Spellslinger 6: Crownbreaker

by Sebastien de Castell

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘How exactly did you get out of your deal with that tribe of squirrel cats? Your species seem pretty … stringent about contracts.’

  A long, long pause. ‘It’s complicated.’

  I let his evasion hang there awhile as our horse made its slow, plodding way along the road. Eventually I couldn’t stop myself from asking, ‘Is it possible that maybe – just maybe – those female squirrel cats weren’t entirely taken with your charms?’

  He gave a low growl.

  I put up my hands. ‘I’m just asking.’

  ‘Well, don’t!’

  ‘It’s just … I would’ve figured, what with you being the supreme master of mating techniques and all, I mean, how could they resist you?’

  ‘My kind are barbarians, that’s how! Couldn’t convince even one of them to come with me to find a nice warm bath. They just laughed at me, Kellen! Made out like I was some dumb house pet. Can you believe that?’

  ‘Inconceivable.’

  ‘I even went and stole some butter biscuits from a store in the town nearby, and you know what those lousy females did? They took one bite and spat the rest out. They spat out butter biscuits, Kellen!’

  ‘Shockingly uncivilised, if you ask me.’

  ‘It’s like they’re not even the same species.’

  ‘So the mating …’

  ‘I did my duty,’ he declared in a grumbling tone. ‘Not that anybody thanked me. No gifts when I woke up the next morning, no flowers. Not even a decent compliment.’

  ‘Is it possible you were doing it wrong?’ I suggested amiably.

  His upper lip curled as a snarl came from somewhere low in his throat. ‘What?’

  ‘I mean, did you try that thing where you drop down on all fours and wiggle your butt in their faces?’

  ‘Shut up, Kellen.’

  ‘And did you remember to make this sound? Female squirrel cats love it, you know.’

  I proceeded to concoct the most horrific, unpleasant noises my body could produce, braying like a constipated sheep while Reichis roared a thousand and one threats at me.

  I kept making those sounds all the way to the riverboat dock, where we bought passage for the coast. I’m pretty sure the captain overcharged me on account of him thinking I might be deranged, but it was worth it.

  Once we set off from the shore, a glimmer of light drew my eyes back to a figure standing at the edge of the road. The six tattooed bands around her forearms glowed just brightly enough to illuminate the familiar cascade of perfectly arranged yellow hair, now circled by an elegant seven-pointed crown. She was too far away for me to make out whether she also wore her customary disapproving glare and downturned mouth to remind me that I was, yet again, running off in the wrong direction, ignoring my familial obligations. Maybe that’s why she’d kept her distance; maybe she figured it was past time the two of us stopped trying to convince each other of the person we ought to be.

  So I waved, and she waved back. From such clumsy, insignificant somatic gestures, hopeful spells are sometimes cast. Perhaps one day that arrogant, insufferable face I adored would appear in a patch of desert or a bowl of water. I would tell her of my travels and she would shake her head at me, causing grains of sand or droplets of water to scatter, and ask what in the world had caused me to believe I’d had any chance of catching up to Nephenia or Ferius, whose ships had surely left the shore long before I’d reached them.

  I’d have to think up some clever, witty tale to tell, because Shalla would never understand the truth of it. I could only keep moving forward because there was no longer any way back for me; I had no home. I’d probably never have one again. ‘The world has no use for a trickster once the final trick is played,’ my grandmother had said to me. Reckon the crazy old bird knew what she was talking about.

  So that left me curled up under the stars on a cramped little section on the top of a rickety old riverboat, an outlaw spellslinger, broke and covered in bandages over wounds that were going to take months to fully heal, with no future and a good portion of the world still looking for an excuse to kill me. All the while, my thieving, murderous, and now, it turned out, romantic failure of a squirrel cat business partner was droning on about the innumerable ways he’d remove, cook and devour my eyeballs if I ever again dared to question his virility.

  I couldn’t stop smiling.

  See, I wasn’t born to be an outlaw. Probably wasn’t built for any of this. But whatever life lay ahead of me was mine, paid for in full, and every point of light in the sky above was another path for me to follow.

