The Widower's Castle

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 3

This is the third 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.

Standing at the balustrade Alsbet could see the boats go out, their sails and pennants flashing red and gold like distant butterflies, their wakes a set of thin white brushstrokes on a bright blue page. Their course was steady, like an arrow’s flight slowed by some punctilious mage to a manageable speed, unwavering even when a riverboat, coming into Lake Orison through the notch, intersected with their path and yawed around them.

Finally their colors blurred with the distance and diminished in the shadow of the distant slopes, until it was as three faint smudges against the blues and greens of lake and mountains that the Duke of Felcester’s distinguished visitation passed out of the lake and went southward down the Mersana toward his home.

Good riddance, Alsbet thought.

Behind her the doors stood open in the spring air, and three people were working in her imperial sitting room, her favorite room in the Castle when it had been her mother’s place, now a torture chamber furnished by her mother’s taste and painted with her mother’s favorite colors.

Its present occupants were among the torturers: None of them looking at her directly, but all of them busy at something related to her imperial duties, her unending obligations.

On the green divan, the room’s one Mandoran furnishing, her lady-in-waiting Ellera was applying herself diligently to her needlepoint in anticipation of the evening sewing circle, when Alsbet too would have to ply the needle while her lady courtiers gathered to share pleasantries and minor gossip.

At the desk Aeden was working away at the several dozen letters of gratitude for services rendered during the spring tourney that would all require her signature within the hour.

In a chair by the door sat the aged chamberlain, Lord Marfwen, his half-doze a different kind of imposition, since soon she would have to waken him and send him out bearing a half-dozen different kinds of orders, all of them on unimportant matters that somehow involved decisions that only she could make.

Not yet. She turned back again to to look down at the city.

It held no awe or grace for her. Rendale in those days might dazzle a country girl, but to its princess it often felt closer to the border town of its not-so-distant past than the capital city of its imperial present. From Alsbet’s vantage point, high up on south-facing façade of the Castle’s eastern wing, she could see most of the city’s grander buildings, and she knew — from books, from Aeden, if not from her own experience — that there were few of the monuments that visitors expected in a great metropolis. Instead of pantheons and palaces and stadiums, a flock of stone residences and a sisterhouse huddled in the shadow of the Castle, a scattering of merchant mansions flanked the harbors, a barracks and a monastery shouldered above the rooftops in the city’s eastern quarter, and a temple dome rose halfway down the paved road that split the city from the Castle to the southern gate.

Otherwise Rendale was still built of wood and thatch and wattle, with cobblestones close to the Castle but unpaved streets and twisting alleyways waiting as soon as a traveler ventured off the north-south artery. Save for a stone extension that enclosed the harbor’s northern approach, the city walls were likewise wooden, built of sharpened logs that jutted skyward in long rows, and their ramparts and watchtowers only enfolded about three-quarters of the city. The southern part of the harbor district was mostly outside, a swathe of docks and warehouses spreading down Lake Orison’s shoreline. Then eastward, around the southern gate, the warehouses blended into the sprawl of Winter’s Town, so-called because it filled with miners and other mountain folk during the chill months and then mostly emptied with the spring.

Above all these walls and docks and warrens rose Alsbet’s father’s Castle, unimpressive by the standards of many regal seats, but still possessed of a certain sprawling, baleful grandeur. Raised by Varilon Narcila, first and last Mandoran viceroy of the north, it had been meant to subdue the tribes that in those days still rode their dugouts and outriggers south from Lake Sacrifice, and it had been left unfinished when Narcila rode south to the War of the Testing, leaving the viceroyalty that took his name to division and decay.

It had taken another century to finish the outer walls and courts and towers, including the wing whose topmost floor Alsbet’s mother had taken for her own, and the prefects — then princes — then emperors responsible had worked amid war, calamity and occasional invasion, using whatever materials lay ready to hand and either improvising or working off plans written in a language that not all of them fully spoke or understood. So the completed Castle had an inevitable unfinishedness about it, with strange angles and towers out of proportion and a ramshackle style that matched the city below on a larger and more arresting scale.

