A wrongfully imprisoned storyteller spins stories from his jail cell that just might have the power to save him—and take down a corrupt government. Arrested on accusations of witchcraft and treason, Chant finds himself trapped in a cold, filthy jail cell in a foreign land. With only his advocate, the unhelpful and uninterested Consanza, he quickly finds himself cast as a bargaining chip in a brewing battle between the five rulers of this small, backwards, and petty nation. Or, at least, that's how he would tell the story. In truth, Chant has little idea of what is happening outside the walls of his cell, but he must quickly start to unravel the puzzle of his imprisonment before they execute him for his alleged crimes. But Chant is no witch—he is a member of a rare and obscure order of wandering storytellers. With no country to call his home, and no people to claim as his own, all Chant has is his wits and his apprentice, a lad more interested in wooing handsome shepherds than learning the ways of the world. And yet, he has one great power: his stories in the ears of the rulers determined to prosecute him for betraying a nation he knows next to nothing about. The tales he tells will topple the Queens of Nuryevet and just maybe, save his life.
Release date:
October 23, 2018
Publisher:
Gallery / Saga Press
Print pages:
432
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. . . there was a woman who owned a little shop where she sold glassware. Beautiful, fine work by the best artisans in all the city, little fantasies of crystal. She also had some poorer work, which she kept for people who weren’t quite high enough in society to be able to afford the very best, but who were clawing their way up as fiercely as they could, who wanted to seem like they were doing a better job than they were. It was a rather boring trade for the woman—she had inherited the business from her father, and she had not much use for or interest in glass, except for the money that it brought in and the reputation it granted her, but the shop was known throughout the city for its exquisite wares.
One day a lord of the city came in. He needed to buy an entire new suite of wineglasses, for a clumsy servant, dusting the shelf, had knocked it loose and the whole glittering collection had fallen and shattered into the smallest fragments.
(I paused for the faintest moment here to see if Taishineya would have a reaction—a bark of laughter, perhaps, or the declaration that she hoped the lord had dismissed the servant immediately, but she just sat there and looked . . . innocently blank. At the time, I thought she looked like she was obviously feigning inquisitiveness, but in hindsight she might have been feigning the feigning of inquisitiveness.)
The lord was hosting a great banquet that very night to celebrate the engagement of his eldest son to a young woman of much renown—he needed to go home with the glasses that very afternoon.
The glass merchant nodded calmly, but her heart had gone still in her chest. She simply did not have that many wineglasses in stock, certainly not of the quality that this lord was looking for. But she had a clever idea, and she had a lot of poorly made wineglasses, enough to supply the lord twice over.
“Well, my lord . . . Usually I wouldn’t suggest something like this, but since your whole collection has been destroyed . . . It just seems like true serendipity that this would happen to you, today of all days,” she said.
“Why?” said the lord.
The glass merchant shooed her assistant out of the shop, locked the front door, and beckoned the lord close. “I’ve just received a shipment of wares so rare that only a very few people in this entire city have ever seen them before.”
The lord’s interest was piqued. “Show me these wares.”
“I shall have to go into the storeroom and count the glasses to make sure I have enough . . . but I think I might. It will be very close.” The lord nodded eagerly, and the merchant vanished into her back room, where she counted the wineglasses, ran a dust cloth over them, and composed herself. She brought back one, covered in a piece of fine white silk, and she set it on a velvet cloth on the counter, peering out behind the lord at the street, as if to make sure no one was looking in. “I don’t display them, my lord,” she said, “for fear of thieves. These are rare indeed. Made by the blind monks from the abbey of Silverbed Lake, on the top of the mountain Eibe in far-off Vilarac.”
“Goodness,” said the lord, marveling, “if they’re blind, how do they blow glass?”
(“Yes,” said Taishineya Tarmos, her head a little on one side.)
“My lord has cleverly spotted the source of their rarity,” said the merchant, with great pride. “I expected nothing less. It is said that the gods guide their hands, my lord, although they may have some small assistance from novices who still have their sight. They use an ancient method, handed down in secret from generation to generation, which no one outside the abbey has ever learned or been able to replicate. Owning these glasses is like owning a relic from a thousand years ago. They are, to make a gross understatement, priceless. I had planned to sell them one by one to some of the best collectors of fine glassware in the city—” and she named several of the lord’s peers and superiors, all of whom were noted for their good taste. “I didn’t think the opportunity would come along to be able to preserve the set in its perfect entirety. It would have been a right shame to sell it in bits and pieces—like separating members of a family and shipping them off alone to each of the corners of the world.”
