High House

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 1

This is the first chapter of The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.

When Alsbet was a girl, her hair was fair and she rode horses.

She had long legs from her mother's family, and she learned early how to guide the ponies and geldings of her father’s stables through the meadows near High House, the summer residence of the imperial family.

The house nestled amid the southern spur of the Guardian Mountains, looking down across the narrow, tree-girt ravines to where the glittering band of the River Mersana snaked its long way southward to the sea. From this perch, if Alsbet rose early enough and rode out to where the meadows fell away into spills of dark stone and conifers, she could watch the sunrise flood the ravines and the river and the lower, darker hills to the west — light gathering like wine eastward behind the white-crowned mountains and then brimming over, while hawks circled against the sudden blue of the early morning sky.

The princess was the fifth and last of her mother’s children, and one of only three who survived infancy; her sisters Elfretha and Megwen slept in the crypt beneath the Castle in Rendale, beside what would one day be her father’s tomb.

Alsbet was born into the snow and wind of a Rendale winter, after a long labor that began in the same hour as the season’s first and fiercest storm. Autumn had lingered late that year, with warm days and light frosts all the way to Winter’s Eve, and the old women of the Castle murmured that it was a good omen for the coming child.

But then a blizzard of ice and sleet came down from the high Guardians, freezing Lake Orison hard enough to ride a legion across the ice, and for two days the Castle lay shrouded in winter, while the winds keened outside and the Queen of Narsil lay groaning within. On the evening that the princess came gasping into the world, pulled from her mother by the knobby hands of a sister of Raphiel, the storm was so fierce that a soldier of the Falconguard froze to death in the snow-curtained Castle courtyard, having lost his way walking from the barracks to the keep.

There was no more talk of omens.      

Yet Alsbet was, in all things, a well-favored child. She was beautiful from the beginning, pink-faced and peaceful as the red sisters wrapped her in blankets and placed her carefully in her mother’s arms, and a priest of Mithriel anointed her with oil while the maidservants dragged the bloody sheets down to be burned. And though she was a child of winter, in her memory she seemed to grow up in perpetual summer, in the mountains with the horses and long days and pleasant servants who tucked in her sheets each morning and fetched her meals and took care of the stables and made sure that everything suited the little princess, her elder brothers Padrec and Elfred, and her mother Bryghaida ar’ap Paegara Montair, once a princess in the Brethon kingdom of Allasyr and now Edmund Montair’s bride and queen.

Seven months out of the year’s nine were spent in the Castle overlooking Rendale. But when the princess recalled her childhood, it was as a succession of golden days high in the mountains.

High House had been raised by Alsbet’s grandfather, the Emperor Cedrec, for his second wife Allara, to be a summer refuge from the harsh stone and close passages of the imperial seat. Since Allara was a Verna of Argosa, with the complexion and hauteur of that family, the house was built in the same Mandoran style as the villas that dotted the empire’s southernmost duchy, with large windows and patios, gilt on the walls and furniture, and a central garden where a fountain splashed three months a year.

There was a shrine at the end of one walkway, dedicated to the Archangel Sarathiel, Argosa’s patron, with a marble altar for the sacrifices; there were mosaics worked by riverland craftsmen throughout the house; there were bowls of rose-scented water placed on plinths outside the bedchambers. On summer afternoons, especially, when the mountain views were hidden behind curtains and the sun warmed the inward courtyards, High House felt almost like a noble’s palace in the river cities, leagues away from the frigid and barbarous north.

But Allara was seven years dead by the time Alsbet came into the world, and her mother’s Brethon informality rather than her step-grandmother’s southern etiquette set the tone in the family’s summer residence. So while in the Castle in Rendale everyone was stiff and proper and treated her as befitted the daughter of their emperor, in the mountains Alsbet seemed to be with friends, even if they were friends who were required to wait upon her if she demanded it.

The cook always had a pleasant word and a trifle for the young princess; the stablemen smoked long pipes that smelled cheery on summer nights while they told tales of noble outlaws and wicked tax collectors; the maids cooed over her hair and clothes and acted suitably shocked at the notion of riding horses.

The other children were her playmates — the cook's boy who accepted the seven-year-old's challenge of a duel when no one else would; Anja the youngest maid, who giggled with her mistress in haylofts late at night; Aeden, the studious older boy training to be a steward, who read her the history of the whole world on summer evenings when the sunset was like the blood of heroes spilled across the sky.     

She even counted the soldiers as her friends — at least those who lived with them. The Queensguard, they called themselves: thirty lucky legionnaires who slept in the House’s west wing and spent their summers galloping about in beautiful country. Patrolling for bandits and assassins, they insisted, as if any such could reach them in this aerie.

Gavian, their broken-nosed captain, often dined with the imperial family, and he would lean across a plate of roast duck — birds taken by his “patrols” — and insist that while the road from Rendale was well guarded, they needed to be careful nonetheless, as determined brigands might scale the peaks and so reach High House. He was so serious, so grim, that Elfred, and Padrec, and Alsbet when she was older, all laughed — and even Bryghaida laughed sometimes, relaxed but with a wry reserve. Scale the peaks! Not for nothing were the mountains called the Guardians.

So the soldiers were friendly, and brought her flowers, and called her the “Lady of the Queensguard,” and sometimes Gavian went riding with her and told her stories of growing up in the great river kingdom of Trans-Mersana, leagues to the south, where the same Mersana that sparkled below them in these mountains was thronged with ships and rafts and barges, so many that hardly a spot of water could be seen.

There was a bridge across the Mersana in his native city of Antiala, the captain of the Queensguard said, and his neighbor's brother had tried to jump from it and drown himself. Five times he had leaped — and each time landed safe on the deck of a passing boat, so thick was the traffic on the water!

“Did he ever kill himself?” the princess asked solemnly, and Gavian laughed.

“No — instead he ran off and joined the army, which was even greater folly!” And he tapped his breastplate and grimaced and then grinned, because it was a joke, of course, and Alsbet laughed as well, a child’s peal in the sweet air.                 

