The Prince of Narsil
The Falcon's Children, Chapter 6
This is Chapter 6 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.
Autumn came early that year, bringing with it a sudden snowfall that dusted the northlands with white even before the early harvests were gathered in. The weather warmed afterward, and the snow melted quickly — but then a cold, driving rain settled overhead and stayed, spitting and blowing intermittently, for nearly twice a tenday. Orison swelled and churned, and the Castle’s bailey filled with clinging mud, deep enough to half-swallow the boards that were laid down as causeways across the mire.
When the weather finally cleared, there were high skies and strong autumn winds, and showers of brown leaves swept down from the mountain forests to carpet the Castle and city. The brilliant, waning sun burnished the landscape, and the days ran shorter and shorter, dying into a cold blue darkness that promised winter soon, and long nights draped in shadow and in snow.
It was three days before the Feast of Uriel, the patron of the harvest, and a flotilla of grain boats from the Heart was being unloaded at Rendale’s docks to fill the city’s cellars and granaries, when Padrec of Montair returned to his ancestral home.
They gave a parade for the occasion. The Lord of the City organized it, with the Falconguard lined up along the cobbles of the Great Way and the people crowded up behind them, waving falcon banners for the empire, stags for the house of Montair, and hoisting children and drinking the wine that the council had distributed that morning — but not too early, so it was a friendly rather than a rowdy drunkenness that prevailed as the prince of Narsil rode through the city’s gates and up toward the Castle.
He had an unusual cluster of riders with him: His cousin Alaben, dressed in Montair blue; a pair of young Narsil lords, one beautiful and one nondescript save for his cheerfulness, both in legion armor but wearing the colors of minor houses; and then a group of strangers in rich and multicolored garb, all wearing golden metal suns aflame upon their chests, led by a pair whose striking faces, long and angular, marked them plainly as siblings, if not twins, though one was a bearded and shaven-headed young man and the other a young woman with auburn hair and windburned cheeks and ember-colored lips.
The woman had a small hawk digging its claws into her arm; her brother, a huge bastard sword strapped across his back. The crowds that cheered for Padrec gawked at them, and they both wore amused expressions as the murmurs rose with their passage up the street.
The Castle’s gates stood open; its inhabitants had gathered in the forecourt under a bright sky with high-floating clouds. The prince rode through, past saluting legionnaires, and spurred a little bit ahead of his companions, right into the center of the broad semicircle formed by lords and ladies, the archpriest and the southern emissaries, soldiers and stewards and blue sisters and priests in gold and green and gray — and then behind and above them the servants, all crowded in doorways and windows like rooks upon a ruin.
Alaben followed Padrec, and swiftly dismounted a few spans behind where the prince still sat ahorse; behind him the young Narsil lords followed suit. The Brethons dismounted too, but slowly, elaborately, imbuing the act with showmanship. Only the prince was still on his mount, which stamped and snorted a bit in the crowded court, while its rider swept the whole Castle with his gaze — as though he had never before seen its battlements and towers, as though he were a Mandoran explorer come unexpectedly into a barbaric temple, unsure whether to over-awe the natives with some brazen demand or submit to their ministrations.
Then Edmund and Alsbet came down the steps toward him, the princess in the same blue as Alaben, the emperor in black hose and a white doublet emblazoned with a falcon. Edmund’s face was pale beneath his silvered beard but at least he was sober, which was a reason for Alsbet to be grateful as she stood beside him and looked across at her brother, who looked back, briefly back to his Brethon companions, before his face turned fully to greet his family and his eyes brushed Edmund and then locked with hers.
She smiled, and felt as she did a quiver in her throat, a mix of hope and not-so-buried grief. Padrec did not smile in return; his eyes burned blue in a face that was familiar and different at once, a palimpsest of youth where experience had scrawled something indecipherable.
Then his eyes went back to their father and finally, amid an uncomfortable and watchful silence, he swung down from his mount and crossed the stones quickly and went down on one knee, the thin circlet on his head flashing the sunlight back upward.
He said something about homecoming and the emperor said something about welcome and behind him his companions were kneeling too though the Brethons’ heads were up, and now Alsbet looked at them and her eyes met the eyes of the young woman with the red hair, who might have been staring at her since the start …
… and there was a stir of applause around them as Padrec rose and embraced Edmund, and his companions rose as well, and they all went up the stairs together and into the keep, the ceremony over and the harder part begun.
