The Queen's Man

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 5

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

The last of spring was cold and wet that year, and then the hot days swept in suddenly, their heat baking even Rendale’s muddiest streets into stiffened pavement. Winter’s Town emptied completely, its denizens seeking the high passes, the gold seams, the deep woods, but the harbor was always full, the docks fairly stuffed with riverboats. Everyone in the Castle was gay and cheerful, it seemed, as the summer days went by and they waited for the victorious legions to march home from Allasyr, with Padrec and Aengiss leading them.

Everyone save Alsbet’s father, the triumphant emperor, who drank alone in the warm darkness of Rendale’s summer nights.

His bodyservant did the cleaning, making sure the empty casks and bottles disappeared. But when Edmund came to dinner stumbling, with a stink on his breath and red-rimmed eyes — or summoned the stewards to demand another barrel of something-or-other early in the afternoon — or appeared unexpectedly to hear petitions with his lips curled in a brutal smile — well, then it was only reasonable to worry about what rumor might make of his condition.

For the Emperor of Narsil to be in mourning for his dead wife was understandable. For him to drink his days and crown away was not. Someone had to prop him up, until the black tide receded.

If it did.

Rate he’s going, he’s drinking himself into the grave. That’s what Gavian wanted to say to his princess, in what he thought of as their little council — Alsbet, Aeden, himself, all sitting up together long into the night. But a life spent serving many masters had convinced him that neither superiors nor women nor nobility could bear too much reality, and as his princess was all three he tried to walk a careful line — never telling her a falsehood, but not speaking every truth he saw.

“Don’t leave him alone at night until he’s asleep.” That was one piece of wisdom he had learned from watching other men go all the way down the path the emperor was walking. So Edmund was never left alone, if they could help it, and they kept the group that stayed up with him small — sometimes Gavian and Aeden, sometimes Aeden and the chamberlain (who dozed off too often to be useful), occasionally Alsbet and often just the emperor’s bodyservant, whom Alsbet insisted was loyal-unto-death but whose pay Gavian asked the chamberlain to quietly increase.

The immediate goal of this small circle, apart from protecting the emperor from himself, was to protect his imperial person from the spread of gossip. It was a necessary task but also an impossible one, since the emperor’s personage was required often enough in public that anyone with eyes to see could recognize that more than grief was working in his face.

Inevitably there were murmurs, whispers, and sometimes more than that: Someone from the Castle – a young steward, a factor for the Council — would spend their evening down in the dockside taverns, throwing dice with rivermen, and after the third flagon of Salman red the talk would turn to seeing the emperor wobbling as he saluted the Falconguard, or hearing that he’d stumbled going down the long flight from the upper apartments to the Great Hall.

One day a particularly talkative steward was missed at the midday provender. That evening, when there were still a few hours left of the midsummer sun, Gavian left his quarters and crossed the inner court to the Castle gate. He nodded to the serjeant commanding the sentries, a man accustomed to seeing Gavian set out alone into the city; the captain, it was widely assumed, had a lady somewhere in Rendale, to whom he paid discreet visits every tenday.

Which was true, though not precisely in the way they meant.

Gavian followed the Great Way down through the city, the crowds parting for his hard face even though he wore no uniform. At Jonthen’s Circle he paused in a spot where the line of roofs allowed for a clear view down across the harbor and the spread of lake beyond. The waters of Orison were still and glassy, waiting to be bathed in sunset. A single barge was bellying its way into the harbor, while in the distance the sails of fishing skiffs moved like a flock of birds near the bare stone bulb of White Head Isle.  

It was a soft and drowsy vision, with only the steep heights on the further shore as a reminder that this was still the wild north, not some sleepy inlet on Lake Salma speckled with the pleasure boats of the nobility. It was not at all the vision that had greeted him when he first arrived in Rendale eleven — or was it twelve? — years ago, coming north in the dregs of winter over roads churned brown with earth and snowmelt, riding with a hundred new-recruited legionnaires from the Heart who were going on all the way to Caldmark.

Rendale then had seemed simply filthy, with a layer of wintry grime darkening every surface, from the mounds of hard-packed snow to the masonry on the finer houses to the clothes and armor and even the faces of people in the streets. Everything he had touched felt gritty, almost like the bristling sandpaper they made in Pharssa. Nowhere felt warm enough, not even with huge fires lit and leaping. And the lake below was all frost and mist and gray-brown depths, a bowl of dirty ice and water in a fog bank.

Remember the rule in the north – the closer you get to real power, the grimmer and dirtier it gets. So Sefarian had advised him, when they parted ways — his friend choosing the comforts of a court-in-exile in Great Salma, Gavian hazarding the adventure of the northern empire.