The only part Narcila and his architects would have recognized was the central keep, the con of the Con Rendala as they would have called it, which had been refurbished but still retained its smooth circularity, its clever spiral of upper battlements, the impressive cone that Alsbet could sense climbing the air behind her, a prickling presence as she stood looking out westward and away. It reared against the northern sky, the cool depths of the lake, the greenswept mountains — a monument to the High Kings’ apogee, the Mandoran power that had once stretched from warm southern seas to this northland and its snows.

It was three centuries since the Mandorans had fallen back, retreating southward in stages and leaving various tokens behind — their priests and temples and awesome angels, their fortresses and roads, some language and names and culture, a few treasures like the divan where Lady Ellera had planted her curls and bust and needlework. 

In many ways Rendale had come a long distance from those far-off days when the last Mandoran prefect had fled south in search of warmth and safety, and his northern-born bastard brother had decided that a prefect’s chair could easily become a prince’s throne. The raiding tribes had been pushed north and north and north, out of the lake country entirely and into the high prairies that the empire’s borderforts now guarded. The temple had been raised, the highway had been extended along Orison’s eastern shore and then further north to the fortress of Caldmark at the northern tip of Sacrifice; the river trade had expanded and with it the harbor on the lake. And gold, bright gold, had been discovered in the Guardians, and while the crown laid claim to the gold roads and the richest seams, that was still enough inducement to bring a new wave of fortune-seekers north to the lakes, the mountains, Rendale itself.

And, of course, the House of Cristis had called themselves princes of a narrow dagger-shaped province surrounded by mountains and barbarians, while House Montair governed an empire that stretched, with Allasyr’s conquest, from the Inward Ocean to the Westland Sea.

Yes, Rendale had risen far. Yet it still offered a hundred reasons for visitors from southern lands to scoff at the pretensions of the Emperors of All Narsil. The muddy streets, covered with boards during the spring rains; the seedy marketplaces and frequent fires; the mountain-men in furs and beards; the wooden walls and wooden shrines and wooden houses; the swine roaming free and the sewers carrying the excrement of twenty thousand souls down to Lake Orison, and only the nobility wearing perfume to cover up the stink.

Somehow, though, this lords of this border capital had gathered in all the green lands of the Heart. Somehow they had tamed the Ysani in their highland fastnesses, and taken the towers of Erona on its lake, and conquered the mansions of Argosa. Somehow they had driven the corsairs back from the eastern rivers and the Fens, and even stolen Sheppholm from them, with its deep and hidden harbor.

And now, somehow, they had added the graceful towers of Naesen’yr and Tyr-in-Aelor and the gardens and monuments of Tessaer'al Yrgha to their domains.

Secure in their warm southern lands, with southern politics to occupy them, the lords of the riverlands and lakelands scoffed at the jumped-up empire to their north. But as the years passed and the empire’s borders spread ever closer to their own, the fact that there was power in Rendale could no longer be denied.

So the rest of the continent came to Rendale, to the Castle — came to the frost and snow, the stench and the pale faces and the barbarism. They came from Trans-Mersana, and Great Salma on the north shore of Lake Salmana, and Pegosa down the coast from Sheppholm. They came from the Skalbarder principalities, from the city-states that ruled the Mersana further south, and sometimes even from Janaea, the rich kingdom that sat athwart the river just before the High King’s lands began.

The High Kings themselves sent no emissaries or ambassadors. But still travelers did come from further south, from Mandor’s still-vast realm, and it was assumed in the emperor’s council that a few of them were Eyes come to take the empire’s measure. As for the rest — well, they came out of curiosity, or searching for adventure, or following tales of gold, or because the north provided a safe exile, and it was said that in the domains of Narsil there were opportunities for men of talent who had lost out in the south, or fallen afoul of the inquisitors, or lacked the blood required to rise.

Some of the most important emissaries came unwillingly — a mission to Rendale was regarded as a punishment by most, and scraping to whey-faced northerners beneath the dignity of their own lineage — and they were haughty and scornful, assuming that their barbed contempt would be lost on their unrefined hosts.