The lord urged her to show him the glass, and so she whirled the silk cloth off it with a flourish and let her breath catch in her throat, as if she were overcome.
“Behold, my lord: Vilarac Unseen glass.”
The glass was thick and heavy, and the bowl was set just slightly off center on the stem, but she had polished it clean and put it in a patch of sunshine, where it reflected light into the lord’s eyes and dazzled him so that he could not quite see it clearly. And then she whirled the cloth back over it, looking with great concern out of the shop window behind him. “Pardon, my lord, I thought I saw an urchin peering in.”
“Never mind the urchin. Did you say you had enough of those?”
“My lord, I have merely one more than you asked for,” she said solemnly.
“And what price are you putting on these priceless glasses?” The merchant named a number, and the lord paled slightly and adjusted his neckcloth. “Perhaps,” said he, “we might look at a few others that you have on offer?”
“Certainly, my lord, I would be happy to show you. I understand that perhaps the Unseen glasses may be too much for you. . . . I see now they could be considered rather ostentatious for something like an engagement.”
She led the lord to a shelf holding one of her finest pieces, a tall flute with a stem shaped like a seahorse, decorated with rubies for eyes. “But surely you wouldn’t want something this gaudy and garish.”
“Surely,” the lord said, uncertain. She nodded and tossed the glass over her shoulder, and it shattered.
(Taishineya blinked.)
“And surely you wouldn’t want anything this shoddily made,” she said, picking up a simple cup of glass as thin as gossamer, through which the light broke into rainbows. “It’s trash, really. I never should have bought it from that charlatan, that reprobate.” And with that, not waiting for his reply, she smashed it on the ground also. “Not to worry, my lord, we shall find you something that perfectly suits your needs. Not this one, though, I’ve sold this to thirty families in town,” and she smashed yet another glass. “And my lord surely doesn’t want glassware that simply everyone has, do you?”
“Perhaps I’ll take another look at the Unseen glasses,” he said nervously.
“Ah, certainly,” she said, without missing a beat. And he saw by the delicate, careful way she handled them that this was the real treasure. He bought all of them, even the extra, and the glass merchant immediately packed up and left town, with enough money to comfortably retire on.
But she needn’t have done so—the lord spoke grandly to all his guests of the history and quality of the pieces, and they were all terribly jealous. So everyone lived happily ever after.
Then I said, “Madam, what was the difference between the shoddy glass and the fine glass?”
“Quality of craftsmanship. The lord should have known she was swindling him.”
“Then why didn’t he?”
“He was a fool,” she said with a delicate shrug.
“Who is permitted to vote in this country?”
“Any adult citizen.”
“And how many of them do you suppose are fools?”
There was a long pause between us. “Oh,” she said at last.
“The quality of craftsmanship wasn’t the important distinction. The difference was that the Unseen glasses had a history. They had a story. And humans value stories above all else, whether they know it or not. I travel through a land gripped in famine, where food should be the most valuable thing, correct? But I can stand up in front of a starving crowd and sing for them, and whisk them away from their hunger for a moment, and I’ll have at least a crust of bread when I’m done. Enough to get by on.
“Another story, a shorter one: There was once a king who hated the neighboring kingdom. They had a dispute over which of them owned a mountain on their shared border—a mountain filled with silver. So the king told a story to his people that taught them that they were the ones the gods truly favored. He made their suffering noble. He made their little successes into heroic victories. And then they followed him into war and obliterated themselves and most of the opposing army. For a story someone once told them.”
Taishineya Tarmos nodded and pushed the small animal off her lap. Smoothed her skirts again. “I have a lot to think about,” she said. Her voice was clearer than it had been the entire time before. I hadn’t realized how much of a falsetto she’d been adopting.
“Will you have my message carried?”
After a few heartbeats, she nodded. “You sang for your crust of bread. It was good advice. I will see that it is done.”
Days later Vasili walked up to my cell and unlocked the door before I could even put down my book. “You have a visitor.”
“Who?”
“Young man by the name of Ill-thing or something.”
“Ylfing!”
“Right, that’s it.”
“He’s here!”
“In the visiting room, apparently. Get up and follow me. You carrying anything that could get us in trouble?” he hissed. I had continued feeding him little scraps of information about the Tower of Pattern, but I was trying to wean him off of it now. Consanza’s rebuke had adequately spooked me, and considering how many things Taishineya Tarmos had heard about me . . . Well. Anfisa had much more elegant intelligence systems. I could only cringe at my poor judgment and hope that perhaps the worst parts might slip through the cracks.
