Crimson Read online

  Dedication

  For Tanaya

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter One: A Broken Fall

  Chapter Two: A Sudden Burst of Crimson

  Chapter Three: The Green Secret

  Chapter Four: A Black Bolt

  Chapter Five: The Voice Behind the Man

  Chapter Six: Back in the Village

  Chapter Seven: A Drowning Man

  Chapter Eight: Becoming the Stink

  Chapter Nine: The Master Cobbler-to-Be

  Chapter Ten: The Voice Inside Him

  Chapter Eleven: Your Life Belongs to Me

  Chapter Twelve: The Gods I Don’t Believe In

  Chapter Thirteen: A Stone That Floats

  Chapter Fourteen: Pigheaded

  Chapter Fifteen: Helwood

  Chapter Sixteen: A Trail of Words and Blood

  Chapter Seventeen: The Children of Mansren

  Chapter Eighteen: The Benefactor

  Chapter Nineteen: The Tiny Request

  Chapter Twenty: The Red Road

  Chapter Twenty-One: The Horrible Way

  Chapter Twenty-Two: A Lake of Fire

  Chapter Twenty-Three: A Head in Hand

  Chapter Twenty-Four: A Leap of Faith

  Chapter Twenty-Five: A Necessary Evil

  Chapter Twenty-Six: Walking with Mansren

  Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Paladin

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: On Dark Wings

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: A Somewhat Gentle Heart

  Chapter Thirty: Mansren Rising

  Chapter Thirty-One: A Song of Power

  Chapter Thirty-Two: A Moral Quandary

  Chapter Thirty-Three: A Glint of Silver

  Chapter Thirty-Four: To Bear Witness

  Chapter Thirty-Five: The Battle of Regentium

  Chapter Thirty-Six: A World with You as Master

  Chapter Thirty-Seven: All in a Name

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  FEN DID NOT STRUGGLE AS SHE WATCHED THE QUEEN’S guard dismount from his charger and draw the blade that would soon sever her hand. She was in the middle of the village square, in the middle of her eleventh summer, and despite the fear in her heart, she decided the guard was the most beautiful and perfect man she had ever seen: he was slim, ivory-skinned and wide-shouldered. He towered over the villagers as they parted to let him through.

  His golden eagle diadem, a symbol that he was an extension of the Queen, held his shoulder-length hair out of his eyes. That hair was a bright red, as were the locks of all Queen Servilia’s elite guardsmen. The colour was a sign of the magic that had shaped him.

  His armour shone, detailing every chest muscle. There were tales the metal was poured directly onto the guards’ flesh—an impenetrable skin. The Royal Red Artificers, the only crafters allowed to shape magic, had designed the armour. Even if the suit was penetrated, the wounds of the Queen’s guards were said to heal in moments, due to the Queen’s blood in their veins.

  Fen just wanted to touch the armour. Once. And the hair too.

  Her own hair was dark and long, her skin a yellowish brown. Much the same colour as every other villagers’. They were the people of Village Twenty-One, the workers of the red earth mines and the rice fields. The Queen’s guard looked as if he had stepped down from the heavens.

  “Keep very still,” Fen’s mother whispered. She pressed her daughter’s right arm against the execution block. Lin was a wiry woman; a lifetime of working in the mines had tightened every muscle. But the wrinkles around her eyes didn’t hide her tears. She’d chosen to be at her daughter’s side instead of letting another villager do this duty. “I won’t see you as a thief. You’ll always be my child, whether you have one hand or two. But don’t steal again. We don’t need pretty things.”

  “I know, Mama,” Fen breathed. “It was stupid. Stupid.”

  Moments earlier, Lin had slipped Fen a ginger stone. It burned sweetly on Fen’s tongue.

  “Swallow that candy, my dear.” Lin’s voice was gentle. “You don’t want to choke on it.” Fen bit into the soft centre, all the while staring at the approaching Queen’s guard. He moved with such magnificence. No wonder the Queen’s enemies broke at the sight of a charging column of these red-haired sentries. Fen swallowed the remains of the ginger stone in one gulp.