But they formed, in spite of themselves, a court in the drafty corridors of the Castle. It was not a permanent court as in southern capitals; the emperors and their consorts were not surrounded by high nobility in some constant perfumed revel, and the ladies-in-waiting who attended Brygaida — who attended Alsbet, now — were mostly daughters of minor earldoms whose frivolity was unfeigned rather than part of some deeper game of houses. (Ellera’s father was lord of Beggarsbridge, a minor river town, and her highest aspiration was to marry a lord leftenant in the Falconguard and ascend with him the next time the empire went to war.)

But around them moved a constantly shifting mix of royal emissaries, merchant princes and their factors, young nobles on a northern tour, exiles with proud titles and the money to pay for some protection — and then, as well, those circulating priests and deacons from the nine orders, sent to bring tithes back to the great motherhouses in the south, who preferred to break their rounds of cold nights on cots with a dose of imperial hospitality.

This court, like any household, required a woman’s hand to guide it. So with her mother buried in a mountain grave, Alsbet of Montair had gravely abandoned her girlhood and taken Bryghaida's place as the mistress of her father's house.

It was not all torture, to be entirely fair. Some aspects of the task had been easy. Much of the Castle was self-organizing: the chambermaids did not have to be instructed to clean, the cooks knew their work and prepared morning and evening meals without her supervision, and the task of shoring up the battlements and walls went on as it had for decades.

But even if the meals could simply seem to serve themselves, she was responsible for the comfort of those who ate in the flagstoned hall with its firepits and slitted windows. So she found herself sitting with Lord Marfwen, tenday after tenday, patiently discussing which guest should occupy the place beside her father, and how to do sufficient honor to the others, and whether they might need to organize a hunt or some other entertainment for the party of guests due to arrive from Belgard or whether it was best to wait until the Duke of Mabon appeared some days later … oh, and for the banquet they were planning, there was the matter of the welcoming speech that Alsbet would have to deliver before the archpriest pronounced the blessing …

“Short, well-phrased, complimentary, and gracious,” the chamberlain always murmured while she groaned that she could not think of a thing to say.

These banquets did not take place every night, mercifully, and the size of the court ebbed as winter engulfed the north. Sometimes the most important guest was a minor Ysani earl or Argosan archpriest, Alsbet needed only to make friendly conversation, and the planning could be left almost entirely to the chamberlain.

But even in winter, every other tenday at least came a feast day or some other occasion for which a grander entertainment was required. A ball, perhaps, with dancing and punch — but the dancing music needed be first-rate, to impress the Janaean emissary, whose kingdom was renowned for its masquerades and revels. Or a special performance by a bard — but the ballads he sang had best not touch on any offensive subjects.

These were tasks that could not be simply left to the doddering Marfwen, whose memory for politics and protocol had real depth, but only if stirred with constant conversation.

He should be replaced, she murmured to Aeden. He should be retired.

Perhaps, Highness, but not in the midst of winter without a replacement ready to your hand.

Yet Alsbet was fortunate, in a way, with Aeden by her side.  The young steward was eighteen when his princess became the mistress of the Castle, and he had grown into a tall and slender youth with a dark eyes set in a long, unhandsome face. He knew almost as much as the chamberlain about rhetoric and rank and history, the proper way to greet and introduce the olive-skinned southern eminences. He knew, as well, how to answer the petitions that commoners brought to the throne room on the feastdays of the Archangels, whispering advice to Alsbet before she answered, seeing that the answers she gave became notes, instructions, actions. He wrote dinnertime remarks and correspondence for her, composed her longer speeches, briefed her when a new ambassador arrived, and handled everything else too — except what Gavian did.

Gavian had served as the Queensguard’s Captain for eleven years, and he understood as well as anyone what it meant to rule in Rendale.  It was startling, really, how much he had gleaned from watching Bryghaida’s revels over the space of a decade — startling but useful. He was merciless, too, even in the night hours when the chamberlain was dozing in his chair and Alsbet looked up from the lists of supplies for Azriel’s Eve and groaned that it could not be borne!