So perhaps it was the liberty and the beauty and the friendly servants that made her remember High House so well. But perhaps it was also the way that tidings of her father's wars always reached them there, in the dispatches that couriers carried up the road from Rendale and the birds that flew to the steward’s aviary and the rumors spread by tradesmen and soldiers and wafted on more mysterious currents still.

One of her earliest memories was of a gleaming day in early summer, and a sweating, dust-stained rider swinging from his saddle with the first report of war in the Brethon kingdoms far away, the news that the army of Capaelya had invaded Allasyr where her mother's elder sister ruled as queen.

Alsbet was only six then, and she huddled behind the servants and watched the messenger spill out his tidings, while her mother seemed to shrink backward toward Gavian’s sturdiness, and her brothers, nine and thirteen, capered about self-importantly.

In her memories later the news was all clear and comprehensible, the exotic words fitted neatly to places and people and the tidings matched to their precise significance. But of course she knew that this was just a trick of the mind, that in reality her child-self had understood nothing save the day’s unexpected weight, the strange effect the news had upon the adults of High House, the sudden rush of shadows across her sunkissed world.

All that tenday there was talk of war, war, in the cool curtained corridors of High House, and on Midsummer’s Eve her father came from Rendale to visit them — but not to wrestle with the boys or read to Alsbet late at night, as in other years. Instead, he rode in with a company of hard-faced men — his chancellor, his council, his cousins Benfred and Alaben, and three lord generals of the legions — and all through the great feast of the Eve they sat and talked of supply lines and buying allegiances and the Tessaer Gap and the Mar Tyogg, while the meats grew cold and the shadows fell on the mosaics and the mosquitoes whined in the high grass beyond the banquet field. As late afternoon slipped into evening and then night and the men went on talking and arguing, Alsbet sensed something like fear in her mother, and huddled up against her on the bench they shared.

During the afternoons thereafter, she sat with Aeden, the young steward-in-training, as he tried to explain to her what the council meant — how Allasyr was the empire’s ally, because of her parents’ marriage, and how that meant that the legions would make war on behalf of her mother’s sister and her throne.

He was of Brethon descent himself, with few memories of his parents (he said) but a facility for the language he had known in infancy, and it was his connection to the lands of her own girlhood — a long narrow face, raven-dark hair, a hint of music in his accent — that had persuaded Bryghaida to pluck him from the gaggle of young scribes in the Castle to serve in High House and tutor her princess, on the language and history of the western lands especially. For a girl of six, that mostly involved retelling Brethon myths and legends and old lays — but now he was suddenly trying to explain dynasties and marriages, old grudges and recent outrages, a blend of mythology and politics that left her captivated and confused.

At last Edmund and those with him departed, the seriousness of their councils giving way to the jingle-jangle excitement of a send-off, and only Benfred Montair remained behind. Her father’s eldest cousin was the Duke of Meringholt, the Montair family’s ancestral seat, and Alsbet was told to call him uncle. He was older than her father and grayer, with the high Montair forehead and a beard that mostly swallowed his thin, unhappy smile. He sat with them at supper for two nights, and talked of small things — the care of his lands, the political gossip from the Heart — in a gloomy, pensive manner that made Alsbet feel strangely sorry for him.

He looks as though he needs to be cheered up, she said to her mother one night, and Bryghaida said his wife died young and he never married again, Alsbet ... we should be kind to him.

Finally, over a meal of pheasants brought back by one of Gavian’s patrols, Benfred announced that he would be riding back to Rendale the next morning, and from there home to Meringholt.

“You would do well to visit us in the summer, cousin,” he told Bryghaida. “The boys were so little when last you came, and Alsbet has never seen her family’s true home. You were far away for the last Stag Tourney — all were sorry for it.”

“I’m sure they were, and I rue it,” the empress said. “But there was fever in the Heart that year, you remember.”     

“I remember, of course. But I would hope that you will come next year. I know it’s hard to leave this place for our humble seat, especially in the hottest months. But it is one of the old duties of the Montairs, to open the tourney, and with Edmund gone ...”

“Will he be gone? You seem certain.”

Benfred prodded carefully at the remains of his dinner. “He will ride this autumn. The legions will ride. If they do not, your sister’s throne would likely not survive the winter.”

“But is it not likely that once we join the war, once they see our resolve, that Agaven will come to terms and make peace?”

“That’s what we all hope for, cousin.” His tone made the hope sound entirely vain.

There was silence for a moment, save for the clink of forks against dishware, and the drone of insects beyond the windows, in the reddening fields.    

“The matter I really mean to raise,” Benfred said, “is not something as light as the Stag Tourney. I’ve been reluctant to speak of it, but since I am leaving with the sun …” He took another drink, and then leaned forward, into the candlelight. “In just a month the legions will ride west to war … a real war, not a border battle or a little flare-up in the north. And in wars …”

“Yes? In wars?” Her mother’s tone was suddenly dangerous, impatient.

“In wars good men often die. Your husband — my cousin is a brave and great commander, and no doubt he can lead us to a victory. But sometimes even the greatest general falls in battle.”

“Mother,” Padrec said then, stirring in his chair, but Bryghaida put an hand on his arm and barked a little laugh, a strange one that Alsbet could not remember hearing.

“So you stayed these extra few days just to warn me that my husband might perish in war, Benfred? Or are you just hoping to frighten the children?”

“The boys are old enough to hear me,” he said, “and your daughter is too young to understand.” His eyes slid away from Alsbet’s as she stared at him. “I’m not trying to frighten anyone. I want to prepare you, that’s all, since we’re not close … since you rarely come to Meringholt, and it has been too many many years and deaths and distance since Edmund and I were boys together.”

“Prepare me for what? For grief and mourning? For the feel of widow’s weeds?”      

“You know what I am about to say. If Edmund falls, then Padrec will need a guardian for the years until he comes of age. The council will approve someone, of course. But approval should be a formality when the emperor has an experienced male relative in waiting.”

