Chapter 27 The Old Power

Edward rode east with ten companions, leaving Northgate behind, riding toward the line of darkness that marked the border of the shadow's dominion. The land between was quiet, unnaturally so, the birds gone, the livestock huddled in the corners of their pens, the people watching from behind closed shutters with faces that did not know whether to fear him or hope. He passed through villages where the wells had run dry and the bread had turned black in the ovens, and he saw the shadow's work written in every abandoned hearth and every empty crib, and he felt the weight of it settling into his bones. By the second day, they reached the edge of the darkness itself. It was not a wall, as Edward had imagined, but a curtain, thin and translucent, through which the shapes of trees and houses could be seen, distorted and wrong, like reflections in murky water. He dismounted and walked to within a few paces of it, and he felt the cold rolling off it, and he heard, very faintly, the hum of his crown responding to something on the other side. "We should not go closer," one of his men said. "No," Edward agreed. "We will go through." He stepped forward, and the darkness folded around him like water closing over a diver's head. For a moment he was blind, deaf, lost, suspended in a void that had no dimensions. Then the darkness released him, and he stood in a world that was and was not his own. The village of Millbrook, the same Millbrook where he had traded his horse for a day's lodging and a meal and information so many years ago, stood before him, but it was changed. The houses were intact, the streets were clean, and yet there were no people, no animals, no movement of any kind. It was as if the village had been emptied of life and left to stand as a monument to what had been taken. Edward walked through the empty streets, his hand on his sword, his senses straining, and he came at last to the well at the center of the village. The water was black and still, and in its surface he saw something that made him stop. His own face stared back at him. But it was not his face. It was older, harder, the face of the double he had killed in the great hall, the face of what he could have been. And it spoke. You came back, the reflection said. I knew you would. You cannot help yourself. You have to see, to understand, to fix. It is your curse, Edward, the same curse that broke the seal in the first place. "I am not you," Edward said. "You are dead." I am not dead, the reflection said. I am the possibility that lives in you, the choice you refuse to make. The power took me when you killed me, and now I am part of it, and it is part of me. And I have seen what it sees, Edward. I have seen the heart of it. Do you want to know what it really is? Edward said nothing. The reflection smiled, and the smile was terrible, and the water rippled, and the vision faded, and Edward stood alone beside the well in the empty village with his heart pounding in his chest. He spent the rest of the day searching the village, finding nothing, and when night fell he and his men made camp at the edge of the darkness, on the border between the shadow's land and his own. He sat by the fire, the crown in his lap, and he turned the reflection's words over and over in his mind. The power took me. It is part of it. If the double was truly part of the power now, then the power was not merely an enemy. It was a mirror, a reflection of everything Edward had refused to become. He opened Sister Agnes's book for the hundredth time and read, by firelight, the passages he had memorized long ago. The crowns were forged to bind the old power, the book said, but it had never said what the old power was. It had called it a force, a hunger, a thing that predated the kingdoms and the crowns and the people who had come to fear it. But the book had never said whether it was evil, or simply indifferent, or something else entirely. Remember what you forgot, the crown had said. And Edward, sitting by the fire in the shadow of the darkness, finally understood what it meant. He had been so busy remembering the crown, the seal, the prophecy, that he had forgotten the one thing that mattered more than any of them. He had forgotten his mother. Not her name. Not her face. Not her sacrifice. He had never known those things, not really. But he had known her voice once, in the brief time before she died, and that voice had spoken words to him that he had never been able to recall. Words about the crown and the people. Words about a choice. Words about something else, something he had been too young to understand and too old to remember. He closed his eyes and tried to hear it, the voice from the dream, the voice from the memory that was not a memory, and for the first time in five years, he heard it clearly. My son. When the time comes, you must choose between the crown and the people. The crown will demand sacrifice. The people will demand justice. And you must find a way to give them both, or neither will survive. Remember that. Remember always. He had remembered that. But there was more, a few words that had been cut off, swallowed by the dream, words he had never been able to reach. He reached for them now, straining, and just before the fire burned down to embers, he caught the tail of them. Because the crown is not a thing to be worn. It is a thing to be held, and holding is the same as giving. He did not understand it. He sat with it through the cold night, turning it over, and by dawn he had decided. He would find the Crown of the Sea, and he would return, and he would hold all three crowns the way his mother had meant him to hold them. Not as weapons. Not as symbols. As something else. Something he did not yet have a name for. His men woke, and they packed camp, and they rode east again, into the shadow's land, because the island monastery lay beyond it, and there was no other way to reach it. And as they rode, the darkness closed around them, and the world grew stranger, and Edward felt the old power watching him from every shadow, learning him, testing him, waiting to see which way he would choose.