THE CROWN OF ROOTS

She had asked for a plain dress, and Mrs. Ketteridge's daughters, who had never in their lives been told that anything might be simple, had taken it as a challenge to make the plainest dress in the world and then to embroider the inside.

It was green. It was the green of a young leaf, a soft wool crepe the color of the first shoots in the Winter Garden, cut straight and high in the waist with long sleeves and no train, and not a single pearl, ruffle, or ribbon from collar to hem. The neck was square and cut low. The seamstresses had fussed about that, and Granny had overruled them, and Tamsin had stood on a stool in the middle of the Rose Tower's old playroom with her arms held out like a scarecrow while four women of the Ketteridge family pinned and chalked and muttered through mouthfuls of needles. Only when it was done, and they had stepped back, did she see the inside of the hem. They had worked it all the way round in tiny silver stitches, in a hand so small that she had to bend to read it. Footnotes matter, said the hem, over and over, in a spiral of thread, from one side of the skirt to the other.

"We thought you'd like it," said the eldest Miss Ketteridge, who was fifty and had a squint, and turned the color of a beet.

"I love it," said Tamsin, and was obliged to blow her nose.

Now she stood at the window of the room with her hair brushed and braided and pinned up in a coil at the back of her head, in the pale light of an early spring morning, and watched the city fill with people.

…

It was the first day of April, and the Silverwater was in flood.

It was a joyous, brimming, bright-brown flood, swollen with snowmelt from the hills, and it ran under the bridges of Highmark with a happy roar. The quays were lined with crowds. She could see them from here, down the long slope of the lawns and across the wall of the park, a dark moving smear along the embankment and over the Bridge of the Founders and up the avenues toward the Square. They had been coming since dawn. They had come by train from the Hollows, and by steamboat from the Bayou, and by wagon and on foot from the Prairie villages, and the Old Quarter had turned out in its Sunday best. Banners hung from the windows of every house along the river. Not golden ones. They were green and white, the colors of the new Commonwealth, with a small sprig of leaves in the corner that Finch had designed, and they snapped and bellied in the wind like the sails of a fleet.

She was terrified. She had been terrified for six weeks. She had learned to carry it as one carries a stone in a shoe, by walking on the other foot, and she was good at it by now. But she looked at the crowd and at the green banners and at the clean brown glittering river, and her stomach turned over, and she put her hand flat against the cold window glass and breathed.

"Is it time?" said Lila, from the door.

The girl was dressed in white. It was a simple white dress with a green sash, and she had a wreath of white hawthorn on her black hair, and her eyes were bright and enormous. She had been up since five. She had carried the rag doll through the whole of the morning's preparations with the air of a diplomat bearing a treaty, and she held it now against her chest, with its button eyes pointed solemnly at Tamsin.

"Not quite yet," said Tamsin, "but in a quarter of an hour."

"Are you frightened?"

"I am very frightened indeed."

"I am too." Lila crossed the room and put her small cold hand in Tamsin's. "Soren said that it is all right to be frightened, if you do the thing anyway. He said that it is the only kind of brave there is."

"He is quite right," said Tamsin. "I wish that he had told me before I got into this."

…

The Square was a sea.

She had never imagined so many people. They filled the great paved oval from the river wall to the steps of the old Council House, forty thousand of them, perhaps fifty, packed so tightly that those at the front stood on tiptoe and those at the back climbed lamp-posts. She came down the long avenue from Vandermere on foot, at Lila's side, between two lines of the new Honor Guard in their plain gray tunics. The crowd parted before her. It did not cheer. It did something else, which she had not expected and would remember for the rest of her life: it fell silent, ahead of her, row by row, as the people nearest saw her coming, so that a hush traveled out across the Square like the circle that spreads on a pond.

They were mixed together.

