THE BLADE OF THE HOLLOW KING

The fence had been leaning toward the road for six years, proving, in Tobin Hale's opinion, that it had somewhere better to be.

His mother disagreed.

"A fence has one purpose," Maela had told him that morning, planting both hands on the kitchen table. "It stands where it is put."

"That's two purposes. Standing and staying."

She had stared at him over a bowl of porridge until he discovered an urgent need to inspect his boots.

Now, three hours later, Tobin straddled the top rail with a mallet across his knees and considered the distant cut of Mount Vaelor against the sky. The mountain rose beyond the eastern fields like a broken tooth, its upper slopes pale with old snow. Clouds snagged on the summit even in summer. People in Barrowfield said Vaelor made its own weather because it had been offended by something in the age before men.

People in Barrowfield said many things when there was ale available and work was not.

What mattered was the scar halfway up the mountain.

Last night's storm had stripped a brown wound across the green slope. Trees lay on their sides. Stone glistened through torn earth. The landslide was visible from the farm, and every time sunlight touched it, something near the bottom flashed.

Tobin had spent the morning trying not to look at it.

He was failing magnificently.

"If you're waiting for the post to stand itself up," Nessa Wren said behind him, "you should try asking nicely."

Tobin caught the rail with one hand, swung his weight clear, and landed with one boot in the mud. Years of climbing orchard ladders and dodging ill-tempered livestock made the recovery easy. Making it look intentional was the difficult part.

Nessa stood in the road with a willow basket on one hip. A twist of brown hair had worked loose from her braid and stuck to her cheek. She wore a faded green dress beneath a gray healer's apron, its pockets bulging with folded cloth, stoppered bottles, and the unpleasant instruments of her trade.

"I heard you coming," Tobin said.

"Of course. That's why you made the noise of a strangled chicken."

"Loose board."

"There are nine loose boards. I counted while you were pretending to work."

Nessa set down her basket and nudged the nearest rail. It shifted under one finger.

Tobin looked back at the mountain. The light flashed again.

Nessa followed his gaze. "No."

"I haven't said anything."

"You make a particular face before you do something stupid. Your eyebrows go up as if you're surprised by your own idea."

"Maybe I'm offended by the condition of this fence."

"You built that section."

"Then I am offended by slander."

She shaded her eyes. The scar lay three miles beyond the last barley field, past the ruined watch path and the black pines that marked the beginning of crown land. A longer walk than it appeared, especially if a person intended to return before supper and maintain the fiction that he had spent the day repairing livestock barriers.

"It could be silver," Tobin said.

"It could be wet rock."

"Old imperial silver."

"Wet imperial rock."

"A landslide that size might have uncovered one of the old road shrines. Travelers used to leave coins in them."

"Travelers used to leave teeth in them, according to your grandmother."

"She said that to keep children out of the hills."

"It worked on the better children."

Tobin climbed over the fence, which required less climbing than stepping through the gap beneath it. "If it is nothing, we lose an afternoon."

"We?"

"If it is silver, we could afford a new roof for the south barn. Possibly several roofs. One of them could even go on the barn."

Nessa gave him the look she reserved for patients who had swallowed medicinal paste and then complained about the flavor. She was good at that look. She had practiced on Tobin since they were seven.

"Your mother told you to mend the fence," she said.

"And I have identified the problem. It leans."

"Tobin."

"Nessa."

The sunlight struck the scar again. This time the flash burned blue-white.

Nessa's expression changed.

It was slight, little more than a tightening around her eyes, but Tobin noticed. Nessa had never been as sensible as she advertised. Sensible people did not crawl beneath a mill wheel at fourteen to set a man's crushed leg while the axle groaned above them. Sensible people did not spend winter nights walking between farms because someone else's child had a fever. She loved unanswered questions. She simply preferred to approach them with bandages.

She picked up her basket.

"We turn back before dusk," she said. "We do not climb on anything that looks recently unstable. We do not touch mushrooms, bones, altars, or sealed doors."

"Agreed."

"You don't know what an altar looks like."

"Most things become altars if you arrange the candles correctly."

"And if we find silver, half goes to your mother."

"Half?"

"I'll tell her where we went."

"Half is fair."

They left the fence leaning toward its future and crossed the fields.

Barrowfield occupied a long shelf of good soil between the Ashwater and the lower slopes of Vaelor. From the road, the farms looked prosperous enough: gold barley, green orchards, tidy stone walls. Up close, the barns showed daylight through their roofs, the draft horses were too old, and every gate bore a fresh square of white paint where the royal assessors had left their marks.