“In waiting for what? For him to die?”

The Duke of Meringholt grimaced. “I might have chosen my words better. What I mean to say is that if Edmund dies, I would be named regent. I am certain of it. No other duke would be willing to brook having a rival with that power, and Alaben would not be trusted with it — not that he is not trustworthy, mind, only that a guardian with many sons of his own is regarded … anyway.” He paused, stroked his forehead, and said: “So I would become the head of this house. I would be responsible for you – for all of you. As if I were their father.”

“Our father?” Elfred said. “You’re not our father.”

“Hush, child,” Bryghaida told him.     

“I am not,” Benfred said. “But — well, you must explain it to them. Surely you will. It would be well if you did … only because the future is uncertain. Hopefully it will never come to this. Hopefully my cousin has many years of life left, many full years.”

“Do you hope so?” she said. 

“I hope and pray, cousin  . . . are you insinuating that I do not?”

Bryghaida gave him a measuring stare. “I insinuate nothing. I’m sure that you pray for the emperor’s health as often as I and my children do. And I thank you for reminding us of your willingness to fulfill your duties in these difficult times.”

“Uriel in summer, I don’t see why you are so cold to me, cousin. I will pray that I do not become head of the family. I do not need such difficulties. And I will pray, as I always do, for the emperor.”

He rose abruptly and gestured to Anja, the maidservant hovering in the doorway. “You may clear this now — I’m finished. I think I may leave tonight, rather than in the morning. There is a moon, and the mountain roads will not be too treacherous in the moonlight. Perhaps you could send someone to inform my servants and ready our horses.”

“I could,” Bryghaida said. “I wish you a safe journey to Meringholt. And I hope that we can visit you there soon — in a time of peace.”

Benfred nodded, paused as if he wanted to say more, and then bowed and passed from the room. The boys took up their chatter quickly, while dessert was served and the torches lit outside, but the queen sat silent for a long time as the summer dark rushed in.

Her uncle was right that Alsbet was too young to understand, but still she remembered.

That was the summer that ended with birds winging their way out of the sunset to tell the queen and her children that Edmund the emperor had ridden to the defense of Allasyr, and that he would not escort them back to Rendale’s Castle as he usually did when the leaves began to turn. It was also the last summer that Padrec her brother spent at High House.

Defending Allasyr was a four summers task, and as Alsbet grew older she spent more and more time poring over maps with Aeden, memorizing the places that messengers named as sites of battles between her father's legions and the armies of Capaelya’s King Agaven. The towns and forests of those western lands became more familiar to her than the pointless list of distant capitals and dead emperors and even deader Mandoran high kings that her tutors recited in the Castle, because each name conjured up images of her father planning strategy, of her brother Padrec serving one of the lord generals, of the soldiers that she saw every winter in the streets of the city galloping into battle in alien lands.

The birds and couriers were thick between Rendale and High House those four years, and the dispatches that they brought contained the names that filled the young girl's head — Myrden Hill, where her father turned back five thousand men in a night battle; Tessaer’al Yrgha, the seat of Allasyr's Queen, besieged for a year until Lord General Aengiss mac Cullolen raised the siege; the River Glamduin, where Agaven’s armies were crushed in a week of battle, and his two eldest sons were slain.

These were the first two years of fighting; what followed was a laborious process of gathering in the defeated lands. The citadel of Naesen’yr fell after a siege, and the port of Tyr-in-Aelor surrendered, and then Agaven himself was killed in battle at Kaeyr Gnoth. But his son — realizing, too late, that this was a war for his dynasty’s very survival — fell back into the Mar Tyogg and carried on the fight.

From that haunted wilderness, a better loved prince might have made the war last a decade. But his lieutenants deserted him over the course of a long winter and cold spring, and finally he slipped away across the border into neighboring Bryghala, and thence down the coast into a warm southern exile.

When the prince departed, so did the last good reason for resistance. And so it was that late in summer in the tenth year of Alsbet's life, a horseman arrived at High House with the tidings that Calas Lyr on the Glass Lake had surrendered, that in its ancient hall Daereynt mar’ap Lyr had bent the knee, and that the war was finally ended.

Aeden was fourteen in that year of triumph, and wise enough to understand what the victory won by the emperor in four summers meant. He sat with the princess the next morning while High House rejoiced and drew a ragged line down one of their maps, showing her how Capaelya would be divided between its conquerors.

Where once there had been three Brethon kingdoms, two remained — an Allasyr swollen by victory and Bryghala jutting out into the Westland Sea. But a strip of the vanquished kingdom, up against the eastern edge of the mountains that the Narsils called the Northwest Chain and the Brethon called the Yrgheim, would pass into the empire’s hands. From Naesen'yr to the mines of Braoghein, the eastern marches of Capaelya were the empire’s now. Their lords had either fled or bent the knee to Edmund, the falcon of Narsil flew above their ancestral homes, and in the depopulated countryside legionnaires from Edmund’s armies were laying claim to what their service promised — not just a soldier’s pay but a landowner’s future, in Capaelya’s emptied estates, abandoned orchards, and burnt-out farms.

“Why do you sound so sad?” the princess asked him, warm on the white stone of the patio. “That means we won, Aed, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said softly, “yes, it does.”    

“And someday all of it — it will be Padrec’s, won’t it?”

“Yes. It will belong to your brother, someday, when he is emperor.”

“Aed,” she asked wisely, “is it because your family was from there? Because we’re ruling your people, now?”

“They’re not my people, Princess.”

“That's right,” Alsbet said gaily, “because we adopted you. So you didn’t lose, Aed, you won. You have to be happy.”

He was silent for a moment. “What did I tell you about the Brethons, Princess? What makes them different from the river kingdoms, from the Heart, from most of the rest of the world?”

“Mandor never conquered them,” she said promptly. “They’re the only ones on the whole continent — or the only ones except for maybe the pirates in the north – the High Kings never conquered. The Unvanquished went into the Mar Tyogg, and they never came out. They only went on calling themselves ‘unvanquished’ because nobody ever found out what happened to that army.”