Nine years: That was how long it had been since Padrec had left his youth behind for the fields and camps and courts of Capaelya and Allasyr, with only two journeys back to Rendale in all that time.
Alsbet still thought of her brother as he had been when he departed High House to squire for his father and later adjutant for Aengiss: a fourteen-year-old with hair like goldenrod and a wide boyish smile, who dueled with his younger brother with wooden swords in the limpid summer light, or climbed with Elfred to the high pastures and chased mountain goats and came home late to regale the supper table with tales of how the world looked from what seemed its very tip-top. In her mind’s eye now her brothers were always laughing boys, their normal youthful cruelties forgotten, their manhood just a distant dream …
It was in the western lands that Padrec had found his manhood, or had the man-size shape within him filled — and what had filled it, for the most part, was war. Fighting was the way that the prince of Narsil separated himself from his childhood; instead of taking up a trade, he took up a sword, and it stayed with him.
It was not exactly that he enjoyed Cruimh, where he watched a broadsword hew a man’s head and shoulders into pieces that landed on opposite sides of the rearing, foaming horse; or Wyr'daen, where a cornfield was left a writhing, red-and-yellow sea of trampled plants and wounded, screaming soldiers. But Padrec came to accept even the slaughter as part of the natural order of things, the way life really was, once you stripped away the trimmings and frippery and female nonsense.
And he accepted it, too, as the price you paid for being surrounded by men who treated you as an equal, a comrade in arms — even if they made sure that this particular comrade didn’t see the worst of the fighting, the most dangerous spots — in a way that a crown prince of Narsil had never been treated by anyone save his younger brother. War was the only place for this, and also the only place where a prince could find himself placed in the charge of older men, men like Aengiss above all, who treated him as a ordinary subordinate, a pupil to be schooled instead of flattered, without the sermonizing of priests or the truckling of every tutor and master-at-arms who had trained Padrec before he went west to fight.
What the war and the legions didn’t fill within him, the world of the western kingdoms did. He spoke a little fumbling Brethon, because of his mother and her tutelage, before he rode to war in Capaelya; within a year he spoke it fluently. He had never known how wearying the winters in the empire could be before he crossed the Northwest Chain and left the moorland and mountains behind for a landscape where spring came early and summer was temperate and fall riotously beautiful and everything was sharper, more vivid, more complicated in its loveliness than the austere stone and evergreens of his childhood home.
Nor had he ever known how beautiful a town or city could be. He had been to Argosa once, as a small boy, and he dimly remembered its spires and domes, but for the most part he had only known the ramshackle sprawl of Rendale and the squared-off, utilitarian bulk of the castles and townships and markets in the Heart. Whereas in the Brethon lands there was a sinuous grace to even houses in the most undistinguished towns, and then the fortresses and palaces were astonishing, in the way that they seemed to have grown from the landscape and been pruned, like large and spreading oaks tamed by some titanic gardener.
They felt old, too, older than his own empire and older even than what Mandor had built in the north, and their age seemed like a powerful, magical thing, a kind of glamour that one might desire to claim for oneself, as one claimed a jewel, a sword, any object of great beauty, or for that matter as one might claim a woman.
The people, men and women both, were another matter; they were enemies or suspicious neutrals, most often, troublemaking or deadly, with hard eyes that watched and weighed and kept their secrets. But even there, for a young man who had lived a whole life among subjects and servitors, to go constantly among people who owed him no allegiance, bore him a reasonable and honest enmity, or offered themselves to be convinced, wooed, persuaded to his cause — there was a challenge in this, a bracing feeling, a thrill that came with not being obeyed for the first time, with having to contend for loyalty, and a satisfaction at success that was deeper than anything Padrec had felt before.
This was true especially for the kind of pursuit common to young men. The prince had never known a woman in his own empire, and the Brethon women who submitted to him or who chased him, the common girls who wanted his bastard or the nobler ones who imagined something more, became for him the most tangible embodiment of his purpose in their lands, a mix of courtship and conquest that made the war’s intentions real in the nape of a neck, the swell of a bosom, the fall of silk or homespun, the flesh beneath.
Padrec was not such a fool that he couldn’t see some of the self-deception involved in this experience, the extent to which he was being led by lust into a kind of pleasant fantasy about the western kingdoms. Nor was he so obtuse as to ignore how much of his pursuit was just a kind of bullying, short of the rapine that some soldiers went in for — the legions prided themselves on their restraint, and there were white and red priests with them to remind them of their duties, but when it happened, well, it happened — but still an exercise of power dressed with only a bit of youthful charm.
