Before the Azran Gate, the Jaludians had set up tables.
They had appeared at first light, a column of clerks, scribes, adjudicators’ assistants, and guards, carrying ledgers bound in dark leather and ink-horns stoppered with brass. They had brought their own carpets to kneel on, their own awnings to keep the light off their precious papers, and their own water in clay jars glazed with the seven-pointed star of the One Covenant. They arranged themselves with the unhurried precision of men who had been doing bureaucratic work for decades and had no intention of allowing a crusader army to rush them.
The first day’s roll was limited by treaty to one hundred and fifty pilgrims: the king, the princess, selected lords, the senior clergy, a handful of knights, singers for the rites inside the House of the Returning Light, servants to carry offerings, chosen men-at-arms attached to the noble households, and those sick men whose physicians believed that if they did not see the holy place today, they would not live to see it tomorrow. Not every man would see the shrine. The treaty never pretended otherwise. Each lord had been forced to choose names, and those choices had already begun new hatreds. The rest of the host would wait outside, hungry for its turn and suspicious of the waiting.
Behind the tables stood the mamluk Guard in white silk. Their curved blades were sheathed but visible, their faces blank as plaster. They were not there to threaten, or so the clerks insisted. They were there to remind, and the reminder was this: the weapons you surrender are not spoils. They will be counted, sealed, held in custody, and returned when you leave. The Sultan’s word is on it.
The Esberians, who had spent two years learning that no promise made by an enemy was worth the breath that carried it, did not quite believe them.
At the first table sat a senior clerk with a ledger large enough to stun an ox. Beside him stood a junior clerk with a smaller book and the expression of a young man who had been told that if he misspelled a name, the treaty might collapse and the blood of thousands would be on his ink-stained hands. Beyond them, under a second awning, two armed custodians waited beside a narrow door set into the outer gatehouse. Six lesser tables did the same work in parallel, their ledgers filling with names, nicknames, mistakes, and increasingly desperate abbreviations. Surrendered weapons would be displayed only long enough to be named, marked, and matched to receipts. Then they would be carried into a sealed chamber beneath the gate, where one Jaludian lock and one Esberian lock would be set upon the door. The Esberian key passed to Sir Odo of the camp guard, Rydric’s chosen custodian; the Jaludian key to Rashid’s clerks. Neither man would leave the gate until the last pilgrim had returned.
Rydric had insisted on that second lock.
Seylim had agreed without argument, which made the Esberians trust it less.
Lord Baudren de Virenne arrived with the first company of knights, and the sight of the tables stopped him dead in the dust as though he had walked into a wall. He had been a soldier for thirty years, and in thirty years he had never once surrendered his weapons to anyone except a priest before entering a chapel. The idea of laying his father’s dagger on a table manned by Unitarian clerks while mamluks watched with sheathed swords was, to him, a violation so profound that it took him a long moment to remember how to speak.
“They want us to strip,” he said, not loudly, but with the particular quiet of a man controlling himself by main force. “Before we enter. Like prisoners.”
“They want us to disarm,” said Lord Tanrek of Montelvair, admiral of the fleet, who had commanded ships through winter storms and was not easily impressed by insult. “Prisoners are stripped by others. We are being asked to do it ourselves. There is a difference.”
“I am aware of the difference. I am not comforted by it.”
“Comfort is not the purpose of the exercise.”
The clerks waited. The mamluks waited. The Esberian knights stood in a clump twenty paces from the tables, and the space between them seemed to widen with every heartbeat, as though the ground itself were stretching to keep them apart.
King Rydric Aldren went first.
He had not announced that he would. He simply walked past Baudren, past Tanrek, past the younger knights, and stopped before the senior clerk. He wore no crown. His surcoat was plain crimson, the Revealed Star embroidered over his breast in gold thread worn thin by dust and campaign weather. At his hip hung the sword of Esberia, the long, broad blade whose hilt had been kissed by bishops, stained by kings, and carried through half the battles of his reign.
The treaty would have allowed him to keep it, peace-bound and sealed, as a royal ceremonial arm.
Rydric unbuckled the sword belt.
A murmur passed through the Esberians. Father Aldemar closed his eyes. Baudren swore under his breath.
