Into the Heart

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 10

This is Chapter 10 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.

“They saw you,” Alsbet said. “They all saw you.”

She had sent for them both — a request, but one written as much like a command as the protocol that her chamberlain insisted upon would permit. And they had come, somewhat to her surprise — an emperor and a crown prince, her father and her brother, who now sat at the long table in her apartments and managed to look, in different ways, ashamed.

“What if they did?” Padrec said. “We had an argument. I have apologized to Father.”

“Such things happen,” her father said. His eyes were deeper in shadow than usual, the stubble on his face a little more like fur. The morning sun spilled on the floor in front of him; it reached his waist but not his features. He did not look at Padrec as he spoke.

Alsbet had not been alone with the two of them like this — well, had she ever? Perhaps not. There were guards outside the door; Gavian and the Falconguardsmen who had followed her father from his apartments. But they could probably only hear murmurs. She was alone with her family, with most of what remained of it. She felt calm, or furious, or slightly excited — one of the three, maybe all of them. She did not feel powerless. That was a kind of progress.

“I do not attend council meetings,” she said. “I am not often in meetings with Lord Rell. I am not a man, not an emperor, not my father’s heir. So how is it that I am apparently more aware than either my father or my brother of what is happening to our family and our crown?”

Whatever they had expected, it was not this question. Padrec slunk a look at his father. Edmund ran fingers across his brow. Neither spoke.

“Are neither of you aware of what the world thinks is happening in this castle? What’s said in taverns and gossiped about on wharfs; what I hear about in letter after letter from your cousin, father, and our uncle, Padrec?”

“I am aware,” her brother began. “You have said to me … that’s what I was trying to …” He broke off, and looked again at the emperor.

The emperor met Alsbet’s gaze, dropped his eyes, raised them again, and spoke:

“Do you mean the realm thinks that Padrec and I are at loggerheads?”

“That is a small part of what the empire says, father. Most often they say a little more. From what I have been told about your … argument, they say some the things that Padrec said to you yesterday, in front of enough people that my captain and my steward both separately heard the details before the evening meal.”

“Alsbet,” Padrec said, “I lost my temper. I have apologized. If I need to apologize to father again, to show somehow publicly …”

“The problem, brother, isn’t that you lost your temper. It’s that you did so while saying exactly the things that far too many people, including far too many great lords, would have expected you to say. It’s that your little family squabble confirmed a thousand rumors and suspicions.”

“Go on.” Her father sounded braced for punishment.

“I don’t want to go on. It’s not my place to say these things. But I don’t feel like I’m being left any choice.”

She let that hang there for a moment, and just before she was going to continue her father closed his eyes, steepled his fingers, and said, “Very well. Very well. I’ll try to say them.”

She could sense her brother tense. She probably tensed herself.

“I am drinking too much.”

A breath. Edmund’s eyes were open, bloodshot, fixed on her.

“I am not ruling the empire.”

Another breath.

“My son is a warrior; I am an old man.”

Padrec shifted; Alsbet thought he might speak. He did not. Their father did, one more time.

“If this continues, someone will overthrow me. Maybe even my own son.”

The princess felt something did not expect: Immense relief. The relief of months, of two years. And with it the thought, irrational but wonderful, that if her father knew what was wrong, he could simply fix it.

But then she looked at Padrec. His expression wasn’t relieved. It was something else, something almost savage. Whatever he wanted from their father, this admission was not the beginning of it; whatever he wanted, this seemed to make this worse.

Her father, though, was still only looking at her. And she had to speak. “That’s too harsh, father, but yes — some things like this are what is said. Things like this fill our uncle’s letters. He may be a stormcrow, and of course — of course Padrec is not your enemy …”

“Nor I his,” Edmund said, turning finally to his son, whose face was now a mask as he nodded in response. But for the emperor that seemed to be enough.

“And of course you are still our emperor,” Alsbet went on, pressed on, toward the real reason she had brought them there. “But no one has seen that. No one has seen you, father, apart from those of us inside this castle. These stories are carried on rumor’s little feet because no true stories are there to outrace them.”

“And what true stories,” her father said, pulling himself up in his seat, “what true stories exactly do you think should be told?

Alsbet reached for the pile of papers, neatly stacked, beside the inkwell Aeden used to write her letters. She plucked the early-summer letter from Benfred, his crabbed hand reminding her of his grim mien, and flattened the parchment on the table.

