The Chernagor Pirates

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Not for the first time—not for the hundredth, either—King Lanius wondered what it would be like to rule Avornis. His ancestors for a dozen generations had been kings. They’d ruled. He, on the other hand…

He, on the other hand, sighed and went on poking through the royal archives. Avornis was a proud and ancient kingdom. That meant it had been accumulating scrolls and codices and sheets of parchment and the occasional (often broken) potsherd for centuries. Lanius, fascinated by history, dug through them as eagerly as a miner went after a rich vein of gold.

The King—well, one of the Kings—of Avornis looked more like a scholar than a ruler. He was a tall, thin, weedy man in his midtwenties, with dark brown hair that needed combing and a beard with a chunk of dust in it down low on his right cheek where he couldn’t see it and flick it away. Instead of royal robes, he wore an ordinary—in fact, rather grubby—linen tunic and baggy wool trousers. The servants had complained that he always came back from the archives covered in dust and dirt, and that robes so smirched were impossible to clean. Lanius didn’t like to cause people trouble when he didn’t have to.

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