Of course it can, Highness, her mother’s captain — her captain now — would say.  Your mother bore it for fifteen years, and she was bearing five children as well.  There’s no cure for obligation.

But Gavian — she would begin, and Aeden would turn from the window where he contemplated sleepy, frost-dusted Rendale and say — 

Besides, princess, this is only the beginning.  You’ll be married soon, and then this sort of task will be yours forever.

They drove her hard, and the work was always finished. Their entertainments and dinners might not be as grand as those in Antiala or Sayhen or Bernned, let alone the distant south, but they made Alsbet proud — more, they would have made her mother proud, and that was what mattered.

What did not matter were the sleepless nights and the shadows under the princess’s eyes; those could be hidden under powder and paint. The tremor in her left eyelid that first appeared shortly after Winter’s Eve was rarely noticeable, and the strange, mottled rash spreading down her arms was concealed under white gloves that became fashionable among her ladies-in-waiting. It had to be concealed, because she was mistress of her father’s house now, and he needed her ...

Yes, another thing that Aeden and Gavian helped with was managing her father.  Something had happened to Edmund after his wife’s death, and after Allasyr had finally fallen to his armies. The emperor had grown grim and withdrawn and discourteous, letting his duties slip and delegating more and more of his responsibilities into other hands.

He didn’t ride to inspect Caldmark and the northern borderforts as usual at the end of autumn, nor did he appear as often at his council meetings, preferring to let the chancellor act in his stead. Dispatches were left unread, the petitions of the commons were given to Alsbet, his council’s laws were signed after only a cursory examination, ambassadors were fobbed off on Lord Arellwen, and the heavy drapes in his chambers were kept closed so much that they seemed to grow together into a purple juggernaut that blotted out the sun.

Alsbet told herself that her father’s grief would pass, or at least ebb somewhat, when the first winter after Bryghaida’s death melted into spring.  Winters were always hard in the north country: snow and cold settled around towns and castles; Sacrifice always froze and Orison sometimes, its harbors glazed with ice even in a warmer winter; and the folk huddled inside the walls were prone to bitterness and black moods.

It was in winter that one heard tales of wives bludgeoning their husbands to death; of mountain men going mad in their cabins and running off to live among the bears or the Druanni; of noblemen giving in to wintry suspicion and ordering all their relatives murdered. In winter, too, northerners took to drink with a passion, and the dark of the year was warmed by the heat of Kiorssa ale, Ysani brandy, hard cider without end.

So while Edmund drank and brooded in his bedroom, Alsbet governed his castle and waited for spring. Her own griefs she buried deep, where not even the strongest thaw could melt the snow and find them.

But now there was finally sun and warmth, the afternoon sunlight of late Jophiel-month falling softly on the balcony, and the princess let go of her ruminations and turned again, to find that the chamberlain was awake and on his feet, bending over Aeden’s writing table, murmuring to the steward.

Ellera looked up from her needlework, caught the princess’s gaze, hesitated, and then rose and joined Alsbet on the balcony, bobbing clumsily — the curtsies of her younger ladies-in-waiting were a work in progress — as she reached the princess’s side.

“Could you see them go, Highness?” she asked. “The duke’s boats, I mean? Have they gone out from the harbor?”

“They cleared the lake just now,” Alsbet said. “They must have been quick enough to load them up in the harbor. Even with Lord Modred to carry up the gangway.”

“Such terrible fortune for him. He was so very brave, don’t you think?”

An innocent question, or a probing one? Ellera of House Tarben was no great genius but also hardly the most foolish of her younger ladies, and she had been seated close to Alsbet for the meals that passed after the duke-in-waiting’s leg had been splinted. Could she read the princess’s eyes during those dinners, and sense the dislike that Alsbet had labored to conceal?

“He bore it well,” she answered. “It must have been a sore disappointment for him to fall so soon.”

Ellera smiled; small teeth, one gold. “He would have fallen to Lord Raldred in the end, surely, which might have pained him more!”