“My uncle — our uncle — has issued invitation after invitation to the Stag Tourney. In fact, he’s been issuing them for years. Since I was just a girl.”

“The Stag Tourney,” Edmund said.

“The Stag Tourney is over,” Padrec said. “A month and more over. It was already over when I was in the Heart, else I would have paid our uncle a visit. Dunk — my friend Dunkan tilted in it, and afterward came north to meet us in Mabon. It’s long over.”

“Yes,” Alsbet said. “And a shame. But Meringholt’s tourney is a small thing by the standards of the Heart. Summer turns over to fall in how long — today is the twenty-sixth of Raguel’s month? So then there are fourteen days to the next angelic feasts. And in Cranholt and Felcester, those feasts are the River Festival. I saw it once as a girl — you must remember, Padrec. All those boats …”

“You mean the lanterns,” her brother said, and surely it wasn’t just her desperate imagination that there was a touch of boyish memory in his voice.

“All those lanterns, all those boats. A great progress, with the statues of Raguel and Uriel bobbing on the river. They carried you and mother, father, the boatmen did, on those willow chairs they made …”

“I remember it,” Edmund said, his voice harsh, and Alsbet regretted bringing up ther mother but plunged on —

“Then let them carry us again. Let us go down together, out of this old cold place, away from all its ghosts. For Mithriel’s sake, let us go, and show them the rumors are just rumors, that Narsil still belongs to the falcon and his children, that we are still strong and united. Benfred is right, we must show them something. Let us ride south, and show them ourselves.”

“I leave for Brethony in three days,” Padrec said, his voice colder.

“For Allasyr,” Edmund corrected, also cold. “There is no Brethony. And your sister is right — there will be no Narsil for you to rule if enough folk believe me weak and our house divided.”

That was no way to handle her brother, not now, so Alsbet spoke quickly. “From Cranholt the road west is swifter than the road across the moors. You will lose a tenday, Padrec, maybe a little more, but you will be in Tessaer almost as soon — and I am certain that your time there can be lengthened on the far side, come the spring. Can it not, father?”

“I would have to consult with the council …” her father began, then allowed her pleading gaze to work on him, and shrugged —

“As my son wishes. But first, it is my daughter’s wish that I will grant. We will go the Heart.”

The last time Alsbet had gone south, for a springtime progress in the days between the wars, they had taken barges down river as far as Aldermark, and then swifter riverboats to Cranholt. But she decided — it was strange to make decisions beyond the day-to-day of the Castle, but no one questioned her when she simply went ahead — that the purpose of the journey required them to travel by land, to show themselves as a splendid regiment rather than a distant line of boats, to invite gawkers and sight-seers from the towns and villages they passed.

So they took the road south from Rendale, sometimes following the thread of the Mersana as it wound through the mountain country, sometimes bending away from it into the forested foothills of the Guardians. Part of the court came with them, ambassadors and ladies-in-waiting and hangers-on, and Gavian and a few of his men among their Falconguard escort, and Aeden as well. The days were hot and dry, with cloudless skies and a glaring sun that mottled the river with gold, and a fine and clinging white dust rose from the hardpacked earth.

Their path was thick with miners, at first, who were bringing gold and iron down from the high country — hard-faced men who bowed low as their column passed, and then jostled one another for a glimpse of their emperor’s daughter. Then the gold roads and mining towns were behind them, and the Guardians fell back into the snowcapped distance — and suddenly they were at Aldermark, the keep at the joint of the Mersana and the Mering where five hundred legionnaires were always stationed. From there the Heart opened out before them, green and golden beneath the sun, no hint of autumn yet on the rolling patchworks of farms and fields and castles, stretching a hundred leagues south to the hills and vineyards of Argosa.

The road forked in three after Aldermark — the straight road west across the moorland toward Erona, the eastern highway following the Mering toward Meringholt and the havens, and the road they took, the south road hugging the bank of the Mersana as it widened and the farm country spread around it.

Now the sun suddenly blazed hot all day, a last wave of summer browning the grass and dappling the river, and every evening it set westward in a swirl of purple, sending shadows streaming across the fields and woodlands, racing one another into the warm twilight. At night, the breeze was sweet with the aroma of grass cuttings. They stayed in castles, squat things overlooking the river usually, while their soldiers bivouacked in the fields outside. But once they were caught between towns as evening fell, and they slept outside in the cool air, underneath the constellations. On a hard bed beneath a thin canopy without the press of stone above her, Alsbet slept better than she had in years.

