Morgan looked to his grandfather in confusion, but Simon shook his head to silence him. “Thank you, Isgrimnur,” the king said. “We’ve done our best to make him ready.”
“I’m sure you’ve done very well,” said Isgrimnur. “He’s a fine young man.” But the old duke’s eyes had fallen closed again. “Bless you, son,” he said, his voice faint and weary. His fingers released the prince’s hand. “May Usires and . . . and the saints watch over you and . . . keep you safe.”
“You are tired, Isgrimnur.” Simon nodded to Morgan, who sprang up as though released from a trap. “We will go now and let you rest. We have only just arrived—there will be time to talk again later.”
Isgrimnur’s eyes half opened, looked first on Simon, then Miriamele. “Don’t forget what you told me,” he said with surprising intensity. “Don’t forget our godchildren, Deornoth and Derra. It was my last promise to Gutrun, and I could not look her in the eye when we meet again unless I know you will work to repair my failure.”
“We won’t forget, Uncle,” said Miriamele. “We will never forget.”
“Good.” He closed his eyes again. “Good. All is good . . .”
When they could see he was sleeping they left him, with Grimbrand still sitting at his father’s bedside. The two priests had reappeared as if by magic, and were again kneeling at the foot of the bed, murmuring the words of the Exsequis.
• • •
Simon did not know what time it was, only that the midnight bells had rung long ago, drawing him up from sleep for a moment. He thought he had been having the dream of burning that had troubled him so many nights in the last months, but all he could remember for certain was a face made of smoke, a face that alternately wept and laughed and spoke to him in a tongue he had never heard.
“Who’s there?” He sat up, feeling for the dagger he kept at his bedside, but then remembered he was not in his own bed, not even in his own country. “Who is it?”
“Only me, Majesty. Tiamak.” The little man came farther into the room. “You heard me speaking to the guards. Is the queen asleep?”
Simon looked at Miriamele, who lay sprawled in the covers like an exhausted swimmer. “She is. Should I wake her?”
“I leave it to you, Majesty. Simon. But I have news.”
For the first time, Simon realized there was something strange about Tiamak’s voice. “What news?” But Tiamak had been crying again, and Simon thought he knew.
“Duke Isgrimnur. That good old man . . . he died an hour ago. His son has just told me. Forgive me for disturbing you, but I thought you would want to know. I thank She Who Waits to Take All Back that we were in time to see him once more.”
Tiamak went out. Simon looked at his sleeping wife. Suddenly the weight of the great old castle around him, of Rimmersgard itself, foreign and yet a part of him, as well as the expectations and fears of all their subjects in all the lands, seemed like a weight too heavy to bear. Even with Miriamele only inches away, Simon felt more lonely than he had felt in many years.
He wondered if he would ever sleep well again this side of the grave. Perhaps those who had gone on, like Isgrimnur, were to be envied after all.
9
Heart of the Kynswood
Lord Chancellor Pasevalles had spent most of his morning listening to a group of fat, wealthy merchants complaining about Countess Yissola of Perdruin and her attempts to wrest control of shipping in Erkynlandish waters back from the Northern Alliance. To hear the merchants speak, the lady was part demon, part pirate, and the worst parts of both. He had done everything he could to mollify these men, but what they really seemed to want was to complain, as they had been doing for a long time, and clearly intended to continue doing. Pasevalles was trying to look interested, whatever mayhem he might have been privately contemplating, when the messenger from the Nearulagh Gate guardhouse found him. The merchants didn’t stop talking even when Pasevalles leaned aside to listen to the guardsman, and might not have noticed his divided attention if he had not loudly interrupted them.
“I’m sorry, my lords, but something very important has come up. I must leave you, but I promise that your concerns will all be relayed to the king and queen.”
“We do not merely want our concerns relayed, Lord Chancellor,” said the fattest merchant of all, Baron Tostig, who had bought his title from a distressed landowner with the profits of a lucrative trade in wool and hides. “We want the High Throne to do something!”
“And so the High Throne shall, I’m sure—but not before the king and queen return to Erkynland.” It was hard to keep patience with men like these, creatures intent only on their own ledger books and never on any larger issues. But Pasevalles had been well schooled in patience long before he had agreed to act as Hand of the Throne while Count Eolair traveled with the king and queen. “But I told you the truth, my lords—I am needed. Father Wibert, will you show the gentlemen out?”
As his secretary rounded up the herd of merchants—most of them still bitterly advertising their grievances—Pasevalles hurried to find his cloak. He made his way across the Inner Keep to the stables and borrowed one of the post-horses, fresh and already saddled. Only moments later he was riding out through the Nearulagh Gate, where the Erkynguard all gave him vigorous salutes. The chancellor was well-liked by the guardsmen, who knew he had taken their side when Duke Osric, the Lord Constable, would have reduced their numbers.