  And there sure are a lot of stars up there.

  Acknowledgements

  A Thousand and One Magic Tricks

  The word ‘magic’ has two commonly understood meanings in the English language: the use of supernatural means to control the natural world, and the art of performing seemingly impossible tricks. Fantasy has always taken a clear stand on which of those two is the most powerful and important, but with the Spellslinger series I found myself arguing that this second type of magic – obviously weaker and yet sometimes nobler and always more human – is the one we should turn to when the game is rigged and the odds against us seemingly insurmountable.

  And this got me thinking about books …

  We often talk about authors as if they’re great and powerful mages whose strange magical abilities conjure up wondrous tales otherwise out of reach to mere mortals. Maybe that’s true for some writers, but to me it’s always felt like writing a book isn’t supernatural at all; it’s a really a long series of magic tricks performed not just by one lone author, but by many magicians working in concert. So I thought I’d tell you about a few of them here.

  The book you’re holding in your hand or listening to feels real, doesn’t it? When you close your eyes, you picture it not simply as a collection of words, but as a kind of artefact with shape and form. That’s because Nick Stearn envisioned something beautiful and tangible, Sam Hadley drew a vision of Kellen facing his father in the deadliest of duels, and Sally Taylor imagined a set of wondrous places where this battle could take place. Jamie Taylor and Alex May then took all those pictures and poured them like molten metal alongside my words into a finished book.

  Of course a book is like a card in an infinitely large deck, and the odds of this one instead of countless others appearing in your hand is due to a long and complex series of tricks. My agents Heather Adams and Mike Bryan had to mesmerise people into believing that a fantasy series about the guy who isn’t the chosen one, that features loads of magic spells that he can’t cast, was a good idea. Mark Smith, then CEO of Bonnier Zaffre, and Jane Harris, MD of Hot Key Books, pulled not simply a rabbit but an entire team of amazing individuals out of a hat – and it’s a big team that includes publicists, designers, sales reps and so many others. I owe you all better than a brief mention like this at the back of the book. I’ll figure out how to do better next time, I promise.

  There are a few magic tricks that astound me the most, and I want to tell you about some of those now, along with the one trick I’ve never been able to figure out.

  First, if you’re reading this book in a language other than English, then you and I have Ruth Logan and Ilaria Tarasconi – along with all those other wonderful publishers around the world – to thank. Want to see a real magic trick? Behold as a translator takes a book full of not just English idioms (evenly mixed between British and North American no less) but also bizarre ones made up by a merciless author and somehow makes the whole story flow beautifully in an entirely different language. Just ask all the talented translators who’ve had to figure out how to make ‘squirrel cat’ sound like a real thing in your language.

  Another of my favourite feats of illusion is the part of the process where the copy-edit comes back from Talya Baker and all of a sudden the hundred-thousand-word mess of sentence fragments and missing punctuation I laughingly call a final draft has been magically replaced with a smooth, flowing manuscript. Not
only that, but every one of my countless splelling and grammaticalistical errors are made to disappear into thin air by Melissa Hyder. Poof! See?

  Before that, though, my editor Felicity Alexander has to read multiple drafts and find the magic words that will get me to write the best version of the story for fans of the series instead of just the one that comes most easily to me. She took over the series from Matilda Johnson, who forced me to actually define how the Jan’Tep system of magic works and kept me from turning Kellen into a whiner. Well, she mostly kept me from turning Kellen into a whiner.

  With his mystical third eye, Eric Torin perceives all the threads that could be fascinating but which I’d otherwise leave unexplored; Kim Tough identifies the pieces that are working early on and keeps me from losing them in the process of searching for new ones. At various stages of the process, Brad Denhert, Wil Arndt, Jim Hull and Nazia Khatun let me know if I’ve gotten the story right or managed to saw my own legs off.

