The Prince of Bryghala

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 17

This is Chapter 17 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.

Eventually summer’s humid fist relaxed its grip, and there was a swift succession of lovely high-skied days and warm mosquito nights that died away into the cooler weather of early autumn.

Alsbet continued to study Brethon, while the gloves hiding her arms climbed higher as the day of her betrothal approached. Padrec was in Rendale for a time, haunting the practice yard and appearing slightly more often at council meetings than before; then as fall approached he went southward with his friends, making a tour of the ducal cities in the Heart, and even going eastward to Sheppholm. Rumor, which made lazy sweeps through the Castle in those months, had him paying court to various different ladies on his pilgrimage, auditioning Gerdwells and Cathelstans for the honor of becoming his betrothed. There was less talk of the exotic Lady Caetryn, who with her brother had apparently remained in Brethony — to supervise their new estates, their reward for saving Edmund’s life.

As for the emperor himself — well, there Alsbet struggled to judge dispassionately. The precipitous decline of the two years after her mother’s death seemed to have been somewhat slowed. The drinking continued, but in a stable, perhaps-manageable pattern. Edmund seemed to pay somewhat more attention to his basic duties, filled his chair in the council once a month, and did not do anything more to make a spectacle of his decline.

And yet he seemed to her so old, so weakened, so much less a man than he had been, and his attempts to act the emperor were essentially perfunctory. If he had rallied, briefly, on the journey to the Heart and then again, in a stranger way, in the days before her betrothal, he had fallen back swiftly in both cases. Between the drink, the griefs and the wounds from the river, he was a shadow haunting his own Castle, and she did not like to think what the dukes would make of that shadow when they came for the betrothal, or how his decline might be managed once he was left without his daughter — once he had only courtiers around him, and was protected only by the uncertain capacities of his firstborn son.

But her worries did not prevent the day from coming ever-closer. The golden days of autumn were hurrying by, and cold winds began to blow down from the Guardians, carrying a hint of the snows that already whitened the highest peaks. The trade boats were departing Rendale for the south, a faint rime of frost on their masts and bows, their captains and crews thinking of the warmth of Trans-Mersana or the river cities. Fires were stoked high and shutters closed in Cranholt and Felcester, Erona and the Havens and the other cities of the empire, and preparations began in earnest for Winter's Eve and the Feast of the Nine Archangels — and the new year that the holidays would bring in their train.

It was yet a tenday shy of Winter's Eve, and frost had sealed the hard-packed dirt of Rendale's streets, when Maibhygon mar’ab Daenab’yr Prince of Bryghala finally came to claim his bride.

The Falconguard was arrayed in armored splendor along the route from the southern gate to the Castle — a finer show than had greeted Padrec upon his first return from Brethony, some noted — and the emperor’s court had gathered in the outer courtyard to welcome the Brethon prince. The old dark stone was hung with the fir branches and holly of the season, the servants dashed about in preparations, and while most of the great dukes had not yet arrived, every noble present was clad in colors that displayed the bears and eagles, trouts and sunbursts that distinguished the empire's houses.

In all, it was a splendid welcome for a prince — but the wind was cold, and fierce from the north, and the six men of Edmund’s council shivered as they waited in the pale light of the almost-winter sun.

“When will he be here, then?” the Lord of the Exchequer said softly, and Arellwen shook his head.

“Soon enough, soon enough. We’ll know from the sound outside the walls."

Exchequer, the Argosan Merdu bar Clava, rubbed his jaw and grimaced. "What kind of reception are we expecting, Enwold?”

“I imagine a curious one,” returned Gaddel, the Lord of the City. “Friendly enough, I hope. I’d like to say that the proclamations I've had posted everywhere have more power than the stories about the betrothal that get passed around in the Mersana taverns. But the truth is that nobody cares about proclamations: What keeps the stories from souring folk on the idea of the prince is just their own affections — there are those who speak ill of the betrothal, but there’s enough love for his majesty yet that not that many folk are ready to be truly stirred up against it. So they’ll turn out respectfully, and some will even cheer …”

“Even I wouldn’t believe our proclamations,” Arellwen said dryly, and the six men of the council chuckled.

