The Hundred Keels
We will not speak of the land we left. The sea has it now; let the sea keep it. Here is a hill. Here we will build.
Men came to Aetheria out of the west, a dozen years after the Burning and nearly twelve hundred years before this book was written, in a hundred ships lashed together against the storm. They came ashore on the Saltwind Coast among the wrecks and the crabs, which were already the size of carts, and they would not say where they had come from. They say it still less now. The land they left is gone, and the sea took it; and the Tidekin, when they are asked about that, look at the water and do not answer.
Their leader was Aldric, a ship-captain of no great birth. He led them up the coast and inland along the river into Greenmeadow Vale, which was rolling hills then as now, and already overrun with boars, in what every surviving account describes as an alarming number. On a crest above the vale where the river bends he drove his sword into the turf and said that they would build there. They called the place Highcrest, and him after it.
Aldric was crowned on that hill at midsummer with a circlet hammered out of ship-iron from the keels that had brought them, and from that day the years in Aetheria are counted from the Crown. The circlet is still the crown of Highcrest. It does not fit any of his descendants, who have had, as a line, larger heads; it is carried on a cushion.
It is from Aldric, the bards say, that the custom comes of the leader who does not fight: for he directed the landing from the deck of his ship with a speaking-trumpet, and did not set foot on the shore until the boars were dealt with. The less generous say the custom began because the first leader of a war-band in Aetheria who fought in the front rank was also the last.
The Rent of Bread
The first people the settlers met in Greenmeadow were the goblins, who came up out of a hole in a hillside, looked at the new city on the crest, and presented an invoice.
The goblins had dug the Warrens under Greenmeadow long before anyone could remember, and claimed the whole vale as theirs by right of having been under it first. King Aldric, who had a hundred shiploads of hungry people and no wish for a war in his own cellars, settled with them for a loaf of bread per household per year, paid at midwinter, forever. This is the Rent of Bread, and it is the oldest treaty in Aetheria, and the goblins have never once failed to collect it.
In recent years the goblins of the Warrens have unionised, under a foreman named Grizzlik and a Big Boss called Snaggletooth, and they are demanding butter.
The goblins do not live in all of the Warrens. The worst of the tunnels, the wet ones near the top, they let to the kobolds, at a rent the kobolds cannot afford, payable in candles, since a kobold is afraid of the dark and a goblin knows the value of a thing someone is afraid to be without. Kobolds being short of candles in the ordinary way of things, it was only a matter of time before they dug upward looking for more, and came out in the cellar of Hollowbrook, the oldest farm in the vale, an hour’s walk from the city gate.
They took every candle in the house. They took the cheese, too, which is how they came to an understanding with Old Gnawbelly, a rat the size of a pony that the Hollowbrooks had been feeding scraps for forty years to keep it on their side. The candles are kept, in a great dripping heap, by a kobold named Wickmaster Pip, who wears a lit one on his head and has not slept since, in case it goes out.
The Widow Hollowbrook went to the Crown, which had sixty knights and no interest in her cellar, and then to the guilds, which had no knights at all and a great deal of interest in a pie. Hollowbrook Cellar has been every new guild’s first job ever since. The kobolds keep coming back, because the goblins keep putting the rent up, and the widow keeps paying in pie, and it is generally agreed that this suits everybody except the rat.
The Ravenhold March
As the kingdom spread north out of Greenmeadow it came to the edge of Whisperwood, and the wood did not want it.
The trees there talk, and much of what they said about men was unkind. Worse things than trees lived further in. From the Mirrorhall came reflections that walked about on their own. From a hollow at the wood’s heart, which had once been a druid grove and had gone wrong, came Old Mother Oak and her brambles and her wolves, hungry, and the squirrels, which had opinions. The Crown needed a wall against the wood, and a lord to hold it. It got Varric.
Lord Varric Ravenhold was the King’s Warden of the Wood, and he held the March for thirty years from a keep of grey stone on the forest’s edge. He was a hard lord and a just one, and when he began to grow old and saw that his sons would not hold what he had held, he went alone to the top of his tower one night and called out to the ravens; for the ravens are the eyes of Corvane, and the Kindler of the winds does not sleep as soundly as her brothers.
What answered was the Ravenmother: a raven the size of a man, or a woman the colour of a raven, or both. Varric asked her to let him hold the keep until the wood was quiet. She agreed. She took her price, which the songs disagree about, and then she kept the rookery, and every raven in it was hers.
Lord Varric died in his bed some years later. He got up again the next morning and went back to his seat. He is sitting in it still, a century and more since his heart stopped, for the wood has never been quiet, and the bargain holds. His gatekeeper Warden Holt still guards a door at Ravenhold that nobody has used in a hundred years. The ravens still keep the keep.
Every guild in Aetheria goes to Ravenhold first. It is where they learn: to stand where they are told, to kill the birds before the birds kill them, to pass a lord from one shield to the next when his blows grow too heavy. Lord Varric does not seem to mind. Some say that he is grateful for the company. Some say that each guild that brings him down brings the wood a little nearer quiet, and that one week, when enough of them have done it, he will not get up.
The Grey Tithe
In the three hundred and eighty-ninth year of the Crown, a ship of the Crown’s marines ran aground in the Ashfen on a river that had not been there the year before, and her captain, a hard man named Morvane, took his crew ashore to look for a way through. They found a crypt in the bog, half sunk, which the lizardfolk would not go near. They went in.
