Bram didn't sit. He crossed straight to the window behind the desk and braced both hands on the sill, looking out at the Landing spread down the slope — the cobbled streets, the market, and the long view of all of the fields stretched out to the woodline — and let a long breath out through his nose.
"That's a fine view," he said as he drained his cup.
"It gets better from the roof." Harold set the stone down on his desk where he could see it.
Hargen came in last and dropped his keg onto the other corner with a thunk that jumped the inkpots, drove the tap in with the heel of his palm, and started filling cups before anyone had asked him to. He pushed the first one across the desk to Margaret.
She took it hesitantly as she watched Harold gently nod to her. "Thank you."
Thessa had drifted to the far wall on her own. She put her palm flat against the stone, and her beard swung gently as she continued to examine the keep.
Hargen worked down the cups, and on his way around with the last of them, his eye snagged on the dark heap of plate stacked against the side wall — the Thresher King's scale armor, still where Harold had stripped it off and stacked it after the trial. He stopped. He set Harold's cup down on the desk without looking at it, crossed the room, and ran a broad soot-stained hand down the breastplate, following the overlap of the scale, and grunted. “Decent,” he said. He picked up the sword leaning against the pile, turned it once in the light, set the flat against his knee, and leaned into it to watch the blade bow.
Harold caught Bram's eye and raised an eyebrow.
Bram lifted a hand off the sill. "Our folk can be single-minded about their passions. He means nothing by it."
"I've noticed." Harold took a pull off his cup. "There's a reason everyone loves or hates dwarves."
Hargen leaned on the blade a second time, harder, watching the steel curve — and it let go with a crack that snapped both halves apart and sent the point skittering across the floorboards under the desk. He looked at the stub left in his hand, grunted, and dropped it on the heap with the armor.
"See. Brittle."
Bram came up off the sill. "Hargen—"
Harold looked at the two pieces of his sword on the floor of his office, shocked. That was a system-forged blade.
"Bah." Hargen waved a hand at the wreck of it before either of them got going. "Worry not, Lord Count. I'll make ye a better blade than that trash ever was. Scale's a waste on an edge — pretty, holds nothing, you saw." He nudged the broken half with the toe of his boot. "You've more of the beastie left? Bones, the spurs, teeth or claws would be better. Whatever you didn't render down? Bring me those, and I'll make you something proper."
Bram crossed the room in three strides and cuffed him across the back of the head hard enough to rock him forward a step. "This. This right here is why we got run out of three holds and a free city, you soot-brained — you do not walk into a man's house and break his things—"
"The blade was shite, Bram." Hargen rubbed the back of his head, unbothered, and looked back at Harold. "I did him a kindness. He'd have died on the thing the first time it met real armor."
Margaret tried to conceal a cough in her cup.
Harold crouched, picked up the two halves, and weighed one in each hand for a moment, then sighed. "It was a good sword," he told the room.
"It was a wall decoration," Hargen said.
"Right." Harold pressed two fingers against the bridge of his nose, breathed once, and put his hands flat on the desk. "Before anyone redecorates further—" he looked up at Bram "—let's talk about where I'm putting a thousand dwarves."
Bram was still on his feet, and he gave Hargen one more flat look that promised a longer conversation later before he turned back to the desk.
Harold tipped his cup toward Margaret. "This is Margaret. One of my advisors. She'll be sitting in."
Margaret inclined her head to the three of them and took a small sip of her beer, and said nothing.
Bram grunted an acknowledgment and eyed the chair across the desk. It came up past his belt. He set one hand flat on the seat, gave a short hop that got him most of the way, hauled the rest, and landed square — then settled back into it.
Thessa waved a hand at the lot of them without turning from the wall. “Go on, don't mind me,” and she went back to running her fingers down a seam in the stone.
Hargen had drifted to the window with his cup. He was halfway through a pull when a shape the size of a hay wagon dropped past the glass on a downstroke of wings, and he came off his feet backward — beer one way, dwarf the other — and fetched up against the bookshelf with both palms flat against it.
"By Brokkun's hammer—what in the deep was that—"
Harold didn't trouble himself to hide the laugh. "Don't worry about the eagles. We've got them under control." He waggled his hand. "For the most part. They're part of our budding air force."
Hargen stayed pressed to the shelf, watching the window fearfully.
Bram hmm'd into his beard. "Dwarves and the sky don't sit well together, lad. We've history with the things that come out of it." He drank. "Dragons, mostly. None of it the kind ye tell at a wedding."