And with the one girl, the sloe-eyed one after the battle at Kaeyr Gnoth, that had been uglier …
But even if he could stand outside himself enough to judge his feelings, still they were his feelings, and the sense of self forged by his nine years in Brethony was the only manhood that he had.
So to return, after so many years, to the familiar-but-not surroundings of his father’s keep and city … to return to the world of courtiers and the ceremonial life of a crown prince … to return to his sister, whose place it now was, somehow, and who seemed to demand something from him, something related to their father, that he could not grasp or give …. it all seemed like vain rubbish coming between him and the life that he had lived for a nearly a decade in the lands beyond the Northwest Chain, yr-Yrgheim in the Brethon words, the life that he would have kept living if his father and the council and the dukes had not been so stubborn and short-sighted, if they had not denied him the very thing that he had fought for, a throne to call his own.
So he told himself, in a self-pitying monologue, while carrying out his duties and especially while escaping tothe practice yards and the armory and the archery fields, all places which offered refuges from the unreality of his father’s Castle, Alsbet’s Castle, places where he could sweat and grunt and bruise his body in imitation of the battles he had fought — and in preparation for those yet to come.
But the real refuge was the one he had brought with him, the little court of friends and allies — some of them his companions from the beginning of the wars, and some of them young Brethons from families that had thrown in with him and fought for him and helped win him the Stone Seat where his father would not let him sit.
Here, too, he was shrewd enough to step back and recognize that their friendship was shaped by opportunism, as influenced by his princely power as the bowing and scraping he disdained. But still, these were men and women who had taken real risks in throwing in their lot with him, who had turned their back on certain ancient loyalties, who had placed a bet upon on a very different future — and he could not help it, he loved them for it. Maeyr Dolvyden, Gwaithyr Ywen, Flewden the youngest son of the Daethyons and through his mother Padrec’s cousin once removed, whose older brothers had all fought against him but who had come over to them just before the battles in the great orchards below Llyr …
And then the twins. So much of how he thought about Allasyr, his kingdom of Allasyr — which the twins liked to called his kingdom of Hy Brethony, the old name from the old years when there was a king in Tessaer al-Tyogg of legend — so much of it was now connected to the Rhedryons, the son and daughter of the lord of Calas Rhedras, with their poise and mystery and strange intense fixation upon him, upon Padrec, which might all be an act but if so was the strongest mummer’s show he had ever seen.
Their father’s lands were in the west of Capaelya, of what had been Capaelya, and the Rhedryon manor house overshadowed a dreamy, wooded dell, all mist and sunshine intermixed, with sheep on the slopes above and miniature villages placed among the rills and ponds. There had been a battle close by in the late days of the first war, after Agaven was dead but his son Gahaven still fought on, and afterward Aengiss had occupied the manor, using its halls for hospital rooms and emptying its barns to feed his men.
The Rhedryons, father and children, had fought for the Capaelyan prince and been defeated with him, and along with their men-at-arms they had fled south and eastward, toward the green depths of the Mar Tyogg. So it was a seneschal who surrendered the manor to the Narsils and it was old men and women and children who gave cold looks to the empire’s legionnaires even as they went along with their demands.
But on the third day after the battle a party came riding back up the road that ran away eastward through the mists — a column of a dozen men under a banner with the Rhedryoni wolf, and at their head the twins, Cadfael and Caetryn, alike and different, beautiful and strange.
Their men-at-arms offered their weapons to the surprised legionnaires who met them, but the twins insisted on keeping theirs — his heavy sword, her bow — until they were brought to Aengiss, who greeted them with Padrec and his other adjutants and accepted their surrender with a mix of amusement and suspicion, and then asked, in Brethon that was at once precise and harshly (Padrec suspected deliberately) accented, whether they had perhaps mislaid their father?
“Our father,” Caetryn said, her voice like music and cold water, “has not yet realized where the path of wisdom lies.”
“Indeed?” Aengiss said. “Or perhaps he has decided that the path of wisdom lies in allowing his heirs to join what appears to be the winning side, while he himself remains with Prince Gahaven … and then if the fortunes of war change, well, his children were headstrong and impetuous, and they will do penance while he professes that he was loyal to the true king all along.”
Cadfael shrugged. “He was angry at our going, but perhaps he is now having some thoughts of that sort. But our surrender is sincere, and so is our promise of loyalty. If it is his highness’s will that we become hostages instead of allies, we will accept the decision with good spirit.”