That was what she saw first, and what undid her. There was no line. She had expected one, a Gilded side and a Rootkin side, a wary gap between. But they stood all jumbled up, shoulder to shoulder, like peas in a pod. A collier in a patched cap had a lady in sable at his elbow. A grandmother in a Bayou shawl held a small gold-eyed boy up on her hip so that he could see over a banker's hat. A pair of old Gilded gentlemen in frock coats, who looked as though they had not been outside their clubs in a decade, stood next to a girl of ten from the Wards in a charity pinafore, who was looking up at them with frank curiosity. Nobody was talking. Nobody was touching, much, but nobody was leaving a gap. And at the edge of the crowd, near the Council House steps, a knot of men in dark coats and cold expressions, with white rosettes in their lapels, stood with their arms folded in a tight, hostile, motionless clump.

The Pure Light, she thought. Well, they came, at any rate.

She saw Lord Pembroke Vane among them, upright and unsmiling. He met her eyes across forty yards. He did not bow. But he did not look away, either, and after a moment he gave a slight, curt, grudging nod, the nod of a man acknowledging an opponent who has fought clean, and she thought that it might be the beginning of something.

…

They had built the platform on the river wall.

It was a plain structure of unvarnished planks, raised six steps above the paving, with a bench at the back and a rail across the front, and it looked out over the Silverwater where it curved beneath the Bridge of the Founders. There was no throne. There was no canopy and no cloth of gold. There was only a table in the middle, covered with a white linen cloth, and on the table stood a stoneware jug and a single dented gray cup.

She stopped in front of it, and her breath caught.

She knew that cup. She would have known it in the dark. It was the cheap tin mug from the scullery of Vandermere Hall, the one that had stood on the lowest shelf, the one that the Rules for Blighted Staff had set apart. It had a chip in the enamel at the rim and a long scratch down the side, and there was a faded stain at the bottom that no scouring had ever removed. She had drunk from it every day for four months, in the kitchen, with the cook's red arms working at the range, and had hated it, and had been grateful for it, and it had been in all that time the one object in the great house that she could call her own.

"I asked for it," said a gruff voice at her elbow. "I hope you do not mind."

It was the cook. She stood at the foot of the platform steps in her Sunday black, a stout, weather-beaten woman with forearms like hams, twisting her apron in her hands. Her eyes were red. Behind her, in a row, in their best uniforms, stood the whole household of Vandermere: the footmen and the scullery maids, the grooms, the laundresses, and at the end, rigid as a ramrod in a gown of black bombazine, with her great ring of keys at her waist and her mouth pressed into a line, Mrs. Prudence Halloway.

"I thought it would be right," said the cook. "That is all. I thought you would want the one that was yours."

"Thank you for keeping it," said Tamsin. "I had not dared to hope that it would still be there."

"It's been on the shelf the whole time, miss. I never let anyone put it away." The cook sniffed hard. "Go on up now, because they are all waiting for you."

Tamsin glanced along the row of the household. Mrs. Halloway had not moved. She stood with her back like a rod and her face as stony as ever, and her eyes met Tamsin's for a long moment. Then, with an air of enormous effort, as of a ship executing a turn, the housekeeper of Vandermere inclined her head by perhaps half an inch.

It was, Tamsin judged, the most extreme gesture of respect of which the lady was capable. She returned it with the full depth of a curtsy.

…

The crown was brought on a cushion of plain gray wool.

Finch carried it. He walked up the platform steps with a stately care, in his best plum waistcoat, which had been cleaned and mended, and with his round face shining like a polished apple, carrying the cushion in front of him at arm's length as though it might go off. His white hair stood up like a dandelion clock. He did not look at her. He was concentrating very hard on not tripping. Granny Odell came behind him on Jonah's arm, a small black-shawled figure with her stick, and took her place at the side of the platform without a word. And Tamsin, looking at the cushion, forgot the Square, and the crowd, and her own heart, and only stared.

It was not gold.