Not a fool, Lady Ellera, but still not yet a friend. She had Gavian and Aeden but no women she could trust. Her friendships with her maidservants she had left behind in girlhood; with her ladies-in-waiting, both inherited and chosen, she found herself unable to progress to trust and intimacy. She could nod with Ellera and smile and agree —

“Yes, better to lose to an old soldier than a young and landless lord!”

— but she couldn’t add:

Because he and his ice-eyed father are colder fish than the salmon pulled from the depths of Sacrifice in winter.

The father was Jonthen Cathelstan, the Duke of Felcester, who had reached Rendale soon after the last of the winter’s ice dissolved, with the duke-in-waiting Modred and a colorful entourage in tow. A few days later, he was joined by the Duke of Sheppholm, Eldred Gerdwell, who brought a smaller company on a hired riverboat.

There had been the inevitable banquets in the great hall for both of the dukes, boating parties on the lake, and finally a spring tournament in the stubbled fields north of the city, with pennants and pavilions, archery contests and jousts, and the falcon of the empire flying above the boar of Cathelstan and the three ships of Gerdwell.

It was not the finest tourney in Rendale’s history, not with so much of the empire’s flower far away in Brethony. Few noblemen entered the lists, and most of those were either too old, like Duke Eldred himself, who was unhorsed by a pallid Ysani lordling on the first day — or they were young and inexperienced, like the unlucky Modred, who fractured his ankle on his second tilt when Gavian’s lance swept him from his mount.

Gavian himself survived until the third and final day, to Alsbet’s pleasure, and in the end he was beaten by a young Heart lord named Raldred Gant, who made a charmed run through the tourney. In the final tilt, it was young Lord Gant riding against Egfred Wentwain, the Lord Captain of the Falconguard – and it was Lord Wentwain’s lance that splintered, and Lord Gant who unhorsed him and galloped madly around the muddy field, to the cheers of the commons and the tolerant smiles of the nobles. Flushed, exuberant, and panting, the young lord rode to the imperial box and bestowed his crown of flowers on Alsbet – a gesture that made the crowds cheer Lord Gant all the louder.

But afterward — with the pavilions and pennants gone, the grandstands dismantled, only the churned-up turf north of the Castle left as proof that there had been a tourney at all — the Cathelstans had lingered, with Modred keeping close to Alsbet, and the princess unable to simply drift away from a young lord and guest prisoned by his splint and crutch.

Not that he wasn’t perfectly polite in turn, but his soft, piggish face and pale blue eyes still made her skin crawl and her courtesy falter. She could see too much of his father in him, and Jonthen Cathelstan was an enormous man who sweated and smelled and stared at the world with a mirthless, measuring gaze — and whose eyes, at the tourney and the feasts and too many meals thereafter, were always on either Alsbet or her father.

But now they were gone, thank the angels: The send-off from the Castle court complete, the maids draping the guest chambers in Blind Tower with dust cloths, and all the immediate tasks and courtesies awaiting her – the signatures on Aeden’s notes, the orders for the chamberlain — a kind of mopping-up after the battle. There was nothing on the horizon save an ordinary run of evening meals and daily obligations. Unless a bird arrived tomorrow announcing another ducal visit, of course …

The opening door was like an answer to her thought, cleaving through Ellera’s cheerful prattle, raising the faces of Aeden and the chamberlain from the writing desk.

The maid’s curtsy was deep and practiced, the note was swiftly passed from her hand to Aeden’s to Alsbet’s, who opened it to find her father’s scrawl, requesting her presence in his chambers at four bells — which was soon enough to make this a peremptory summons.

“I wouldn’t worry, highness,” Aeden said softly, glancing over her shoulder at the scrawl. “He wasn’t closeted long enough with either of the dukes to make a marriage.”

He must not have spoken softly enough, because Lady Ellera chose that moment to giggle loudly, and Alsbet decided that she was just an idiot after all.

