The Crown-Shard Reward

Among the warrants and cart-masters' offers nailed up at the Parchmarket in Caldmere, one notice has outlasted all the rest. It is renewed on the first day of each month in a fair clerk's hand, the old sheet taken down and burned, the new one sealed with a notary's mark that has worn faint with eleven years of stamping. The archive sets it down here in full.

TO ALL WHO READ THIS. The Crown is broken but not ended. Any person who brings to Master Oswin Prall, notary, late of the Halls of Record, true and provable news of any shard of the Sundered Crown of Varrow — its place, its keeper, or its likeness set down faithfully — shall have TWO HUNDRED GOLD MARKS, and FIVE HUNDRED for a shard delivered and verified. No questions asked of honest finders. Let it be known that gilded forgeries are death to their makers and sorrow to their bringers, and that this notice stands until the Crown returns or I do not. One condition: he who claims must not publish where he searched, for the peace of the realm.

The man behind it, Master Oswin Prall, is a retired notary of the Halls of Record and a declared man of the Crown-men, which is to say he holds that no succession in Varrow is lawful until the shards of the imperial crown are found and the circle closed again.

What the archive knows

Of the Crown itself the record is thin and quarrelsome. It was old gold of the first emperors, set about with river-pearls, and it sat upon the heads of emperors only in the days before the fall: it was broken on the Sundering Night, three hundred and twelve years past, and no head has worn it since. What broke it, accounts dispute. Preceptor Corvin Hale, whose history is the most-copied and most-disputed, says it burst apart upon the high altar as the Cathedral of the Hymns fell. A sexton's fragment, written in shaking ink, says it was found whole among the ruin and broken afterwards, in panic, by men who feared it. The chroniclers of the Pale Choir say it was never a crown at all but a closed circle that kept something shut — a phrase the archive records without endorsing.

Where the pieces went, no record holds. The Regency Council pays lip-service to the search and funds none; the treasury's arrears fall first to soldiers and second to bakers, and never yet to treasure-hunters. Three times in the last century a 'recovered shard' has been brought up the river to Caldmere, and three times it has been exposed as gilded forgery — the last of the Thornwick forgeries, in 289 AS, cost a goldsmith of Thornwick his hands. Since then the price of claiming has been known, and the Crown-men's reward notices, of which Prall's is the longest-lived, have drawn fewer fools and more quiet men.

It is the quiet men the archive notes. Prall's condition — that a claimant must not publish where he searched — was not in the first year's notices. It appears from the third year onward, after, the clerks say, a claimant came to him in winter, spoke at length behind a locked door, took no money, and left Caldmere by the Amber Gate before dawn. What was said, Prall has never repeated, and the archive has no record of the man's name.

Rumours

Collectors' rumours persist, as they do around anything the law has failed to find. A pearl-set curve of old gold is said to have been seen in a League vault at Saverra, pledged against a loan and never redeemed; the House of Morel declines all questions on the matter, which some take as confirmation and others as good banking. A country family of no account, House Verrick of the western marches, is said to keep a 'luck-stone' that cuts glass and has cut it for four generations; the Verricks show it to no one and are polite about it, which in the marches is understood as a wall.

Stranger is the report that Osmund Rill, the sole survivor of the 271 AS expedition into the Glassmere, was asked by a Crown-man what lay at the waste's heart and would not name it — though Rill by then had lost nine days and more besides, and his silences are many and not all of them meaningful. A servant of the Seventh Circle, pressed at Ostrovane, is said to have answered only that a broken circle gathers its own pieces, which the archive records as it was told: third hand, over wine.

The archive's own position is the dull one. Everyone who claims a piece of the Sundered Crown, claims it quietly. Whether that is the mark of fear, of guilt, or of a thing that prefers not to be found, this record does not presume to say. Prall's notice stands. The two hundred marks stand with it. As of this entry, no one has collected.