“And don’t you think there’s something a little … a little sad about watching a people that have never been conquered have one of their kingdoms divided up?”

This gave the princess pause, but only for a moment. “But it isn’t all the Brethon who were conquered, Aed. It’s just the wicked king and his kingdom. Allasyr is Brethon too, and they won the war, with us. And” — a gesture at the map — “you said it’s only a part of Capaelya that belongs to us now.”

“I just think that it’s a little sad to see a kingdom disappear. And maybe someday Allasyr and Bryghala will go too, and it will be all empire.”

“That's silly. We saved Allasyr — why would it go? It’s my mother’s kingdom, anyway, our family would not …”

“Saved it?”

“That’s why we fought, isn’t it, to save it from Agaven?”

“Yes, we saved it.” He was speaking without looking at her now. “Saved it for what, though? Saved it so we could have it later, maybe. If it’s half yours, princess, because of your mother the queen, then it’s half Padrec's. And maybe someday your father will decide that it should be all Padrec’s, and the legions will march again. And then Bryghala …”

“So you think that all those kingdoms —” she began, and then stopped as he rose, muttering something apologetic, and walked stiffly away across the patio to where the lawns began.

When he was almost out of sight, heading across the grass toward meadow and mountain and far away river, she rose as well and called out:

“Aed – they wouldn’t be gone, they would just be ours!”

After that came three summers of peace, when her father was with them often, riding with her through the high pastures or swimming in the delightfully cold lake a league west of the House. There were still skirmishes being fought in what had been Capaelya, against scattered marauders for whom rebellion was mostly an excuse for pillage. But Edmund was content to leave the mopping up to his commanders — and to his son, he liked to add, for Padrec still galloped about their Brethon lands as an adjutant for Aengiss mac Cullolen.

“Now there's a man who knows war,” the emperor said one day as they picknicked on a flat rock overlooking a miniature cataract. “They say that old Garent Redfist, in my grandfather’s time, was the greatest general the empire’s ever had — they say that, but I can't imagine anyone matching Aengiss in tactical brilliance. At Kaeyr Gnoth, he was outnumbered ... Agaven had two men for every soldier of his that day, and Aengiss split his forces. Split them!” He laughed, but it was an awestruck laugh, like a man raised in the desert who looks on the ocean and chuckles because he does not believe it and yet there it is.

“My sister said ...” Alsbet's mother began, but he was not done.

“Split them three ways!” he said, and now the desert man was swimming in the impossible ocean. “And when he fell on them from the south, west, and east all at once, it was ... there was ...” He trailed off, his eyes distant.

“My sister wrote to me that she had never seen anything so beautiful as the sight of his army coming to save them — she said it was like a host of angels come to Tessaer’al Yrgha that day.”

“An army of angels,” Edmund said softly. “He would like that, Aengiss would. He thinks that war's the closest a man comes to the heavens while on earth ... if he believes in the Archangels at all. Sometimes I believe that he thinks war better than anything a heaven could have to offer.”

“Is he a better general than you, Da?” Elfred asked. At fourteen, the younger prince was a bundle of ill-fitting parts — legs like spindles, a concave chest, heavy feet and ears that looked like exotic mushrooms sprouting from his yellow hair. His older brother had filled out and gone to war by the time he reached Elfred's age, but Edmund’s second son seemed too fragile for that: He had dizzy spells, slept badly, and when the snows came to the Castle he spent long weeks in bed with a racking cough.

“Mayhap he is, boy. He's never lost a battle that I know of, that’s certain, and I've lost a few. He loves it more than I do, anyway — loves breaking the enemy like so many twigs. If he were in my place, we’d be battering on the gates of Mandor next week, ready to seize the High King's sceptre. Maybe. Or maybe he'd have lost everything, gone too far. Better this way, the way the Archangels set it, with the emperor on the throne, and his general training the heir to that throne. Training him well.”

“And me!” Elfred said sharply. “I’ll be an adjutant alongside Padrec next year. You promised that.”

“Aye, I did.” A shadow passed over the emperor's countenance, which Alsbet remembered later. But for now her brother surged on —

“Padrec and I, we have it worked out. As long as you’re alive, he'll lead the armies and do the conquering, and then when he's emperor and has to rule, I'll take over and finish the work.”

“The work?” His mother smiled tolerantly.

Elfred swept his arms wide, a gesture that took in the whole landscape around them, and made him look like a wobby marionette.

“The whole continent — ours! Even the High Kings never had the whole of it, Da, but we will!”

Later, Alsbet looked back on that day and felt as though the mountains had almost stirred, almost answered her brother’s boasting. Aye, little fellow, we've heard it before. And if you want it, you must be as hard as our stone, as cold as our snow, and as patient as the winds that wear us away. Do you have that in you, little one?

Later still, she decided that the mountains had indeed spoken, and they had been speaking to her.

But that was all in the future, in another of the games that hindsight played. For now Edmund laughed and tossed small pebbles over the lip of their picnic rock into the foam below. “That's fine, lad, but remember ... you have to fight for all of it. You have to fight real men, not just names on a map.”

“Fight and kill,” Bryghaida said softly — softly, but with a prodding edge..

“Aye, and kill. And many — most — that die in war are innocent, lad. That’s what I meant when I said it was better to have a man like Aengiss leading armies than deciding when and where to got to war. You need a better reason than just the love of battle to unsheathe your sword.”

Somehow this condensed a thought that had been floating vapor in Alsbet’s mind.  “Does Aengiss want to be emperor, father?” she said.

Her father's eyebrows climbed. “I think not, my lady! And I hope not as well -- there's only room for one emperor in the north!”

“But there’s no reason why he might think — why he might think he could take the throne?”

“Take it how, girl?” They were all staring at her now.

She shrank down a little. “Well — I thought — didn’t your ever-so-great grandfather” — when Aeden didn’t want to bore her with genealogy, he always said ever-so-great, and it sounded romantic and fairy-tale-ish — “take the throne that way?”