The six loyal men, they called themselves sometimes, in the privacy of their meeting chamber, where the seventh seat — the emperor's seat — was still too rarely filled. The Lord Chancellor, the Lords of Exchequer, Secretariat, City and Army, and the Archpriest of Rendale: save for Ethred, who had the power of his temple and his order, they were nothing without their emperor, and even the corpulent archpriest, as a Montair cousin, would find his holy seat precarious were Edmund’s dynasty to fall.

The others were men from minor houses, one recently ennobled (Merdu bar Clava had been Merdu of Neruda, a talented merchant who came north to deal in furs and stayed to handle the empire’s coin) and one a Skalbarder in exile (Aaken Borkji, the lord of the Army, with a head for supply chains and training and recruitment). The emperor and Arellwen had gathered them in to serve the empire, and their fortunes were tied to the crown’s so tightly that there should be no question of their loyalty. When Padrec took the throne, they would be returned to their hedge-earldoms and modest estates, granted greater lands and wealth in gratitude but shorn of the impressive power that they wielded now.

Sometimes Arellwen looked forward to that day. He was Ysani, but his ancestral home of Carn Maal lay amid the barren beauty of the moor country, far from the troublesome gaze of the great Ysani dukes in Mabon and Ysan City. He saw the keep and apple orchards of his boyhood only a few times a year, now, and his sons were stationed far from the lands that the elder, Lethen, would one day hold as earl. For now his wife was steward there, and the boys were both officers in the legions – one in Brethony, one with the Old Hound along the northern border, both far from the intrigues that disturbed their father's sleep.

Arellwen had slept well, once – before Queen Bryghaida went to her grave, when being chancellor had meant assisting an able emperor, not governing in his stead. But now —

“He looks sober today,” Army noted softly. "Half in the grave, but sober."

"She saw to that," said Exchequer. “When she's gone . . . that stripling secretary and her captain are about the only ones who look after him now, and when she's taken them to Bryghala with her, angels help His Majesty.”

“I may even miss some of her demands,” Secretariat allowed. “The girl doesn’t know what she’s doing when she plays at politics, but at least she wants to play, at least she knows that somebody’s supposed to. Would that Padrec had a dose of that quality.”

“But just a dose,” said City. “You don’t want him riding out to take off the heads off every priest who speaks ill of his father.”

“If thinking this marriage a mistake were grounds for losing your head,” said Exchequer lightly, “the prince would have to decapitate himself.”

City chuckled dryly; nobody else laughed. Army grimaced behind his thick Skalbarder beard. “Heavens help us, too, once she’s gone. The holidays should be interesting — do we know exactly how many of the dukes will show for the festivities?”

“Enough to make things entertaining,” Secretariat said. “Ysan and Erona here already, Bluehaven a day out, and then Cathelstan and the Iron Duchess and Gerdwell soon after. And Dolwyden as well.”

“And not Aemen but his son?”

“Yes, his son. The younger one, though. Aedevys.”

“So that’s seven, then – not counting Benfred. Enough to make young Padrec uneasy, perhaps?”

The six loyal men looked across the courtyard to the great double doors of the keep, where Padrec stood stiffly beside his father and sister. If all six were all loyal — but that was not a thought that Arellwen cared to entertain. They all had their private plots and ambitions; angels knew that he had his own secrets, the ones he kept for his emperor and the ones he kept for himself, and some that belonged to both of them. But a man could have secrets without being a traitor, and surely the archangels would not add to his burdens by planting a viper in their midst.

The Archdeacon harrumphed, and said:

“Well, somebody told my princely cousin to spend the summer politicking.”

“Somebody? Aengiss mac Cullolen.”

“Aengiss.”

“We’re sure he’s coming?”

“We’re sure.” That was Secretariat, with the certainty of a spymaster.

“I still believe we might consider admitting him to our counsels,” said Army. “Aye, even if he imagines himself a power behind Padrec’s throne. The throne may need powers behind it, soon enough.”

“I’ll know,” Secretariat said confidently. “I'll know if one of the dukes gets uppity. There will be time enough to turn to that old vulture if need be.”

City shivered in the wind. "Oh, but they will. Edmund played the man well enough in the Heart last summer. But enough of them come for Winter's Eve — come and see him for themselves, see how he really fares . . ."