He had seen the truth of the advice soon enough, passing from the relative comfort of Argosa, where he first offered himself in service to the empire’s legions, to his captain’s assignment at Valemark, where the land was wilder, conditions harsher, and the commanding officers clearly more competent and important than the rather softer sort who had greeted him in the Argosan barracks.

But neither Valemark nor his other assignments around the Heart had prepared him for his first glimpse of Rendale, five years after he first slipped across the border: A city that ruled a wider territory than any kingdom or principality in the riverlands, all while feeling like a stable in desperate need of mucking out.

He hadn’t expected that he would stay, but then he hadn’t known what to make of the cryptic summons, given him by Wulf Alcaster, Valemark’s commander then, wry and already white-bearded, who told him that the message came direct from the emperor himself.

The Queen is looking for a man, and I think she wants a man like you.

From the circle Gavian bent west, through Tribunal, the warren around the red priests’ courthouse — where they mostly heard marriage disputes rather than the heresy cases that occupied them in the south — and then descending again by twists and turns, doubling back once or twice just in case he was being followed.

It wasn’t likely: The Lord of the Secretariat had his whisperers and the Lord Chancellor had a man who did some dirty work, but nobody watched in Rendale the way they watched in Antiala, the eyes and even Eyes everywhere, the knowledge that every innkeep or panderer was probably in some faction’s pay.

A simpler place, the north — tougher, harder, but also in its way much more naïve.

Descending into Dockside now, he moved between taverns and warehouses, the scent of smoked fish covering the more unpleasant smells. Near where two new-arrived riverboats were unloading, with a crowd of shirtless men rolling barrels in the dusk, he bent into a narrow street, turned again into a narrower alley, and reached a red door in a white wall, painted with a small bluebird just above the handle.

It opened, after a moment, to the careful and specific rhythm of his knock. The doorkeepers were the usual pair, a muscled bravo with a heavy knife tucked in his belt and a thinner man, Skalbarder by his features, who looked unarmed and was probably more dangerous for that. The heavier one patted him for weapons and relieved him of his blade; the thin one nodded wordlessly and led him down the corridor, up one flight, down another, through two curtained doorways, and into the Ladyhawk’s domain.

By custom there were no legal whorehouses in Rendale: the Lord of the City presided over an official regime of virtue. Instead there were the “known women,” keeping rooms in Dockside or in Winter’s Town, and then there was this singular establishment: a large space, windowless, draped in reds and blues, divided here and by screens painted in the riverlands style with iridescent birds, the whole space lit by more candles than were necessary, so that the light was always shifting in the drafts, and the birds seemed to shimmer, move, and fly.

Left of the bar a double door opened into an ordinary-looking little tavern that faced out onto one of the Dockside streets. But no customer ever passed from the official establishment to the real one. If you wanted to drink, you could do it in the Hawk and Dove for the same price as any other dockside bar, but the company was sparse and the bartender unfriendly. If you wanted to patronize the House of Birds, you had to take the red doorway, know the knock and — if you weren’t a known quantity like the captain of the Queensguard — pay the necessary price.

There were probably a half-dozen patrons in the main room when Gavian came in, drinking at scattered tables with a pall of spiced smoke above their heads. They weren’t the important clientele or they wouldn’t be loitering there, waiting for a girl with a free twenty minutes to come down and claim them — and hanging about in the meantime with a bored-looking zither player, two women on their day off working the bar, and a pair of younger girls clearing drinks, one chestnut-haired and familiar to Gavian and one dark-haired and new to whatever the Ladyhawk considered training.

Based on past experience he assumed both would be given to the clients before Winter’s Eve.

The important clients went through the smaller door to the right of the bar, dark wood painted with the rainbow of a peacock’s tail. That was where he went now, with a nod to green-eyed, freckled Alma, one of the women pouring drinks — dressed for the task in a plain red dress, cut to be revealing but without any of the fripperies, the feathers and masks and face paint, that the House of Birds required for its real work.

She was the last woman he’d paid for pleasure, two years ago now, and he still regretted it. The archangels forgave such things in men, but he was too old for a whore’s condescending ministrations, especially a whore painted to look like a oriole, at least to someone who had never seen one. And besides, to use this house for its services, he thought, would change his relationship with its proprietor for the worse.

But it wasn’t Alma’s fault, and he hoped she didn’t take offense. She smiled at him now as she always smiled at him, but of course that was her business, the kind façade, and he could only imagine the real thoughts that stirred beneath the surface in a place like this.