  “Be as strong as a horse,” her mother intoned. “Be as brave as a tiger.” It was an old saying.

  Fen didn’t feel brave. She’d nearly wet her trousers when the cries of “A rider! A rider from the Queen!” had echoed through the village. First, a mud-speckled herald on a grey gelding had galloped down the River Road and past the huts, his purple cloak—the Queen’s colour—flapping.

  “The Queen’s justice shall be done,” the herald had shouted to the gathering crowd. He was a short, pale man with a scar that slithered from his chin to his cheek, splitting both lips. Despite his spattered clothes, he smelled sweet. Those from Regentium often wore perfume. They lived in houses stuffed with cushions and carpets. Most were as light-skinned as this man. “Bring the offender to me.”

  Lin had taken Fen’s hand. “We cannot change this,” she’d whispered. “We can only face it.” She led Fen to the herald. “This is my elder daughter. This is Fen.”

  “Place her arm on the executioner’s block. Be quick! We have three more sentences today.”

  On the previous morning Fen had been at the market, staring at a glass butterfly that glittered with such delicacy it looked real. The Regentium merchant was a portly, fair-skinned man with a big leather hat and a high-pitched, haughty voice. He wasn’t the greatest of merchants or he wouldn’t have been trading at such a small village. His voice dripped with disdain for the villagers, but he was plenty happy to take their copper coins.

  He’d been distracted by a fisherman who was haggling over a jade pendant, so Fen had slipped the butterfly into her muddy cloak. When she was twenty steps from the stall, the ornament began to whistle so loudly she covered her ears. The villagers and other merchants stopped their trading and stared. She ripped the butterfly out of her cloak and threw it, expecting the fragile creation to smash on the ground, but instead it had flapped its glass wings, flown back to the merchant and landed on his hand.

  He had pointed at Fen. “Thief! Dirty thief!” His accusation had frozen her. She hadn’t known whether that was a spell or her own fear. Then two of his guards had grabbed her. “I demand justice!” the merchant shouted. “Queen’s justice!”

  A messenger raven had been sent to Regentium. By that evening the merchant was safe again behind the red walls of the capital city, sitting in his soft-cushioned bed drinking ice wine. The next morning, justice arrived at Village Twenty-One on horseback.

  Fen had never stolen anything before. She had wanted a gift for her sister, who would soon be turning five summers old. Not just a couple of buttons pasted on a stick but something real. Something amazing.

  “Hold the thief’s arm straight,” the herald commanded. “We want a clean cut.” Lin’s mother tightened her grip.

  The Queen’s guard stopped before Fen. This man had likely fought for a hundred years, or even a thousand, perhaps had been in the War of the Ten Cities itself, and yet he looked no older than eighteen. “Is this the transgressor?” His jaw was hairless and smooth. He’d been forged in the same way a sword has been forged.

  “Yes, she is,” Lin said. “Though she’s just a child.”

  “Silence!” the herald shouted. “Every citizen, no matter the age, must obey the Queen’s law. That is what keeps the peace.”

  The Queen’s guard looked
directly at Fen. His eyes were blue and cold and perfect—the same as the Queen’s. Each guard was designed to reflect her likeness. Everything about him was so unbelievably immaculate. Not a hair out of order, not even a scar on his face. She wondered if the awe she felt was forced on her by the Queen’s magic.

  “No!” it was a small voice, but shrill. “Not her hand!”

  May, Fen’s sister, pushed her tiny body between the guard and Fen. “You can’t have her hand!” Somehow May had escaped their neighbour’s clutches. May put her own hand over Fen’s.

  “Get out of here,” Fen whispered. “Go!”

  “Yes, go!” The herald grabbed May. “Or we’ll cut off your hand too!” He tossed her toward the crowd. Fen didn’t see who caught May. Only that she was being held. And she was safe.

  “Now,” the herald said. “Down to business.” He unrolled a muddy scroll. “Queen Servilia, she who freed you from the tyranny of Mansren, she who has brought you a millennium of peace, she who is the mother of our land, she who is the law incarnate, has declared Fen of Village Twenty-One a thief. On this the twenty-fifth day of the month of Maia, in the one thousand and seventh year of Her Majesty’s reign, Fen has been sentenced to have her right hand removed. The Queen, in her mercy, will not take her subject’s life.” He closed the scroll. “Prepare for the Queen’s justice.”