  Like a mad alchemist, Joe Jameson takes my words and brings them to life in over a hundred different voices he created for the audio editions of the Spellslinger series. Joe is without question the greatest audiobook narrator in the world (Wait, I didn’t write that! How dare you take over my acknowledgments!?! Shut up, Sebastien, I’m in charge now.) Anyway, moving right along …

  Without all those astonishing people and their bewildering tricks, Spellslinger simply wouldn’t be the series it is now – one that I am so incredibly privileged to get to put my name on. Receiving your wonderfully kind and inspired letters and emails when you enjoy them is what magically makes my day better.

  Oh, and you know that thing Kellen likes to say about there always being one trick left? Well, here’s the one that continues to mystify me to this day:

  Until the age of twenty-seven, I’d never written anything longer than a page that wasn’t a university essay or a weird extended joke with friends. I’d heard so many authors talk about their ‘unstoppable drive to write’ – you know, the one that defined them from childhood and provided the evidence that they were meant to be artists. Me? I wrote nothing. Nada. Zip. Then I started dating Christina and all of a sudden someone who’d never demonstrated a single shred of discernible talent as a writer – who really hardly ever finished anything he started – was staring dumbly at the finished draft of a book.

  Crownbreaker is my tenth novel in an utterly improbable and truly magical career, yet I still haven’t figured out how she made that trick work.

  Sebastien de Castell

  August 2019

  Vancouver, Canada

  Postscript

  Every story has a final page, the one we hesitate to turn for fear doing so closes the door on places, people and squirrel cats we’ve only begun to truly know. Yet turn the page we must, because there are thousands of stories awaiting each and every one of us, and it is unwise to linger too long inside just one.

  ‘But what about …?’

  ‘Did they ever …?’

  ‘Will he one day …?’

  Questions. There are always questions. Even after the book is closed and given its place on the shelf – or, better yet, given to a friend – there remains that desire to tug on every remaining thread. Our own world is always, by necessity, unfinished, but must that also be true of the worlds of our stories?

  Yes.

  There has to come a time when the reader’s own imagination becomes sovereign – when Kellen’s path and Reichis’s latest heist take place in your mind instead of in mine. A moment when it no longer matters what the writer thinks or intends. Otherwise the author becomes a kind of tyrant, and the book a cage inside which the reader is trapped.

  None of this means there won’t be more books in the future featuring a certain tricky (and occasionally whiny) outlaw and his thieving, murderous, blackmailing (and more recently, loan sharking) business partner. Only that, for a while at least, we have to set them free.

  ‘But what about …?’

  I don’t know. Let your thoughts wander and see for yourself.

  ‘Did she ever …?’

  Ask them. The two of them are as much in your mind as mine.

  ‘Will he one day …?’

  I promise, the answer is waiting for you inside your own imagination.

  It’s easy. Let me show you …

  … Picture a ship. A true Gitabrian long-voyage merchant vessel with long, sturdy oak planks curving to its hull and gleaming bronze caps atop each mast. The mainsail masters the wind so perfectly that the ship fairly glides across the ocean. The crew, hardy and experienced, can’t remember a smoother voyage.

  ‘I’m gonna die,’ groans a figure leaning over the rail.

  Normally such plaintive grousing could be attributed to a young Jan’Tep outlaw known for self-pity, but today, in a singular act of almost implausible supernatural justice, the victim of this terrible seasickness turns out to be a slightly tubby squirrel cat whose fur has turned the exact same green as the vomit he spews over the side and into the waters below.

  ‘Maybe if you stopped eating those butter biscuits from the hold,’ suggests his business partner, who is at this moment unaware that he is destined to wake up the next morning with bite marks on his legs and his black frontier hat filled to the brim with squirrel cat puke.

  ‘It ain’t the butter biscuits,’ Reichis insists, before sending the regurgitations of a few more into the calm ocean below. ‘It’s this raging sea. Storm of the century, that’s what it must be. This water’s probably swirling with crocodiles.’

  Kellen doesn’t comment, for fear some of the crew members nearby will laugh at the squirrel cat’s plight and then … Well, sailors do their job better with both eyeballs.

  ‘It’s unnatural,’ Reichis moans. ‘Creatures of the land aren’t meant to travel by water.’