Down, then, and down, her maid hastening behind because Alsbet could never travel without an escort anymore, she was much too important to be left alone. Down three flights and then out into the first level of the con, into the audience hall that sat below the banquet hall on the second level that sat below the throne room on the third — a stacking of oblong spaces, each higher-ceilinged than the last, with windows north and south and doors and galleries opening east and west.

She cut through the courtiers and servants faster than they could clear a path for her and passed under the largest of the doorways, into the great tapestry-draped corridor that ran away down the west wing toward the Castle’s chapel. Then halfway down the corridor she made a swift turn right and up again, one flight and then another, to reach her father’s door.

She had to descend and then climb again because the con allowed direct congress between the Castle’s east and western wings only on its bottom level — well, and through the not-entirely-secret passage that connected the throne room to the imperial chambers, but Alsbet had no intention of coming upon her father unawares. Since her mother’s death she had practiced formality at every turn, the protocols protecting her from whatever miasma of grief and guilt surrounded him, making sure his widower’s infection didn’t spread.

The good news was that Edmund had been better during the tournament. So she thought, or so she desperately wanted to think — that he had been more engaged, more alive than during the long, brooding winter, that neither of the dukes would have noticed more amiss than anyone would have expected from a monarch bereaved just seven of the year’s nine months ago.

Yes, that was the good news, whatever he wanted from her now. And his wanting to speak with her — maybe that was better news. Maybe they would consult together. Maybe he was ready to see her fully, as he had never quite seemed to see any of his children in the time before. Maybe he would seem strong enough that she could take some of the burdens the last year had placed upon her and lay them at a father’s feet.

There were legionnaires at the door to his apartments, and his bodyservant waiting inside — bald, sunken jowls, a stump where he had lost a hand defending Edmund from a sword blow long years ago, a scraped washboard for a voice. A frightening figure in her girlhood, now a reassuring one: of all men in the Castle, the most loyal.

Though not, perhaps, a reassuring figure with whom to share the anteroom: Alsbet’s maid’s face was a study as she arranged herself on a bench as close to the outer door as possible.

The bodyservant opened the inner door; the princess passed within.

The wide, flagstoned sitting room was darkened, cavernous. The curtains were drawn against the late afternoon sun, which made a line of fire between the hangings. A true fire snapped in the hearth. The emperor occupied a fireside seat, with a long bearskin cloak pulled up around his shoulders and a flask from the castle cellars conspicuous nearby.   

When he spoke, though, his voice was steady.  “How are you, daughter? How are you bearing up?

It was the question she wanted, but how to answer?

“I’m well, I’m well,” she told him, with a false laugh – one of her new habits. “A little tired, maybe, but well.”

His laugh was not false, only bitter. “Tired indeed. I fear that’s all you’ll ever be, tired. The burdens of being an emperor’s daughter.”

“It isn’t such a great burden, father.”

He waved a hand, brushing away invisible cobwebs. “Of course it is, Alsbet. I know all about the burdens. I’ve tried – well, your mother and I tried to spare you from them, for a long while at least. I’d hoped to keep you young a little longer, but it seems the angels had other plans.”

Alsbet looked at the flame quivering in the fireplace and tried to think of the right words.

“You’ve been brave,” her father said, before she could speak. “I know you must miss her more than I do. I don’t know how that could be possible, but you must. And you’ve been truly brave.”

“So have you, father.”

He laughed again.  “Brave? That’s no compliment. I’m not supposed to let it touch me. That is what being emperor means — not letting the ordinary things touch you.”

“Father — ”

“I know, you can see it … it does touch me, Alsbet. Not the first time, either. My father, my mother — I loved them but I didn’t weep for them. But I was like this when my sister … when your aunt died. Black, black black. The world dark as a mineshaft in the Guardians. I just had to wait it out. It passed. This will pass too. But the darkness is thicker than I expected.”

“I know you loved her, father.”

“Your mother? Well, I grew to love her. Not at first; it’s hard to love someone your father picks for you, someone you meet a tenday before your wedding. But even once I did, once I knew I loved her, it always seemed — why, I was gone from her half the time, gone to war or simply occupied. And so I thought that death, that having her gone for always, would be easier, somehow, than it was with my sister. With your aunt. With my first Alsbet.”