The emperor stared at her. “Which way?”

“Ethelwin?” she mumbled. “And the Emperor Arviragis?”

“Did Master Fenreth teach you that tale?" her mother asked.

Maybe Arviragis and Ethelwin had been on the list of emperors that her tutor in the Castle recited to her, or somewhere in the books that he borrowed from the gray brothers in the library, but Alsbet had no memory of them. “Aeden,” she muttered, abashed now. “It was Aeden.”

“Ah yes, the Brethon lad,” her father said. “How did he come to tell you that story?”

“He loves history," Elfred said, loudly. Elfred and Aeden were close in an age, and neither was particularly fond of the other. “He reads. He's probably read all the books up here, and he’s always thick with Brother Medwen at the Castle library.” He said it as if there could be no greater crime.

“He reads so he can tell me more stories,” Alsbet said.

“I told you he's a clever young man, husband,” Bryghaida said. “A fine steward. I chose him well. She learns more history from him than from Fenreth, I’m sure.”

“Does she?” the emperor said easily. "Well then — so long as it’s true history. And” – this aimed, with a cuff, at Elfred — “a bit more reading would not hurt a certain prince. But daughter, what did he tell you about Ethelwin and Arviragis?"

The princess looked away in embarrassment, staring at the cataract. The water was a rich blue, except where it reflected the sunlight and became a gold and silver torrent. Below them, in the pool, fish darted about, black arrows in the sky-blue depths, and Alsbet wished fiercely that she could join them.

“Come on, now.”

“She doesn't remember,” Elfred said scornfully. "She doesn't really listen to him — she's just a child. She just remembers the names ...”

“That's not true!” Alsbet cried, stung. “I do listen! Arviragis was the emperor — Ethelwin was a great general, his best general, the conqueror of … somewhere. Of the Ysani? And he was in love with the emperor's wife. And so ... Arviragis found out about it, and was going to have him executed, but Ethelwin escaped and led his army to the gates of Rendale. And then he convinced the lords inside the Castle to kill Arviragis and make him Emperor instead. And when the queen found out, she … I mean, when Ethelwin came to her chambers in the highest tower of the Castle, she dressed in her wedding white and went out on the balcony and threw herself off."

Five hundred spans she fell, Aeden had told her, with only a wedding gown for wings. And when they found her, her body was broken, but there was not a spot of blood to mar that lily-white.

And that, highness, he had informed the transfixed princess, is how your dynasty got its start.

“Well told, my lady,” said Edmund. “Your young steward must have a way with words. But that’s history fit for taverns and hearthsides, not for a princess of the empire. There’s more to the story than that, more that a Montair ought to know.”

“Tell us, father,” Elfred said, the chance to hear his father talk of war and death and power overwhelming his desire to snipe at his sister.

“There’s too much to tell for a lovely day as this. But I’ll just say this: Arviragis was a sickly fool, the son of a half-mad father. His family’s day had passed; the realm had groaned under his misrule long enough. And it wasn’t our ancestor’s generalship alone that took the throne. We were chosen by the other lords as well, because they tired of being ruled by men unfit for the throne. The romance may have been real, but it was the power of the Heart’s dukes, not just love and arms, that put House Montair on the throne.”

“And Arviragis didn’t have the legions, did he, father?” his son said, pleased with the flash of insight.

“Aye, that’s right. He lost the lords and the people, and there were no legions yet, or just the Falconguard. So losing the lords was enough to lose him the throne, because all his armies came from them. He still had gold, the gold of these mountains, but he was spendthrift with it, and it didn’t buy enough support to save him. But it couldn’t happen that way now — because of the legions, because of what all your grandsires after Ethelwin made.”

This sounded like other things that Aeden had said to her, close enough that Alsbet worked up the nerve to ask: “But Aengiss commands legions, father …”

“Great Mithriel you do fear for my throne, daughter!” Edmund laughed. “But no – as great a general as he may be, he’s only one lord general among many. And his family is not a great house — the Cullolens are vassals of Mabon, with few lands to their own name. That’s the wisdom of the legions — that they’re a place for lesser-born and common folk to rise and be rewarded …”

“And foreigners,” Bryghaida murmured.

“Aye, and foreigners — like your Captain Gavian, or old Ornvinn who commands in the north. But not for the great lords; they have their own sworn swords, and that’s enough. So for an emperor to lose the empire he’d have to lose more than just the loyalty of one general, one great man of war. He’d have to lose all the legions, all their commanders, and many of the dukes. And for eight generations we’ve been wise enough to make sure that it never comes to that.”

She heard Aeden’s voice, now, wise and lecturing in her head. Under your house the empire rests on four pillars — the lords, the people, the gold of the Guardians and the legions. Should one crack, the throne would have the others.

But if one cracks, he had added, the others are like to crumble soon enough …

“And you’re wise, too, father.” his son said. “Wise and loved and great. Emperor Edmund the Great! Sure no one could overthrow Da, Alsbet.”

“I wasn't saying they could, just …”

“You were.”

“And I say she wasn’t, and let that be the end,” Edmund Montair declared, rising from the remains of the meal to stand over his wife and children, his gaze turning westward, beyond Lake Orison, to where the mountains died away into downs and forests and farmland — the highlands of Ysan and the green country around Lake Erona and the wild moors — and then more mountains — and then the Brethon lands beyond.

Alsbet looked up at him, taller than most men, well-built, with hair gone gray but still every inch a monarch, and she thought how tired he looked in the summer sunlight.

“I am glad I’m here,” he said at length. “Here where I can rest.”

But even with rest and peace came change. That winter Elfred was sick again, and in the spring he was informed that he would not, in fact, be sent to be an adjutant with Aengiss mac Cullolen or any other commander. Instead, he was to journey south with the empire’s envoys to Trans-Mersana and pass a few years in Antiala — in the hopes that a more temperate climate would bring him better health, that the great University of the Archangels would further his education, and that the experience of a more sophisticated court would prepare him for whatever duties lay in his princely future.