Now the six loyal men looked to their emperor, who seemed very happy amid the pageantry and pomp — but naively happy, like a babe with a shining bauble, a child on his birthday morning. Three years had spun by since his wife's death, but he looked like he had aged twenty.

With his cousin Benfred standing near him, the change was more startling still, because in Arellwen’s memory Benfred had always seemed prematurely aged — a gray figure blurring into the background of the imperial family, a man who had sat on their council intermittently during Edmund’s reign, carrying a certain sour wisdom, but without the presence required to channel wisdom into power.

Yet now the thin gray duke looked younger than the emperor; indeed, Edmund looked almost like Benfred’s uncle, or his ghost.

And Benfred — what was he thinking these days? Might he be of some use …?

“When will he arrive?" Exchequer demanded again, stamping irritably on the staircase. “You’ve been with the Bryghalans, Arellwen — do they have a difficulty with being punctual?”

“Patience,” Arellwen said. “I believe that Prince Maibhygon enjoys a touch of drama.”

Somewhere in the city, the first trumpets sounded.

He's almost here, Alsbet realized.

This was not how it was supposed to be. When she had been younger, a girl in the golden warmth of High House, when everything had been different, better, happier — in those days the prospect of an arranged marriage had still been frightening enough to shake her girlish joy.

So she had created a perfect interior vision of her betrothal: her husband would be selected by her father and mother, and he would come riding up the road to High House and they would all be there to greet him, Bryghaida the queen and Edmund the emperor and Padrec and Elfred and Gavian with the Queensguard and Aeden and all the other servants . . . and her husband would be handsome and kind and wise, and they would be a family in the warm summer light forever and ever.

But instead her mother was dead, and her father on his way to joining her, and Padrec was a mystery, and Elfred barely answered letters, so he could not be in frigid Rendale to see his sister and meet her betrothed … while Aeden became colder and more grim-faced as the day approached, and Gavian seemed by turns harsh and sad and wistful, not gay and laughing as he had been once, in High House before it all had come tumbling down.

Alsbet looked out across the courtyard, then, seeing Aeden standing with the Castle staff and Gavian with the Falconguard, both rigid and staring straight ahead in the rising wind, and the Princess suddenly understood that she was profoundly and terribly alone, that the world was not the good place she had thought it in her childhood, that her father could die and Padrec’s throne might totter, and that her marriage was a mistake, a mistake, because her mother's country had been conquered by her father's sword and how could she marry a Brethon when so much of Brethony had been destroyed for what? So that her mother might die and her father turn to drink and Padrec lose his boyhood to the awfulness of war?

Maybe I am going mad, she thought, and it was her first clear thought in what seemed hours. The trumpet blasts were nearer, now, and she fought down an urge to scratch at the rash that had climbed almost to her shoulders. Everyone was at attention — nobles, servants, Falconguard, council, her brother and father beside her, her uncle, the dukes and earls and lords and ladies — and the trumpet blasts were here, and the gates to the Castle swung open and Alsbet's husband-to-be rode through.

He's so old, was her first thought, and then she realized that he was a she, not Maibhygon at all but an elderly, bird-like woman with fierce eyes and missing teeth, a high servant of some kind who slid from her horse to the cobbles and swept a wide curtsy. In her left hand she clutched a staff, which she now raised and brought down against the stones with surprising strength, so that the heavy thud resounded through the courtyard of the Castle.

"Your Imperial Majesty," she cried, her aged, Brethon-accented voice quavering in the stiff wind. “As arranged by treaty, His Royal Highness, Maibhygon mar’ab Daenab’yr, Sword of Bronh, Admiral of the Westland Sea, Count of Vy'daema and Warden of the Western Shore, Steward of the Seacastle and by the grace of the holy sun, Crown Prince of Bryghala, has come to claim his bride. May he enter and find welcome here?"

Now it was the empire's turn. Not to be outdone in ceremony, the Lord Chamberlain stepped forward and declaimed: “In the name of His Imperial Majesty, Edmund Montair, first of that name, by the grace of all the Archangels Prince of Rendale, Guardian of the Heart, Protector of Ysan, Defender of the North, King of Erona and Argosa, Sealord of Sheppholm, Regent of Allasyr and Capaelya …”

The old woman, leaning on her staff, seemed to grimace ever-so-slightly as the Brethon kingdoms were named. Only Bryghala left, Alsbet thought. I shall be the queen of the last kingdom of Brethony . . . and maybe its last queen as well.