Rydric laid the sword on the table.
“Rydric of the House of Aldren,” he said. “King of Esberia.”
The senior clerk’s face did not change, but the pause before his pen touched the page was just long enough to be noticed.
“Royal sword of King Rydric of Esberia,” the clerk said, in careful Vestimarian as he wrote. “Surrendered voluntarily, despite ceremonial exemption. To be held in sealed joint custody and returned upon exit.”
The junior clerk wrote quickly, his hand shaking only a little.
One of the custodians lifted the sword. He did it with both hands and bowed—not deeply, not theatrically, but enough. Then he carried the blade through the narrow door into the chamber beneath the gatehouse.
The clerk handed Rydric a receipt.
It was a small rectangle of paper, absurdly fragile against the weight of the sword it represented.
Rydric folded it once and tucked it into his belt.
“There,” he said, turning back to the knights. “Now no man can claim he was asked to do what his king would not.”
That settled the matter, though not gently.
Sir Aubrey of Valrens was the next to break. He was young—younger than most of the knights who had survived the siege, which was not saying much, since most of the knights who had survived were old men now, regardless of their years. He had carried his broad campaign sword across the Sepharan Sea and across the Kedrayan plain and through every skirmish, sortie, and starvation the siege had thrown at him. His hands trembled as he lifted it from his shoulder. The blade was long, heavier than most men would have chosen, and it caught the grey morning light in a way that made it look like a sliver of winter sky.
“I do not know how to do this,” he said, and his voice cracked on the last word.
“Blade on the table, lad,” Baudren said, more gently than he had spoken to anyone in weeks. “That is how.”
“I mean—” Aubrey stopped. Swallowed. “I have carried this since the beach. Since Darat al-Bahr. It has never left my hand. Not when I slept. Not when I—”
“When you killed,” Baudren said. “Say it. This is not a court. We are all killers here.”
“When I killed. Yes.”
“And now you will lay it down, and you will walk through that gate, and you will pray at the House of the Returning Light, and tonight you will eat bread that is not weevil-ridden, and tomorrow you will wake up, and the sword will be here, and the world will not have ended. Do you understand me?”
Aubrey looked at him. The young knight’s eyes were red-rimmed and hollow, the eyes of a man who had seen too much and eaten too little and slept not at all. But he nodded, and he stepped toward the table, and he laid the greatsword down with the care of a man placing a child into a cradle.
The senior clerk recorded it in his ledger. The junior clerk recorded it in his book. A custodian marked the sword with a strip of linen sealed in green wax and carried it into the chamber.
“Name?” said the clerk.
“Aubrey of Valrens.”
“You will reclaim this weapon upon exit. Present this receipt.”
He handed Aubrey a slip of paper. Aubrey stared at it. He had not held paper in his hand since leaving Esberia. It felt impossibly light, impossibly fragile, a thing made of air and hope.
“What if I lose it?” he asked.
“Then there will be a dispute,” the clerk said, “and the dispute will be heard by the joint tribunal. The joint tribunal will consult the ledger, the secondary register, the seal-list, the testimony of the custodians, and, if necessary, the object itself. If my colleague here has written your name in a legible hand, this will be easy. If he has not, you may wish to pray that your sword is distinctive.”
The junior clerk looked at his book as though it had bitten him.
“It is legible,” he said, in Jaludi.
“It is not legible,” the senior clerk replied, also in Jaludi. “It looks like a spider drowned in ink and then crawled across the page in its death agonies. Rewrite it.”
Aubrey, who understood perhaps one word in ten of this exchange, took his receipt and walked toward the waiting line in a daze.
The northern sergeant with the skinning knife caused the first real argument of the morning.
He was a big man, broad-shouldered and thick-bearded, with hands that looked capable of strangling a horse and a face scarred by fire. He surrendered his spear and short sword without complaint, but when the clerk reached for the knife at his belt, he stepped back.
“It is a tool,” he said.
“It is a blade,” the clerk replied, in the tone of a man who had been having this argument since sunrise and expected to continue having it until sunset.
“It is a skinning knife. I am a skinner. Or I was, before I was a soldier. I have carried this knife since I was twelve years old. It has skinned more deer than it has killed men, and the deer were all Esberian deer who died in a state of grace, and the men were all enemies, which I understand is a word I am still permitted to use outside the gate.”