People came to watch them pass, small crowds from the villages, gawking boys from the fields in wide-brimmed hats, girls in their best dresses carrying roses for the princess. The local lords were obsequious; their sons and daughters either threw themselves at Padrec and Alsbet or hung back in desperate shyness at the feasts. Her brother was stiff at first but he seemed to warm to the attention; her father still looked pale and all-too-old, but he played his part better than she had dared to hope. It helped that Aeden was at his side, his own bodyservant having been left in the castle: She had ordered her steward to steer the emperor through the meals with an eye to his flagon, which was not empty — she had no wish to risk what might come if he ceased drinking entirely for their journey — but which he drank from, under Aeden’s eye, at a cautious pace, so that he had what he needed to talk and smile and be agreeable and not a serving more.

The balance wasn’t perfect — she caught him dozing at table once, and another time he snapped at Aeden when the young steward waved away a servitor’s jar. But he carried himself well enough for the image they were trying construct — a happy family, a solid emperor, a loyal and handsome heir, with a lovely princess at their side.

On the seventh day from Aldermark they reached Valemark, the huge legion fortress that had been, like Rendale’s Castle, a Mandoran project once, built on the northwestern curve of the “S” that the Mersana transcribed as it washed through the Heart, with a great curtain wall that protected what was once a ford and now a bridge, across which the trade from Ysan came bustling down into the farm country.

When it had been a ford folk had come down from Ysan too, but they had been warriors, raiders, clan-chiefs out for plunder, splashing across the river in search of good hunting further south — until the Mandorans had claimed the Heart and raised the great smooth wall and built one of their smooth keeps, the Con Vala it was called, on the far side of the ford to command the countryside around.

It was here, with the Mandorans decades gone, that the Narsil Empire had well and truly begun – after a harsh winter had come over the north and Ysani clansmen had come south in strength, in alliance with Skalbarders who sailed through the fens and put Darkhaven and Greenhaven to the torch. At the Con Vala the Ysani overran the crumbling curtain wall and forded the Mersana; once they had crossed they stayed all through all the snows, devouring the Heart’s crops and stores and animals while its people fled south to Argosa or east into the Fens, huddled behind the walls of Felcester or Cranholt, or inside the Con Vala’s unconquered keep, living on rats and contemplating surrender.

This contemplation ended with the springtime coming of Berdegeris Cristis prince of Rendale, seventh in the line that had begun with the last Mandoran prefect’s bastard son. His army was just a thousand strong, but the Ysani bands were scattered across the farmlands, and Berdegeris was a talented commander who smashed them one by one, picking up allies from the countryside as he moved, so that when he reached the Con Vala he had almost the numbers of the besiegers. His men were hardened by years defending Rendale against raids from both north and south, while the raiders had spent a winter growing fat on spoils outside the starving fortress … so the battle began with the Ysani charging wildly and ended with them fleeing pellmell back across the ford, dying pinned against the inward side of the curtain wall or scattering away northward toward the moors, or surrendering in such numbers that for the first time since the Mandoran era tribute flowed from the Ysani hills down into the Heart rather than the other way around.

There was a statue of the first emperor inside the curtain wall at Valemark now, rising up to split the road just before it ran across the bridge, so that anyone entering into the heart of the Heart had to pass under Berdegeris’s long face and hollow-looking eyes. And the banner of the throne that he had established, the red falcon on a field of twilight blue, flapped overhead when they were greeted at the gates not only by the fortress’s commander, Everont Egred, but also the familiar but unexpected face of Benfred Montair.

He seemed to have pushed the advance of age back a bit since Alsbet had seen him last: His thin hair was cropped close, his beard cut down to a military stubble, his eyes were a little brighter and his conversation livelier, as he welcomed them to the Heart and clapped her father on the back like they were boys again and talked about how unfortunate it was that they hadn’t been there for the Stag Tourney but how it was a grand thing to have them in the Heart again, how he had taken a boat from Meringholt as soon as he heard they were coming, and Padrec, Padrec, nephew, you haven’t been answering my letters but by the archangels it’s good to see you …

So then they were truly a family party, strangely, as they left Valemark the next day with a larger escort and went straight southward, no longer following the river’s loop but cutting across the rolling farm country toward where the Mersana looped back again and Cranholt waited.

