Rowan is ushered into the grand house to meet the head of the Council.
It seems that a serving man had been behind that door all along, waiting for the thugs. Expecting them with their precious stolen sword, listening to the fight, and doing nothing.
He lets Rowan in now, and closes the door. One of the guys outside is still screaming with pain, and Rowan’s legs feel like they are going to give out from under him.
“Will you take care of those . . . the injured?” Rowan asks. The servant, an older man with his lips caved in where teeth should be, nods, and gestures at Rowan to follow him.
There are armed guards in the foyer. They shift when Rowan passes, but do not move.
The toothless servant leads Rowan through stone halls hung with tapestries, up a winding staircase, and into a great hall. A long table with a white cloth upon it is set for dinner, and around it sit men, women and children. Several guards stand at the periphery. The servant leads Rowan into the light.
At the head of the table is the man who calls himself the Render.
The man sees him and stands rather suddenly. He wears a white robe and the circlet around his head that Rowan remembers from the first time he saw him, at the gathering by the white stone. He’s a handsome man. He looks like a leader. The shock on his face is quickly masked.
A woman rises with a little half-scream. A small boy begins to cry.
The guards step forward, but the white-robed man puts up his hand and they fall back.
“Chosen! All praises that you are safe.”
Rowan is suddenly aware of his own smell, and the blood that stains his face and the blade he holds stiffly before him. He thinks he should have cleaned the sword—that’s what people always do in the books and old tales. He wishes he was shaven, clean. Thoughts stutter through his mind; he realizes he’s still holding the sword straight out in front of him, and makes himself lower it.
The toothless servant goes to the council head and mumbles something.
“Please,” Rowan says, “there are some injured men on your doorstep—will you see that they are cared for?”
“Your men?”
It takes Rowan a moment to understand what the man is saying—Christ, he feels tired all of a sudden, the adrenaline from the fight draining out of him like water out of a bathtub. The council head is performing a lie for the benefit of the others. “No,” he says. He stands as tall as he can. “I believe they might be yours.”
The man’s eyes shift. “See to them,” he says to the servant, who leaves the hall.
“I come alone,” says Rowan. “The ones outside tried to take this from me.” He makes an abbreviated gesture with the sword. “Please,” he says then, looking at those around the table, “I have not come to hurt anybody.” He tries to look reassuringly at the woman who screamed, at the children staring round-eyed. Everyone, he notices, is richly dressed in velvets and silks. They are plump, clean, so much more prosperous than the Whetungs or those at the resistance meeting. These must be the rich of Kalmar. There’s a great fish on a metal platter in the centre of the table with an apple in its mouth, like the whole roasted pigs he’s seen in illustrations of medieval feasts.
“Why have you come?”
“I told you,” says Rowan. “The gang tried to steal my sword. I followed them to your doorstep, and I was coming here at your inv—”
“The sword belongs to you?”
So, the man doesn’t want the others to know that he met with Rowan at Great Night and invited him to come here. Rowan closes his mouth, opens it again. “It seems to think it does.”
“A sword doesn’t think.”
“It burns anyone else who touches it.” Rowan turns the hilt toward the man. “Care to try? If you are truly the Render, as you claim, it will not hurt you.” His voice wobbles a little, but the sword stays steady.
The man looks around the table and meets the eyes of a woman with jewels in her hair and exhaustion in her eyes. “You and the children will leave us now.”
Without a word she rises; all the other women rise with her. One child begins to cry, and is swiftly hushed. They file out of the room, guards saluting as they pass.
Ten robed men and, at a quick count, as many guards, are left in the room.
Rowan tries not to look as scared as he feels. He makes sure his back is to a wall, and keeps a firm grip on his sword.
“So, Rowan,” the man says, “welcome.”
He has a look like he’s trying not to smile. This makes Rowan’s heart sink into his sneakers.
“Why didn’t you have them kill me?”
“Who?”
Rowan restrains himself from saying, The men dying outside your door, you conniving idiot. He will be direct. “We both know you can’t touch this sword.”
The man doesn’t take his eyes from Rowan. “It’s true.”