The clerk blinked.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
“The treaty,” he said, consulting a document weighted down with a stone against the rising wind, “specifies that all blades exceeding four finger-widths in length must be surrendered into custody for the duration of the pilgrimage. Exceptions include tools of trade upon verification, sealed royal ceremonial arms, surgical instruments in the possession of physicians, and the declared personal blade of the Princess Alianor, which is separately governed by the ninth article.”
A few heads turned at that. Alianor, standing some distance back with Sivelle, did not move.
The sergeant seized on the part relevant to himself. “This is a tool of trade.”
“Your trade is soldiering.”
“My trade was skinning. The soldiering was a temporary career change brought on by the High Luminary’s letter, the king’s recruiting sergeants, and a disagreement with my brother-in-law that made it advisable for me to leave the Northern Marches for a while. The knife is a skinning knife. I can prove it.”
“How?”
The sergeant looked at the knife, then at the clerk, then at the sky, as though appealing to Heaven for patience.
“Do you have a deer?”
The junior clerk made a sound that might have been a laugh and turned it into a cough at the last possible moment. The senior clerk’s expression did not change, but something in his eyes suggested that he was not immune to the absurdity of the situation.
“I will summon your captain,” he said.
The captain was summoned. He confirmed that the sergeant had indeed been a skinner, that the knife was indeed a tool of trade, and that if the clerk did not accept this, the sergeant would probably spend the next twelve days talking about it to anyone who would listen, which would be worse for morale than any number of hidden weapons. The clerk, after consulting the treaty terms and making a note in his ledger that took up half a page, allowed the knife to be retained.
It was then sealed into its sheath with a strip of green thread passed through the guard, around the scabbard mouth, and beneath a blob of wax stamped with the small seal of the gate clerks. The knife could still hang at his belt as a retained tool, but it could not be drawn without breaking the seal. If the seal were broken inside the walls, the sergeant would be detained, expelled from the city, and fined two months’ pay—deducted from the Esberian surety lodged with the gate clerks and charged by Morain against the offender’s company—unless he could prove necessity of defense before the joint tribunal.
The sergeant inspected the thread as though it were a personal insult.
“It cannot be used with that on it,” he said.
“That is the purpose of the thread,” the clerk replied.
The sergeant considered this, decided he had won a victory narrow enough to be called honourable, and walked toward the gate.
“You see?” he said to no one in particular. “Diplomacy.”
Lord Baudren approached the table last among the knights of the first company.
He had been delaying. Everyone knew it. Baudren had been delaying since the moment the tables appeared, finding reasons to speak with this squire and that man-at-arms, checking the harness of horses that had already been checked, adjusting the fit of his surcoat though it fit as well as it ever had. He was not afraid of the mamluks. He was not afraid of the clerks. He was afraid of the moment when he would have to put his father’s dagger on the table and walk away from it, and he had been afraid of that moment since Rydric had first spoken the word pilgrimage.
The dagger was not beautiful. It had been made in Virenne three generations ago by a smith whose name no one remembered, and it had been used for everything a dagger could be used for: cutting meat, trimming harness, opening letters, killing men. The hilt was wrapped in leather replaced twice, most recently by Baudren himself, whose stitching was soldier’s work—functional, ugly, and strong. The blade had a nick near the guard where Baudren’s grandfather had parried a sword that should have killed him. The sword had not killed him. The grandfather had died in his bed twenty years later, and the dagger had passed to Baudren’s father, and then to Baudren, and now Baudren was supposed to lay it on a table and trust that a Jaludian clerk would keep it safe.
He did not move.
Rydric came up beside him. The king had been watching from the edge of the line, and he had seen Baudren’s delay, and he had understood it, because he understood Baudren in the way that men who have fought together for twenty years understand each other—not through words, but through the small betrayals of posture and breath.
“It will be there when we ride out,” Rydric said quietly. “Put it on the table, Baudren.”
“My father—”
“Your father gave it to you. You will take it back when this day is done. This is a pause. Not an ending.”
Baudren’s jaw worked. He was not a man given to visible emotion, but the grey morning light was unkind to old soldiers, and his face showed everything he was trying to hide.
