Chapter 3 The Challenge

The road from Northgate led east, through rolling hills and narrow valleys, into the borderlands where the kingdom's reach grew thin and the law was more suggestion than statute. Edward walked for three days without speaking to another living soul, his pack light, his mind full. He ate bread and cheese and drank from streams when he was thirsty, and he slept in barns and ditches and under hedgerows when he was tired. He was not a soldier, but he had grown up working the fields, and his body knew how to endure. On the fourth day, he reached a town called Thornbury, a market town that sat at the crossroads of three counties. It was here that he learned that his journey had not gone unnoticed. He was in a tavern, eating a bowl of pottage and drinking a mug of ale, when a man sat down across from him without asking permission. The man was tall and lean, with a face that was all angles and a smile that did not reach his eyes. He wore the colors of Northgate, though not the livery of a servant. He was a knight, Edward realized, or at least a man who served a knight. Edward, the man said. It was not a question. Son of Gareth. Edward set down his spoon and looked at him carefully. Who are you? My name is Corbin. I serve Lord Richard. The man's smile widened, but it remained cold. His lordship sends his regards, and his warnings. What warnings? That you are a fool. That you think your blood gives you rights you do not possess. That your father's last act of kindness was a mistake, and you are making the same mistake by accepting it. Corbin leaned forward, and Edward caught the smell of wine on his breath. There is a way for you to prove yourself, Edward. A way to earn your place, if you are worth anything at all. Edward's hand moved to the knife at his belt. He had learned to carry a knife since childhood, and he knew how to use it. Speak plainly. Corbin's smile did not waver. The Crown of Saint Edmund. It is said to be in Blackmere, in the crypt of the old cathedral. Your father sought it before he died. He believed it could prove your claim, if you could bring it back. The crown has power, Edward. Not the power of kings—that was lost centuries ago. But the power of truth. It reveals lineage. Blood speaks to blood, they say, and the crown does not lie. Blackmere is cursed, Edward said. It is quarantined. The plague took everyone there. Everyone except the Cursed Ones, Corbin said. Those who survived. They still live in the ruins, surviving on stolen goods and smuggled supplies, holed up in the crypt where the plague cannot reach them. The crown is there. Your father died trying to find it. Perhaps you will have better luck. And if I refuse? Corbin's eyes hardened. Then you are nothing. A bastard with delusions of grandeur. And your half-brother has the power to make sure you stay nothing. He has knights, Edward. He has lands. He has the law on his side. You have nothing but a dead father's wish and a rumor about a crown in a tomb. He stood up and tossed a coin on the table. Think on it. You have seven days. If you return with the crown, Richard will acknowledge you. If not... well. There are places in this kingdom where a bastard can disappear without anyone asking questions. He walked away, leaving Edward alone with his thoughts and his pottage, which had gone cold. Corbin's words lingered in Edward's mind long after the man had left. The Crown of Saint Edmund. He had heard of it before, of course—every child in the kingdom had heard of it, in stories told by firelight and in fragments quoted by priests. But he had never believed it was real. Now he was not so sure. The crown had power, Corbin had said. Not the power of kings—that had been lost centuries ago. But the power of truth. It revealed lineage. Blood spoke to blood, they said, and the crown did not lie. If that was true, then the crown could prove his legitimacy. It could prove that he was not merely a bastard, but a son of noble birth. And if he could prove that, perhaps Richard would have to acknowledge him. Perhaps he would not have to spend the rest of his days as a peasant laborer, working fields that were not his, eating food that was barely enough, sleeping in a corner of an inn that smelled of stale ale and desperation. He would find the crown. He would claim his birthright. And he would make Richard pay for everything he had done. The Challenge - Continued Edward sat in the tavern until the fire burned down to embers, turning the thing over in his mind the way a mason turns a stone in his hand, judging its weight before committing it to a wall. Seven days. A quarantined city where everyone he might meet had buried the dead or joined them. A crown that could read the truth of blood the way a priest reads scripture. Every careful part of him said no. Careful men lived long lives in Oakhaven and died in the same bed they had been born in, and by the second winter nobody but the priest remembered their names. He went out into the street. Dusk had settled over Thornbury, and the town was shutting itself away for the night—apprentices barring shutters, a tinker arguing cheerfully with a cook over the price of a kettle, tallow smoke and wet straw mixing in the narrow lane. Nobody looked at him twice. For twenty-three years he had hated that: being no one, the shadow at the edge of another man's fire. Tonight he tested the feeling again and found it changed. Being unnoticed was not only a wound. It was also a tool. A man nobody counted could walk into Blackmere, if it came to that, and walk out again, and no one at Northgate would hear of it until it was done. At the inn he climbed to the loft and lay down with his knife under the blanket, and instead of Richard's face or Corbin's cold smile he thought, unexpectedly, of his mother. A woman whose name had been scraped out of every record, as if a life could be unwritten by an uninvented pen. If the crown spoke truth about blood, then somewhere in its gold was her name too—not only his father's line, not only a claim to lands he had never seen. Hers. That, more than Richard's acknowledgment, more than Corbin's threats, decided him. He slept badly and woke before dawn with his mind made up. First he would need coin, and rope, and a horse he did not have. Three days of honest labor, then the road east.