Now the air was cooling, the trees flashed a little yellow here and there, and there was a village every morning and afternoon and evening, with a crowd to gape and a local lord to scrape and sometimes a book for the emperor to sign, in the shrine or the grange, so that an hour’s visit could be remembered by the locals long after Edmund had returned to the distant frosty place from which he ruled. (“Is it true that it always snows in Rendale?” a young woman had said to her shyly after her father, the lord of Elren’s Pond, had nervously presented his daughter to the princess.) So four days went by, and still Benfred was all good humor and her father surprisingly solid and even Padrec seemed genuinely softened, or so his sister felt, by the unfeigned fascination that his own subjects offered up.

They reached Cranholt on the evening of the fifth day of riding from Valemark. Padrec had been here recently enough, on his southern circuit with his friends, but for Alsbet it had been years since she had been in any city larger than Rendale, and she refused to feel any shame at staring just a bit, in a most unprincessly manner, at the high stone walls and higher towers, at the crowds gathered at the city gates and along the streets inside, at the handsomeness of the houses the closer they came to the causeway that ran out from Cranholt’s wharves to the Duke’s Isle where Wilfred Duncaster had his seat.

Her brother saw this, and leaned from his saddle as they reached the causeway and the largest spire of the Water Towers reared up and said, softly but loud enough to carry over the noise of the river ahead and the crowds behind — “I thought these cities were impressive too, before I went west. It’s why you should come to Brethony, Alsbet … the world is wider than the Heart.”

“I want to come,” she returned. “But for now it’s this part of the world that needs our attention.”

The Duncasters were waiting at their gates, the old gray duke and his only slightly-younger sister Alessa, who was the real power in Cranholt — and not only them; many great lords had come out for the imperial family’s appearance. She saw Modred Cathelstan, the heir of Felcester, who had paid her court not so long before, looking sleek and unpleasant in a bright hose and doublet. Plump Cethberd Gyldenfold and his daughters hovered nearby, the salmon of Greenhaven displayed in various places on their finery, and behind young Modred was a crowd of Heart earls and their families whom she knew dimly from their occasional visits to the court — Lotho Gedmen of Bluehaven, the red-haired Herrolds, Ethred Hasteng and his young Ysani wife Mayve, and more whose names she would need Aeden’s prompting to remember.

Then somewhat apart from them, with an air not of hanging back but of expectancy, stood a tall woman with a heavy jaw and hair the color of beaten silver, wrapped in a rose-colored shawl and wearing a thin silver circlet on her head.

It took Alsbet a few moments, the time it took to slip free of Modred’s attentions and pass through a guantlet of Duncasters and their liege-men, to ruffle through possibilities for who this woman might be. By the time the courtesies brought them together, the princess was quite sure that it could only one person, and when the woman greeted her with “your highness” she answered with “your grace,” because of course this was the regent of Argosa, the great-aunt of Ambarian the boy duke, the Lady Cresseda who was known as the iron duchess to enemies and admirers alike.

Her eyes were wry, though, rather than steely. “I am so pleased to have the opportunity at last,” she said, in the musical-yet-exacting Argosan accent, “to meet you again now that you’re out of swaddling clothes.”

“I confess,” Alsbet said in her best formal, courtly voice, “that I do not have the pleasure of remembering our last meeting.”

“So much the better for your swaddled infant self, perhaps,” said the Duchess, “since it was the funeral of your aunt.”

“Yes, of course,” the princess said, thrown off her stride by the reminder of her namesake. “I am so sorry not to have known her …”

Cresseda placed a hand, ungloved and wrinkled, on Alsbet’s own. “She was lovely, truly lovely. It would have been a wonderful thing if we might have shared a family. Alas. But I have no doubt that you are just as lovely – indeed already I can see you are! — and I have dear Wilfred if he might place us close together for the feasting, so that we might become better acquainted than his been possible heretofore. We are both women upon whom the archangels have placed unexpected burdens. Perhaps we will find a great deal to discuss.”

“I hope so,” sad the princess, wondering what intrigue was being offered here. Then the duchess half-turned back to a man hovering just behind her, whom Alsbet had taken for some lesser noble but who wore the stole of a priest — no, an archpriest, by the stripe — beneath his cloak’s rich embroidery.

He was handsome and young, with black hair and a hint of copper in his skin, and he bowed smoothly as the duchess introduced him —

“ – the archpriest of our great temple, and my chancellor, Reverand Father Amalis.”