“My son is dead,” he said.
Rydric closed his eyes.
The silence between them was not the silence of strangers. It was the silence of men who had buried too many people together and had run out of words for it.
“Then take it back for yourself,” the king said. “You deserve that much. We all do.”
Baudren looked at the dagger. Then at the table. Then at the clerk, who had the good sense to look away.
He laid the dagger down.
The clerk recorded it. The junior clerk recorded it. A custodian sealed it and carried it through the narrow door. Baudren watched it go with the expression of a man watching his own heart being carried across a room.
“Receipt,” the clerk said, holding out the slip.
Baudren took it. He did not look at it. He folded it once, twice, three times, and tucked it into the pouch at his belt, and then he walked toward the gate without speaking.
The common soldiers were easier, and they were harder.
They were easier because most of them had no ancestral weapons to surrender, no daggers that had been in their families for three generations, no greatswords carried since the beach at Darat al-Bahr. Their weapons were tools in the truest sense: spears from the royal armouries, swords stamped with the mark of some Esberian forge they had never visited, axes sharpened so many times the blades were thin as leaves. They laid them on the tables with relief disguised as reluctance, because surrendering a weapon also meant surrendering the fear that you would need it, and some of them had been afraid for so long that the fear had become a kind of companion.
But they were harder because there were so many of them, and because the clerks had to count every blade, and because standing in line while enemies handled your weapons was not how any of them had imagined entering the holy city.
Some of them laughed while they waited. It was not the laughter of men who found the situation amusing. It was the laughter of men who had expected to die and were now being asked to fill out paperwork, and the gap between those two realities was so vast that laughter was the only way to cross it.
“Name?” said a clerk to a man-at-arms whose face was still marked with the sores of the hunger weeks.
“Corin.”
“Corin of where?”
“Corin of nowhere in particular. My mother called me Corin. That is all the geography I have.”
The clerk wrote down Corin of Nowhere without comment. The junior clerk, who was either beginning to develop a sense of humour about the proceedings or simply losing his mind, wrote Corin of No Particular Geography in his own book.
A squire wept as he surrendered his sword. He was perhaps sixteen, and the sword had been his brother’s, and his brother had died of the flux three weeks into the siege, and the sword was the only part of his brother that remained. The clerk waited in silence while the boy composed himself. The custodian who carried the sword into the chamber did so with something that might, in a different light, have been called tenderness.
“Receipt,” the clerk said.
The boy took it.
“I cannot read,” he said.
“Then remember the shape of it,” the clerk replied. “The paper will remember the words.”
Alianor came after the first company had nearly been processed.
She had intended to come earlier, to show her knights that she would not ask them to do anything she would not do herself, but Rydric had delayed her with questions about the pilgrimage route, Father Aldemar had delayed her with concerns about the liturgy, and Sivelle had delayed her with the practical business of making a princess look like a pilgrim rather than a prisoner. By the time she reached the tables, the morning was half gone and the first company was already gathering between the outer ditch and the Azran Gate.
The clerks looked up when she approached. The mamluks looked up. The Esberian knights who were still waiting for their receipts looked up. Alianor Aldren had that effect on people, and she knew it, and she hated it, and she used it anyway.
She wore no veil. The treaty allowed one, and propriety nearly demanded it, but she had decided that if she was to enter Solymer as a pilgrim, she would do so with her face bare and her eyes open. Her gown was plain by royal standards—dark blue wool embroidered with the Revealed Star in silver thread, a garment that could be read as either penance or defiance depending on the angle. Her hair, which she usually wore loose enough to keep clear of sword and helm—a fierce, boyish style that would have been condemned as improper on any other princess and had, on Alianor, somehow become merely another fact of war—had been braided tight against her skull and pinned beneath a net of silver wire.
Behind her, Sivelle carried Mercy in her arms.
The sword was sheathed in the plain leather scabbard Alianor had commissioned in Tarsen when she was first knighted and had wanted a weapon that could not be mistaken for ornament. The hilt was wrapped in dark cord, stained by years of sweat and use. The pommel was a simple steel wheel. There was nothing beautiful about Mercy except its balance, which was perfect, and its edge, which was lethal, and its name, which had once been a joke and now felt like an accusation.