“… and Emperor of All Narsil, I declare Castle Rendale open to the Prince of Bryghala, and bid his highness enter and claim that which was promised by treaty.”

Me, said a small, soft, field-mouse voice in Alsbet's spinning head. I am promised.

The gates were already open, but a pair of legionnaires scrambled to yank them wider as a party of horsemen cantered in. They were clad in black armor, with green capes and green sashes down their chests, and they formed two rows, facing one another. There was a flourish of trumpets from outside, and as one the Bryghalan knights swept their swords out and lifted them, forming a tunnel of steel over the head of Prince Maibhygon as the heir to Bryghala’s throne entered the castle of his future wife. The low winter sun had broken through the clouds a short time past, and now it flashed on the Bryghalan blades, flashed tears in Alsbet's eyes as she tried and failed to distinguish the features of her prince.

“Falconguard!” someone shouted, and twenty soldiers, some of whom had ridden with her at High House before her girlhood died, stepped forward in perfect lockstep to lift their lances and form a second tunnel of reflected sunlight in the chill of the courtyard. At the end of it, Maibhygon was waiting, and she still could not make out his face.

“Her Imperial Highness, Alsbet Montair, by the grace of all the Archangels Rose of the Guardians, Jewel of Rendale, Lady of Castle Rendale and Princess of All Narsil,” the Chamberlain cried.

“Me,” she whispered, and her brother beside her seemed to hear, because he half-turned — but then she was gone, down the rich red carpet laid on the cold stone stairs, under the canopy of steel, erect and regal as a princess should be on what was, after all, her day of days. Her father smiled, happy in this martial display of peace, and Aeden bit his lip till it bled, and Gavian’s cheeks were wet.

And then she was there. He was not a tall man, her prince, but sturdy, with black hair falling across his shoulders and a thick beard around his chin. He was older than her, of course, by nearly a decade, but there was a fire in his dark eyes. A circlet of gold sat lightly above a high forehead and strong nose, and his green cloak fell to the paving stones, covering the dark armor beneath. He seemed strong, she would think later, but for now there was only her hammering heart and a strange desire for him to smile at her.

She curtsied, and welcomed him to Rendale, her Brethon practiced, all-but-fluent now. He bowed, gracefully, and thanked her, in careful Narsil that became more halting as he declared that her beauty put the sun and stars to shame. She blushed and said that he was too kind, and she hoped that he had enjoyed a pleasant journey. He replied that the journey was made worthwhile by what waited at the end of it. Then he took her hands, and kissed them, and whispered in lilting Brethon:

“We’ll be just fine, my lady.”

And now he smiled, and Alsbet felt a tremor of hope, like a bird suddenly perching on her wounded heart, and they went together into her castle, leaving the soldiers and servants and cold wind behind.

Aeden hated him from the beginning. He had vowed to avoid such petty feelings, and the first time he met the prince — dropping to one knee as Alsbet told Maibhygon that Aeden was Brethon, too, and her oldest friend — he thought that it might be all right after all. His Highness of Bryghala was courteous and even friendly, with none of the headstrong arrogance that characterized Elfred and Padrec, and it seemed from their brief conversations that the prince had even read a few history books. In all, he was the sort of fellow who might have made an amiable companion, had a few small matters of birth and betrothal been arranged differently.

But Alsbet liked him too much. Part of it was doubtless relief at discovering that her never-glimpsed husband-to-be was handsome (more handsome than you, Aeden, a spiteful voice whispered), and part of it was that Maibhygon was, truth be told, a likable fellow: a trifle formal, perhaps, and withdrawn, and halting as they moved back and forth between the two languages, but likable nonetheless. So her liking him was understandable — understandable but nevertheless intolerable.

She walked with him too much, talked to him too much, talked about him too much, and when all was said and done, it was clear that her impending marriage was suddenly making her happy, or at least making her imagine happiness, more than anything Aeden had done for her in years.

