the Lily had commissioned the tower’s construction for the seat of his capital, of what stories the walls had to tell. Liamond handed Ancin a cloak and donned one himself as they approached. Reluctantly, Ancin followed suit, bruises aching as he lifted his arms over his head to do so. Ancin wasn’t sure the cloaks made them any less conspicuous. The colors were muted enough to not catch the eye, he supposed, but Liamond’s horse was clearly expensive, and both men’s bags were larger and heavier than most of the other travelers they passed approaching the city. Even more, Liamond’s bags clanked with his armor and the staff Master Inghard had given Ancin displayed the glyphs on them clerly. As far as Ancin could tell, though, no one on the outskirts of Kaewold paid them much mind. Liamond acted the whole way as though they were the center of attention, nonetheless. Ancin decided to leave the man be, instead watching the city pass as they moved through it.

  Kaewold was situated right on the banks of the Shorough River, at a sharp bend in the river’s path so that the city was nearly a peninsula. It was vertical, the top of the Tower somehow taller than Ancin remembered. It looked over the city as it sloped down, tiering itself like a cake split in half. The keep and inner city sat beneath the tower, and beneath that the city proper, filling the narrow strip of land as tightly as it could before spilling out below, through the outer walls and covering the land in houses and shops and roads like a wave of civilization.

  The trek through the outer city had taken nearly an hour, a whirlwind of sounds and smells and sights; the squeal of cartwheels and babies, merchants shouting about their wares, the scents of fresh food and rot, of excretion both human and animal, of incense and freshwater. It was overwhelming for Ancin, who had not been anywhere beyond Ergrove in years. A small part of him was almost thankful for Liamond’s presence, worried that he might be swallowed by the bustling city without the knight. When the two arrived at the city gates, Liamond tightened his hood and spoke as little as he could to the guards collecting the entrance toll, telling them lies about their reason for entering and handing them a fistful of bolts to enter, the long, narrow rectangles gleaming briefly in the sunlight while changing hands.

  After passing under the portcullis, Ancin spoke to Liamond for the first time that day. “Where to now?”

  “Now,” he said quietly, “we see the queen.”