“His highness?” Aengiss glanced at Padrec, his tone deliberately dismissive. “You are not surrendering to a prince of Narsil here, my lord and lady. Here there is only Lord Adjutant Montair, in service to my own command, which is in service to the Queen of Allasyr, my emperor’s great ally …”
“Yes, no doubt,” Caetryn said in that same melodic voice, looking coolly past Aengiss to the prince. “And yet nonetheless it is your prince to whom we wish to bind ourselves. It is his face that I have seen. It is his rule that Brethony is destined for. He may bid us obey you, or his father, or Queen Dynaira; he may hold us hostage in our own keep or anywhere he pleases. But in finery or rags, in his cells or by his side, it is Prince Padrec of the House of Montair that we wish to serve.”
There was no cell and no hostage-taking; fighting a war in a hostile country meant accepting surrenders even if they might be cynical and allies even if they seemed a little strange. So the twins and the men-at-arms were folded into Aengiss’s army — and then Cadfael and Caetryn, Cad and Cat as they called each other, were folded as well into Padrec’s little group of compatriots and friends.
Not that his other friends were particularly welcoming, at least at first. What Dunkan Mac Mordain said in his loud, crude way – “after they fuck you, maybe both of them together, they’ll tie you to a tree naked and sacrifice you to their forest gods” — was echoed in different ways by Elbert Freshett and Paulus bar Merula, respectively his most decent and most cynical intimates among Aengiss’s adjutants, both of whom warned against letting the mystical streak of the Brethons draw him into some strange game of theirs … especially when one of the players was a woman, probably trying to trip him into bed.
But to Padrec’s surprise — and, yes, disappointment — the reality was somewhat different. Cad and Cat were mystics, clearly, but surprisingly matter-of-fact ones. She had the sight, he had the gift of interpretation, and between them they had seen quite a few things that had already come to pass and quite a few more that they were confidently expecting. And one of those things, glimpsed in a vision after their retreat from the battlefield (when they met, Cat still had a stitched-up wound slicing down her shoulder), was a future in which Padrec would be crowned the king of Hy Brethony, the vanished realm that had once united all the Brethon lands. For this, they were willing to serve him, befriend him, ride beside him in battle and instruct him, with a mesmerizing intensity, about his destiny and how it might be accomplished.
But all this intensity was somehow also restrained, invested with grace and self-containment instead of the need and desperation that most courtiers and sycophants exuded. And part of that restraint was a refusal on the part of Cat to take even a small step toward flirtation — even toward the mild, rote kind that almost every woman brought into a prince’s presence tried to practice — let alone toward the bedding, the fucking, that Dunkan had predicted and that Padrec (he could admit it) had wanted from the first time he saw her eyes rise to meet his from beneath her red hair’s spill.
Instead she was offering a kind of devotion without any kind of surrender, and it was baffling to him, as though she belonged to a different race, a different order of being — angel or damned, elf or fae – whose motives and very nature were obscure.
It was also made him desire her even more.
Once the first war ended, once Capaelya was conquered and divided, they were no longer with him all the time. But they came to Naesen’yr often enough, where Padrec shadowed Aengiss and his cousin Alaben as they administered the empire’s new territory and settled soldiers from the legions in its lands. And when the twins came they brought with them other young nobles, some friendly and some suspicious, who were all apparently united by a vision of this Hy Brethony and who had been meeting in secret for some time – years? more? – before the Allasyr-Narsil-Capaelya war.
Most of them were Capaelyan, clearly trying to find their way in the ruin of their realm. But a surprising number were from Allasyr, and a surprising number of those were willing to talk seriously about Padrec as a potential heir to their throne, a successor to their childless queen, which was an idea that had lurked somewhere in his mind but whose realistic possibility he only now began to grasp.
And a few even came from Bryghala, the westernmost kingdom, befogged and mysterious with its ancient citadel of Aelsendar, which had taken no part in the war and refused to recognize the dismemberment of Capaelya, sending no embassies and giving sanctuary to any noble who chose exile. These were the most suspicious by far, but even they seemed capable of falling under the spell — not Padrec’s spell, though he tried to cut a kingly figure for them, but the spell that Cat and Cad seemed to weave around him, in which an ancient story that he had barely known before he crossed the Yrgheim was suddenly the story his life, the destiny that he had never known he wanted.