Alsbet did not need him in those last, frosty days, so Aeden took to wandering the Castle: Roaming long hallways where tapestries hung in dust-thick silence and baleful suits of armor stood guard; clambering up the stairs to the summits of the five great towers; wandering aimlessly in the heavy, ancient chill of the crypts beneath the keep. His rambles, however, were no escape from the ache in the pit of his stomach, the dull gnawing pain that extinguished his appetite and stole his sleep and taught him the valuable lesson that heartsick meant just that, because something at the core of him was heavy with despair.

Before Maibhygon, there had been unhappiness, but there had also been a romantic and pointless kind of hope that had nothing to do with reason and everything to do with foolishness and naivete, and the absence of a bitter clarity about his own importance in Alsbet's world. All through the long years of Aeden's adolescence, a part of him had clung to the belief that somehow, despite everything, she understood his feelings — that his princess would marry her prince but do so unhappily, and come to him for comfort and conversation, as she had in the sun-kissed days of her youth. He had never quite guessed that Maibhygon mar'ab Daeneb'yr might be what Alsbet — his Alsbet — truly desired, desired more even than her Aeden, her oldest friend who loved her so very much …

“I was wrong,” he whispered in the darkness of the Crypt of Emperors, where only a single guttering candle illumined the long row of tombs, dark stone carved with the likenesses of the ruling families of Narsil, from Arviragis Cristis to Berdegeris his descendant to all the many Montairs — the ambitious Ethelwin, the pious Padrec, three warlike Cedrecs, three martial Jonthens and all their relatives, waiting to gather Edmund and Padrec and Elfred into their eternal dark.

Peering at the faces, Aeden thought it odd how family resemblances ran: Prince Padrec looked like his grandfather, Cedrec III, while Edmund in turn resembled his grandfather, Jonthen III, and the one whose statue looked most like Elfred was Ethelwin himself, the dynasty's founder, seven generations back. As for Alsbet — Aeden peered closer. Maybe her namesake, Edmund’s sister Alsbet, or her great-grandmother Elswena . . . maybe.

But the face Aeden needed was far away, buried under snow and earth on the slopes of the Guardians. Bryghaida ar'ap Paegara Montair would never lie in the darkness with the other imperial women — and neither would her daughter, because Alsbet would be buried alongside her husband, of course, in Aelsendar, having borne him many sons – having given herself to him in marriage – given herself to him in the bedchamber …

“Don't think of that,” Aeden said savagely, and suddenly the crypt's faces seemed to be laughing at him, whispering scornfully to one another, asking who was this come to gawk at them? A baseborn fool, that was who, a dreamy young virgin who had not learned in twenty-one summers that the clever young steward did not marry the princess, not now, not ever, not in a thousand years.

Marry one of us? the Montairs asked one another in disbelief. Marry one of us, baseborn? The Jonthens and Cedrecs and Padrecs laughed, and their wives and daughters and brothers and sisters laughed with them. Alsbet belongs to us, baseborn . . . did you think we would let you have her? Fool fool fool fool

It was just a draft in the cold crypt that whispered to him, just the dancing candle-flung shadows that made the statues seem to laugh, but still he fled through the shadows and up the stairs into the clean cold air above.

The next day he went down to the city, to the houses crowded together near the docks, where the grid of the city streets became an ill-stitched quilt. Officially the priests of the Temple allowed no whorehouses, but Aeden had gone drinking with Gavian’s soldiers and his fellow stewards often enough to know that this was just a pretty lie, and you just had to know the right alleyway, the right sign over the door, to find all the comforts that the Castle’s gold could buy.

He had been to the House of Birds but never as a customer, only to drink with other men in the common room and perhaps look around a little but mostly to confirm his own romantic rectitude by proving how little he was tempted to partake. He was not particularly pious, indeed his reading had instilled certain doubts about the nature of the archangels. But his special devotion to his princess was still a spur to keep his chastity, to prove every day that his love for Alsbet was not some boyish fancy, but a passion so profound that no other woman’s arms could even tempt him.

Now, though, his despair made that idealism seem like stupidity, and so he went through the door with the painted bird and drank himself up the courage required to ask, with feigned experience that fooled nobody, for a room and a girl who looked, with her dark Ysani curls, as little as possible like his princess.