Through the small door, then, into a chamber set about with couches and more screens, where the birds were paraded for the most important guests. Then down another hall to a staircase that went up two flights to the proprietor’s apartment — a room as large as an imperial bedchamber, rich and warm with carpets from the weavers in Bernned, woven with lakebirds all aflutter against deep greens and blues.

They were talking together at her table, its oaken bulk large enough to almost make Reffio look like an ordinary man, were it not for his mistress’s slightness throwing his own size back into relief. Like Gavian they both had the faint olive cast to their skin that marked them as riverlanders — or, like the captain, riverlanders once upon a time. Reffio was bald and huge and dressed in his usual gray, his only adornment the matching golden rings on each fat steak of a hand. The Ladyhawk, gaunt with a predatory beak under curls dyed black, wore green with a single diamond at her throat. One of her eyes was milky and blind, the other hazel and gleaming. Only a few people in the north had ever known her real name, and Gavian suspected that he and Reffio were the only ones who were still alive.

“Captain,” she purred. “We have something of yourrrrs, I believe.”

The purr was an affectation, layered over what remained of her Trans-Mersanan accent, the way the high collar of her dress hid the tattoos of the Coterie. Not that anyone would recognize those symbols this far north, let alone realize that they marked her as the woman who had once been the madam of Jophiela’s finest brothel, through whose watery basement Gavian had escaped from the the Usurper’s assassins twelve — or was it thirteen? — years before?

“Trussed up like a winter goose, captain,” Reffio said, the soft voice always a surprise. He came from further south than either of them, Gavian believed, but apart from the distinctive gentleness his accent was unplaceable.

“Good of you,” he said to them both. “The crown is grateful for your service.”

“Aways a pleasurrrrre to do a favor for a friend,” the Ladyhawk said. “But this is a bit more serious than our usual arrangements. Ones hopes, captain, that it’s not a sign of trrroubled times ahead.”

“It’s an attempt to keep those troubled times at bay, more like.”

“Awful hard to put a stop to gossip,” Reffio said. “Our friends down Cranholt and Felcester way already hear the same kind of stories this one was slopping round the taverns.”

“I’m not trying to stop gossip,” Gavian said, “I’m just trying to put a little fear into the gossipers.”

“Well, putting fear, there’s something we can do, no doubt.” The huge man made a soft burbling sound, an unlikely sort of giggle. “Come to the right locality for that.”

“Also it’s a bit harrrrd to stop gossip when no one feels the weight of it,” the Ladyhawk observed. “There’s a lot of foolish presumption in our empire, in this city. A lot of people who’ve watched one Montairrrrr follow another and think it will always be that way. Who think that warrrrs happen on the edges of their empire, that there’s no real cost to what they say.”

She leaned forward on the desk with a grin that was somewhere between confiding and predatory. “But you and I, captain, we know differrrrent. We know how bad things can get, and how quickly, and just how fast you might have to leave all you’ve ever known behind.”

“We do indeed,” said Gavian. “Though I suspect that I’d be the only one going, if things go bad this time, and that you’ll find a way to turn a profit even if it’s someone besides His Majesty Edmund Montair on the throne.”

She laughed, a dry bark. “I hope you’re rrrright, but I’m not young enough to be enthusiastic about that sort of … adaptation. And I like having a friend like you in a securrre position in the Castle, you know — my old friend, who rememberrrrs the old days, the warmer places, the Grand Duchess’s Water Garrrden under the summer moon.”

She leaned back, as if to let the memory work on him for a moment, and then snapped her bone fingers and waved a dismissive hand.

“So now go down and take a look at what we’ve caught for you.”

Reffio led the way, down a different stairway from the one that had brought him, through a different back passageway, a curtained doorway, a stairwell, and an earthen tunnel lit by the candle and flint the big man produced from somewhere in the folds of his gray robe.

The light was weak and the company uncomfortable, and Gavian let himself listen to the Queen. Maybe her voice wouldn’t last, fading eventually like memories of his parents, his childhood, the sights and sounds of Antiala long ago. But for now, he could still hear Bryghaida, waking and sleeping; he could open a door to the past as easily as Reffio had swept up the curtain that led down into this dark.

A lot of these northern lords think of us as prettier versions of their steeds. Or not-quite-as-pretty versions, as the case may be.

In this memory she was talking to him in a chamber like the Ladyhawk’s — interviewing him, really, for the assignment he carried now. She was wearing a blue dress and eating figs. Her hair was dark like mahogany, her cheekbones high, her eyes amused. Her beautiful eyes.

My sons I don’t worry so much about. This empire knows what to do with sons. And I didn’t think I would have a girl who lived. But the gods – the angels – someone has given me a daughter who may actually grow up here. And I worry about her, alone with the kind of men who serve her father. She needs to be prepared for politics, prepared for power, no matter what kind of marriage my husband makes for her. I want her prepared.