It was a ring of thorns. It was a plain circlet about the width of her two hands, braided out of strips of dark iron and the long supple roots of bloodroot, twisted together in a rope and bent in a loop, and where the roots crossed, they had been left to leaf. Tiny fresh shoots of the palest green sprang from the braid at intervals, with here and there a single white flower no bigger than a thumbnail. The iron had been taken from the broken chains of the Cistern. She knew it at once by the dull gleam of the old copper rivets. And the roots had been cut that morning, from the bank of Marrow Creek, from beside a young willow where a small green sapling was already standing a hand high out of the mud.

"We made it between us," said Granny gruffly. "The Archivist did the iron. He's a better smith than you'd think. I did the roots. It took us three nights."

"It is the most beautiful thing that I have ever seen."

"It is a bit prickly," said Granny. "I would not wear it to church."

…

Lord Ashcombe read the oath.

He stood at the front of the platform in his provincial broadcloth with a paper in his thick hand, and his gruff Prairie voice carried to the farthest edge of the crowd, rolling across the heads of fifty thousand listeners in the clear April air. She repeated it after him, line by line, clause by clause, and heard her own voice, thin at first and then stronger, ring out over the water.

"I, Tamsin Reed, chosen by the Convention of the Provinces to be the first sovereign of the Commonwealth, do solemnly swear that I will keep and defend the Equal Charter of this country, and will not suffer it to be altered save by the lawful vote of those whom it governs.

"I swear that I will read what I sign, and that I will not sign what I have not read.

"I swear that I will answer any question that is put to me honestly, and that if I do not know the answer I will say so, and go and find it, and come back.

"I swear that I will keep no secret that the people have a right to know, and will publish my accounts, and my letters, and the reasons for my decisions, to any who ask to see them.

"I swear that I will not set one people above another because of the color of their eyes, or the name of their house, or the blood in their veins, and that I will count it the first duty of my office to see that no one is ever again poured into a well.

"And I swear that I will lay down this crown when the Convention bids me, without complaint, and walk out of the door of my own accord, and go home."

A sound went through the crowd at that, a low rumbling murmur that was half a laugh. She saw Silas Garrow in the front row slap his cap against his knee. She saw an old Bayou woman wipe her eyes.

"Now the cup," said Ashcombe softly.

…

Lila lifted the crown.

She stood on the top step in her white dress and her wreath of hawthorn, with the iron-and-root circlet held up in both hands, and her green eyes shining. She was not tall enough to reach, and Tamsin knelt on the planks of the platform so that the child could set it on her head. It was lighter than she had thought. The thorns pricked at her scalp, very gently, and the cool living leaves brushed her temples, and she felt the roots settle into her hair as if they had always belonged there. They were warm. A faint green hum ran down through her skull and into her spine, and the half-withered thread of power that had lain so faint in her since the Cathedral stirred, and drew breath, and lifted its head.

"Rise now, Tamsin Reed, first of the Commonwealth," said Lila, in a clear piping voice.

She rose to her feet.

The cheer that went up from the Square was not like any sound she had ever heard. It began far away, at the edge of the crowd, and rolled in, wave on wave, until the whole city was roaring. It shook the planks beneath her feet. It rose from fifty thousand throats, the deep rough voices of the miners and the high clear voices of the Gilded ladies and the sweet cracked voices of the old women of the Bayou, and under it all, she realized, was singing. They were singing the Rooting Song. They were singing it in a hundred harmonies, none of them quite in tune, with a joy so great that it seemed to come up through the stones.

She turned to the table.

The cook had poured the jug. The gray cup stood full, with the clear water brimming at the chipped rim, and she picked it up with both hands. It was cold. It smelled of snow and moss and stone. She looked out over the Square, over the sea of mixed and shining faces, and beyond them to the river rolling bright and brown beneath the old bridge, and she lifted the cup high, so that every person in that great crowd could see the dull gleam of the tin.

"I do not rule over the water," said Tamsin Reed, in a voice that shook, and rang, and carried to the far wall of the Square. "I answer to it."

She drank deeply.

It was the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. It was clean, and cold, and tasted faintly of earth, and as it went down she felt the whole river in her, the long bright thread of it from the willow spring to the sea, the minnows in the shallows and the children in the creek and the brown fast flood under the bridge, and she thought, there, Agnes, it is exactly as you said. The tears ran down her cheeks. She did not wipe them. She set the cup down, and the crowd roared again, and she let it.

