A Crown for Cold Silver by Marshall Alex

Author:Marshall, Alex [Marshall, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction / Fantasy / Historical, Action & Adventure, Fiction / Action & Adventure, Fiction, Fantasy, Historical, Fiction / Fantasy / Epic, Epic
ISBN: 9780316277990
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2015-04-14T06:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

6

Zosia lived, all right, as a saddle sore on the thigh of every rider in the Imperial regiments tasked with pursuing the Cobalt Company. The timing was right for it to be the mayoress that Sister Portolés had met, the Cobalts showing up in regional complaints and then official reports just a few months after the massacre at Kypck. Depending on who you talked to, they were a band of mercenaries hired to stir up trouble, unusually effective revolutionaries, or bandits who’d gotten organized. Considering they had gone from raiding outposts and border garrisons to sacking whole castles and pillaging provinces, the threat the Cobalt Company posed to the newly won tranquility of the Crimson Empire would have been immediate and severe regardless of their leader, but if it was truly the Stricken Queen returned, well, Fallen Mother have mercy on them all.

Portolés did her best to keep her mind on these more practical, definitive problems, rather than on the slippery questions of why the story Queen Indsorith sang her in the throne room was so different from everything she had grown up believing. That she was sworn to secrecy on the truth of how Cold Cobalt lost her crown, even where her superiors in the church were concerned, did little to relax her worries. Nor, for that matter, did all the finer points in Heretic’s propaganda that supported some of what Queen Indsorith had told her. Baiting her companion into sharing even more minutiae on Blue Zosia turned out to be as simple as not beating him silent whenever he opened his mouth, which was often.

“… which makes a lot of sense, when you put it all together,” he said as their boat bobbed across the waves toward the gleaming cliffs of Hwabun. “You can just murder a woman, but then you make her a martyr. But by concocting a version of events where she’s meeting your marionette in a fair fight, and loses, then you’ve stripped her of one of her key strengths: her skill in combat.”

“So you don’t think it was a fair fight?” asked Portolés, fanning him on. “That Indsorith, what, poisoned Zosia before the duel?”

“That the duel never even happened!” said Heretic. “Whose word do we have that it did? The letters signed by Zosia that confirm it are just that, letters, easily forged. Open your eyes, sister, you’ve been duped, just like the rest of the Chain, the rest of the Empire.”

The Immaculate escort they had been assigned at the border didn’t even try to conceal his amusement as he directed the two sailors to bring them into Hwabun’s harbor. Let Heretic and this infidel have their smiles. Portolés was discovering that by checking her pride she was gaining far more insight into popular sentiments than she ever would have by checking his cheek. With any luck, she was about to discover a lot more about the Stricken Queen.

Hwabun. The Immaculate Isle where Kang-ho had fled two decades past was the sensible first stop on their search.

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