第14章 The Proof

Edward emerged from the tunnel to find the loyalists waiting for him, their faces grim but hopeful. Torren stepped forward, his eyes fixed on the crown in Edward's hands. You found it, he said. I found it, Edward confirmed. And now we have a problem. What problem? The crown has declared me king, Edward said. Aldric will not surrender willingly. He will fight, and he will kill anyone who stands in his way. We need to move quickly, before he can organize a defense. Torren nodded. We have a ship ready. We can reach the main island by dawn. Then we go now, Edward said. They moved through the darkness, running across the island, their footsteps echoing on the rock, their breath visible in the cold air. They reached the beach and boarded the ship, and within moments they were cutting through the water, heading toward the main island and the fortress of Blackstone. The journey was tense and silent. Edward sat at the bow, the crown wrapped in cloth on his lap, his mind racing with possibilities and fears. He thought of his father, who had died without ever knowing that his son would one day claim a throne. He thought of his mother, whose name had been erased from history, whose sacrifice had allowed him to live. He thought of Richard, his half-brother, who sat on Northgate's throne and would one day have to answer for what he had done. And he thought of Aldric, the usurper, the murderer, the man who had stolen a kingdom and built his power on a foundation of lies and blood. The ship landed at dawn, at a small cove on the southern coast of the island, far from the main port where Aldric's soldiers would be watching. Edward and the loyalists moved inland, following the paths that Catherine had shown them, paths known only to those who had served Edmund and his queen. They reached the outer walls of Blackstone Keep by midday, and Edward studied the fortress with a critical eye. It was massive, built into the side of a hill, with towers that rose like teeth against the sky and walls that were thick enough to withstand a siege. There were guards at every gate, soldiers patrolling the ramparts, and the air was thick with the smell of smoke and sweat and fear. We cannot take it by force, Torren said. There are too many soldiers. No, Edward agreed. But we do not need to take it by force. We need to expose Aldric. We need to show the people the truth. How? Edward looked at the crown in his hands. With this. The crown reveals truth. It has already spoken my name. Now it must speak Aldric's crimes. The fight was brutal and desperate. Corbin was a skilled swordsman, his blade an extension of his will, his movements precise and lethal. But Edward fought with something Corbin could not understand—the fury of a man who had spent his entire life being told he was nothing, who had been denied his heritage, his family, his right to exist. He fought with the anger of twenty-three years of shame and humiliation, and that anger gave him strength that Corbin could not match. They clashed steel against steel, the sound ringing through the cavern like a bell. Corbin pressed the attack, his blade a blur of silver and death, but Edward parried and countered, his movements growing more confident with each passing moment. He was not the most skilled fighter in the cavern, but he was the most determined, and determination was a weapon that skill could not match. You are good, Corbin admitted, a grudging respect in his voice. But good is not enough. The problem with truth, Lyra said that evening in the cove where the ship lay beached, is that it needs an audience. A crown can speak in an empty room and no one hears it. You have to put Aldric in front of witnesses he cannot silence—nobles whose land he covets, merchants whose ships he taxes, soldiers who remember King Edmund paying them on time. Catherine supplied the occasion. In nine days the fortress would hold the annual accounting, when every landed house of the western isles sent a representative to swear the year's fealty and collect their tax receipts. Even Aldric could not bar the doors on his own ceremony without confessing fear. Nine days, then, to get a dead man's crown inside walls built to keep out exactly such things. They rehearsed on the beach by lamplight. Edward learned which lords owed their seats to Aldric's favor and which had lost sons in the purge—Lord Merrick of the Saltmarshes, old Lady Vane, a customs master named Pell who had once been flogged for short-counting the usurper's grain. Torren drew Blackstone's lower corridors from memory in the sand until the tide came and erased them, then drew them again higher up the shore. Twice during those nights a fishing boat crossed the bay and twice Edward's hand went to his knife before Lyra identified its lights as friendly. On the sixth day a rider came down the coastal road wearing black and red, and stopped at every village well along the way. By evening word reached the cove: the Order was telling of a wounded man who had crawled out of the sea caves raving about light and voices, and Aldric had doubled the gate watch and canceled all leave. The proof was coming whether they were ready or not. So they stopped rehearsing speeches and started rehearsing failure. If the diversion came too early, Pell would signal from the customs house with a lantern hung in the wrong window. If Edward was cut off in the lower corridors, Lyra would finish the plan alone, with or without him—a sentence she made him repeat back until he said it without flinching. And if the crown refused to speak indoors, under a roof built by Aldric's masons, then old Lady Vane would rise first and demand testimony anyway, because a court turned against a tyrant does not always need magic to stay turned. Catherine, listening from the doorway, said quietly that this was the first plan she had heard in eleven years that assumed its author might be wrong. She meant it as praise. Edward wrote the lantern window on his wrist in ink and scrubbed at it until only a gray smudge remained, which he decided was close enough to memory. The Proof - Continued