A couple of the robed men gasp; others, Rowan sees, do not. Some of these councilmen might be closer to the council head than others. Do they all know that he is lying when he calls himself the Render?
The man addresses the gathering. “The deception was necessary.” He turns back to Rowan. “The failure of the last Render has created troubles for this world that you can only begin to imagine.”
“The last Render?”
“Another person from your world. Surely you know that.”
Rowan says nothing.
“Those from your world bring nothing but trouble to Antilia.” The man turns back to the gathering. Is it Rowan’s imagination, or is there some actual emotion vibrating behind his words? “Throughout history we have been tied to you, frightened like children. Without the Chosen the world will split and fall, forever lost, into the ocean! But we are outside time now. The Chosen failed, last time, and that failure is the crucible that will release us. The cycle has been broken.”
Rowan doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Outside time? The man keeps speaking. This rhetoric is for the benefit of the councillors, Rowan realizes. He had best keep his own ignorance to himself.
“That is why I wished to take possession of the sword. People will only be frightened by your coming, and it is my responsibility to keep the peace. New laws for new times.”
“New laws for new times,” the other councilmen echo.
Rowan attempts a stab in the dark. “And yet the people are discontented, and the volcano continues to speak.”
Silence.
Rowan looks around the table at the men seated there. “So, this is the council of Kalmar?”
“The part of it that matters,” the man says.
The councillors release tension in laughter.
“Yes, the part of it that matters!” a balding man chortles.
“What is your name?”
The laughter stops. The council head stares at Rowan.
“My name?”
“Everyone calls you the Render, or the imposter, depending on their views. But you must have a name. You know mine. What is yours?”
The man clears his throat, then smiles. “It has been a long time since anyone called me by it. But my name is Brandr.”
“Brandr.”
“Yes.”
You could cut the silence with a knife. None of the councillors betray surprise—Rowan guesses that they have known the man’s name, or knew at least that he at one time had one. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But it makes him more human.
“Pleased to meet you.”
Rowan decides to make things a little more uncomfortable for the man—Brandr. He slowly paces around the table until he stands behind the man. It sort of works; Brandr looks a little pissed off.
“What do you want, Chosen?” a tubby man asks, his voice dripping with sarcasm. He looks familiar; Rowan remembers him from landing on the quay with Ari. He was the councilman who greeted them and led them to the sword in the stone.
Rowan takes the bull by the horns.
“First, I want all prisoners in the jail outside the city released on amnesty.”
There’s a stir. Some of the councilmen laugh. “But they are dangerous criminals,” says the tubby man. “Surely . . .”
“That is my principal demand,” says Rowan.
The room becomes quiet.
“And?” Brandr says after a pause.
“And what?”
“You have other requests to make of the council?” He’s hoping to give me enough rope to hang myself, thinks Rowan. Make a fool of myself.
He decides to just ask them, see what they’ll say. “Do you think the people are happy?”
He might as well have dropped his pants. The councillors stir, look concerned, embarrassed, look at each other, at the table, at the curtained windows.
They think I’m trying to trick them, Rowan thinks.
The shuffling silence goes on so long that he speaks again. “There’s a famine in the land?” It comes out a question. Damn it, what else can he do? He’s not from here, he doesn’t know how it all works.
“One of the highest priorities of the Council is the redistribution of food resources,” says a small guy with a big chin.
“Is it working?” asks Rowan.
Another silence.
“Look,” Rowan says, “people seem to feel I can do something. I represent something to them. Hope.”
The man, Brandr, comes in smoothly. “No, boy. You represent change. The louts will jump at anything that looks different. They are easily amused, the herd, and as easily lose interest.”
The tension in the room relaxes somewhat. Rowan sees some of the men nodding, looking gratefully in their leader’s direction.
For some reason Ophelia comes into Rowan’s mind at this point. Listen to the language, Rowan almost hears her saying. She would, she’d notice the words, she’s sensitive to them. “Do you often describe your people as animals?” Rowan asks.
“What are you talking about?” Brandr snaps.
“You called the people a herd,” Rowan points out.
“We have cleansed the population!” a thin, dark man blurts. “We are not animals!”