"Then let's talk about the part that does sit well." Harold set his cup down. "We had a deal. I bring the Gemheart stone back, you bring your clan here and throw in with what I'm building. An enclave of dwarves moves everything I've got planned forward by years, and I don't say that to flatter you — the deep folk are the best smiths and builders on the continent." He glanced at the two halves of his sword on the desk and back at Bram. "Some of you seem determined to prove it. And if I've understood your clan right, yours is one of the unusual ones."
Thessa's head came off the wall for the first time. "Damned right we are." She said it like a fact about the weather. "There's not a clan over the ground or under it that shapes stone the way Gemheart does. And that's without our heart." She put her palm back against the keep wall and went quiet again.
Margaret turned her cup a slow quarter-turn on the desk. "Unusual how, Master Ironhold? You'll forgive the question. A thousand armed dwarves stepped onto a hillside this afternoon, and my lord is being asked to accept an oath on the strength of a handshake." Her voice stayed level. "What does the Gemheart clan expect from swearing to a human count that the holds who turned you out couldn't have given you?"
Bram took a long pull and rested the cup on his knee. "Lord Harold promised us land we could make our own under his banner. The holds that turned us out wanted our hammers and grudged us the mouths we came with. Your count went and pulled our heart out of our Hold when we couldn't do it ourselves, and no one else would risk it." He shrugged. "We don't forget a debt that size, lass. It's not a thing we know how to do."
Margaret watched him through it and took another sip, slower than the last, and set the cup down without comment.
Bram drank again and nodded into it. "So. In exchange for the stone, me and mine swear to you. I don't think ye grasp yet what it is for a clan to walk the world without its heart, sunny." His thumb worked the rim of the cup. "Ours least of any. Or what it means for the Gemheart to be in the world again."
The other two had gone still. Thessa had her hand flat on the wall and her eyes on the stone sitting on the desk, and Hargen had come off the bookshelf to stand near it without seeming to decide to.
Margaret set her cup down and caught Harold's eye across the desk, and gave him the smallest nod.
Harold turned the stone over once under his fingers, watched the green move in it, and looked back up at Bram.
"Why don't you explain it to me?"
Bram set his cup down on the desk and left it there. The grin had gone out of his face, and he looked at the stone for a long moment before he looked at Harold, and when he spoke his voice had dropped.
"What I'm about to tell ye, no dwarf tells an outsider. Not a human, not an elf, not the other races of the deep." He set his broad hands flat on his knees. "So hold it close. Or you will have all of dwarfdom at war with you."
"And gladly too," Hargen said from over by the stone, without heat.
"The Gemheart's not a relic, sunny. Not the way your kind means the word." Bram tipped his chin at it. "It's our heart. I mean that the way I'd mean my own, beating in my own chest."
Harold turned the stone a slow half-turn under his fingers and waited.
"In the first days — before the holds, before there were clans to fight over anything — the gods made the first of us," Bram's eyes glazed over as he recited an old tale. "The whole pantheon, all their hands in the same earth, and they shaped him out of the bones of the world. He walked. He delved. Then…he died, and his name went into the dark with him. Not one dwarf alive knows it." His thumb found the rim of the cup he'd set down. "But his body stayed. The gods don't make a thing twice. So when he fell, every clan there was went to war over what he left behind."
"War over a corpse," Harold said.
"Over a corpse." Bram's mouth pulled flat. "Every clan you've heard of and a couple dozen ye haven't, bleeding into the deep over the pieces of one dead god-made dwarf. When the killing was done, the clans that were still standing each carried off a part of him." He looked at the desk. "We carried off his heart. Gemheart. That stone you've been turning over in your fingers like a worry-stone, Count — that's the first dwarf's heart, and it's been beating under our hold since before your people worked out how to bank a fire. And the gods cursed and blessed us for it. Binding us all to the pieces of their first child we carried off."
Harold's thumb stopped on the stone. This was more insight into dwarven history than he had ever heard before.
"Every Gemheart that's ever drawn breath was bound to it the day they came out screaming," Bram went on. "You're born, the heart knows ye, and ye carry it the rest of your life — a thrum, down low, like a forge running in the room next door that never goes cold." He pressed a fist against his own breastbone. "We lost the hold three hundred years gone. Three hundred years, lad. Not one of us bound. Not a single child born to the heart in all that time." The fist began beating his chest in time with the pulses from the stone. "And here I sit with the thing six feet off, and I can feel it thrumming in time with me again."
Thessa hadn't moved from the wall, but her hand had come away from the stone of it, and both her eyes were on the multicolored hue on the desk.