“Princess, the archangels are very kind to send you among us. The stories do little justice to your charm and beauty.” His words were formal, his accent precise like the duchess’s but with a slightly different tenor.

“You are most gracious, reverend father.” One of her resolutions on this journey was to act in every way as if her family’s power were unchallenged, and she decided, on impulse, to test his relaxed air as she thought a confident princess would. “You are quite young for your office. The archpriests of Felcester and Cranholt must feel somewhat in your shadow; I am surprised they allow their dukes to even admit you to their cities, lest the younger brothers in the temples get ideas.”

Amalis laughed, but it was the gleam of amusement from the iron duchess that pleased Alsbet. “Not only young but even foreign, highness,” he said. “My family is of Bernned in Great Salma — the first time I entered your vast domain was ten years ago, on my order’s business. I am still something of a stranger in these lands.”

His stole was white, marking his order as Mithrielan – quite common for archpriests, who were almost always drawn from the white or gold or red. But the rest – his youth, his patrimony — was distinctly unusual. Of course, the orders moved their priests around often enough without regard for borders, and the temples had more power to choose their own archpriests the further south you went. But still a young archpriest from abroad would surely not have been imposed upon the house of Verna without a larger disturbance.

“A stranger and yet a man of holy influence,” she said as these thoughts turned over, and then simply put the question boldly: “And my I ask, reverend father, what has been the means of your ascent?”

The archpriest looked significantly at the duchess: “I have a great and noble patron in the lady of the city,” he said.

Cresseda shook her head. “Our house takes great interest in the affairs of the temple, it’s true, as all wise rulers must. But Father Amalis is far too modest. He left Bernned first for Antiala, where he was the greatest of pupils at the university where your brother Prince Elfred now studies, princess. So his order had him groomed for leadership from the first. And to that end, his years in our city were supposed to be a time for seasoning, a sojourn among the pale barbarians” — she touched her cheek, which like the archpriest’s was slightly darker than Alsbet’s — “before he took up duties in the greater cities of the south. But our good archpriest Vagana died unexpectedly a year ago, and we saw a chance to steal a talented young father from Antiala or Pegosa or even Mersanica itself, if we elevated him now, so young. And to my surprise the temple and the orders were agreeable …”

“Her surprise and my horror,” said Amalis. “Her grace exaggerates but it’s true I was something of a scholar in my day, and I had hoped to continue happily as the priest-teacher for the temple school, and perhaps to teach at my order’s own university in Mandor some distant day. I did not imagine myself, young or otherwise — ” his smile was deliberately rueful — “as an administrator.”

“In my day,” Alsbet mimicked gently. “You make yourself sound very old, reverend father, but I am not sure you have more than ten summers upon me.”

“Twelve I believe, highness,” he said, “if I recall your day of birth aright. Among my other blessings, I have the gift of a decent memory … to go with the more dubious gift of a boyish face.”

He seemed about to say something else, but then his eyes slid around Alsbet and he dropped to one knee, while beside him the duchess went down in an almost girlish curtsy and then rose and with a sad smile said, “Your Majesty. Edmund. It has been too long.”

“It has indeed,” her father said as Alsbet turned to find him just behind her, trailed by a crowd of nobles. She thought she could see sadness in his face as well, but a different kind than the sorrow that had stamped him for so many months — a more distant and almost nostalgic sort.

“Perhaps,” said the Duchess of Argosa, “you would do a faded beauty the honor of escorting her into the dinner that our fine hosts have laid for us?”

“With a good will,” said the Emperor of Narsil.

Father Amalis stepped backward with another bow and the crowd of nobles made an eddy around them, and then Edmund took the duchess’s arm and they parted the crowd and passed through an archway and from sight, pulling the rest of the company along behind them as a moon might pull the tide.

The great hall in the Water Towers was circular and windowed, occupying a surprisingly high level of the main spire (the Duke’s Finger, the locals called it ) with remarkable views across the city to the east and across the river country all around, a sweep of boats and marsh country burnished by the sunset and shadowed by the dusk. The tables were also circular, arranged around a firepit that was unlit on this still-warm evening, with the duke’s table somewhat elevated and his own seat placed to have the clearest downriver view.