“I have nothing! Is he all right?” I scrambled up. Vasili gripped my upper arm and pulled me out of the cell and down the corridor.
“Who?”
“Ylfing!”
“Looks like he’s in one piece.”
I didn’t miss him, mind you. Not at all. I was just rather pleased to know he wasn’t dead—it’s not every boy or girl who wants to run off and become a Chant, to unname themselves and to disavow their homeland, to sink it beneath the waves. I haven’t let Ylfing do it yet; that’s why he still has his name. He has time to back out of it, if he’s going to.
My heart was behaving rather oddly—felt all light, like a soap bubble. Not because I was happy to see Ylfing. I was probably having a heart attack at that moment, that’s all.
Vasili took me to a small room, like the one where Zorya Miroslavat had brought me for my first so-called hearing for the stupid espionage business. Right before the door opened, Vasili instructed me that I was not to come within eight feet of Ylfing, that he had been patted down just as I had, and that we would both be searched again when our visit was over. “I don’t think you’d do something like that,” Vasili admitted. “But I have to say it just for formalities.”
“Yes, yes, yes, all right,” I said, and he opened the door, and it was all I could do not to hobble across that room and catch that stupid boy up in my arms, even if he is half a cubit taller than I am.
He looked . . . not as well as he could, but well enough under the circumstances. A little thinner than when I’d left him. And he had—on his neck—! “What is that?” I demanded, jabbing a finger at it.
I swear it to any god listening: that terrible child turned purple, clapped his hand to his neck, started stammering.
“Is that a bite mark?” says I.
“No?” he said, trying all he could to make puppy eyes.
“You’d given up on me?”
“Chant! By all the gods, no!”
“Don’t lie to me! You were lolling about in some haystack with one of those smelly shepherd boys you like so much.”
“He’s not a shepherd boy!” Ylfing shrieked, hand still clamped to his neck. “And he’s not smelly!”
“Instead of looking for me! You were—you were canoodling Canoodling. While I was languishing in prison, you were canoodling.”
“It wasn’t canoodling!”
“Even if he wasn’t a shepherd boy, he was one of these horrible Nuryevens.” I switched over into Hrefni. I’d had enough of this goddamn country, and having no one with whom I could bad-mouth it. Hrefni is a comfortable language, and it was a great relief. “It was some rich city idiot who kept you in silks and fed you peeled grapes, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it? While I was in prison.”
“There weren’t grapes!” he squeaked. “Not a single grape! And no silks! And he’s not rich! I looked for you all I could, I asked everyone in Cayie where you would have been taken, and I came straight here when they said that’s where you’d be!”
“And then you get here and—” I stopped, gasped. Clapped my hand to my mouth. “Prostitutes?”
“I didn’t go to any prostitutes!”
“What have I told you about those places? You have to be careful! Did you use a sheath? I hear there’s paperwork involved here—you read everything carefully before you signed anything, right?”
“I am not talking to you about this, Chant. I am not. Talking to you. About this.”
“You’re talking to the gods and everybody about it, my boy, with that bruise blazoned there for all the world to see.”
“It was just once, a few days ago! I met him at the House of Law when I was trying to find out where they’d taken you—when I was looking for you.”
“You’re fucking an advocate?” I shrieked.
“I am not fucking anyone!” he shrieked back. “I spent the night, past tense, one time, with a scribe of the courts. Is that acceptable to you? At least it’s not a shepherd or an advocate!”
I turned away and folded my arms, glaring at the wall. Had to think about that. I supposed I didn’t have any grudges against the court scribes. None of them had screwed me over, not yet.
Ylfing should really learn to restrain his sarcasm. No respect for his elders, none at all. He bullies me, you know. It’s a terrible thing.
“They wouldn’t even tell me if they had you at first,” my errant apprentice went on. “And then—they kept moving you around, didn’t they? First you’re in the House of Order, then Order doesn’t have you and won’t tell me where you are, then I hear a rumor that you’re in the Tower of Pattern, then after that, all they tell me is that you’ve been transferred out of Pattern again. . . . I tried to come to your hearing the other day, but there was a huge crowd and they wouldn’t let anyone in.” He huffed, then added, “That’s when I met Ivo, by the way. He’s got beautiful handwriting. Much better than mine.”
“I wish you two the greatest happiness together after I am dead,” I sniffed.
“Dead? Wait, what have they really charged you with? Everyone keeps telling me something different—first it was witchcraft, then they said it wasn’t witchcraft, that you’d been convicted of something odd like ‘heinous behavior in the twelfth degree’—”
“Brazen impertinence,” I muttered.