He remembered his fumbling reply: Your majesty must know that I am not a courtier …

No, of course you aren’t. But there isn’t a court here anyway, not of the sort that anyone from either of our kingdoms would recognize.

She laughed, and her laugh was lovely too. Such as there is, she can learn to navigate. But I’m looking for a man who can play what looks like a simple role, but knows something of how complicated the world can get. Who can give me some advice for now, and over time help her come to know the world, too, in a way that the north doesn’t exactly encourage in its women …

The floor was growing damp now, way down here in the underbelly of the world.

“I see your mistress has a new apprentice,” Gavian said, trying to make conversation, his voice reverberating oddly.

“An apprentice?” Reffio nibbled at the word like a man unsure about a morsel he’d been served. “Ah, you mean the black-haired girl then. She’s new to us since your last visit, true. A good girl, that one. A find. No trouble from her.” A light giggle. “She’ll be making some of your officers happy this time next year.”

“You found her? Where did she come from?” Where do any of them come from?

“This one? I’d say the same as most of the other stuff I deal in, captain — she fell off a boat, you know? Fell off a boat, and dear old Reffio was there to pick her up, let the mistress shine her up, and sell her once she’s looking her best and fetch the highest price. Of course, in the mistress’s business you sell the goods more than once …”

The truth is that women can rule anywhere no matter what law or custom says, the Queen’s voice said to him. Your holy books – I should say our holy books, forgive me – they give women their equality in the Histories, gives it to Gora and Iraba and even Era at the very start. And then of course it’s stripped from us in the Law.

That smile again, wide and yet mysterious. And who knows what comes in the Prophecies? The priests will not tell us, so perhaps we may assume it is given back to us.

A rich laugh, that invited him to join. He did.

But in any case the Histories have the truth of it, captain. Women have a power of our own no matter what rules are laid on us. And I want a southern man near my daughter, near myself, because everything I’ve heard suggests that southerners know this, that you know that women always wield influence — and that you know it with your heads and not just with your heart. Or guts, or other parts.

Do you know it, captain?

He wasn’t sure how much he knew of women’s power, then or now, but he remembered feeling something stir in him at that “near myself,” an illusion but a welcome one.

I think I do, Majesty.

Then, more daringly — And at least I am sure that I am willing to serve a woman’s power, if you’ll have me for your tasks.

In the task at hand, the squelching tunnel dead-ended in a studded door, which Reffio heaved open, and they both stepped through onto a wooden platform built out over some small corner of the harbor.

The underside of a Dockside building supplied the low ceiling overhead, and the last light of the evening illuminated the shapes of floats, wharves, and boats just a little ways off across the twilit water. But they were in shadow here, in a space concealed by massive pilings. A curious outsider would need to row a dinghy in between the pilings, holding high a torch, to really see where they now stood.

The steward knelt there, bound and hooded, half-naked and blue with bruises. One of Reffio’s minions was watching him. He vanished at the bald man’s wave.

Gavian kept his distance, dropped his voice. “Does he know why he’s here?”

Reffio shook his head. “From his jibber-jabber I think he guessed we might be after him about some married girl he’s sweet on. Don’t think he’s tried to say anything for a while, though. Hard day for that boy.”

The captain nodded. He crossed to the bound figure, bent, took his knife and drew a line, a thin red line, from shoulder to hip. The steward jerked and tried to scream through the gag, but the ropes held him in position, and eventually the muffled attempts at screaming subsided into desperate nasal gasps.

Gavian made his voice as low and rasping and strange as he could manage. “Now you’re marked,” he said, “so you’ll always remember this. It’s the price of telling lies about your emperor’s body, lies about his health and mind and heart. It’s a little foretaste of the special hell the angels have prepared for liars. And it lets you know that when you have a few tankards and spread your lies around, you’re being fucking watched. Do you hear me?”

The hood bobbed furiously. Gavian lifted the knife and let it rest on the young man’s neck.

“But there’s a bit more, lad. You’re a messenger now. It’s our secret what happened here, you don’t have to let slip all the shameful details. But all your friends need to know what you know now. They need to know that you’re all being watched. They need to know because if I have to haul one of them down here, I’ll haul you back too, and they’ll get the mark, and you’ll go into the lake. You hear what I’m saying?”

The whimpering increased, the head kept bobbing.

“Good,” said Gavian. “Good. You’re not such a bad lad, I’m sure of it, you just need a little push to stay on the narrow path. Everyone needs a little push sometimes. Think of me as the Archangel Gavriel, guide to wanderers, steering you back to the true way. Think of this knife” — he pressed it a little harder on the neck, felt it break the flesh – “as the sword of Mithriel, killing the sinful parts so the rest can live. Think of it that way, and this long day and night will serve you well for years to come. Do you hear and understand?”