She was pale as a winter morning, a cardinal’s mask across her eyes even when she was bare everywhere else, and she had a weary kindness about her that acknowledged his obvious naivete. He undressed for her, wondering briefly if his love, his pure love, would prove its purity and power in this moment by cutting off his desire at the root, keeping him from any flesh that wasn’t Alsbet. But no, of course, of course that wasn’t how it was; only when the frenzy left him and he lay on the furs with her arms across him did the expected sadness envelop his no-longer-blinded mind, the knowledge that he could always have this but never that, the realization that the game he had played for years was just a game, and now it was over and he was a man and there were no illusions left.

That night he drank heavily in a tavern near the castle and went back again to the House of Birds, inflamed already in anticipation of the moment, despairing already in anticipation of all the days to come.

After Bryghaida died, Edmund had ordered a garden planted along the western wall of the keep. In the years since, tendrils from the ordered rows of shrubs and trees and bushes had spread across a cracking flagstone terrace and up a never-finished wall, transforming the ground below the Castle’s tallest tower into a pastoral island amid stone and mortar. In spring and summer, it was a favored place for the assignations of servants and courtiers alike — professions of love were whispered amid daffodils and crocuses, kisses exchanged behind curtains of white roses, and one young lord and his intended had even convinced a priest to marry them beneath the shaggy overhang of ivy around the tower’s door.

When the snows came, the bushes were bearded in white and miniature icicles hung like frozen tears from rose bushes and forsythia. The lovers vanished, and only a few hardy birds winged their way from frosted branches to pick at the bare flowerbeds. When Alsbet brought her betrothed there on a clear, ice-blue afternoon a day before Winter's Eve, they were quite alone in that portion of the bailey — which was what she had intended.

They walked bundled in heavy wool, with scarves wrapped tight and their breath hanging like steam in the winter air. Maibhygon was describing his family's hunting lodge in eastern Bryghala, near the fringes of the great Brethon forest, the Mar Tyogg. “We will hunt there, my lady,” he said, proper and formal as ever, in his clipped, awkwardly precise Narsil. She wanted to speak Brethon with him, but he would not permit it — “we have years and years of my language ahead of us, my lady, so allow me to practice yours for a time.”

“I should like to hunt, my lord.” Alsbet smiled. “I have not hunted much since I was a girl.” Which was not so very long ago, she almost added.

"Well, if it please you, we will chase the red deer of the Mar Tyogg — a noble animal, that is, and a hard chase to bring one down. They seldom venture out of the heart of the forest, which lies away east, in Capaelya . . . in what was Capaelya, beg pardon, my lady. I forget sometimes.”

There was a long, snowy pause. “I am sorry,” Alsbet said softly, wondering if saying so made a difference.

Maibhygon looked at her, and for a moment there seemed to be great anger in his gaze — but it passed, and his eyes were kind again. “I am sorry as well, my lady. More sorry than you will know. When I was young — younger, I mean, I would go out of the lodge on a summer evening and look out across the forest. It goes on forever, you know, and men called it the Heart of Brethony, and somewhere in that green heart are the ruins of Tessaer al'Tyogg, where they say the greatest kings of all Hy Brethony once ruled. Some say the gods themselves kept a great citadel there. No one has seen it, of course, because the forest is dark and deep and has many secrets — men go in and never find their way out -- but I felt it, my lady, I felt it. The Heart of Brethony . . ."

At times he reminded her of Padrec’s Brethon friends — but less callow, a man rather than a youth, his romanticism tragic and somehow earned.

His sigh drifted out in steam as they neared the base of the tower that reared its stony spire hundreds of spans above. Matheld’s Tower, it was called after the queen who had thrown herself off so many long years and dead emperors before, and the ivy bearding its base was ice-white and gleaming in the lingering sun. Maibhygon reached out and touched a branch, squeezed it, cracked it, let the icy fragments skitter down the rope of vines into the snow, and sighed again.

“I suppose that Aelsendar is the heart of Brethony now . . . what is left, that is. And you shall be queen there. An old place, Aelsendar is, like the forest, but lovely, with beautiful towers and people and deep roots in the ocean stone. You will smile to see it, my lady. It is not your fault that we men fight wars, not your fault that your father won. And when we are wed, there will be no more wars."