Antiala was the city that Gavian had told her so many stories about, and Alsbet wanted to ask her brother to write to her and describe the sights that he was sure to see. But he was so angry, stamping about his quarters in the Castle while the spring rains drummed on the slate and beams above, that she said nothing and listened to him rage instead.

“I was supposed to be a general,” he cried furiously, with tears standing out on his cheeks. “I was supposed to lead armies into battle! And do you know what father said? He told me that someday I might win great victories in diplomacy. That I might win greater things for the empire than he had! That if Padrec fell in war and the throne fell to me, this would be better preparation for being a monarch than all the battles that he’s fought!”

“It might be so …” Alsbet said.

“Oh, aye? Your wretched Aeden isn’t the only one who knows the stories, sister. I know them well enough to know how often a diplomat makes an appearance. How many times do you hear of So-and-So the Negotiator? Of High King Such-and-Such the Dealmaker?”

“Nessorian the Peacemaker,” his sister murmured, plucking names from the vault of memory. “Ornvinn the Crafty, who swindled the Mandorans out of Pegosa. Or Terab in the Histories – the peace he made was like a river, watering the land from the high places to the sea … ”

“Holy Terab in the Book of Priests?” His voice was savage. “Why, that’s brilliant, Alsbet, you’re right — even priests make a better showing in the histories than miserable ambassadors! Why, I might better off taking the white or gold or blue, and inheriting on office from that old glutton, Ethred.”

Ethred was a very distant Montair cousin, the archpriest of Rendale’s temple, and a prodigiously fat man. When he led the tenday sacrifice, the altar platform creaked and the pews nearest him quivered.

“Blessed Elfred of Rendale — it has a certain fittedness in it, does it not, a certain ring? Maybe that’s how I should answer father: He would send me away, would he? Well, I would as well simply stay here, join the white priests and be a rebuke to him for all his days. Or the browns, even – why not? I could be a brother at Gabelden, or go east and join the anchorites in the Hanging Hills …

“You should not talk so, ‘Fred. The Archangels can hear you …”

“And why should they not hear me? Should they not be impressed with how pious I’ve become? And maybe you can join me, sister dear. Why, we can be like Goris and Gora in the histories … or maybe just Judeth and Jonthen, brother-and-sister blesseds! Holy models of piety for every priest to preach on, a subject for a hundred shrines …”

He trailed off, looking at his younger sister across the chasm that suddenly separated him from the childhood they had shared.

“He does not really love us. Not really. We're just tools in his hands, things to use to keep secure his precious throne for his precious Padrec. He’ll probably marry you to an ogre.”

And then Elfred broke down and sobbed.

When he left Rendale two weeks later, with fifty legionnaires to escort him, another spring storm was drenching the north and any tears shed were drowned in the rain.

The summer that followed was the last summer of peace. That autumn the redeye fever swept through Allasyr and Queen Dynaira, Bryghaida’s sister, succumbed in the ancient palace in Tessaer’al Yrgha, following her eldest nephew and his infant son to the grave by just a week. The line of succession after those untimely deaths was more like a branching thicket, and by the time the first ravens reached Rendale there were already three claimants to the throne.

Once the birds finished the return journey there were four — and the fourth had the legions of Narsil behind him. The old families of Allasyr had always regarded their alliance with the empire as a necessary evil, but a number of lesser lords had become greater ones because of lands gained in the war with Capaelya, and their patriotism was weaker than their appetite for a greater position still. Diplomacy — meaning the empire’s gold, and Edmund’s promises — had done its work with the Dolwydens and the Ywens, the Ygerns of Kernafen and the Aeferyns of Calas Ryn, and by Winter’s Eve they had all ridden to Naesen’yr to bend the knee to Queen Dynaira’s other nephew … who was Padrec of Montair, heir to the Falcon Throne of the Narsil Empire.

So there was a winter’s worth of skirmishes, in Allasyr and in the lands that for three hundred years been Capaelya, as each of the Brethon claimants to the throne tried to prove their mettle quickly, to unite the old families against the upstarts and the legions and the Montair boy. And meanwhile Aengiss mac Cullolen ingathered his men from the fortresses they held and the farms they had claimed and marched them north and east to the Tessaer Gap, the great pass between the Brethon lands and the empire, and built fortifications to hold it open for the mustering of the legions and the levies from the rest of Narsil, who would be marching westward with the spring.

“You must know it was imagined from the beginning, Highness,” the lords and ladies in Edmund’s court told Padrec’s mother, and Bryghaida smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled. She understood; from the empire’s perspective this was precisely the reason for the treaty that had taken her from her childhood home in Allasyr and given her in marriage to Narsil’s then-crown prince. Her blood in Padrec's veins gave his son a claim on what had been her sister's throne, a claim that could be backed by the swords and lances of the legions. Now it would be; now her part in history would be as a tool of the empire's expansion, a key in the lock of the western lands where she had lived her first seventeen years.

And so Bryghaida ar'ap Paegara, who had loved Allasyr so much as a child, loved the pine forests and the great peaks of the Yrgheim that reared around her father's palace in Tessaer'al Yrgha, loved the lilting accents of the Brethon tongue and her father's subjects – her sister’s subjects – now perhaps her son’s and husband’s subjects – loved them even more than her daughter loved High House in the Guardian Mountains ... she who loved her country so was bringing a conquest down upon it.

She had always feared it might be so, from the first day of her betrothal, but as long as her sister was alive and well on the Seat of Stone she could pretend, ignore her sister's barrenness, ignore the war that conquered Capaelya, ignore and ignore ...

But no longer.

That spring, with his legions still holding the Tessaer Gap and Padrec’s rivals still at war with one another, Aengiss mac Cullolen came to Rendale and met with Edmund, his council, the other lord generals. As the weather warmed Alsbet watched her mother grow drawn and pale, stay in bed too much and sleep too little ... The red sisters from the hospital in Rendale could find no malady, and the famous doctor of Mabon, Mother Merida, gnarled with age and well-known as the greatest physician in the north, told Edmund that her order wasn’t in the business of healing wounded hearts. But the Queen of Narsil became so gaunt and frail that her husband sent her to the mountains a month early, hoping that the air would refresh and restore her. Alsbet accompanied Bryghaida, leaving her father behind with his councillors and generals in a city filled with the excitement of a distant war.