  The Queen’s guard lifted his sword, and the sun caught the blade. The villagers made a small sound of expectation. Somewhere in the crowd May began to squeal.

  “Don’t let your tongue slip between your teeth,” Lin whispered. Then, even quieter, “I love you.”

  The Queen’s guard was the arm of the Queen reaching all the way from Regentium. Fen had dreamed of meeting her someday. Of standing in her presence and being raised up to the royal court. Fen’s mother and sister would be so proud.

  But today, she would meet the Queen in another way. For Fen had heard that at the moment of punishment, the Queen herself would look through her guard’s eyes to be certain justice was done.

  The guard swung the sword. Fen, despite her best intentions, tried to jerk away, but her mother held tight. There was a thunk and her forearm became a circle of pain.

  “The Queen’s justice has been served,” the herald said.

  Fen’s ears felt as if they were floating above her—the words rose up to them. At any moment she would fly to the heavens, perhaps to join her father and all the other ancestors . . . but her burning arm held her to the ground. “All hail Queen Servilia,” the herald commanded.

  The villagers gave a muffled shout in reply. Within the hour they would be back in the red mines, out in the rice fields or plying the river for fish and eels. Her mother was murmuring, “Fen Fen Fen oh Fen.”

  The herald dashed to his horse and was galloping along the road in the space of a few heartbeats. The Queen’s guard turned away from Fen. His cloak shifted in the breeze, revealing the smooth metal that ran along his back and outlined his spine.

  Fen did not look at her arm. She swore she wouldn’t allow her thoughts to go dark.

  The smithy said, “Keep a tight grip on her.”

  “Grit your teeth hard, Fen,” Lin said. “You are brave and you are strong. Your father would have been proud of you.”

  The last sight Fen saw that day was the Queen’s guard trotting on his charger, not looking back at the justice he had left behind. Then a white-hot iron bar was pressed against her stump and her vision went black and, mercifully, the pain went with it.

  Chapter One

  A Broken Fall

  THREE YEARS HAD PASSED.

  The sun began to rise on Village Twenty-One and at that same moment, Fen’s sleep was broken by Queen Servilia’s voice: “Arise, your Queen commands it. Be fruitful and obey my laws.” The regent’s flawless image shimmered in Fen’s mind. Her royal red hair—a symbol and symptom of her magic—was held back by a golden crown. Her red diamond necklace, invested with the power both of her office and of her magic, glittered at her pale throat. Her darkly painted lips moved a few moments after the words were spoken, as if the image were coming from a very distant place.

  Fen sat up, knowing her mother and sister in the room next door were also awaking on their sleeping mats, for they, too, would have seen the same royal face and heard the same royal commands, along with every slumbering member of the five hundred villages and the city of Regentium—each citizen throughout the whole queendom of Illium.

  Queen Servilia had awakened her people this way for the last one thousand and ten years. Ever since the day she’d defeated Mansren, a demon of pure magic. He had started the War of the Ten Cities, fighting against kings, czars, khans and emperors, each of whom controlled their own city and lands. Mansren sacked and obliterated nine of the cities with his army of shirkers—terrifying creatures he’d formed from magic dust and blood. Servilia, Queen of Regentium, the last remaining city, had sent her elite guards and soldiers to fight against the demon, and while he was distracted, she’d descended from the sky on an equusa—a flying horse—and turned Mansren to stone with a spell from her red diamond necklace. He had then been shattered into pieces by Marcellus, the first Queen’s guard. The shirker army was scattered and destroyed. The nine cities were forever gone, but the Queen swore to protect the five hundred villages that remained. It was the first day of her reign over all of Illium. The first day of peace.

  The Queen had then planted fields of flowers around Regentium, in memory of the battle fought there: magic flowers that never died, come snow, sleet or hail. The flowers surrounded red walls that would never fall, and they were looked down upon from the Queen’s Red Tower, tallest building in the land.