“Yes," she said, “that is what my father wants.”

"That is what we all want," Maibhygon told her. "You will be welcome in Aelsendar, my lady."

Do you hate us? she had asked in one of their first conversations. There is no one to hate, he had answered. Old things pass, new things come. That is the way of it. There was something soothing about his voice: his stilted, elaborately phrased Narsil seemed like the speech of a Brethon knight in one of Aeden's epics, and she felt that she could sink into him, drown in his talk of Aelsendar and the ruins in the forest, drown in those fierce eyes and that soft voice, and let everything be well again.

Perhaps this was what love was, she reflected hopefully, this feeling of somehow being home, and safe, after a long journey.

“Your mother, rest her soul, must love this garden,” he said, looking around at the tangle of snow-sheltered rose and ivy. “Do you ever feel her here?”

"Maybe. I do sometimes, that is, but it may be just my imagination …."

"I don’t think so." Maibhygon's eyes were far away. “The dead are with us, watching … and here surely approving, I believe."

The dead. Her prince had been married before. Her name had been Ygerna, and she had been a princess of Capaelya — Capaelya that no longer existed.

We should be honest, he had told her, a few days ago now. I loved my wife, and I do not love her less for the years that have passed without her. But Iyou loved your mother, and she was taken from you. So perhaps we can be happy together — two people, both having lost someone dear to them . . . we do not have to love one another to be happy, my lady.

"I would dearly love to see this garden in spring," he was saying, and his eyes were dark and his face handsome.

But I could love you, she thought. I think I already may.

Now the brilliant blue of the winter afternoon was dimming as heavy clouds rolled in from the Guardians, blown by a chill wind that set the banners on the tower flapping — the stag of her house and the falcon of the empire had been joined by the white-tree-on-green of Bryghala since the coming of the prince.

Her prince, she reminded herself. Tomorrow was Winter's Eve, when the sealing would begin: the first vows would be spoken before Ethred in the stifling incense and candle-light of the temple, with the lords of the empire to witness. Then the five hidden days till the new year, and the second vows on the Feast of Mithriel — and then a journey to Bryghala in winter, and a marriage on the first day of spring, in Aelsendar whose roots went deep into the sea. Then she would be Maibhygon’s queen, and maybe, someday, they might love each other.

“Yes, it’s gorgeous in the spring,” Alsbet said.

“Still,” Maibhygon said with a faint smile, “winter does possess advantages,” and he bent swiftly to a snowdrift and flung the white powder at her, a swirling, gleaming curtain that burned against her cheeks as she giggled and stumbled away, fumbling for a snowball.

The sky was going dark swiftly, but before night fell they ran laughing amid the ice-jeweled garden, and afterward they went back into the old stone of the keep, where warm meals and warmer fires waited. As they passed inside, Maibhygon leaned over and kissed her chastely, his lips cold and warm at the same time, soft and gentle and to Alsbet, who had never been kissed before, quite satisfactory.

Aeden did not see the kiss, though he might have if he had chosen his route differently; he was wandering the Castle again that evening, passing from hall to hall, parapet to parapet, all the while surrounded by the ghosts.

They were everywhere, not just in the crypt. Rendale’s three hundred year history was an insignificant jot on the ledger of time — the Hall of Kings in Mandor had stood for a thousand years, and some of Brethony’s towers claimed a similar antiquity — but three centuries were still enough to fill the stones of the Castle with echoes of heroism and treachery and simple folly.

For all his knowledge, Aeden had never been so attuned to all the echoes, but then he had never before felt so otherwise alone.

Here, for example, was the west gatehouse, its door painted with a broken sword in memory of the soldier whose shattered weapon had held off the Maeonwy raiders when they came over the walls during a brutal winter. In the reign of the second Berdegeris, that was, centuries gone, but the building was still there, and the guards swore that on Witchnight, the darkest of the hidden days, they could hear the harsh voices and drums, and the thump of booted feet as the soldier carried his broken sword to meet them.