…

She saw him when she turned.

He was standing at the foot of the platform steps, in the front rank of the crowd, a little apart from the others. He was not in the uniform of the Honor Guard, nor in black velvet, nor in any of the silks and gold braid of his old station. He wore a plain black suit of good wool, without a medal or a stripe, with a white shirt open at the collar and no cravat. His hair was too long. His hands were bare. Both of them, she noticed, bare, the left as well as the right; he had left off the glove sometime in the past six weeks and she had not marked the moment. They hung open at his sides, scarred and pale and callused, and the sun lay on them.

He had given up the title of Duke on the day after the Convention. He had signed it away in the presence of a notary, and the lands with it, and Vandermere had been made over to a trust for the Commonwealth. He lived now in two rooms on the third floor of the Hall, which he had chosen himself, and his only possession was a trunk of his mother's books. She had never seen him look so entirely at ease.

Dorian stood in the front row beside him, resplendent in the gray tunic of the Honor Guard Commander, grinning like a lunatic. Jonah was tall at his other side, taller by a hand than he had been at Midwinter, bronzed and straight-backed and breathing easily. Finch had come down the steps and was mopping his forehead. Granny stood on the platform with her chin lifted and tears running unashamedly down her seamed brown cheeks.

And Soren came up the steps.

He came up slowly, one at a time, with his eyes on her face, and the cheering faltered around him as the people nearest saw what he was doing, and fell away into an expectant hush. He crossed the platform. He stopped in front of her. And, to the astonishment of fifty thousand people, he went down on one knee on the rough planks, in his plain suit, in the sun, and took something from his pocket.

…

It was a ring.

It was a thin plain band of dull silver, without a stone, without a crest, without any ornament at all. He held it up between finger and thumb. She saw that it was very slightly uneven, as if it had been made by a hand more used to a hammer than a jeweler's tool, and it caught the light with a soft, humble, workmanlike gleam.

"It was the Aldridge signet," said Soren. His voice was low, but the Square was so quiet that she knew they could hear it at the back. "The one that my father wore, and his father, and every man in my line since Edmund. I took it to a smith in the Old Quarter last week. He asked me if I was sure." The corner of his mouth lifted. "I told him it was the only honest use I could think of."

She could not speak.

"I have told you a number of things in the past few months," he went on. "I have told you that I was afraid, and that I was sorry, and that I would rather lose an empire than live one day without you. I think that all of them were true. But I do not think that I have ever asked you anything, because I was so accustomed to giving orders that I had forgotten how." He drew a breath. "So I am asking now, in front of everyone, since you made me promise to be honest. Will you let me stand beside you for the rest of my life?"

The silence in the Square was absolute.

She looked down at him. She looked at the shabby suit and the bare hands and the long, tired, dear, exasperating face, and she thought of a tall man in black gloves on a balcony, looking down at a girl in a shabby coat on the day she arrived, and not knowing that he was looking at the rest of his life. She thought of a cold cup of tea. She thought of all the things she might say, all the lovely and eloquent and inadequate answers.

Then she smiled, through her tears, and lifted one eyebrow.

"Footnotes matter, Soren," said Tamsin. "Ask me again properly."

For an instant he stared at her. Then his face cracked. He threw back his head and laughed, a great ringing helpless shout of laughter that rolled out over the water, and the crowd, which had been holding its breath, let go of it all in a roar of delight. He was still laughing as he took her hand, her left hand, with the bandaged wrist, and bent his head over it.

"Tamsin Reed," said Soren, wiping his eyes with his free hand, and his voice cracked with merriment and with something deeper. "Sovereign of the Commonwealth, scholar of Marrow Creek, and the only woman in the Dominion who has ever refused to marry me twice. Will you do me the very great honor of becoming my wife?"

"Yes, I will," said Tamsin, "and I will do it gladly."