“The trick is to let them have their mystery but don’t let them have your heart,” Aengiss said to him one day, after the Rhedryons and another chapter of their secret society had galloped away into the forests and the mists. “Your heart belongs to the empire, and because their story might serve the empire’s purposes you can indulge it. The myths are necessary if we are to really take and hold this land – all of it, not just this strip that we’ve claimed. But you need to remember that they are just myths, stories be turned to your use when you are emperor, not stories to get lost in — or, angels forbid, actually believe.”
Padrec believed in Aengiss, and he didn’t fully believe the Brethon myths. But Cat and Cad — he believed in them, and they made good on that belief. When the next war came, the war for Allasyr, they rode across a hundred leagues of hostile territory to join him, and soon after many of the young Brethons who had come to Naesen’yr were rising for him, and the twins were beside him on the battlefield, and when they won on those fields the cheers of the legions — for Narsil!, for the empire!, for Aengiss!, For the falcon and the crown! — were all accompanied by cheers that were for him alone, cheers in Brethon from young and lusty voices, cheers for aeys rhy’aira, the young king.
And now far away from those fields, far from the twining towers of Tessaer al’Yrgha and its palace’s still-empty Stone Seat, surrounded by near-strangers in the cold of his childhood home, the twins were still beside him and those cheers were still always in his ears.
Alsbet had dinner with them soon after they arrived, not a court dinner but a private one, in a long table in her apartments, just her and Padrec and Cat and Cad and the other Brethon lords. It was an awkward evening, as she had known it would be: She was determined to speak in Brethon throughout, which made her efforts at conversation even more halting than they otherwise would have been — and then everyone else spoke slowly, with elaborate courtesy that felt painful in its own way, as the servants came and went with courses and through the stained glass in the room’s western window the autumn sun set far too slowly to release her.
Only the twins did not seem to feel the awkwardness. The other Brethons were agonizingly cautious — one young lordling, Dalbain, spoke only twice in three hours – but the two Rhedryons talked freely not only to Padrec and Alsbet but to one another, carrying the conversation between them when it flagged for everyone else. The princess, who had little experience with twins, found a particular fascination in just watching them volley back and forth: Even though they weren’t speaking her native tongue she could sense the slight difference in the way they spoke to one another, the speeded-up quality of their sallys and responses, as though everything said had been anticipated by the other, as though they merely occupied slightly different regions of the same united mind.
“We must have you come to Brethony, of course, Your Highness,” said Cat at one point, turning away from some obscure colloquy with her brother about the families whose lands abutted theirs, holding up her tumbler near her cheek so her wine’s refracted redness sharpened the lighter crimson of her hair. “Your speech is excellent, indeed better than your brother’s in grammar, but you will soon find his fluency and comfort once you come among us fully. A great tour, for your retinue as well of course, would be a beautiful thing. To see your mother’s country, to come among your own people …”
Your own people – was that generosity or presumption? In this dinner as indeed in every encounter with the Brethon noblewoman, Alsbet had watched for signs of the understanding, the romance, that she assumed must exist between her brother and this Caetryn — else why would she be here, a lone woman among men, traipsing around in Padrec’s train?
But there was no obvious sign of it, no tales from the servants of any movement between their bedchambers at night, no soft glances between them over meals. Instead there was this curious mixture of blitheness and intensity, with nothing coquetteish about it, which was often trained on Padrec but could be just as easily turned, as now, on her as well.
“… no better time for it than the autumn, when your brother returns with us to his kingdom. To cross the Yrgheim in those months, to see the slopes ablaze” — here Cat let slip a word, an ejaculation, that Alsbet did not recognize, and then went on, “it’s surely the best way to enter Brethony, to come into our lands. And then you might winter their with us, in Tessaer or even Naesen’yr if the cold is too hard too close to the mountains. I am sure you are well-sick of mountains by now, if this is always your home! The lakelands, though.” She breathed out, with an unladylike noise in exhalation, and said again: “The lakelands.” It was as though nothing else could possibly be said.
“It would be a grace to have you come, Alsbet,” Padrec said. It was said awkwardly, like most of what her brother said to her, but unlike some things it also sounded sincere.