Something in that crypt had lain there since before the Drowning. Captain Morvane came out of it some months later, and he was a lich, and his crew came out behind him, and they were dead, and all of them were walking. They called the sickness they brought with them the Grey Tithe, because it took one in five; and because, of the ones it took, a good many got up afterwards and went to join Morvane in the Sunken Crypt.
Not all of them. That is the thing to remember about the Grey Tithe. Some of the risen woke with their own minds, and found they had no wish to serve a drowned sea-captain in a bog. They called themselves the Unquiet. They walked out of the Ashfen in their thousands and came to the gates of Highcrest, and the gates were shut against them, and they waited outside in the rain for nine days without eating, which is easier for the dead. On the tenth day the Lich-Captain marched on the city, and the Unquiet turned and met him at the Leechwater ford, and broke his army there, and the Mother of Leeches with it.
Morvane went back into his crypt, where he remains; it is damp, dark and extremely haunted, and anyone going in is advised to bring a towel. The Unquiet were let in at last.
The Tusk Wars and the Concord of Highcrest
The orcs of the east had lost their grasslands to the Blight, and they did not see why they should not have Greenmeadow’s instead. The trolls of the southern isles had been raiding the Saltwind Coast since the first ship landed there, out of what they described as tradition. The Crown fought three wars against the orc clans and their troll allies in its first four centuries, the Tusk Wars, and won none of them outright and lost none of them either, and at the end of the third war the treasury was empty and everyone was very tired.
What ended it was the Grey Tithe. The plague did not care whose city it was in, and when the dead marched out of the Ashfen they marched over orc camps and troll beaches as well as men’s farms. So in the year 412 the Crown called the peoples of Aetheria together on the crest above Greenmeadow, and they made the Concord of Highcrest: that every people who signed it should be free folk of the realm, under the Crown’s peace and the Crown’s law, and should have the Crown’s gates opened to them, and should keep the realm’s enemies out together.
The men signed it, and the kingless dwarves, and the elves of Whisperwood, after a debate of eleven years. The gnomes signed it with a mechanical pen of their own invention, which blotted. The orc chieftains signed it in blood, as is their custom, and the troll chieftains signed it in somebody else’s blood, as is theirs. The minotaurs of the Stormreach came down from their heaths for the first time in memory and signed it with a hoof-print. The goblins signed it with a thumb-print and a footnote, and the footnote is longer than the Concord. In the year 431, after a quarrel that very nearly undid the whole thing, the Unquiet were admitted too.
There has been no war between the peoples of the Concord since, save the usual ones about who started it.
The Charter of Banners
Be it known that any company of free folk of the Concord, having a banner, a hall and a leader, may take up arms against the ancient enemies of the realm wheresoever they abide, and keep what they win thereby; and their names shall be written in the Rolls of Renown, for the realm to know whom it owes.
By the eleventh century of the Crown the realm could no longer pay for its own defence. The Tusk Wars had emptied the treasury once and the Stormwall levies had emptied it again. The Wyrm sat on his tower. The Dreamer stirred under the sea. A dead lord held the Whisperwood March, and the dead under the Ashfen were restless. And the Crown, which had sixty knights and owed money to every one of them, could do nothing about any of it.
So Queen Elspeth the Second, who was a practical woman, did what practical rulers do when they cannot afford a thing. She made it somebody else’s business. By the Charter of Banners the old wars of the realm were thrown open to anyone with the courage to fight them, the friends to fight them with, and a roof to come home to: and whatever such a company took from the lairs of the ancient enemies, it might keep.
In a generation there were a hundred guilds in Highcrest. In two there were a thousand. They rented halls in basements and over taverns. They put up notices for recruits. They argued about loot. They went down into Hollowbrook Cellar for a pie, and into the Goblin Warrens, and then into the Sunken Crypt, and then, with a great deal of shouting, up the Wyrmspire; and some of them came back, and the Rolls of Renown began to fill.
And so the doom of the world passed out of the hands of kings, who had at least been trained for it, and into the hands of the guilds, who had at least been told to bring potions.
The Age of Banners
This book is written in the eleven hundred and eighty-seventh year of the Crown, in the reign of King Osric the Third, who is very old and very seldom seen. It is the eighty-fifth year of the Charter. Men call it the Age of Banners.
There are more guilds in Highcrest now than there are inns, which the innkeepers find gratifying until the guilds come in. They race one another to the old enemies, and the first guild to bring down each one is written at the head of the Rolls, and the bards make songs about it, and the other guilds make songs too, of a different kind. They recruit from the boards and from trade chat, which is what the people of Highcrest call the shouting in the market square. They post contracts on the bounty board at dawn. They go out to the islands on the ferries and to the Corsair Reaches in ships of their own. They fight one another in the arena, for honour, and in the contested lands, for less.
And every one of them has a leader who does not lift a blade, but stands behind and calls: who goes in, who stands where, who takes the blow, who carries the burning mark to the edge of the room. Wherever the leader of a guild first sets their banner, whether in a rented basement or a hall of stone, the custom is that there is a statue there one day, of a figure with no weapon and one hand raised, pointing.
This book is for them, since they are the ones who keep breaking the world, and may one day wish to know what it was.