Chapter 1030: The Coronation Ceremony
“She was completely over the line,” Nightingale said, stepping out of the Mist with the particular grumpiness of someone who had been holding a complaint for too long. “What did she even mean by that?”
Roland had noticed it too — the subtle shift in Edith Kant after he told her how Iron Axe had dealt with the nobles. Something in the Pearl of the Northern Region had settled, as though a calculation had resolved itself and come out favorable. Not threatening. Just honest in a way she hadn’t been before.
“Can you tell if she was lying?” he asked.
“She was telling the truth.” Nightingale’s mouth twitched. “She meant every word. If she hadn’t, I’d have stopped her right there and pulled it apart.”
“Then let it go.” He smiled. “I don’t have the time or the strength to guess at everyone’s intentions.”
The complaint died in her throat. She jerked her head away, staring at nothing in particular, and said in a carefully indifferent voice, “You’re right. You only need to focus on one or two people. That’s enough.”
Roland pressed his lips together against the laughter that wanted out. He had never met anyone as transparent in their opacity as Nightingale — the harder she worked to hide something, the more clearly it showed. He cleared his throat. “Back to the office. I have work.”
More work than he could count, if he was being honest. The two newly developed internal combustion engines needed testing and calibration before he could begin thinking seriously about mass production. The parts lists and supplementary machinery were still unfinished. The armored train designs sat half-sketched on his drafting table; the biological rubber program was barely past its first trials; the factories needed expansion, and so did the army.
But there was one thing that outweighed all of it.
It was, in the broadest sense, a formality. A ceremony. The sort of thing he had spent three years dismissing as expensive theater.
The moment Olivia arrived in Neverwinter, he had known.
It’s time.
A week later, the Castle District opened to the public for the first time in its history.
Thousands of civilians — screened, queued, and guided by police and castle guards — packed the yard and the slope beyond. The streets of Neverwinter beyond the castle walls were equally impassable, thick with people who had come despite the flurries of snow still drifting out of a white sky. The cold did not seem to trouble anyone. Enthusiasm, Roland reflected, was its own warmth.
The castle itself had been transformed for the occasion.
The stone wall along the front yard had come down, replaced with iron fencing so that the crowd on the slope could see through to the yard. The equipment and furniture stored there had been cleared; new turf had been laid across the frozen ground. Two long red banners edged in black hung from the castle’s roofline, dropping the full height of the building, their color startling against the snow-pale stone. Shabby as the castle was, the banners gave it something — a solemnity that the architecture alone had never managed.
The most significant change was on the second floor.
A balcony now jutted from the wall facing the yard’s gate, wide enough to stand on, solid enough to bear weight. Minister Carl knew — because he had overseen the work — that Agatha had built it first in ice, and Soraya had followed behind her painting the surface into something that looked, convincingly, like mortared brick. In weather like this, the ice beneath the coating would hold for days.
Inside the castle, the preparations had their own particular chaos.
“Your Majesty.” Wendy’s voice came through the bedroom door, patient but with a current of urgency underneath. “Everyone is assembled. The ministers and guests are waiting.”
“A moment,” Roland called back. He turned to the girl in the white dress.
Anna was standing at the window with the curtain half-drawn, looking down at the crowd below. She had the look of someone who has just discovered that a thing they agreed to in theory is very different from the thing itself.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“Give me a moment.” She let the curtain fall and turned to face him. “Are you certain you want me to come with you? The ceremonial officer told me no king has ever done it this way before.”
Roland studied her. She was smiling — she was almost always smiling — but the smile had a quality he didn’t often see in her: the slightly fixed brightness of someone working to keep their hands steady. Anna was not accustomed to crowds. Her confidence lived in her workshop, in the problems she solved, in the precise feedback of her own ability. She had grown up in the countryside, had spent her childhood afraid of her own power, and was still, in some essential way, a young woman in her twenties who preferred a drafting table to a thousand staring faces.
This was not her terrain.
“Then I’ll establish a precedent,” Roland said. “Or would you prefer I crown myself?”
“Of course not.” She shook her head. “It’s just—”
He stepped across to her and put his arms around her. She didn’t pull away.
“Let me put it differently, then,” he said.
“Differently?”
“Yes.” He drew back enough to look at her properly, and said, with full seriousness: “Miss Anna, I would like to hire you as my wife. Will you accept the position?”
She laughed — a real one, sudden and brief. “I’m not a prisoner anymore. You can’t—” Then she paused, something soft crossing her expression. “And it’s very short notice.”
She raised her gloved right hand.
He took it.
“Thank you, Roland,” she said quietly. “Let’s go.”
“As you command.”
They pushed through the bedroom door together, walked the length of the hallway, down the stairs, and into the ground-floor hall.
The room went silent the moment they appeared.
People stepped aside and lowered their heads without being asked — an instinct, or perhaps a practiced courtesy by now. Roland moved through the corridor they opened and let his gaze move along the lines.
On his left: the witches of Neverwinter. Tilly, Ashes, Nightingale, Wendy, Lightning, Agatha — and behind them, others he had come to know well over three years. They looked nothing like what they had been when he first met them: hunted, afraid, half-convinced the world would kill them for existing. Now they stood here inside his castle, members of his court, part of the structure of his kingdom. The change had been so gradual he sometimes forgot to be astonished by it.
On his right: the officials. Barov, Edith, Iron Axe, Carl, Kyle, Theo, Yorko — faces that had become as familiar to him as the hallways of this building. They had come to him from a dozen different origins — merchants, soldiers, alchemists, street-raised survivors — and built something none of them had been trained to build.
At the center of the hall stood a stone table. On it: two golden crowns.
The coronation had been simplified considerably from what the ceremonial officer had originally proposed. With King Wimbledon III dead and the Church of Hermes gone, there was no one left to administer the traditional rite. Roland had declined the ceremonial officer’s offer to perform the honors himself, insisting that the king and the queen crown each other. The officer had objected strenuously. Barov, to Roland’s mild surprise, had sided with Roland.
He bent his head. Anna’s hands were steady now as she lifted the first crown and set it into place. Then Roland straightened, took the second crown from the table, and placed it gently on her head.
They turned together.
Every person in the hall went to their knees.
The sound came up from a hundred throats at once: “Long live our king.”
They crossed the hall and climbed to the balcony.
The noise hit him like a physical thing.
He had not even raised his hand yet when the first wave of it broke over him — a roar from the yard, from the slope, from the streets beyond the iron fence that ran in every direction as far as the sound could carry.
“Long live King Roland!”
“Long live the king!”
“Long live the City of Neverwinter!”
Streamers fell from somewhere above. Petals — impossible petals, in the middle of winter, someone had saved them or made them — caught the wind and spiraled up. The snow was still coming down. Nobody seemed to notice.
The city bell struck the hour.
And then, at the edge of hearing, from somewhere far to the west — from the border of the Barbarian Land and the Western Region, where the First Army held its encampment — the cannons answered.