THE ASHEN HEIR AND THE HOLLOW CROWN

THE EIGHTH COHORT

Kael did not sleep that night.

He lay on the dead man’s bunk with his eyes open, listening to forty men breathe, cough and whimper in the dark. Every time he closed his eyes, the white city rose behind them: the ivy-wrapped towers, the lamps, the boy waving to his mother. Then the crimson crept across the sky, and he opened his eyes again.

By the time the dawn horn blew, he had made three decisions.

First: tell no one about the ring.

Second: find out what the Ashfront was really guarding.

Third: stay alive long enough to do either.

Breakfast was grey porridge and a heel of bread so hard that Kael could have driven a nail with it. He sat at the end of a long table, among men who pretended he did not exist.

The Eighth Cohort, he learned within an hour, was where the Ashfront put what it did not know what to do with. Thieves who were too clever to hang. Soldiers who had talked back to the wrong officer. A deserter who had been dragged back from the southern border and given a choice between a rope and the Wall. Boys barely older than Kael who had stolen bread, or burned a lord’s barn, or simply been born to the wrong parents.

A wiry youth with a gap between his front teeth dropped onto the bench beside him without asking.

“You are the prince,” he said.

“I was.”

“I am Dax. Pickpocket. Sixteen. Sentenced for lifting a purse off a magistrate’s wife, which, in my defence, she was very rude to me first.” He grinned. “I heard you killed a nightmarish.”

“Sergeant Vell killed it.”

“That is not what Corporal Pell told the kitchen. He said the sealed-core prince stuck a spear in its ribs and held on like a burr on a dog’s tail.”

Kael set down his spoon. “Who else heard that?”

“Everyone,” Dax said cheerfully. “There is nothing to do here but gossip.”

Kael closed his eyes. So much for staying quiet.

“Do not look so grim,” said an older voice from across the table. It belonged to a heavyset man with a grey beard and one milky eye, who was methodically tearing his bread into smaller and smaller pieces. “A bit of respect is not a bad thing. It might keep your throat uncut.”

“That is Old Tobb,” Dax whispered. “He has been here eleven years. Nobody lasts eleven years.”

“Twelve in spring,” Tobb said, without looking up.

Respect, however, was not what the rest of the barracks offered.

It arrived in the training yard, in the shape of a man named Garrick.

Garrick was built like a door. He had a shaved head, a broken nose that had set crooked and the lazy, confident smile of someone who had never been punished for anything. He had been an officer’s son before he killed an officer. In the Eighth Cohort, he ran the barracks the way a wolf runs a pack.

“So,” he said, stepping into Kael’s path as the cohort lined up with wooden practice spears, “the hero of the north rampart.”

Someone snickered. Others went silent.

“I am no hero,” said Kael.

“No, you are not.” Garrick smiled wider. “You are a coddled little lordling with a sealed core, and you got lucky. I would hate for you to think that luck means something. Training bout. You and me. Right now.”

“I do not…”

“I was not asking.”

A ring formed. Dax tugged at Kael’s sleeve and hissed, “Do not. He broke a man’s jaw last month in one of these.”

Vell was nowhere in sight. Kael looked at Garrick’s grin and at the crowd of tired, hungry faces waiting for entertainment, and understood that refusing would cost him far more than losing. In a place like this, a man who would not stand was a man who would be pushed down every day, until he did not get up.

He picked up the wooden spear.

“Good lad,” Garrick said.

They circled. Garrick moved like a man who had won a hundred such fights, loose and unworried, his guard low. He struck first, a heavy overhand swing that would have cracked Kael’s skull. Kael barely got his spear up in time. The impact numbed his arms to the shoulder, and he staggered back, boots skidding in the mud.

“Too slow, Highness!”

The second blow caught his ribs. The third drove him to one knee. Laughter rolled around the yard, and Kael tasted blood.

And under the pain, in the quiet place behind his eyes, something stirred.

[ PREDATOR’S SIGHT (RANK F): ACTIVE ]

The world sharpened.

Garrick was still smiling, but now Kael could see the small things behind the smile. The way he favoured his right shoulder, an old injury, badly healed. The way his weight shifted slightly onto his back foot before every overhand swing. The way his breathing came a little too fast after each exchange, because he was a brawler and not a fighter, and brawlers tire.

The skill did not say weakest point of a wounded target. But Garrick was wounded, in a hundred small ways he had never bothered to hide.

Kael rose slowly.

“Had enough?” said Garrick.

“Not yet.”

Garrick swung. And Kael, who had been taught nothing of combat but who had read every siege manual in the Drakmoor library, did the only thing his body could think of. He did not block. He slipped. A half step to the left, inside the arc, at the exact moment Garrick’s weight went onto his back foot.

The wooden spear passed over his shoulder.

Kael drove the butt of his own weapon into Garrick’s bad shoulder with all the strength he had.

There was a crack. Garrick howled, dropped his spear and went to his knees, clutching his arm. The yard fell utterly, shockingly silent.

Kael stood over him, breathing hard, the practice spear trembling in his hands.

“That was luck,” said Garrick through his teeth.

“Yes,” Kael said. “And the next time, it will not be.”

He was not sure where the words had come from. But he saw something shift in the faces around him, a reassessment that took less than a heartbeat. The pack was recalculating.

From the shadow of the barracks wall, Sergeant Vell watched with her arms folded and an expression that was neither pleased nor displeased. When Kael glanced toward her, she turned and walked away.

That night, his ribs bruised and his arms aching, Kael found a note under his bunk.

It was small, folded into a tight square, written in a tidy, cramped hand.

The storage cellar under the infirmary. Midnight. Come alone. Wear the ring openly. A friend.

He read it twice. His stomach turned over.

A friend. Or a trap. Or a man who had seen a wound close that should have killed.

He thought of Brennan, and the warning. Survive long enough to ask the right questions.

At midnight, he was standing at the top of a narrow stone stair, a candle in his hand, the ring a cold weight on his finger. Far below, a lantern glowed.

The man waiting at the bottom was the healer from the infirmary, the one with the forgettable face. He was sitting on a barrel with a small clay cup, and he did not look surprised.

“You came,” the healer said. “Good. That means you are either very brave or very curious. Both will be useful.”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Orin. For nineteen years, I have been waiting at the end of the world for someone to walk into this fortress wearing that ring.”

Kael’s mouth went dry.

Orin set down the cup, and for the first time his tired eyes sharpened into something fierce and old.

“That is the Hollow Crown,” he said softly. “And you, Kael Varyn, are not the first to wear it.”