More nodding, and Gavian reached under the hood and loosened the gag. “Let me hear you say it,” he said.

The response was unintelligible, a miserable mumble.

“Say you understand, lad. Just say it so I can hear you clear. Nobody here but us and the lake and a friend with a sharper blade than mine.”

“I …” A gasping, retching sound. “I understand.”

He yanked the gag tight again. “Good. Good. I think you do. I think you do. I don’t think you’ll be forgetting what we’ve talked about.”

He stood up and went back to Reffio, now a vast blot of darkness in the gloaming.

“Have what you were needing, captain?”

“I didn’t need anything from him,” Gavien said, “except his fear. Many thanks for delivering it. Now to finish the favor, can you make sure he’s back in the Castle, safe and sound with that cut I made bandaged up, before the cock raises us all tomorrow?”

“Ah,” the big man said. “You want him to live? That’ll be a bigger favor, then. And not the usual way we deliver the fear you were talking of before.”

“Well, you can add the favor to the bank and let your mistress make it come out even. But I need this one as a messenger, I need him carrying the fear around himself. Easier for it to spread, that way.”

A light chuckle. “Oh, we’re a philosopher of fear then, are we, captain? May it be that you’re correct. For me, though, in my business — well, this looks like half measures. Like a way of shying a little from what’s necessary.”

“Half measures this time,” said Gavian. “Now show me the way back.”

A tenday later summer’s zenith came and went, the great midsummer feast of Gavriel, which was also the day when Padrec’s triumphant return from Allasyr had been originally promised.

Gavian could see that Alsbet had placed great hopes in her brother’s homecoming, more perhaps than she admitted to herself. But he did not come, there was no news of his coming and no letters, only stories of delay that built, as the hot days proceeded, into a rush of activity among the men on Edmund’s council — a flurry of birds and messages and meetings, which the emperor himself rarely attended but whose details every gossip claimed to know.

Alsbet’s ladies-in-waiting heard one story; Gavian through the soldiers another; Aeden through the stewards heard a third. At last the princess summoned Arellwen to her chambers, and with her captain looming in the background requested to be read her into the debate.

The chancellor talked to a bit like a man explaining something to his horse, or maybe to the six-year-old she had been when he first assumed his office, but beneath the condescension Arellwen’s accounting seemed honest enough. The trouble was the matter of the two thrones, the fact that the legions had conquered Allasyr in the name of Padrec’s claim to the Stone Seat in Tessaer al’Yrgha — a claim that Padrec’s Brethon allies insisted doubled as a promise that their kingdom would retain its own laws and court and government, even under the house of Montair’s rule.

Which did not, to Arellwen — “and to your father,” he added, with only a flicker in his eye to suggest that her father might not be fully invested in the problem — seem like an impossible bargain to strike. It was … ticklish was the word he used to describe crowning a son as king in the Brethon lands while his father ruled as emperor in Rendale, but everyone would understand Padrec would be governed by his father’s wishes until he took the Falcon Throne himself. Yes, it was a complicated scenario, but hardly an unmanageable one …

“But the dukes,” said Gavian.

“Yes, captain,” Arellwen sighed. “The dukes.”

The dukes of the Heart belonged to houses that had been part of the empire almost from the start. But the dukes of Argosa and Erona ruled lands that had been conquered, in the same way Capaelya and now Allasyr had been, and their thrones and laws had not survived the conquest – and nor, for that matter, had the old thanelaw of Ysan or the city rights of Sheppholm. So for those houses, with recent kings and princes in their branching family trees, the idea that Allasyr would retain an independence their forefathers had lost was … well, it was a dose of salt in the scars of conquest, and perhaps a reason to demand their own laws and special rights as well.

“And we don’t intend to offer them any,” Alsbet said. It was more an observation than a question, but Arellwen responded quickly:

“No, princess, it would be most unwise. Making some adaptations for the sake of bringing Brethony into the empire cannot be a reason to turn your father’s realm into – well something like the Salman League, some sort of confederation. The dukes already feel themselves to be little kings. It would be most imprudent to encourage the sentiment.”

Then the priests were a problem as well. The nine orders already enjoyed a weaker position in the empire than in the lands further south, and everyone knew that older ways of worship still lingered in the empire’s hinterlands, in the dark of moor and hill and fen.

So now to add an entire new realm of heathens … well, it was a fraught thing, an opportunity but also a great risk, if their missioners failed and the worship of Bronh remained entrenched. So having Padrec crowned in the traditional way, with priests of Bronh attending, was decisively not an image that any archpriest wanted to conjure — and Ethred stirred and rumbled against the possibility in every council meeting.