“Yes, that’s the one—can’t say I was surprised about it—but then they said it was espionage!”
I turned around again and sat down at the table with a great sigh. Ylfing backed up—good of him, I’d forgotten that we weren’t to come within eight feet of each other. We both glanced at Vasili, standing at the door, who shrugged.
“What did you do, Chant? Did you do something bad?”
“I didn’t do anything but what you saw me doing in Cayie! I was doing my job, and they came up and arrested me!”
“Maybe it was because you rubbed herbs all over that woman’s goat’s udder even though she asked you not to.”
“It was inflamed. I was healing it for her.”
“I think she probably thought you were cursing it.”
“I wasn’t cursing it, obviously. She should have known.”
“I just think that it’s not very polite to touch other people’s goats when they don’t want you to.”
“I was helping!”
“I know, I know,” he said, holding his hands up all defensive. “At home it wouldn’t have been a problem. She would have listened if you said you were good at healing goats.”
“You should stop calling it that. Home. One day you’re going to have to—”
“Sink it beneath the waves, yeah, I know. Unless you run me off before I become a master-Chant,” he chirped. “Then I will go to my home, and I will probably be the best at many things, and I’ll know more stories than anyone in all the villages. I’ll probably get taken to every Jarlsmoot.”
“And I’ll be dead and all the things I have left to teach you, lost. All the things my master taught me before she died, the secrets she told me on her deathbed . . .”
“Not all the things. You’ve had other apprentices.” And yet I was pleased to see him look at least a little unsettled.
“You want me to die, I suppose, so you can sleep around with court scribes and shepherds.”
“I don’t want you to die at all!”
I sniffed and abandoned this line of argument. He isn’t very satisfying to snipe with, not like Consanza is. That woman loves an argument like she loves her own breath. Ylfing just protests and wobbles his lower lip. I turned to a new subject: “Do you have any powers of prophecy?”
“What, so I can tell you how the trial will go?”
“No, I had to make a deal to get that message to you.”
Ylfing slapped his hand to his forehead. Disrespectful child. “Did you promise someone I’d read their future?”
“I promised the Queen of Commerce that we would attempt to scry to see if she will be reelected next year.”
The disrespectful child groaned. I glanced at Vasili—fortunately, we were still speaking Hrefni, which has no relationship to Nuryeven whatsoever. He didn’t seem to mind that we were speaking a different language, but I supposed that we didn’t look much like two people who were plotting anything suspicious, like how to break one of them out of prison or how to convince the Queen of Coin that we were really reading her future. “Stop that whining, Ylfing, we have to think of something. Can you scry or not?”
“No! I don’t think so, anyway. Although one time, I had a dream that my friend Bjorn went to the Jarlsmoot with his father and proved himself the best at fishing of all the children, and then he did go.”
“Did he win at fishing?”
“Well, no, but he did catch a few good ones. Not the best, not the worst. That’s a nice place to be.” He blushed and ducked his head. “You know, Ivo taught me a little of scribing the other day. I wanted to know how to write beautifully like him—do you think he might be the best scribe? He can’t be, he’s only a year or two older than I am, but he must have practiced for a long time. I bet he’s the best out of all the other scribes our age.” He plopped himself down into the other chair. “Did you know they don’t teach the foundations of an art here? If you want to learn scribing, you just learn scribing, you don’t have to learn ink making or paper making or how to whittle pens or make nibs. He says he knows sort of how to cut a quill pen, but they mostly don’t use quills, unless you’re some sort of official person writing something fancy, and even then Ivo says you’d only use a quill from some exotic southern bird and everyone would know you were trying to brag about how much money you have. They’re rather odd here, don’t you think? They think having money is a skill, and that if you have lots of it, then you must be the best out of everyone, like a jarl, but if you don’t have any, then you should be ashamed. Seems like most everyone here feels that way most of the time, but why would you be ashamed of not having a money skill? Nobody in Hrefnesholt has money; should we all be ashamed? The Umakh didn’t either, not really.”
“The Umakh have a lot to recommend them,” I agreed, as soon as I could get a word in edgewise. “They didn’t imprison me, for example.”
“Yeah. They’re odd in their own way, though—that sour milk they drink all the time, ugh! And Syrenen didn’t notice that I wanted him to show me how to shoot a short bow from horseback.” He looked terribly crestfallen. He’d been crestfallen back then, too.
“It’s a good thing he didn’t notice. You noticed they were a little dubious about men together—‘women own the men and the horses,’ as they say.”
Ylfing shrugged. “I just wanted to learn. I didn’t like him that way.” Which, if that was true, gives poor Syrenen the dubious distinction of being the only young man in the entire world Ylfing hasn’t mooned over.