Edmund was in that seat on this night, with Duke Wilfred to his left and the iron duchess to his right, and then Alsbet was seated beside Cresseda and beside her, along the curve, sat the most eligible younger Duncaster, the Duke’s grandnephew Aldred. He was not the ducal heir; that honor belonged to his brother Cedrec, whose wife, a Gyldenfold, had so far had borne just one son, leaving Aldred with some chance of the succession — but not the sort of chance that made him a particularly plausible match for a princess. Which, in a way, made it easier to sit beside him, to banter in a friendly way without trying imagine him as a husband and a lover — while Modred Cathelstan, the more suitable match and the more uncomfortable conversation partner, glowered at them from further round the table’s curve, where he was sandwiched between Benfred and a Duncaster niece.

During gaps in the conversation Alsbet stole glances at her father and brother, and was pleased by what she saw. There was no way to bring Aeden in to hover here without attracting too much notice, so it was up to Edmund to restrain himself, and so far as she could tell he was managing to do just that, taking civilized sips from his flagon while he reminisced with Wilfred and Cresseda about the empire of their youth, about long-gone tourneys and distant scandals that she’d never heard him speak about before.

Meanwhile Padrec was seated, like herself, beside the most eligible Duncaster of the opposite sex — in his case Wilfred’s granddaughter Eltha, who had chosen a bosomy dress for the occasion and whose flirtations seemed to be holding his interest, which was more than any woman in Rendale besides the Lady Caetryn seemed to do. After they were a few courses into the meal, and a few cups of ale, Alsbet’s sidelong glances even caught him laughing at one of her jokes.

It was around this moment that young Aldred excused himself, with an awkwardness that she assumed meant that he was headed for the privy, and no sooner was he gone than Cresseda placed her hand across Alsbet’s again and said, with a smile and a voice perfectly pitched so that only the princess could hear: “Such a nice young man, that one. Not the worst dunce of the Duncasters, either. But of course that isn’t saying much.”

“You are unkind,” she returned, trying to be playful. “The Duncasters are a noble house, and surely even so great a family as the Vernas have their dunces.”

“Raguel, do they ever,” the duchess said. “I wish I had known how many when my father gave me to Avarian all those years ago and made me one of them. It would have spared me many wasted years of effort with men who think that being rich in silver is the same as being rich in sense.”

“Happily as a Montair my life is entirely free of such frustrations,” Alsbet said with mock-blitheness. “I can only imagine the burdens others must carry.”

“Why else do you think we were so eager to have your aunt marry into our southern fold? We knew we needed some of the good northern sense that built this empire — and laid our own walls low. Indeed, I’m quite certain that we need it still.”

“That is very kind of you to say.” Alsbet recalled dimly that the iron duchess had several nieces, and so she gestured at her brother and said: “But I am surprised, then, that your grace decided to bring a priest as your guest rather than perhaps one of your own relatives, to tempt the crown prince away from the ladies of House Duncaster.”

“Are you? But we do not have the wisdom of the Montairs yet, and Amalis has his own sort of wisdom, upon which I find myself relying more and more. And besides I have heard that your brother has eyes for more … western women.”

She was probing, but in this case Alsbet could be honest — to a point. “Have you? There was one Brethon woman who came with my brother’s retinue from the west, but I’m sure there is nothing between them save the oath of fealty. I do not know all my brother did in our new lands, but he has said nothing to me of any attachment. And I think my father would not permit such a thing in any case.”

“Princes do not always wait for permission. Your uncle did not.” A gesture across the table to Benfred, now deep in conversation with Wilfred’s sister Alessa. “He was to be given in marriage to my cousin Colura, you know, before he ran off with that Ysani girl. Married her in some shrine in the highlands, with a priest who didn’t know what he was doing, before your grandfather found out. Better if he hadn’t — she gave him no children, only grief when she died, and Colura ended up dead of the redeye fever. Two branches clipped off before their time. There was too much grief in that generation.”

Alsbet knew that Benfred had made an unsuitable and tragic match, but she had never quite imagined him as a young swain, eloping in secret, marrying somewhere romantic, braving the wrath of his uncle the emperor and his father the duke.

Cresseda seemed to read her thoughts. “We were all of us young once, princess. Even your uncle. Even me. We were all of us where you are now, waiting for our elders to decide our fates, our loves, our very futures.”

“Is that where I am?”

“Oh, I’m afraid so. Unless you are planning to imitate your uncle. Unless you have a young lover waiting for you back in dreary Rendale, with a fast horse and a shrine already chosen.”