“They can’t cause much trouble, surely,” the princess said. “Not with the crown’s subsidy paying them.”

“It depends who you count as a troublemaker,” Arellwen said. “The subsidy pays the archpriests, the great temples, keeps them tethered … but they keep a lighter hand on their priests here than the orders in the south, and we keep a lighter hand on everyone. So there’s room for some group of upstart priests to start preaching against us, and the temples can say, ah, so regrettable, we will have a fatherly word … but the sermons still send an unfortunate message.”

But then there was the other side of the dilemma: Even setting aside Padrec’s own professed desires, the empire could ill afford to alienate the Allasyri houses that had rallied to the prince’s banner. So the solution, the compromise, that the council was hammering out involved postponement. For the time being, both Allasyr and Capaelya would be governed by a small council, consisting of Edmund’s cousin Alaben, Aengiss, and a clutch of Brethon nobles, and Padrec would be a kind of visiting regent on frequent visits to Tessaer al’Yrgha, but for now he would return east to Rendale and behave as a crown prince.

“And what does my brother think of this settlement?” Alsbet asked. “My very absent brother.”

“I do not know the prince’s mind as well as some, and your highness can of course ask him yourself …”

The princess waved her hand. “I can, but he is a poor letter-writer, and I am asking you for your sense.”         

The chancellor allowed a silence to persist a moment longer than was comfortable, as if he were stealing time to think.

“I will be honest and say that Prince Padrec’s desire to be crowned king of Allasyr immediately, and his anger over our provisional solution, is one of the things keeping him from returning to our city.”

“I supposed as much. Thank you for your honesty,” Alsbet said.

“It might be,” Gavian said then, gruff and forward, listening to Bryghaida’s murmuring voice in his ear, “that her highness should soon be included in the meetings of the council, should her father continue his frequent absences. As his representative.”

This time the silence last twice as long as was comfortable for anyone.

“If his majesty Edmund wished to formally delegate those responsibilities to you, highness, we would of course welcome your presence,” Arellwen said at last. “It is my hope that when Prince Padrec returns, as heir to the throne he might fill the emperor’s seat on occasion. But we would defer to his majesty’s judgment on the appropriate composition of the council in either case.”

Alsbet smiled. “Thank you Arellwen. Perhaps I shall speak to my father, then.”

In the end Alsbet did not join the council, because her father, in a sober moment, told her that Arellwen was right, that Padrec belonged in the council meetings when he himself was absent, and since the prince would return soon, very soon, there was no need to discomfit the lords by subjecting them to the presence of a lady.

Gavian wanted her to push him, but he could see that the princess was relieved at her father’s answer, frustrated with her captain for asking and forcing her to ask — and eager, desperately eager, for her brother to return.

There was another tourney, then, in the late summer, when the dry, sweet-smelling heat lay heavy on Rendale and the lake. It was a grander affair, with three of the great dukes in attendance — Jonthen Cathelstan again, and Baldwen Rilias of Erona, and Cethberd Gildenfold of Greenhaven, plump and egg-bald and talkative in a style that no one could take seriously.

There were also distinguished foreign visitors: A Maeonwy chieftain in tattooes and leather from the northern prairie; new emissaries from Pegosa and Great Salma, eyeing one another with suspicion; and Laef Holvijian, a muscled, handsome corsair and the son of Erek Holvijian, the Sea King of Belgard, officially on a trade mission but perhaps really there to be introduced to the emperor of Narsil’s daughter.

More of the empire’s young lords were there as well, the ones who had come back alive and hale from the fields of Allasyr, and the city flowed red and green and gold with their pennants and livery. There were feasts in the castle and carnivals and plays and dances in the city’s marketplaces and theaters. Outside the walls, the tents and lists and archery ranges stretched from the lakeshore to the forests, a great summer tapestry to celebrate the empire’s victories.

Some of the young lords made a point of telling Alsbet what great friends they were with her brother, how they had fought alongside him on this field or that one, that they had slept beside him and broken bread with him, that he often spoke of her but honestly nothing he had said could do justice to her beauty.

But her brother was not there.

Most of the self-proclaimed friends of the prince entered the lists, and one of the most confident of them — Dunkan mac Mordain, a beefy, blonde-haired, sunburnt Ysani — stormed through the tourney toward what seemed an inevitable victory. On successive afternoons, Lord Dunkan unseated Rolend Virias, the mountain-like Eronan who had won the last Stag Tourney in Meringholt – then young Raldred Gant, not so charmed this time around, whose leg shattered beneath him when Dunkan’s lance swept him from the saddle — and finally sturdy Enred Welshimer of Verningholt, widely reckoned the finest horseman in the Heart.

