The Crimson Ring Dynasty

The Crimson Ring Calendar is the only reckoning current in this dynasty. Land deeds, tax registers, boundary stones, epitaphs — anything that must be set down on paper or in stone is counted from the year of the founding. This year is Crimson Ring Year 1218, and the twelfth king sits upon the throne. The year is divided into 12 months, counted from Cold Month through to End Month, and the exile boundary stone in the northern snows uses the same set of month-names as a tax notice in the capital — that fact is itself the proof that the dynasty still stands.

Here magic is called cursed blood. It runs in the bloodlines of the seven great noble houses; its potency is held up by marriage, its excesses restrained by oath, and the balance among the seven bloodlines regulated by the Crimson Ring Crown at the center of the capital. Commoners have no cursed blood. A man with no house may see cursed blood only a few times in his whole life, and most often at a city gate — where a guard taps a small metal rod lightly against the newcomer's chest and listens for whether anything sounds within. Blood that has run out of the houses must be registered before its bearer is let into the city.

The rules of the dynasty are known together as dynastic custom. There is no master volume of it; it lies scattered through the handwritten copies of the rite-officials, the ancestral-hall books of the several houses, and the sheets of regulation kept in the gate-houses. One and the same article of custom is cited one way by a rite-official, another way by a house steward, another way by a gate clerk, and every one of them can produce a source, and not one of them can be refuted. Above the gate-arch of the South Gate of Graycrown is carved the first line of the founding oath; the wind has ground at it for centuries, and now only the words Crimson Ring can still be made out. Of the second line six characters remain: seven rings stand together, the kingly way. As for where the rest has gone, the rite-officials say it was the wind, and the wanderers on the highroad say it was chiseled away. Neither account has ever been looked into.

From the founding until now, this order has turned like a bronze vessel long in use: noble rites, bloodline marriages, the crowning of kings, year after year along the same course. Yet in the Solstice Month of this year, the heirs of the capital began to die one after another. What the court announced was one man, the second son of House Duskcandle; what the caravans returning north counted among themselves was 4, all inside the same month. The houses accuse one another, and whom they accuse depends on what wine which house head drank the night before.