  Fen knew the story well. The War of the Ten Cities against Mansren was a tale told by the Royal Historians at every public holiday. The villagers celebrated Servilia’s victory once a year on Shattering Day, when the children smashed open stuffed Mansren dolls and ate the candy inside.

  Even one-handed, Fen had gotten pretty good at smacking open those dolls and grabbing the sweets.

  She scratched at the dried skin on her right arm. The stump still longed for the hand. Sometimes, if she were sleepy enough, she could feel her missing fingers. Today there was something more than an itch. It was tingling, as if her ghost hand had fallen asleep. She shook the stump until the prickles went away.

  She pushed back the blanket on her sleeping mat, stood and dressed in the cool air, using her left hand to do up the cloth-knot buttons and to slip on the rectangular jade locket that had once been her father’s. Fen stumbled out to the table, scraped the skin off the top of the rice porridge on the cookstove and filled her bowl.

  Her mother came out of the other bedroom already dressed in grey mining clothes. The silk dust mask hung around her thin neck. She gently ran her fingers through Fen’s hair. “It’s still black,” she said. “Be diligent with the dye.”

  Fen nodded. One red hair had appeared in her dark locks a month ago. Fen had yanked out the traitorous hair and burned it. No one in her village was ever born with hair of that colour. No one in the queendom, except the Queen and her guards, was allowed to have red hair.

  Crimson hair was a sign of magic, and it grew one of two ways. Either the person had used the red dust to create magic, which was illegal, or else the magic had appeared within them on its own—this was known as wildmagic.

  Only the Queen’s most trusted artificers were allowed to work with the red dust. It could be formed into armour or swords; it could be used to strengthen a bridge, to build battlements or to invest a spell into an amulet. Most others who touched or breathed it died of the red cough.

  But wildmagic was much more mysterious. It would appear in a person for no known reason and had nothing to do with the dust at all. One night their hair would turn a bright red and they’d wake with the ability to make rain or to levitate or to turn objects to stone.

  A wildmagic had arisen in the village when Fen was a child. Chen, an ancient fisherman, had steppe
d out of his hut one morning with a full head of red hair and burning hands. He had been amazed at his newfound ability to shoot fire. He lit an oven. He lit torches. Even singed the eyebrows of his wife. But one greedy villager, seeing only the bounty on wildmagics, had sent a raven to Regentium, and by that afternoon Chen was being chased through the village by infernus hounds to the town square, where his head was removed by a Queen’s guard.

  Fen did not want to become a wildmagic—she had given enough of her body to the Queen. A few days after she plucked out that one red hair, a patch of red had appeared just behind her left ear. She’d gone to her mother but not spoken of it, for words had a way of crossing the leagues to the Red Tower. Lin had nodded, led Fen to the cupboard and mixed a perfectly shaded dye. Fen had used that dye every day for the last three weeks.

  “I’m leaving for the mines,” her mother said, patting Fen’s shoulder. “The red dust waits for no worker.”

  “You should eat, Mama.”

  “I’m too old to eat.” Lin gave Fen a squeeze and sipped from a chipped porcelain cup. “The tea will be enough.” Until nightfall Lin would be scraping the red dust into bronze pails and carrying it to the royal wagons. The wagons would be covered with tightly woven tarps that wouldn’t allow a speck of dust to escape. Soldiers would guard the wagons, guiding them to the Queen’s Road and on to Regentium. There, the Red Artificers would take that dirt and invest its magic into blades or armour or staffs or lockets. Or it could be used to turn young men into Queen’s guards and to create corvuses, the Queen’s giant raven-like messengers. And to do many other things that Fen had no idea about.

  “We are digging so deep to mine the dust,” her mother whispered. “The veins of red are smaller. If it runs out, what then?”

  Fen didn’t know the answer. The workers of Village Twenty-One had been mining the red dust for hundreds of years. Many of the other villages had their own mines. Were they running out too?

  “Ah, those are worries for ancient toads like me,” Lin said. “Forget them! Now, roust your sister and take her berry-picking. And be careful in the trees!”