As Lord Enred was carried, dazed and bleeding, from the field, Dunkan tore off his helmet and shook his yellow hair in the sunlight while the commons roared for him – their great, golden hero, at least until the following day, when he would ride against Laef Holvijian for the laurels and the purse.

Benfred Montair had come from Meringholt for the tourney’s final days, and he sat with Alsbet and Edmund in the imperial box watching Dunkan drink in the adulation of the crowd. Benfred had grown old as Alsbet grew up, his hair thinning to a few listless strands of gray, his face sinking away into wrinkles where shadows pooled, and his eyes shifting slowly from deep blue to a rheumy gray-green. He had grown taciturn, too, or so it seemed to Gavian, who stood guard behind him all afternoon under the summer sun and felt the duke’s presence as a kind of void, empty of all but the most basic rudiments of personality.

So it was a surprise when Alsbet reported that Benfred had requested a personal audience with her that night.

He came to them after that evening’s banquet. Dusk was just settling around the peaks of the Guardians, and long bars of orange sunlight still stretched across the floor and up the walls and cabinets. Benfred took a chair facing the western windows, looking outward across the tinted lake, and his doublet’s embroidered stag shimmered gold, as if at any moment it might leap from the fabric and lope away into the sunset.

“Can you send your men away?” he said peremptorily, gesturing to Aeden, seated at the desk, and Gavian who had positioned himself at the window, feeling the sunset bright behind his shoulders.

“I prefer to keep them with me,” she returned. “I trust them absolutely.”

“Well, that’s a splendid thing, and a folly – the men you can trust absolutely don’t exist. But never mind, you have rank on me, keep them.”

She nodded, and Gavian could see her trying to make it an acknowledgment of deference rather than an acceptance of permission.

“I am not a good uncle to you, Alsbet,” he said before she had time to speak again. “I have never tried to be, honestly.  Your mother was not fond of me, and because of that – and because of the wars, I suppose — you hardly ever came to Meringholt.  Only twice in the last ten years, if I’m right, and both times in winter.  When I was young, before High House was built, all the young Montairs would summer in the Heart … your father, your aunt Alsbet who died, our cousins Ethred and Caldrec and the rest, all of them.  Those were pleasant times. Or maybe I just remember them as pleasant, because I am old. No matter. Had you summered in the Heart, then things might have been different. I might have been a better uncle to you.”

“What’s done is done,” Alsbet said gravely.

“A splendid-sounding maxim,” he replied with a thin smile, “although not one that I have ever subscribed to. What’s done is never done, Alsbet. What’s done is what makes the world as it is now.”

There was an expectant silence, as Benfred scratched at his cheek, where a beard had grown once.

“I’m here about that,” he said at last. “About the world as it is now, because I want to be a good uncle — and a good Montair, and a good duke.  I’m here because I’m hearing things, Alsbet.”

“Things?”

“Things about your father – about our emperor, that is.  Things that I can see are at least part way to being true, after being in Rendale for two days.”

“What things are those, uncle?”

He sighed.  “Why, I think that you must know, Alsbet. Your father isn’t well, and you must know that better than anyone. It’s common knowledge around the empire this summer … tavern gossip in the Heart … a lot of murmuring about what’s the matter with the emperor.”

“Well, they can be told that there is nothing the matter with him, uncle.  Nothing save grief at my mother’s passing.”

“Grief?” Benfred’s laugh was curt and rasping.  “Grief is allowed, for a time. I know something of it myself. But Edmund is not a woman, nor a wailing brother from Gabelden.”

“It has only been a year,” Alsbet said coldly.  “Less than a year, even.  I only took off my black during the spring, you know.”

“You can wear black until the sky falls, for all I care. It’s Edmund that matters. And it hasn’t been a year. A year since your mother died, yes, but more than that since he refused to ride with the armies against Allasyr. He did not fight in his own war, Alsbet – he left it to Aengiss, and to Padrec.”

“So?”

“So now men speak of Padrec as the true emperor, in some places.  Not many and not loudly, mind you … but I have my few poor spies, and what they hear said, more must think.”

Alsbet sighed.  “Well, let them think that. My brother is not likely to lead a revolt.”

“No,” Benfred said.  “I suppose not. But he did not win the war alone.  He won it with Aengiss. A viper, that man is, and ambitious. He wants worlds to conquer, and an emperor who will help him do it. Which was Edmund – but maybe no longer.”

“And why are you telling me this?  I am no one.” Gavian winced at that. “I am the mistress of this Castle, uncle, and nothing else. Why don’t you talk to your emperor yourself?”