  ‘Unnatural? You recall you leap from the tops of trees to glide in the air above canyons all the time, right?’

  ‘That’s completely different, idjit.’ The squirrel cat turns his head, muzzle upturned. ‘How come you ain’t sick?’

  Kellen shrugs. ‘Don’t know. I’m already claustrophobic and have a dozen other problems. I guess there’s only so much bad luck you can fit into one person.’

  ‘Then how come you look just as miserable as I feel?’

  He doesn’t respond. The answer will only make him sound as stupid as he feels.

  Why did he think he’d get lucky enough to pick the ship Nephenia was on? He doubted she could’ve made it to the coast in time to catch the previous week’s sailing, but perhaps she took a slower route and was still on their own continent, sitting in a travellers’ saloon somewhere with Ishak at her side, maybe even hoping Kellen will walk through the door.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, he thinks. Now I’m stuck on this ship for the next three weeks, headed for a place where I don’t speak the language and have no idea how to behave. I’ll probably end up stranded on the Island of Those Who Despise Spellslingers.

  Not that the sailors on this ship particularly like them either. Recent events have left most sensible people distrustful of anyone with Jan’Tep blood. Kellen has had to keep vigil at night so Reichis could get some sleep in between bouts of seasickness. He keeps his castradazi coins in his pocket and a half-dozen steel throwing cards in his right hand at all times. Turns out it’s hard to keep powder dry when you’re at sea.

  ‘How’s your friend?’ asks one of the sailors. He’s about Kellen’s height, but burlier and with a thick red beard that can’t have been trimmed anytime in the last decade. He’s also the only person who’s been remotely polite to them.

  ‘He’s fine,’ Kellen replies. ‘He just likes throwing up a lot, that’s all.’

  The sailor chuckles. ‘He seems a noble beast. No doubt a formidable adversary in a fight.’

  ‘Got that right, ya big ugly bear,’ Reichis chitters, then goes back to groaning.

  ‘And you?’ the sailor asks Kellen. ‘Forgive me for saying, but you seem …
lost.’

  ‘I’m fine too. Happy as can be.’

  The sailor claps him on the back. ‘I’ve seen that look, friend. You stare out at the sea like a man wondering if perhaps falling in would be the best thing that could happen to him – that perhaps what he seeks will only ever be found at the bottom of the ocean.’

  ‘Again, I’m fine, thanks for asking. Wouldn’t want to keep you from your duties.’

  He knows that’s unlikely to be an issue. It’s already late, and the stars have come out overhead. They’re pretty enough, he thinks, but to his surprise he’s discovered he prefers the stars over the desert. He’s about to pick up the squirrel cat and make their way back to their cabin when the sailor clamps a hand on his shoulder. Kellen realises then that it’s just the two of them out on this part of the deck.

  ‘You should remove your hand, friend,’ he says. ‘I imagine you need it for pulling ropes and such things.’

  The sailor ignores the warning as he points out to the gentle waves. ‘There’s an old Gitabrian sailing tradition – if ever we’re lost at sea, we call out over the bow, shouting at the top of our lungs for the sea gods to send us that which we most desire.’

  ‘You mean like an extra ration of liquor?’

  The sailor just smiles. ‘Usually it involves a woman.’ He catches Kellen’s look and says, ‘Ah, is that what troubles you, lad? Some sweetheart you left behind?’

  ‘One who left me behind is more like it.’

  The sailor gives him a disapproving look. ‘Self-pity is an unattractive quality, my friend. Best hope when you next find her you’ve rid yourself of it.’

  Before Kellen can reply, the sailor claps him on the back again. ‘Now, tell us this woman’s name. Shout it to the sky with as much force as the oceans themselves during a storm, and see what the sea gods reply.’

  ‘I’m not going to—’

  ‘Just do it, you whiny little prat, or maybe I will push you over the side.’

  When Kellen booked passage on the ship, an old man at the docks warned him every landlubber had to pay twice: the first time for the ticket, and the second for not knowing the ways of a ship. The ticket you paid for in coin, the ignorance with humiliation.