While the Bell Speaks

The crown's surveyors arrive at Harrowmere Keep at dawn, with ledgers and iron bars, to take inventory of a castle whose king died a month ago. You are the keep's last page, and tonight is midsummer's eve — the one night a year the old king ever entered the throne room, which he barred with his own hands the night Queen Maren died, thirty years past. No one has told you what to do. Only that tomorrow, men who never knew him will open those doors their way.