“I did,” Benfred snapped. “Last night I spoke to him, and got exactly nowhere.  He had been drinking. It was not a fruitful conversation. And that is the other thing that I have heard, Alsbet, and now seen confirmed with my own eyes.”

“What?”

“That Edmund has become a drunk. That he drowns his sorrows in wine and ale.”

“That’s a lie,” Alsbet said, sharply — too sharp, Gavian thought. But she composed herself and said it again, in a more measured voice.  “That is a lie. You mistake him. A tourney and its revels are a natural time to drink.”

Benfred’s thin smile reappeared, still mirthless. “Well, I’m glad to hear it. Because a drunken emperor, a drunken emperor who will not fight – well, however great his victories were, that emperor would have many enemies very quickly. Forget Aengiss — a drunken emperor might make Jonthen Cathelstan greedy and ambitious. Or the iron duchess down in Argosa. The Brethons will not stay beaten. And all those foreign emissaries you entertain here will send their letters to their masters, and the king down in Trans-Mersana will stop worrying about pretenders and bastards and turn his eyes north. Or maybe the corsairs will come calling – Holvijian, someone else. All that our house has built could crumble if we have an inebriate emperor who will not fight.”

“He is not an inebriate,” Alsbet told him.  “He is just in mourning.  I hope that he will cease to mourn soon, and be himself again.”

“Well, then your dutiful uncle hopes so too.  But you know, Alsbet, he is no longer young. And when an old man falls into a rut, it becomes difficult to break.”  He chuckled again. “As I know better than anyone.”

He rose, then, the stag of Montair rippling on his breast. “I will see you tomorrow, yes? At the tourney, with your father? You will be crowning the winner?  And your father will be bestowing the purse?”

“That is traditional.”

“Well,” Benfred said, “then everyone will be watching us.  All the dukes, especially, who are here for the tourney. Cathelstan of course, and Cethberd, and Baldwen. And other eyes as well. I think that I saw Coallen, the heir of Ysan… and maybe one of the in-laws of old Wilfred in Cranholt’s, although it has been a while since I saw them last. I could have been mistaken. But not about Serapian bar Verna, the fat cousin of the duchess down in Argosa — that oiled beard I’d know anywhere. What he sees, his cousin sees.”

“What’s your point, uncle?”

“As I said – just that they will all be watching us. Watching him. And wondering, perhaps, about what will happen next.”

The Captain of the Queensguard thought about Benfred’s words all the next day, while the sun blazed down and the crowds cheered, and Laef Holvijian and Dunkan mac Mordain each broke two lances and went at each other with their massive wooden tourney swords, until Dunkan’s blade finally splintered and Laef caught him in the helmet with a frightening stroke that left the Ysani dazed and staggering, too dazed even to yield, so that his squire had to do the honors for him. 

He thought about the watching eyes, the dukes and earls, the lesser lords and gossiping commoners, as Laef Holvijian bowed to receive the laurels and then took the crown of summer roses from her hands, strode to the center of the muddy field, basked for a moment in the mix of roars (for his victory) and boos (for being a corsair, a foreigner), and then returned to place the roses on Alsbet’s brow and make her queen of the tourney — a gesture that was less touching than it had been from the young and feckless Lord Gant that spring, but perhaps slightly more exciting, because Laef, all muscled arms and bristling black beard, gave the princess a look that few men dared to give her, and as she rose and returned to her seat her captain could see the blush that flowered on her cheek.

Then the purse was bestowed, from Edmund’s imperial hands, and to Gavian’s eye they seemed to tremble a little — and he wondered if Laef would notice, if he would tell his men and they would tell everyone they saw on the road and boats back east to Belgard — if within a month the dockhands along the Mering and the farmers in the Heart and the shepherds in the Hanging Hills would gossip about the emperor’s shaking hands and his love for strong drink — if everything that Bryghaida had asked him to preserve was built on sand, that bad weather would melt and wear away.

The crowds roared and booed, roared and booed, while Dunkan was carried from the field and Laef Holvijian found his helmet. He made as if to tuck it under his arm, and then changed his mind and hoisted it over his head, pumping it up-and-down, up-and-down, so that the steel caught the sun and blazed with it, while the boos faded and the crowd’s roar surged like a storm in the summer air.

Gavian looked at his princess, saw her youthful beauty aglow for once instead of muted, sensed the thrill of the moment working in her – and why not, she was just a girl, she deserved a tourney and suitors, not a sickly emperor to watch over and a captain making impossible demands.

And then he looked to her left, where Benfred stood, gaunt and old and gray, like the reaping angel at her shoulder, waiting to gather them all in.