Sivelle set the sword on the table.
The senior clerk looked at it. Then at Alianor. Then at Sivelle. Then at the junior clerk, who was staring at the princess with the expression of a young man discovering that the stories had not been adequate.
“The princess is entitled to retain sealed ceremonial arms,” the senior clerk said, in careful Vestimarian. “This is provided for in the treaty. The sword need not be surrendered.”
“I know what the treaty provides,” Alianor said. “If my knights walk unarmed, so do I.”
The clerk hesitated. He was not accustomed to being refused an exemption by the person who was supposed to benefit from it, and his training did not cover this situation. He looked at the mamluk captain as though hoping for guidance. The captain’s face remained perfectly blank, but the angle of his head suggested that he found the situation interesting in a way that was not entirely comfortable.
“Highness,” the clerk tried again, “the sword is a weapon of rank. It is not—”
“It is a sword,” Alianor said. “It is made of steel. It cuts. The treaty does not distinguish between swords that are weapons of rank and swords that are weapons of desperation. My knights have surrendered theirs. I will surrender mine. Record it.”
The clerk recorded it.
When he handed her the receipt, she looked at it for a long moment. Then she folded it precisely and gave it to Sivelle, who tucked it into the leather pouch at her belt beside the small tin of headache powder and the needle-case and the other small necessities that composed the infrastructure of Alianor’s life.
“Mercy,” the clerk said, reading the name Sivelle had supplied.
Alianor looked at the sword as the custodian marked it and carried it toward the chamber.
“It is a foolish name for a sword,” she said. “I have always known that.”
“What would you call it now?” Sivelle asked.
“I would call it what it is. A promise I am making to people I do not trust.”
Then came the other blade.
The clerk did not ask for it. He did not have to. The ninth article had been written because everyone who mattered had seen the misericorde flash beneath the betrothal canopies. There had been no way to pretend it did not exist, and pretending was precisely what the treaty could least afford.
Alianor drew the narrow blade from her sleeve.
The men nearest the table went very still.
It was not the weapon she had carried into the betrothal in secret, not anymore. Now it was a registered scandal, a private blade dragged into law because private terror had nearly become public catastrophe. A strip of blue silk had already been prepared for it, embroidered with the Revealed Star in silver and the seven-pointed star in green. Learned Rashid had called it a “declared personal blade retained under exceptional guarantee.” Father Aldemar had called it an outrage. Lord Baudren had called it a terrible idea and then, after hearing the alternatives, a slightly less terrible idea. Rydric had signed the clause without speaking. Seylim had signed it after reading it twice.
Zeid, Alianor knew, had argued for it.
That knowledge sat in her like a thorn.
She laid the misericorde on the table.
“This remains with me,” she said.
The clerk inclined his head. “Under the ninth article. The blade is to remain sheathed and peace-bound within the walls. Its seal will be inspected at entry, at the House of the Returning Light, and again upon exit. If the seal is broken except in defense of life, the princess will be removed from the city and the matter referred to the joint tribunal. By the same article, Lady Sivelle of Tarsen is named witness to the blade’s custody, and both kings have accepted responsibility for its exception.”
“Record it,” Alianor said.
The clerk did.
He bound the sheath with blue-and-green silk, passing the ribbon through the mouth of the sleeve-sheath itself so that the blade could not be drawn cleanly without tearing the seal. He pressed one small seal of wax over the knot and returned the misericorde to her hilt first. The gesture was so like Zeid’s gesture at the betrothal that for one unbearable instant Alianor was back beneath the pavilion, the knife at her throat, the prince’s body pressed against hers, the shock of his secret passing into her flesh.
She took the blade and slid it into her sleeve.
It was no longer hidden.
That made it feel, somehow, more dangerous.
The last name was recorded. The last receipt was given. The last weapon vanished into the sealed chamber beneath the gatehouse. The two custodians shut the door. Rashid’s senior clerk set the Jaludian lock. Sir Odo set the Esberian one. Each man tested the other’s lock, then took his own key and stepped back from the chamber door like sentries posted before a tomb. Neither would leave the gate until the last pilgrim had returned.