In the long cold council chamber in the Castle, where the chill of winter lingered in the stone walls and unlit hearth long after the spring rains washed the city clean of snow, Edmund the emperor sat with his commanders and thought of Elfred in Antiala, Padrec on the border of Allasyr, and his wife wasting away in High House. There were maps littered across the oaken table, and the soldiers pointed and chattered about supplies and invasion routes and weather conditions, while their sovereign's attention wandered far, far away.

“Your Majesty!” It was the voice of Everont Egred, the youngest of the lord generals, raised to his command during the war for Allasyr. A fishmonger son’s from Felcester, the lowest-born commander as well as the newest, he had a close-cropped red beard and restless eyes. But now they rested, puzzled, on the emperor. “Did you hear the question, Majesty?”

Edmund let himself drift back to the business at hand. “I’m sorry, gentles, my attention wandered. The point in question was ... ?”

“The question of Maebwyn’s Run, my liege,” rumbled Ornvinn Fiorbis, the heavy-bearded, Skalbarder commander of the northern legions.

Now he remembered. It was the other pass into Brethon lands, a thin road across the mountains that led into the wild north of Allasyr. “Indeed yes. I would think reinforcing the forts should suffice, Ornvinn. And requesting, firmly, some assistance from Duke Baldwen in patrolling the countryside to his far north.”

There was a pause, the silence of uncertainty. Then a low voice, a familiar rasp just above a whisper, filled the awkward space.

“That is no doubt a wise decision, Majesty. Perhaps I am, as ever, over-eager for the most complicated plan. We will have the advantage of numbers, our enemy is divided, there is no need to make things overly complex.”

That was how the emperor realized that his mind had wandered during an argument about the latest strategem proposed by Aengiss, and that his unthinking response had overruled his greatest general’s plan. Edmund’s mind flickered over alternatives – to backtrack, to allow Aengiss to make the case anew, to acknowledge the distractedness they all could see. Then for some reason it flickered to the day by the waterfall, to Alsbet’s girlish questions about politics and history, to her touching fears about military rivals for his throne. And he let his eyes meet his general’s coolly, and tried to make his voice measured and casual at once:

“The plan you have is no doubt a brilliant one, Aengiss. We will just have to keep it in reserve, in case the simplest method fails.”

Standing at the far end of the conference table, the Ysani general nodded. The light from the windows was weak, and his end of the room was shadowy enough to hide the colors on his commander’s cloak — but the dome of his head, shaven down to white stubble, somehow gleamed silver above his hawk’s nose and deep-set blue eyes. Eyes that locked with the emperor’s and seemed to flash slightly before Aengiss looked down again to the maps beneath his fingers, like a fortune-teller playing with the tea leaves again after an unsuccessful reading.      

“Not that it would have been a likely path for you, Majesty, but closing off the northern route also narrows the possibilities for which legions you will ride with.” This was Edmund’s chancellor, Arellwen, dour and trustworthy, a member of the council since his father’s time, a Ysani hedge lord bound to the Montairs absolutely but also sincere — far more than most — in his devotion to the realm. “I assume that with your son riding with Lord Aengiss, Lord Wulf’s Moorguard would be a natural place …”

“I would gladly surrender my command to his majesty,” Egred said, and beside him Wulf Alcaster chuckled. The oldest Lord Commander, he would lead no legions in this war, remaining to oversee garrisons in the Heart and along the peaceful and sparsely-populated border with Trans-Mersana. He had been a soldier long enough to remember fighting alongside Edmund's grandfather, Jonthen III, in the conquest of Argosa, and now he looked at the younger man beside him with the tolerance of age.

“Better you than I, youngling,” he said. “The commander who rides with his emperor surrenders all the credit and takes all the blame. Your father told me that, majesty, just before he asked me for my battleplan to take back Seldwen’s Keep in the last Erona rebellion.” He laughed again, and Egred laughed too, insincerely, while across the table Fiorbis rolled his eyes and growed something unintelligible.

“Matters of credit aside, it hardly seems to matter where his majesty rides,” Aengiss said, his eyes rising from his maps, “so long as it is not in the van — since after all he is not claiming the throne of Allasyr, young Padrec is.” His fingers drummed absently on his sword hilt. “It would be perhaps most convenient for His Majesty to join your forces, Varelis, as their encampment can be reached in only two weeks’ ride. The important thing is his presence, not his exact location.”

“Perhaps the commander of the Falconguard has an opinion, as it will effect his command as much as any of ours,” said Varelis bar Veruna, an Argosan whose heavy jowls had earned him the fond nickname the Old Hound among his men.

“The Falconguard will divide as always,” said Enwold Gaddel with a shrug. “Lord Captain Wentwain will go west with His Majesty — he is well-known to all of you, I think. A good soldier, maybe a true commander in the making …”

“Then let his majesty go with Varelis …” Fiorbis began to growl.

“Do you remember,” Edmund said suddenly, "raising the siege at Tessaer'al Yrgha, Aengiss?”

At this the Ysani soldier smiled faintly, as if at a pleasant childhood memory. "I do indeed, Majesty."

“A striking thing, isn't it, that we are sitting here planning the capture of that very city that you saved four — almost five years ago now?"

“Majesty, I can promise you that when I saw the city for the first time – with an army encamped around it, and my own set to the task of saving it -- I knew that someday I would be the besieger. I did not expect it to come so soon, perhaps, but ... there is no room for regrets or ironies. We advance, or we fall back. There is no standing still.”