I sighed. “Well, O young man of so many skills, how are we going to persuade the Queen of Coin?”
“What’s she like?”
“Flighty. Smart, though, smarter than she wants anyone to notice. Much concerned with seeming. I told her about the glass merchant’s wares; she appeared to take it to heart. She’s bored with politics, but she wants to be reelected. Pure vanity.”
“Then just tell her she’ll be reelected!”
“We’re not in the business of telling lies!” I snapped.
“What are you talking about? You lie literally all the time!”
“Little white lies to ease the way, nothing that hurts anyone,” I scoffed. “Nothing that they’ll ever find out wasn’t true.”
“Then tell her you don’t know. Or tell her she should either do something that makes her happy or try harder to be good at politics.”
“Brilliant idea, genius apprentice, and after telling her that, I’ll go ahead and tie my own noose, lay my own pyre. Perhaps you can invite that Ivo to watch the spectacle! I can’t speak as to how romantic it will be, but I’ll do my best to come up with some kind of tragic monologue, if they even let me have my last words. All this knowledge, gone! You might never find another Chant to teach you, and even if you did, they might not apprentice you. Then you’ll never be the best Chant.”
Ylfing rubbed his hands over his face in a gesture I recognized that he had stolen or inherited from me. “Then tell her something so vague that she won’t be able to tell whether or not she’ll win.”
“Do you think I haven’t already thought of all this? Do you think you’re coming up with new ideas? She’s not going to buy it if it’s vague; she’ll know we’re swindling her.”
Ylfing ruffled his hair with his fingers in frustration, a gesture that was all his own. “What if you gave her a conditional, then? She’ll win the election if she does such and such—if she slays the dragon, goes on the quest, finds the lost relic, kisses the forest queen. Something like that.”
“I don’t know what conditions the election would hinge on! And I can’t find out—I’m stuck in here! There’s only one guard who will speak to me, and he’s standing there at the door, and I don’t even know if I can trust him to give me good information! So I can’t find out!”
“I’ll find out for you! Obviously!”
“You’re the worst at being polite,” I snarled.
“Being polite isn’t a skill,” he countered, “but if it were, it is better to be bad at something than to be good at it, because it is pleasanter to anticipate the journey than to nurse your blisters.”
“It’s a wonder your people bother to learn anything at all, then!”
“Learning is how you live prosperously,” he said, disgustingly earnest. “It’s a duty of honor to your family and to your village. No one ever fed themselves by looking at the water and waiting for the fish to catch themselves.”
“Fine. Go find out, then; find out every possible thing about Nuryeven elections, and do it all before they manage to throw me to the executioners for spying.”
“But if you haven’t done anything, surely they can’t convict you without evidence.”
“You remember all those stories I told you about Xing Fe the Sailor?” He nodded. “He ended up here, apparently. Made some mistakes. Got convicted. I . . . may have mentioned in court that we were friends. I didn’t know they knew him. It was part of my apology—had to apologize as my sentence for brazen impertinence.”
Ylfing nodded, somber. “You do lecture a lot. At anything that stands still long enough, I used to think. You’ve probably told them a lot of things.”
“You’re one to talk! You’re the one who should be convicted of brazen impertinence! And I so appreciate the vote of confidence. Where would I be without that?”
“Who is your advocate?”
“Consanza Priyayat—I don’t know her last name, just the matronymic.” The naming system is complicated but consistent, and I’d overheard enough names by that point to have slowly gleaned the structure of ’em.
“Oh! Oh, I didn’t realize—in the crowd, at your hearing, everyone was talking about her. She’s amazing, apparently; she’s won all these cases. I think someone said she’s never lost one? And Ivo said she’s one of the very best at arguing. How lucky you are! You got one of the very best ones!”
“Ivo can shove it up his ass. He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s talking about. She’s awful. She doesn’t care about this case. It was just assigned to her as a requirement to keep her license. Well, okay, she does care about it a little bit now that the Primes are involved, because she wants to, as she put it, kiss ass like she’s never kissed ass before. She wants to have a cushy desk job waiting for her in ten years when she’s ready to retire from idiotic courtroom theatrics. Lazy twit. We don’t get on.”
“I bet I’ll like her,” Ylfing said, all sunshine. “You just don’t like people with strong personalities. I bet you’re just clashing horns with her. I’ll go see her and introduce myself. I bet if we put our heads together, we can come up with a way to get you out of this.”
“Optimism is the surest sign of a fool.”
The very next morning I was rudely
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