The Emperor of All Narsil sighed, shifted his cloak, and seemed to sink back into the shadows that pooled around his chair. “They sent her away. The same way I sent Elfred away. For the good of the empire. For the good of our house. They sent away my Alsbet, my first Alsbet, my beloved sister who gave her name to my beloved daughter … sent her away to marry Asclepian bar Verna, down south in the Rose Keep in Argosa, and then she died trying to give him a son.  We went to claim her body, I went with my father, with Benfred too, with your mother home and pregnant with Padrec – yes, with Padrec I think, memory plays tricks but yes, I think that’s right. He was born soon after, and that helped me bury the grief, helped me be ready for what was to come, because then your grandfather went to the grave. But when I saw her body, wrapped up to be brought back, not even her face but just the shape of her … my angels, I wished I was lying there instead, there in Argosa, torn up by Asclepian’s stillborn heir, all wrapped and perfumed for the grave.”

“And now I wish it again. I’m glad I buried your mother in the mountains, Alsbet, because if she were here in the crypt I might have them dig me a hole beside her, put a statue on top, let me lie down with my ancestors and sleep.”

“Father,” Alsbet said. “You know she would not wish that.”

Edmund smiled in the darkness.  “No,” he said.  “She would not. But many things have happened lately that she did not wish.”

There was nothing to be said, then, and they were quiet for a long time.

“I will miss you, Alsbet,” her father said finally. “Very much indeed.”

“You don’t need to miss me.  I’m not going anywhere.”

The emperor shifted forward in his seat, letting the bearskin cloak fall a little off ohis shoulders. “Not yet, not yet. But we had guests this week, daughter – important guests. They were not here for the tourney, you know that, or the pleasure of Rendale’s taverns, or the venison at our high table.”

They were here for me, her inner voice murmured, while the fire moved and her father’s huddled shape threw a long shadow across the flagstones.

“Don’t worry, don’t be afraid, I wouldn’t give them anything – not even a scrap. I did what I had to. I put them off.”

“Put them off, father?”

“Yes, put them off, Alsbet. Jonthen Cathelstan, the fat devil, wants to see you married to his Modred. He had a whole host of reasons for this match, and some of them even made sense. The Cathelstans are one of the most powerful of the Heart families — maybe the most powerful, with the Duncasters so old and Cethberd of Gildenfold such an intemperate fool. Felcester sits athwart the Mersana, right in the middle of our empire – an important city to hold, certainly. And an alliance with them would balance the ambitions of the other Heart lords, not to mention the Vernas in Argos. Not to mention everyone else.”

He chuckled, bleakly. “Yes, there’s quite a lot of good that could come from such a match, no doubt about it. Except that I saw how you looked at that boy Modred, and how he looked at you – and how Duke Jonthen looked at us all. He’s too ambitious, that one. Too ambitious to make his son my son-in-law. If Modred Cathelstan married you, I’d fear for Padrec’s hold on the throne when I die.

“Then there’s the estimable Duke of Sheppholm.  The bastard of the Fens, some folk call Eldred Gerdwell — not many, though, since he cuts out the tongue of anyone common-born who mentions the circumstances of his birth. How would you like to be a part of that family, daugther?  Of course, he only has girl children, but his wife died a winter gone, and Eldred suggested that he might — might, you know — consider taking another wife. A new Duchess for Sheppholm, and a new mother for his girls. I’m sure they’re more good-tempered than their sire.”

Alsbet wondered how much he had been drinking.  She wondered what life had been like for Eldred Gerdwell’s first wife, and how Jonthen Cathelstan would be as a father-in-law. She imagined sharing a bed with one of these suitors — the pale Modred, all flab and soft fingers and oily whiskers; or Eldred, who was tall and whip thin with pox scars down his cheeks. 

“Don’t worry, Alsbet —”

“I’m not worried, father,” she said, a little sharply.

