Page 65 of The Salt King

Avelyn felt several pairs of eyes move from Ras to him and back to Ras again, and he knew what they were thinking. In a choice between an accomplished ranweth gentleman and a mouthy little cock who had betrayed the King for the insane triplet gods of the Outside, everyone knew Lady Hringen had married the right one.

“My lord reminds me that you were bred a miner,” Lady Hringen said slowly, “and that Lord Harkta’s seams were once Lady Brocken’s.”

“From,” said Lord Harkta, “the same clan as the first witches, long ago.” He smiled slightly at Avelyn, as though they both knew a joke nobody else did. “The last of the Brocken, come back to us at the King’s first stirring in a thousand years. Interesting, isn’t it?”

Avelyn hadn’t the faintest idea what the joke was supposed to be. He wanted to demand that everyone just say what they bloody meant, preferably in clear bullet points and helpful footnotes.

But Lady Hringen lifted her head slightly; Lord Harkta had sparked a thought there, not that Avelyn could guess what it was.

“Your Roman Witan,” Lady Teksa said. “What do you hope to show them?”

“Light paintings, from the deep,” Avelyn said, because there was no direct Hreod word for photograph. If you scattered English about too much, people winced at you like you were swearing. “To show them the salt light. They don’t understand that the light is real, because they cannot see it. If we are to make them understand that the Salt King really is in the deep, and that something is happening to him lately . . . then the way to start is to show them salt light, and how it’s brighter the closer we go to the King. This is to the purpose of understanding better what effect the light might have on Outsiders. Specifically whether it’s dangerous.”

There was a charged silence.

He had to concentrate on keeping still, even though the frustration was wild now. Although it felt purposeful, the way they were lobbing their meanings over his head and making him lunge to catch even just one or two, he knew from long experience that was unlikely. Most people struggled to imagine not understanding something they felt was self-evident. It was why most people were balls at missionary work: they couldn’t imagine what it was like not to have faith. It was why, when you learned a new language, you had to just live it until you understood, because if you asked an English person why in God’s name their language cared so much about when everything was done, all you got was a bewildered look, because how was that person to know it was unusual?

“How many at An El have the King’s Blessing now?” Lady Hringen asked abruptly.

“What?” said Avelyn, tumbled.

“May the King bless you” was a Hreod curse. It sounded mild if you translated it word for word, but what it really meant was something much closer to “I hope you die in a fire.”

Lady Teksa made a little It’s all right gesture and pointed to a carving on the wall. It was ancient, and showed a woman dressed in heavy silver robes—the silver was all done in filigree—surrounded by a brilliant golden-violet corona.

“It means the formation of salt light around a person,” Lady Teksa explained, with an impatient glance at Lady Hringen.

So they did know what it was.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Answer the question,” Lady Hringen said sharply.

“Fourteen this morning,” he said.

There was a collective hiss. His chest was starting to feel tight with that longbow feeling again.

“His Witan needs to understand what’s happening,” Lord Harkta said, not to him but everyone else. “They will need to send more of their witches soon, and they won’t if they don’t see. We cannot wait.”

“The purpose of not explaining to them was to make them send a stronger witch,” Lady Wolkvos said, sounding annoyed. She had a strong marshland accent, the kind that the mining clans would consider beneath them, and she leaned into it now: she was emphasising her practicality and their overelegant intellectualising. She plainly didn’t like Lord Harkta, maybe because she didn’t think he had earned his place here properly, or maybe just because he sounded as though he could recite bardic poetry from memory.

Avelyn had a dizzy out-of-body realization that if you were a native English speaker, this was how you understood most of the world all the time—every inflection and accent meant something, carried information, extra data. It lit up stark everything he was normally deaf to.

“Now we have a strong witch,” Lady Wolkvos was saying, “we want to kill his faith?”

What?

“Caer Halen is on the fen,” Lady Teksa said. “The knights are riding, and there are nightmares in the mine. I think we are beyond the point where one witch makes any difference.”

“Are you sure? Even this witch?” Lady Wolkvos snorted. “Don’t you remember? The last Brocken witch said, ‘Either train him, or send him where there is no salt light before something terrible happens.’ Never did a witch prophesy ring more true.”

“What?” Avelyn had to set his teeth against an unwanted stab of a memory. The last Brocken witch, face invisible behind a silver mask, looking at him with the same affectionate rue his uncles did. Bring me a witch stone from the deep, and I’ll give you a mask. God, but he’d wanted that so badly at the time. He couldn’t remember why. It was a mess of nonsensical Hreod Thinking now. He would remember if he thought about it, but he was absolutely not going to do that.

“What really happened when the shaft collapsed?” Lady Wolkvos asked him. “Was it your fault?”

Avelyn hadn’t expected an attack like that, and it was a punch in the gut. He thought he was going to have to scrape up some kind of answer—Some kind of lie, Hreodwater Avelyn murmured—but it had been such a merciless blow that half the Witan stirred.

“King’s teeth, leave him alone,” Lady Hringen growled, and he was nearly as shocked to see her defending him as he was by the ambush.