At the end of the Hale property, Tobin passed one such mark on an apple tree. Three black strokes meant the farm owed grain, coin, and one able-bodied laborer for the king's autumn levy.

He had not told his mother he knew what the third stroke meant.

Nessa noticed his gaze. "The village council is petitioning for an exemption."

"The village council has been petitioning for an exemption since I could grow a beard."

"You still can't grow a beard."

"That is unrelated to the efficiency of local government."

They crossed the Ashwater on a bridge built when the royal road had mattered. Grass sprouted between the fitted stones. On the center parapet, someone had tied blue and gold ribbons around a weathered carving of a crown.

King's Victory was three days away.

For ten years, Valedor had celebrated the morning King Valen Ironwood descended Mount Vaelor alone. In the official telling, his younger brother Malrec had challenged the crowned king, broken every sacred rule of the duel, and died regretting none of it. Valen returned from the summit grave and silent, submitted to a public Victory Reaffirmation, and became the harder king Valedor believed it needed.

The village version included more lightning, a flock of ravens, and Malrec's severed head bouncing all the way to the river. Tobin had once measured the distance and found the claim ambitious.

Nessa touched one of the ribbons as they passed. "My father says the king stopped smiling after the duel."

"Your father saw him once from the far side of a parade."

"He says it was a very revealing parade."

"People always say that about King Valen. The duel changed him. The crown changed him. The weather changed him. No one wants to believe he might simply be a bastard."

Nessa glanced at the levy mark visible across the river. "Not where soldiers can hear you."

There were no soldiers on the old road. That was part of why Tobin liked it.

Beyond the bridge, they followed a deer track into the pines. The air cooled. Needles softened their footsteps, and last night's rain ticked from the branches long after the sky had cleared. Tobin moved ahead, using a hazel stick as a sword whenever the path gave him sufficient room.

He had spent four autumns in Barrowfield's levy drill, first with ashwood wasters and later with blunted iron. He knew the village guards, the six approved cuts, and how quickly Sergeant Voss found fault with a young man's feet. Tobin performed the third cut cleanly, added an unnecessary flourish, and decapitated a fern.

Nessa watched the leaves fall.

"A fearsome enemy," she said.

"Poisonous."

"That was bracken."

"Then it died innocent. The tragedy deepens."

She made a thoughtful sound. "If you joined the levy, how long do you think it would take your commander to murder you?"

"Commanders aren't allowed to murder their own soldiers."

"That hesitation before you answered was encouraging."

A scream cut through the trees.

Tobin's stick came up. Nessa was already moving.

They found a red fox beneath a bank of ferns, its hind leg caught in a wire snare. The animal had twisted the wire through fur and flesh. Blood darkened the leaves. When Nessa approached, it flattened its ears and snapped hard enough to crack its teeth.

"Hold the basket," she said.

"It wants to eat you."

"Then it has poor judgment. Hold the basket."

Tobin obeyed. Nessa covered the fox's head with her apron, pinned its shoulders with one knee, and worked a bone-handled probe under the wire. The animal thrashed. Its claws opened two red lines across her wrist.

"Nessa."

"I'm aware."

She clasped the fox's injured leg.

The air changed. Tobin could never explain exactly how. Nessa's threadhealing produced no light, no chanted words, none of the thunder and colored smoke traveling players used when they pretended to be court magicians. The world simply drew closer around her hands. For a moment, Tobin perceived the injury as she must have seen it: skin and sinew divided into hundreds of fine, trembling lines.

Nessa breathed in. The lines pulled together.

The cut on her wrist deepened.

She flinched but did not let go until the fox's bleeding slowed. Then she clipped the snare with a pair of shears and rolled away.

The fox vanished between the ferns without gratitude.

"You're bleeding," Tobin said.

"Observant. Perhaps you should become a healer."

He set down the basket and wrapped her wrist with a strip of linen, snug enough to slow the bleeding without numbing her fingers. Nessa tested the tension, then shifted the knot away from the claw marks.

"You remembered," she said.

"You made me practice on turnips for an entire winter."

"The turnips were less dramatic."

"We could have left it," he said when she was satisfied.

"Yes."

"We're already losing daylight."

"Also yes."

He waited for her rebuke. Nessa lifted her basket.

"That's all?"

"Did you need me to explain why leaving a living thing to tear off its own leg would be bad?"

"No."

"Excellent. You're becoming civilized."

They continued uphill. Tobin looked back once, but the fox was gone. Only the severed loop of wire remained beneath the fern, shining whenever the branches shifted.

