The Crown Tower: Book 1 of the Riyria Chronicles by Michael J Sullivan

Author:Michael J Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2013-08-05T22:00:00+00:00

Nine hours later Grue was still feeling the sting of his fall and finding more places where the mud stubbornly stuck to his skin. He was back in his tavern, the bear returned to his cave to lick his wounds and sharpen his teeth. He’d been there all day and much of the night, sitting, waiting, and thinking.

He sat at the table near the bar, trying not to look at the front door, thinking it must be like watched pots. It hurt to move. Grue wasn’t a young man and falls were chancy things. Nothing was broken, though perhaps his reputation had been bruised.

The story would have run like urine down a drainpipe. Grue has lost control of Wayward. Women push him around. His own whores shove him in the mud and laugh. He didn’t recall anyone laughing; no one had so much as smiled. If anything, Gwen had looked terrified when he hit the street, but that didn’t matter. They likely laughed afterward, and even if they didn’t, the stories would say they did, which made it so. He could have rallied his troops. Willard knew a couple of dockworkers he called Gritty and Brock—big fellas with big fists. The three of them would make a mess of Dixon. And if he was really serious, he’d call Stane—that man was crazy and would do anything for a bottle, a girl, and a blind eye. Dixon would pay, that was a promise he had already made to himself, but that was a present he could wait on.

Grue had other plans.

The candle on the table flickered and he noticed the tin candle plate—the only one left. He had it set out special.

Remembering not to glance at the door, he turned toward the bar and focused on the painting there. He had been looking at it a lot that day; it helped to calm him. The whole of The Hideous Head had been built from the scavenged wood and cannibalized parts of other nearby buildings. In that sense the Head was a genuine product of the Lower Quarter—a child of all that had come before—the bastard son of a dozen parents, disowned by all. The front door, which he refused to look at for fear it would never open, originally came from the Wayward and was still the best door on the street. The windows—the two larger ones that faced the front—came from a failed tailor shop. The smaller window, legend held, was ripped from the hull of a ship that ran aground off the Riverside docks. In these artifacts the tavern was a storehouse that preserved the history of the Lower Quarter.

That’s how Raynor Grue liked to see it. He had a tendency to decide what the facts were—made life easier that way. He could be a miserable old rotter who lived in squalor, preying on people’s vices, or he could be a reputable businessman living in a treasure house of artifacts and providing amusement to hardworking men. Both were true in their own way.

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