This doesn’t make any sense, and the idea of population cleansing has only the most sinister associations for Rowan. “Aren’t you?” he says, but it means nothing, he’s only saying it to be irritating.
But his question seems to electrify the council. Scattered shouts: “The halves are gone!”—“We are not animals!”—“Not anymore!”—“No!” Some jump to their feet. A big fellow, red in the face, yells, “We have cleansed the north country!” with such force that he looks like he’s choking.
Before Rowan can respond, the red-faced man demands, “And what are you? Chosen?” He spits the word. “Did you come down from the hills like the others?”
“What others?” What is he talking about?
“The bandits, the renegades!”
“Gentlemen, be cool,” says Brandr, and Rowan almost wants to laugh at this, the colloquial nature of the phrase. “I think we have only heard one demand from the Chos—” he stops himself “—from Rowan, and I think we are in a position to grant his wish.”
“Never!” shouts the red-faced man, but Brandr stares him down until he sits. Undercurrents run through the room, they mystify Rowan.
Brandr turns to face Rowan, and he makes the peculiar gesture Rowan remembers from people on the quay when he first arrived: folding his arms in front of himself, he claws his hands down from elbows to wrists.
There are gasps from the others.
“You are the true Chosen,” Brandr says. “I salute you. We must work together now.”
He meets Rowan’s eyes.
“I have been working for the good of the people. They have needed a strong leader. The land threatens to split every day; in danger we wake, and in danger we try to sleep at night. Never did I imagine a Chosen one would walk among us, and yet now I see that this is what you are.
“We will release the prisoners tomorrow.”
Some shouts burst from around the table, but Brandr raises his voice. “We will,” he enunciates, “release them. On my cognizance.”
Rowan can’t believe he’s hearing this. “You will?”
“Yes. At, let’s say, high noon. I will send a messenger tonight.” He turns to the stunned councilmen. “This action will prove that in this hour of need, when legends walk among us, we are united as a people. Antilia belongs to us all.”
Rowan looks around the table. Confusion, rage, but also fear. They’re afraid, they really are. “My friend Ari. I want him safe.”
“Certainly.” Brandr’s gaze doesn’t waver.
Rowan remembers the faces of Yishay and Yonah, lit by candlelight. The many, many dead. He feels a burden. He can’t leave it here, he must try and deliver something. Change. “May I come back to address the Council, after the prisoners have been released?” Maybe between now and then he can figure out what to do.
“Oh, certainly,” says Brandr. “Certainly. If you wish to address the Council you could come to our morning gathering, the day following the release of the prisoners. In fact, I think it would behoove us to appoint you the newest member of the Council.” He gestures to Rowan, a half-bow.
Rowan isn’t sure he wants to join the Council. “Where do you meet?”
“Here,” Brandr says, but then he gets a thoughtful look. “Perhaps,” he muses, “as a fitting symbol of this new dawn, we should meet in the old gathering place, the great hall?”
That must be the great domed building.
“It is sadly damaged by time and the shaking of the earth, but I think it will serve the purpose.”
The big building must have immense significance for everyone in Kalmar. Yes, that makes sense; and the more of them that are able to gather, the better. Rowan nods.
Brandr gestures to a guard standing against a wall, who steps forward. “This man will guide you out.”
“Thanks.” The guard has paced in front of him and is waiting for him to follow. Rowan wishes he could think of something epic to say. He looks at the dinner party, all of them staring at him with expressions ranging from horror to curiosity. “Um, good night. Enjoy your . . . enjoy your fish.”
He makes himself walk tall. His spine trying to crawl out of his body, but he makes himself walk tall.
The guard bars the door behind him. There are streaks of black blood on the stones, but the wounded are gone. Rowan heads away from the stone mansion, following twisting alleys around and downward, always downward. The sword cut the howling man’s arm almost off, it was hanging, swinging by threads of flesh. He finds the market square, empty now it’s night. The intestines of the other looped out on the stones, wet. He stumbles, falls. They’ll die, those two, he knows they will. He’s killed them. It would have been better to finish the job instead of letting them die slowly like that. Rowan lies down. Walking is too difficult. He’ll sleep here, on the stones, tonight.