"Without it, we go back the way the founder went. Into the earth." Bram said it painfully. "Every year fewer of us are born. Every year, the ones still walking feel a little less — less fire, less wanting to cut a thing just for the joy of seeing it cut true. A Gemheart with no heart forgets how to dream up the next stone." He shook his head once. "Another couple of hundred years and there's no clan left to speak of. Just dwarves who used to be Gemheart, going quiet, one after another, till the last of us lies down and doesn't trouble to get back up. Our heart cold and lifeless as stone."
He reached over and picked his cup back up, drank, and didn't seem to taste it.
"It runs differently for each clan, mind. Every clan took a different piece of him, and every clan carries a different curse when its piece goes missing. The Stonefist took his hands." He turned the cup in his fingers. "They lose their relic, they lose the feeling in their own — fingers first, then up the arm, dead to the elbow inside a few generations. Picture that, Count. A dwarf who can't feel the stone he's set his whole life to working on. Can't feel the haft of his hammer. Can't feel his wife's face when he cups it." His jaw worked. "That's not dying. That's worse than dying."
The room had gone quiet, the three dwarves still in a way they hadn't been since they walked in, and even Margaret had stopped turning her cup.
Bram set one blunt finger down on the desk beside the stone, close, not touching it.
"So when I tell ye the Gemheart is everything to us, sunny, I'm not reaching for a pretty word." He looked up, and there was nothing sly left in his face. "It's the whole of what we are. The ones that came before, and the ones not born yet, you aren't giving us a pretty rock. You are saving the lives of my clan."
Harold nodded once. He picked the stone up off the desk, came up out of his chair, and walked around the side of it toward Bram.
The dwarf was already on his feet. He'd come off the tall chair without anyone catching him do it, and he stood square with his eyes fixed on the stone in Harold's hand, fever-bright, tracking it the way a starving man tracks a full plate carried past him.
Harold stopped in front of him and looked down, and for half a breath he looked at Margaret instead.
She met his eye and gave him the smallest nod. True, all of it.
He looked back to Bram. The other two had gone still as fenceposts — Thessa off the wall entirely now, Hargen a step from the desk — both of them staring at the stone, then at Harold, then at their clan head, and back again.
Harold smiled. "Have your heart back, then."
He put the stone into Bram's hands.
Light came up out of it the instant Bram's fingers closed — not one color but every color a gem could throw, white at the heart of it, spilling up his arms and across his chest and out into the room until the lamps were nothing at all against it. Bram's breath left him in a ragged shout. His hand flew to his chest, his knees buckled, and he folded down toward the floor with both arms wrapped around the stone like a man shielding a coal from the wind, and the sound he made was half a groan and half a word in no language Harold knew.
Thessa went down beside him without a cry. Hargen reached for the edge of the desk, missed it, and dropped to one knee with his fist twisted into his own shirt over his heart.
Harold went down with Bram, got an arm under the dwarf's shoulder, and took the weight. "Bram. Bram."
"It's—" Bram dragged the word up out of his chest. His eyes were streaming and he didn't appear to know it. "Three hundred years, lad. Three hundred years and it's a forge lit cold and roaring all in the one breath—" He got a palm flat to the floor and shoved, Harold hauled, and between them they brought him up onto his feet, swaying, the stone clutched to his ribs and the light settling down out of the air now, sinking back into the gem until it only pulsed — slow, steady, in time with the fist still pressed over his heart.
The door banged off the wall hard enough to jump the window in its frame.
"Harold!" Josh had one hand on the doorframe and the other thrown back the way he'd come, and there was no joke anywhere on him. "Harold, the dwarves — outside — they all just went down. All of them at once, the whole hill, every last one—"
Bram started to laugh through the streaming of his eyes, low and wrecked and helpless with it, his fist still pressed to his chest.
And then the words came down across the world, in front of every set of eyes that drew breath beneath the system — every soul in the Landing and far past it, every elf in their forests and every ork on the water, every dwarf lying face-down and weeping on a hillside that had been bare grass an hour before:
World Notification!
Humanity has achieved a significant milestone!
During a Lord's trial, a Human Lord has changed history and saved a lost clan of dwarven royalty.
The Gemheart Clan is returned to their rightful place to lead Dwarven kind again! If they can earn it.
Humanity has earned a boon!
Harold read it once, and then again. His eyes read the words and went to the dwarf swaying against his arm — to the multicolored heart pulsing at his chest, to the tears he hadn't wiped, to the single word hanging in the air over both of them.
Royalty.
"Bram," Harold said. "Is there something you neglected to mention?"