“I am not planning anything so rash, your grace. But I am young — you heard the reverend, seventeen summers. I have duties in my father’s house. The time to leave him … well, that time seems far away, and there is no man tempting me.”

“Very wise, princess. It wise to wait, wiser still if you have some power of your own to hold. You should enjoy it, learn its uses … you do not know how much you might give up when you go into your husband’s house. Or, I suppose, how much you might gain — there are men who are ruled by their wives, and men who are happy to share power. But my husband before his illness was not one of them, and most of the young men you might marry would share his mind.”

Alsbet’s eyes flicked to Modred and the duchess nodded. “Yes, if that one is like his father you still spend your days under a fat thumb. But really, you know, most of the Heart families are like that. Not Wilfred with his sister, but they grew up together … for the rest, they are northerners, and in the north the men rule and fight and the women lie back and wait for spring.” She smiled. “And in Ysan of course the spring never really comes.”

“And in Argosa?”

“Well, outside the empire they say we are still the north as well. But not every Argosan man is like my late husband, and many are quite different. You know that women can inherit with us, if their fathers will it, and so the men of our land are accustomed to women holding property and power. That is why they have accepted me as regent these last five years – not only because they know my iron” – she smiled thinly – “but because they have seen other women rule before. They have seen queens. And would that we had had one, not the fools who ruled us then, when it came to war with your great house.”

Alsbet hadn’t yet come up with a reply when the duchess squeezed her hand again. “So they would accept you as well, princess.”

She had been half-expecting something like this, but she still stumbled as she said: “For … not for your grandnephew? For Ambarian?”

“Certainly for Ambarian, if you would have him! Our houses were meant to be joined, Alsbet. Your aunt and namesake was to be my sister, my dear brother-in-law Asclepian’s wife, the mother of his ducal heirs. Instead she is dead and he is dead and my husband is dead and the wife who finally gave Asclepian a son is dead … and the only ones left of our line are my daughters and nieces and the one boy, my grandnephew, in whose name I rule your empire’s greatest city. Which means, perhaps, that it is time to try again.”

“The young duke is … he is very young,” Alsbet said slowly.

“So are you, girl,” the duchess said, still quietly but sharply. “As you yourself were just saying. He is seven now, you are seventeen. You could be betrothed to him for seven long years, time enough to help your father through his … well, he seems better than the stories, but I know, we all know, that your mother’s death was unkind to him. So you might have time to help him, and then have time to come to Argosa, and by the time my little boy is a young man and ready for your bed I can teach you something about ruling, and together we can guide him, make him the duke that so few men know how to be.”

“You flatter me greatly, your grace. But is this not … this is a conversation for my father, surely.”

“Oh, there will be time for me to bend his ear. But we hear impressive things of you in the south, Alsbet of Montair, and despite the modesty you are putting on you have not so far disappointed me. I think a girl who has her father’s trust deserves to be approached first, as a woman in her own right. Your father has his own mind, but a man who has lost a wife, who lost a sister once — I remember his grief then, princess, though you do not — I think such a man will heed his daughter’s wishes if he can. So I am suggesting, only suggesting, that you might make your way to Argosa and meet my delightful grandnephew and see if you can see in him the man he might become.”

“I have never seen Argosa,” the princess said, more softly.

“It is the greatest city that your family rules. I believe, if I may be particularly bold, that it is the city from which your family is destined to someday rule, with Rendale as the summer capital that it deserves to be. But first, first, our families need to be bound as our lands are bound. That was the plan of your grandfather and my father-in-law, once. I am just suggesting — I only suggest! — that it might be a plan for today as well.”

Alsbet flicked a glance at her father, leaning close with Duke Wilfred, and then at her brother, who had allowed the Duncaster girl’s hand to rest slightly upon his own.

“Why me then and not my brother?” she said. “I know you have granddaughters of your own, your grace, as well as your ward the future duke. All jests aside, why are they not here with you, to meet Prince Padrec, in the hopes that our houses might be sealed through future emperors, not future dukes?”

Cresseda leaned back away from her and smiled again. “A fine question, princess. And I fear I cannot share every answer with you tonight, upon our very first acquaintance. But this much I can say: If there is to be an alliance of Montair and Verna, I would very much prefer for it to begin the way the greatest things begin …”

… and then suddenly Lord Aldred was with them again, making apologies, pulling out his chair and seating himself and Alsbet had to turn to him, but as she turned she still heard the duchess’s voice finishing close beside her ear.

“… as an alliance of women.”