Then there was the headless statue of Prince Edgeris, looming over the west end of the practice yard and garbed in a heavy cloak of ivy. Erveront the Great and Bad, Edgeris's father, had commissioned the statue after the prince won a great victory over the Ysani clans. Later, the emperor accused his son of plotting against him, and, not content with lopping off the offending skull, ordered Edgeris's handsome stone likeness decapitated as well and the stone head flung into the depths of Lake Sacrifice. When a son-in-law overthrew Erveront, there was talk of removing the statue from its perch, but nothing came of it, and generations of squires had labored at swordplay beneath the eyeless gaze of Edgeris Cristis, while the ivy whorled its green way around the prince's legs and chest and birds came to nest atop the broken neck.

So the headless prince wandered the halls with Aeden, and so did the valiant guardsman, and the adulteress Queen Madwen, whose luscious form was said to haunt the rooms where she had bedded her husband's lords, and they accompanied him as he climbed the southernmost spire, called Burnt Tower, where the tales held that Ethelfair the Wicked had put his enemies to the torch, and at least one wife as well.

The ghosts whispered in the wide room at the tower's top, just below the watchman's post, where a window’s shutters opened on the twilit expanses of the north, and they were fine enough company for a broken heart.

“I am twenty-one years of age,” Aeden said clearly, watching Orison’s waters darken against the the purple of the Thornhills to the west. “I am no bondsman. I am not required to follow Alsbet to Bryghala.”

Of course not, Ethelfair’s wife said as flames two centuries cold claimed her.

“I can stay here. The Council — Lord Arellwen would love my service, someone who speaks Mandoran and Brethon, and I could rise, become the chamberlain, perhaps even do them enough service to be ennobled someday.”

Indeed. A fine chamberlain you would be, Queen Madwen told him with a wicked smile.

Yes, a fine chamberlain. That was what he lacked — an ambition, a sense of purpose aside from his fruitless love for a girl who was as far above him as this tower was above the bailey. He could find his purpose here, in Rendale, once Alsbet was gone. It would hurt, of course, but why shouldn’t he remain in the empire, make a life, forget about the future Queen of Bryghala and all the pain of loving her . . .

And then Aeden thought of the mocking whispers in the crypt, whispers that would follow him all his days in the Castle, calling him baseborn fool no matter how he rose.

There were other choices, though, spread out before him in the dusk like a shadowed tapestry. Southward Lake Orison opened into the Mersana, and southward went the riverboats in spring, through Felcester and Argosa — and why stop there? Why should he stay in the empire's cities, when the river went on, through Trans-Mersana, through the city-states, Basania and Jasipar and more, through Janaea, all the way to Mersanica, whose endless walls enclosed the greatest port on the continent. He spoke some Mandoran, spoke it well enough to find work in those warm southern lands. And if nothing else, he would be seeing the wonders of the world: the olive groves around Nevus Albina, the gleaming sands of the White Dunes, the bazaars of Abusu, the bright blue waters of the Great Divide, and even Mandor itself, the Golden Temple and the Magi’s Hill and the Hall of Kings.

“There is nothing holding me here,” he declared firmly. “I can go south — see the whole damn world.”

See it all, see it all, Prince Edgeris said, though his headless gaze saw nothing.

Go then, the soldier with the broken sword told him. Go, and be quick about it.

Aye, go, the wicked Ethelfair cried, holding a flaming brand. Go, you baseborn fool! There is nothing for you in Bryghala, nothing for you here.

It is hot in the south, hot enough to boil your blood, the lustful queen said. You will forget your northern bitch soon enough.

“I will go," Aeden said, as the landscape darkened beneath him. The breeze picked up and set the snowdust dancing. But his mind turned to his princess, alone in the halls of Aelsendar's Citadel, and the voices of the ghosts were weaker. His resolve guttered like a candle in the winter wind, and now he saw Alsbet riding toward him on a summer afternoon at High House, and he knew that his words were just that, nothing more, no will behind them.

“I will go,” Aeden said again, and he would go — to Bryghala, and Aelsendar, where the towers rose up from the Westland Sea and the roots of the city went down deep into salt and rock. He would go, because he might be a baseborn fool, but he was Alsbet's baseborn fool above all.

He went down from the tower, to food and too much drink. Before he found his way to bed, he heard the bells of the temple tolling midnight. A new day had begun — it was Winter's Eve.