The track steepened. They found the ruined watch path near noon, half buried beneath moss and pine roots. Squared stones showed where the old kings had maintained a road to the summit. No one had used it since the duel. The crown declared the upper mountain closed, partly to protect a royal site and mostly, according to Maela, to keep souvenir hunters from carrying it away in buckets.

They stopped beneath a leaning marker carved with the Ironwood tree.

By order of the Crown, the inscription read, NO PASSAGE BEYOND THIS STONE.

Someone had scratched beneath it: UNLESS YOU CAN READ.

"We can still turn back," Nessa said.

"You first."

"I have to make certain you don't touch an altar."

They stepped around the marker.

The smell reached them before the landslide did: wet clay, split roots, and something mineral and cold from deep inside the mountain. The pines thinned abruptly. Where the slope had been, there was now a long chute of churned earth descending toward a narrow ravine. Boulders lay in the wreckage like the knuckles of a buried giant.

Nessa caught Tobin's sleeve as he approached the edge.

"Recently unstable," she said.

"I'm only looking."

"You look with your feet."

He dropped flat and crawled the last few yards. The slide had cut through the remains of the old road, exposing layers of worked stone beneath it. One section of retaining wall still stood thirty feet below. Something black protruded from the mud beside it.

Not silver.

Tobin squinted. It was too straight to be a root and too smooth to be stone. Another drop of water fell from a broken branch and struck it. Blue-white light flashed along its length.

"There," he said.

Nessa lowered herself beside him. Her shoulder pressed against his. "I see it."

"Wet rock?"

"Possibly very long wet rock."

"You owe me an apology."

"Come back alive and I'll consider one."

The safest path down lasted perhaps twelve feet. After that, Tobin descended by clutching roots and pretending the loose ground was not moving under his boots. Nessa followed with more care and considerably less commentary. Twice she told him to stop. Twice he did, which he felt deserved recognition.

At the retaining wall, they found a pocket untouched by the worst of the slide. The black object lay beneath the exposed roots of an ironwood tree. The tree itself was dead, split from crown to base, but its roots curled over the object as if they had grown around it.

It was a scabbard.

Tobin cleared mud with both hands. Black lacquer emerged without a scratch. The scabbard was slightly curved and longer than his arm. Tarnished silver capped its mouth. No crest, jewels, or maker's mark decorated it.

"Dwarven," Nessa said.

"Because it's curved?"

"Because the lacquer hasn't rotted."

"Maybe human lacquer used to be better."

"Maybe humans used to be dwarves."

The grip was wrapped in black cord, still dry beneath ten years of earth. A simple round guard separated it from the scabbard. Tobin had seen curved blades on the hips of dwarven merchants, though never one this long. Moonblades, they called them. A weapon made for two hands and close tunnels, where a wide swing would bury an ordinary sword in stone. Levy practice had taught him straight blades, but he knew enough to notice the longer grip, the unfamiliar curve, and a balance that would punish anyone who treated it like a farm saber.

Nessa crouched beside him but did not touch it. She held her palm over the hilt.

Her eyes unfocused.

Threadhealing was unimpressive to watch. There were no flames or colored lights. Nessa became very still, as if listening through a wall. After a moment, the fine hairs along her forearm lifted.

She snatched her hand back.

"What?" Tobin asked.

"I don't know."

That answer, from Nessa, frightened him more than a scream would have.

"Cursed?"

"Probably."

"Probably cursed or probably not?"

"The first one."

Tobin studied the sword.

Then he looked up the ruined slope toward the summit of Vaelor, hidden behind cloud.

"A royal duel was fought above this ravine," he said.

"Yes."

"Ten years ago."

"I also know how years work."

"And now a dwarven sword appears after a landslide."

"A cursed dwarven sword."

"A historically significant cursed dwarven sword."

"That distinction will comfort your mother."

He wrapped one hand around the hilt.

The cord tightened beneath his palm.

The balance tightened rather than shifted.

Tobin froze.

Nessa whispered his name.

The sensible thing would have been to let go. He knew this with absolute clarity. He could almost hear his mother explaining it to mourners.

Instead, he pulled.

The blade slid free without a scrape. It was black from spine to edge, a strip of night curved through the gray afternoon. Mud crumbled away from the scabbard. Cold moved up Tobin's arm and settled behind his breastbone.

For one breath, the mountain inhaled with him.

Then a man's voice, hoarse with exhaustion and outrage, spoke from somewhere just behind Tobin's teeth.

You are holding me upside down.