“No standing still — yes, this is how it must be, I suppose.” Edmund rose and regarded the room — the cluster of council lords seated around Arellwen, the generals stiff in their chairs, the adjutants and captains hovering, a servant holding a wine pitcher, frozen in the door while his sovereign was speaking. His eyes skipped from Wulf, erect despite his age, to Ornvinn, who was stroking his long yellow beard and half-cocking his head as he watched his emperor, back across to young Egred and the Old Hound beside him, and then down the table to Aengiss, with his death’s head features — Aengiss, who would never lose a battle — Aengiss, who had won the last war more than he ...

“I will spend my summer in my capital,” he said then, his voice harsher than he meant for it to sound. He did not say: In the mountains, with my wife. “This is Padrec's war, not mine. You will win it for him.”

There was another silence — a mixture of shock, puzzlement, and something else, a kind of … curiosity?

Arellwen was the first to speak.

“Padrec’s war? Those are words, Majesty, but we do not even know that your son will be crowned, or whether we shall dissolve Allasyr as we dissolved Argosa and Erona in your forefather’s time. Either way he will not rule without your rule above him, and the people and our soldiers — our soldiers, especially, they know it. They respect the prince, no one can doubt it, but your son — they do not fight for him. They fight for the empire, and the person, your person — you are their emperor. They fight for you.”

“Also there might be a wider question of morale to consider, Majesty.” It was the Lord of the Secretariat, the council’s spymaster, a sallow Fenman with an earldom west of Sheppholm. He spread his hands reasonably. “You have not been in our western lands since the war. Men would be glad to see you there — the men who have been keeping the peace, and the men we’ve settled on lands and fiefs. The last winter especially was a hard one. I know you have seen the reports of brigands and rebels, but in the details there are darker stories – disappearances, murders, fires, even strange rites in the woods. Faes and fancies, some of it, no doubt, but the Brethon lands are more distant than other lands we’ve settled soldiers, and your cousin Alaben’s dispatches …”

“Alaben is too weak an overseer.” This was Aengiss, blunt as always. “I have done what can be done, but it should have been Benfred.”

“Benfred did not wish to go,” Arellwen said wearily.

“Your majesty,” the spymaster pressed, “your soldiers have been pacifying and settling this troubled land for years. They need your presence to boost their spirits.”

“More than that,” the chancellor said softly, “you are the emperor of that troubled land. These are your subjects turning to heathen rites, if the tales are true …”

“And what precisely would his presence do about that problem,” Aengiss asked, “save encourage it, and make him a target for assassins along the way?” He was talking to them all, but his hawk’s gaze on was on the emperor. “No, I think that his majesty’s point is well taken: We are fighting for Padrec, alongside Brethon lords who are backing his claim to an ancient throne. However the political settlement is made, in the long run – and may it be a long run indeed, of course — Padrec will rule both Allasyr and Narsil. There is no need to insist on the union as a practical matter as yet by having the prince’s father on the battlefields. Better to widen our possible political settlements rather than narrowing them — if that is how his majesty is thinking ….?”

“Salving Brethon pride is a fine ambition,” said Arellwen, “but our own soldiers, our own settlers, also have pride and morale to think of …”

“And if I might say again,” said the Lord of the Secretariat, more urgently, “that the dispatches I read suggest a landscape that your majesty might do well to see with his own—”

“No, enough!” Edmund slapped his hand down on the table, harder than he intended. He let his voice diminish to a calmer tone. “Aengiss has it right: There is no political advantage. As for the bonfires, the rumors — in Capaelya a kingdom is no more, after it had existed for centuries. So there is a natural dislocation. Natural. I do not think it will be be helped by their emperor assisting in a campaign to subdue yet another ancient kingdom.”

Ornvinn Fiorbis opened his mouth, and the emperor's voice rose again.

“No, my decision is final. I will remain here. The wars is yours, my lords – and you will win it for my son. For Padrec. For Padrec.”

Through the windows, he could see the sunlight on the mountaintops.

Bryghaida died with Allasyr. All that long summer couriers came to High House with word of the legions' victories, of Brethon lords bending knee to the the Narsil prince. And with each dispatch, Edmund remembered the words of Aengiss in the council chamber on that spring morning.

You are right, Edmund, he had said as the generals filed out. If a man does not wish to fight, he should not. We will win this war — for Padrec.

And they did. On the thirty-third day of the month of the Archangel Raguel, when the leaves on the high slopes were gold and crimson in the almost-autumn sun, the final courier of that final summer of the queen’s life brought the news that the lords and knights of Allasyr had fallen back into their kingdom’s wild north, and that Tessaer’al Yrgha had surrendered its towers and markets and throne to Padrec of Montair.

“So we didn’t save Allasyr, after all,” said Aeden softly, so that only Alsbet standing beside him watching the Queensguard celebrate could h ear.

"We shouldn't tell Mother,” she replied, for she understood the truth of Bryghaida's long illness.

No one told the Queen, but it did not matter. On the morning of her death, with Edmund and Alsbet beside her, Bryghaida awoke and asked if Allasyr was gone. And when her husband made a fumbling remark about it belonging to Padrec now, his wife smiled sadly and then raised her head on the pillows to look out the window at the mountains.

“I could see the mountains from my bedroom as a child,” she said weakly. "'Dry’chaena evyr a t'Yrgheim,' a poet said — there are no peaks so lovely as the Yrgheim. And he was right. These are higher, but not so beautiful.” She coughed. “And in the morning, I could hear the gardeners singing on the palace grounds. Edmund ... we should plant more gardens at your castle.”

That evening she was dead.

They covered her face with a white cloth, and a white priest came from the shrine to say the blessing. According to custom, the wives of emperors were buried in a crypt beneath the Castle in Rendale, but Edmund had a grave dug for her in a meadow in the Guardians, which were higher than the Yrgheim of her youth but not so beautiful.

She was buried in the first hours of autumn, with cold air biting at the mourners and the smell from the funeral sacrifices floating like woodsmoke in the breeze, and her husband wept by her stone, having discovered too late that he loved her more than the throne that Aengiss had won for Padrec in far-off Allasyr.

Alsbet was fifteen years old.