第5章 The Voice in the Gold

The light was blinding. Edward threw his arm over his face and stumbled backward, his heart hammering against his ribs. When the light faded, he was alone in the cathedral, but the crown was gone. Or rather, it was not gone—it was floating in the air before him, spinning slowly, casting rainbow patterns across the stone floor. And then a voice spoke. It was not a human voice. It was deeper, older, resonating in the stones themselves, in the air, in the bones of his body. It spoke in a language he did not understand, and yet he understood it perfectly. You have come, child of blood. You have come to claim what was never yours to claim. Edward's mouth was dry. I have come to claim what is mine by right of blood. Right is a word men invented to justify their desires. What do you desire, child? Power? Legitimacy? Revenge against the brother who displaced you? I desire nothing but the truth. The crown stopped spinning. The light dimmed, and for a moment Edward thought the voice had gone silent. Then it spoke again, softer this time, almost gentle. The truth is a dangerous thing, child. It can destroy as easily as it can reveal. Are you prepared to face what you might find? Edward swallowed. He thought of Richard, standing at the front of the funeral procession, wearing his father's colors like a second skin. He thought of the steward's words: Your father asked that you be provided for. He thought of his mother, whose name he did not know, who had died bringing him into this world and leaving him to live in the shadow of a family that had never wanted him. Yes, he said. I am prepared. The crown descended, slowly, until it hovered before his eyes. And then it spoke one final word, a single syllable that echoed through the cathedral and beyond, across the cursed city and into the forests and fields and villages of the kingdom. Remember. And then it was gone. Not vanished—gone, as if it had never existed at all. The pedestal was empty. The light had faded. The cathedral was silent. Edward stood alone in the darkness, his heart racing, his hands trembling. He did not know what the voice had meant. He did not know what he was supposed to remember. But he knew one thing: he had been given a task, and he would not fail. He walked out of the cathedral and back through the empty streets of Blackmere, his mind racing with questions he could not yet answer. The crown had spoken to him. It had tested him. And it had sent him away empty-handed, but with something far more valuable than gold and jewels. It had given him a purpose. He reached the edge of the forest and found his horse, still tied to the tree where he had left it. He mounted and turned east, away from Blackmere, away from the cursed city and the voice in the crown. He did not know where he was going, but he knew he could not return to Oakhaven, could not go back to the life he had known. He had crossed a threshold, and there was no going back. He rode for two more days before he found a small village called Millbrook, where he traded the horse for a day's lodging and a meal and information. He learned that Blackmere was not the only cursed city in the kingdom. There were others, scattered across the land, each holding secrets that had been buried with the dead. And there were those who sought these secrets, who hunted relics and artifacts, who believed that the old magic still lived in the world and could be awakened. One of them, he learned, was a woman named Sister Agnes, a nun who had dedicated her life to preserving the knowledge of the old world. She lived in a monastery in the hills north of Millbrook, and she might know more about the crown than anyone else alive. Edward paid for another day's lodging and set out for the monastery at dawn. Blackmere rose from the trees like a dream of a city, all spires and towers and crumbling walls, half-swallowed by ivy and moss and time. Edward walked through the empty streets, his footsteps echoing in the silence, feeling the presence of the dead around him not as ghosts but as memories, as impressions left on stone and wood and earth. He felt their fear, their desperation, their final hours of life. And beneath it all, deeper than the fear, he felt something else—something ancient and patient, like the breath of the earth itself. The cathedral stood at the center of the city, a massive structure of stone and glass, its spire still standing despite the collapse of everything around it. The doors were open. Inside, the light was dim, filtered through stained glass that depicted scenes of saints and martyrs, their faces painted in colors that had not faded despite the centuries. Edward walked down the central aisle and stopped before the altar. And there, on a pedestal of black marble, he saw it. The Crown of Saint Edmund. It was smaller than he had expected, a circlet of gold worn thin by time, studded with stones that had lost their brilliance but still caught the light in fragments, like memories of their former glory. It sat on the pedestal like a crown waiting for a king, and Edward felt something stir inside him, something that was not quite hope and not quite fear but a mixture of both, sharp and urgent and alive. The Voice in the Gold - Continued The sight of it stayed with him on the road north. However many miles he put behind him, whenever he closed his eyes he saw the crown again: a thin circlet of worn gold on black marble, catching light it had no right to catch in a dead city's dark. And beneath the image, always, that single syllable tolling like a bell struck once and never quite fading. Remember. On the second evening, sheltering from rain in a charcoal-burner's hut with the burners away at their kilns, he shared a fire with a gray-bearded carrier who walked this route four times a year bearing salt north and ledgers south, and who had carried messages up to the monastery more than once. Sister Agnes, the man said, when Edward spoke the name as casually as he could manage, was older than anybody could rightly say and sharper than anybody liked. She traded in answers, not alms. Knights had climbed to her with silver and been sent down hungrier than they arrived; shepherds had come with nothing but a question and been kept to supper. What does she want? Edward asked. Honesty, the carrier said, or so it seemed to him. She listens to how a man asks before she hears what he asks. It has been a long while since anyone went up there who did not already know the answer he wanted. That night Edward sat a long time with his palm flat against his chest, below the breastbone, where something had felt not quite his own since the cathedral. Beneath his hand a warmth came and went with the moonlight moving on the smoke-hole, slow as water finding its level in a tide pool. He thought about the voice and its warnings, and about the carrier's test of honest asking, and understood they might be the same instruction written twice: go up the hill with your question open, or do not go at all. He was on the path again before the mist lifted, climbing through bramble and birch toward the ridge where, if half the stories were true, one person in the world had spent a lifetime listening for exactly the kind of voice that only he had ever heard speak from gold.