The truth was that she would have given gold and jewels and any precious thing she had to be able to really travel, to leave Rendale and its Castle, to shake free from memory and sorrow and escape her father’s haunted eyes. She would gladly travel anywhere; to go to the Brethon lands seemed like a particularly desirable adventure, whether they were really her somehow her own people or just the fabled race from Aeden’s legends and histories. But her father –
“My father, alas, requires my assistance as the lady of this court,” Alsbet said, the regret in her voice unfeigned. “With my mother dead there is no one else. It might be that we could come to the west, to your country” – she hesitated over the your – “but only I would think as part of a grand progress of the entire court, with the emperor at the heart of it, visiting his realm. I hope that Padrec, now that he has returned, might persaude my father to consider such a journey.”
Her brother’s face looked unhappy, but it was Cadfael who spoke. “Of course we would welcome our new liege lord, princess. Such a thing would be a blessing to our land, no doubt. But if I may speak plainly, the future of Brethony lies with your brother and yourself — with the blood you carry in your veins, the mix of north and west, the hope of a different realm that our own generation might have the privilege to forge.”
“That we will forge,” said Cat fiercely.
“That we will forge – that we’ve already seen forged.”
What that already meant Alsbet couldn’t quite grasp. Meanwhile another Brethon spoke up, a bearded bull of a man named Aerelyn.
“The truth is, princess, that our sires must pass away for the new thing Lord Cadfael speaks of to come to pass. The old kingdoms were a world of old grudges, feuds pursued past reason, division accepted for its own sake. What your empire has made possible is the new Brethony that many of us already desired.”
“With a new king,” said Cat, looking now at Padrec with another strange expression. “This is something our own father could not see; he has bent the knee but he hates us for being here, he murmurs about young traitors in his cups I’m sure. And so with all the others, fathers and mothers, who criticize without understanding. We don’t want their three kingdoms, their seven hundred feuding families. We want a Brethony that reclaims the destiny that at the beginning it was promised.”
Alsbet wished, not for the first time, that she could step out of this dinner and talk with Aeden about what each section of the discussion meant. Her mind ruffled through its sheaf of Brethon stories for an easy reference point, but finding nothing, said lamely …
“Promised?”
Did she imagine the look that flicked between the twins?
“Promised by our ancestors to us,” Cad said. “Promised by the kings who ruled in Tessaer al’Tyogg that was. Promised by their example. Promised as their legacy.”
“I see,” said Alsbet, sure it was obvious that she didn’t. “Well, I am sure that we … that we of Narsil can take our example from that … from the legacy. I am sure that the time my brother has spent with you will make …”
“Yes, that is exactly it,” interrupted Cat. “This unity must be a unity of flesh and bone and blood. And your father, I know your father is a great and noble warrior, but it is not his to forge. It is Padrec’s to forge. It is your generation that must accomplish it.”
“The unity between our realms.”
“Not only between but within. This is the strange grace of your conquest, princess. In uniting Narsil and Brethon it is also the means of uniting all Brethony, so long and piteously divided, into the realm that we all know that it can be.”
“We were waiting for you,” said the youngest-looking of the Brethon lords, slender Lord Flewden, who was their not-so-distant relation and did look, at a sideways glance, a little bit like Elfred. “We did not even know it, but we were.”
“So you must come!” said Cat with a wide smile, amazing in its sincerity. “Come with your father – with our emperor – by all means if you can. But it is you we want, Princess Alsbet of Montair. Because you are also Princess Alsbet ar’ap Paegara of the realm of Brethony, and we would have you as our own.”
Princess Alsbet of Montair, who wasn’t sure what else she was, looked at Prince Padrec of Montair, and now at last she thought she saw in his eyes a hint of true infatuation. But then they shifted suddenly to hers, and her brother smiled strangely and said:
“You see, sister, I have won us the very best of subjects, have I not?”
“To our prince and princess!” Cadfael said then, raising his tumbler. “And to their fair land of Brethony, one kingdom from the mountains to the sea!”
The others raised theirs, and their toasts had the rhythm of a liturgy:
“From forest to forest, height to depth!”
“From sun to moon and north to south!”
“From under hill to mountain’s height!”
“From the Tessaer of the forest to the Tessaer of the peaks!”
“From the secret doors to the hidden roads!”
“From the lakes of Naesen to the bones of Aelsendar!”
“To Padrec Montair, king of all!”
They drank lustily, their awkwardness at last falling away. Cat’s eyes flashed and her hair tossed, Padrec’s smile was a bit foolish, Aerelyn had Cad’s arm gripped in his own and together the two lords pounded on the table, making the plates dance.
But Aelsendar is the capital of Bryghala, Alsbet thought as her own wine went down, and Bryghala is not ours.