“I won’t marry you to ...”

“You’ll marry me to someone for the good of the realm, and of our house, father.  Just as you married mother. And the angels made sure you were happy in the end.”

He smiled sadly. “Just as I married her, yes.  Except that marrying her was easy – easy for my father to pick her, I mean, having just set down the Erona Rebellion, with all the dukes quailing before him, and my sister married to Asclepian. That was my father’s plan, you see ... he married Alsbet to House Verna, and Verna was going to be our ally thrice over, through my stepmother and through my sister and through Benfred, and Argosa was going to brought into the empire completely, the memory of conquest wiped away. Leaving me free to marry your mother, so that Allasyr — so that Allasyr might someday be taken by the empire too.”

Edmund’s voice broke, but he recovered quickly. “He was farsighted, your grandfather, but the archangels made mock of his visions. My stepmother was barren and your aunt died in childbed, and Benfred, he … and the alliance with Argosa crumbled. The weakness of our house, Alsbet ... it is a damnable thing. The Montairs were not a strong house, not ever. That story you talked about, that day in the mountains … the earls of Meringholt, that’s all we Montairs were, just middling lords ... until Ethelwin showed his mettle and we were put on the throne. Not a duke, not a great lord – just a good general and a wise man, your ancestor, who happened to be in the right place at the right time, and who made all the other houses think that he could be toppled easily when one or another one was ready.”

His voice rose into a whine, like the voice of an old man, thick with well-remembered grudges. “A compromise, Alsbet, between the great Heart families, that’s what we were. Why do you think we Montairs spend so much time conquering?  Why do you think we’ve worked so hard to make the legions what they are? When Ethelwin Montair took the throne, there was just the Falconguard. Now there are so many, an army always at our beck and call. That’s our power — the legions, and the lands they conquer. Yes, the gold roads too” – his fingers fretted each other absently, like a banker testing a coin — “but someday the mines will run out, Clava on the council is already planning against the day, drawing up taxation schemes, hoping that every war we fight now means more revenue someday. But it’s a bloody business — we conquer to keep our legions paid, and loyal, which is what keeps our lords loyal as well. We conquer and conquer . . . we wade in blood, just like we’ve waded in blood ever since Ethelwin and his patrons killed Arviragis and took the throne.”

Alsbet went to her father. He was shaking a little as he spoke, and she put her arms around his neck and held him, feeling him tremble, smelling the brandy. 

He went on talking, his voice muffled against her shoulder. “I don’t know what to do, Alsbet. I don’t know. Our crown is strong, now. Crowns are always strong after we win a war — it’s like our house is a tree, a giant oak, and we need to be watered with blood to keep on standing. Watering the crown with blood, that’s what I’ve been doing . . . with Brethon blood, and ours, all these long years.”

“Father, you need to —”

“I need to find you a husband, Alsbet.  That is what I need to do.  But who should I pick?  Tell me that.”

She thought of young Raldred Gant then, for some reason, with his new-forged armor and wide, ecstatic smile. The Queen of the Tourney! he had called her. The Queen of the Spring!

“I don’t know, father.”

“No more do I. Alliances, my father always thought. Marry my sister to Verna, make him our ally. But if I married you to Modred Cathelstan, or maybe Duke Cethberd’s son, what’s his name, Fenreth or Fereth — would that make them our ally? I don’t want Padrec to have any rivals for the throne, Alsbet. Rivals are deadly. But if I marry you to a duke’s son, don’t I just give Modred or Fenreth a claim on Padrec’s throne?”

“Padrec will be safe,” Alsbet said, feeling her father’s fear, tasting it in the chamber.

“We’re strong now, daughter.  We’re strong — our crown is well watered in blood. I want you to be happy, I want you to marry well, for your happiness and the good of the empire both.  That’s what I want more than anything now, Alsbet.”

“I know, father. I know.”

He shuddered, and his hands snaked out to clutch at her shoulders. “I’ve never been confused before, Alsbet. My darling Alsbet. I’ve never been so confused.”

She held him, saying nothing, for a long time.