He cantered down Main Row, through the city, and out into the warren of streets that had sprung up there with the growth of Erchester. He could not help being impressed by the way the place had changed just during his time at the Hayholt. Twenty years earlier, Erchester had ended at the city walls, but today it sprawled far beyond them, with buildings both ramshackle and surprisingly well-made standing shoulder to shoulder all across Swertclif, although most of the roads were little more than well-worn tracks still muddy from the winter rains. When Pasevalles had arrived, some years after the Storm King’s War, no more than ten thousand people had lived in the castle and town, despite it being the capital of all Osten Ard. He felt sure that today there must be at least five times that many. Someday in the not too distant future the new residents outside the city proper would demand the protection of their own wall.
The only place in the outer city where houses were not squeezed higgledy-piggledy along the walls like mushrooms was on the western side, where the royal forest called the Kynswood lay stretched like a sleeping beast. It was becoming harder every year to keep the forest safe from Erchester’s growing population, not just to keep a few deer for the king’s and queen’s table, but to prevent the wholesale cutting of trees for timber, since the Kynswood was a great deal closer than the mighty Aldheorte. Only the previous Autumn the king and queen had been compelled to double the number of royal foresters, and even so King Simon hadn’t liked it much: “But what if a man is starving?” he had asked. “Should he be hung for trapping a hare?”
“If starving men know they can find a meal in the royal forest,” the queen had told him, “then there will soon be no hare in the forest, or deer, or boar, or anything.”
The king and queen made an interesting pair, Pasevalles thought, seemingly as different as husband and wife could be. Simon was proud of his lowly birth and upbringing, and if given his way would have spent most of his time in the stables or the kitchens, gossiping with the servants. But the queen had been born to the old royal house, and was comfortable with most of the privileges of wealth and noble blood. She was also very fierce about protecting what she felt was right: When she sat in judgment she was fair-minded, but in no way the soft touch for a sad story that her husband was.
Once he was beyond the outermost neighborhoods of Erchester, Pasevalles guided his mount off the Kynswood Road and down into the trees. He knew his secretary Wibert would be furious when he learned that the Lord Chancellor had gone outside the city without guards, but there were
times when Pasevalles did not want to wait and this was one of them.
It was not easy to find the spot, but at last he saw a flash of red and white through the trees below him—the two rampant dragons, emblem of the royal house. He tied his horse to a branch and made his way down the slope. A pair of Erkynguards and a royal forester with a feather in his cap were waiting with a fourth man, a thin fellow in a ragged jerkin who looked as though he had been sleeping rough for some time.
“Don’t hang me, my lord!” the thin man squealed as Pasevalles finally reached them. “I only found it—I never did nothing!”
Pasevalles could see the unmistakable shape of a human body half-buried in the leaves at their feet. He turned to the man with the feather. “Your name, Forester? Then tell me what has happened here.”
The forester had the lean, weathered look of one who, had he not been given this post, might have been poaching with the man begging for his life. “Natan am I, Lord Chancellor. My lad and I were on our rounds when this fellow ran out, screaming like the White Foxes had come back. Said there was a dead ‘un in the woods. A woman.”
“Was he carrying anything? Any game?”
“I weren’t!” cried the ragged man, bursting into tears. “I were only lost!”
Pasevalles knew better, but he waited for the forester’s reply.
“No, lord. His hands were empty. His bag, too.”
The steward turned to the weeping man. “And what is your name? Be truthful or I will know it, and things will go hard for you.”
“Dregan, lord, but I done nothing wrong! I swear on St. Sutrin’s holy name!”
Pasevalles shook his head. “You may go. But I hope I never hear your name again, Dregan. And if you are caught in the royal forest again—well, you may wish we had hanged you.”
The ragged man got to his feet with many cries of gratitude, then ran back up the hill toward Erchester. The Erkynguards watched him go with the sulky expressions of dogs denied a chase.
“Begging your pardon, lord, but you know he was in these woods for only one thing,” said the forester Natan.
“Of course, but if we’d beaten him, he’d be back in a few nights. As it is, he has told me his name. That will give him pause a bit longer.” Pasevalles stepped closer to the body, then sank to his knees beside it. “So he brought you to see this. Then what happened?”
“I sent my boy to fetch the guards.”
“And we sent a messenger to you, Lord Chancellor,” said one of the Erkynguardsmen, almost proudly.
“Fine. You all did as you should.” He leaned closer, brushing away the damp leaves that clung to the body. He could see a little less than half of the face, but that was strange enough, thin and high-boned and less pale than he would have imagined. What was stranger was that he could see no other sign of decay despite the body likely having been in place for days, at least by the amount of forest debris that covered it. The corpse looked to be a woman’s. “I don’t see any sign of what . . .” he began, then the royal forester jumped and swore behind him.
“That eye!” he said. “It twitched! I saw it!” He took a few stumbling steps back.
“Don’t be foolish,” Pasevalles began, then he saw it too, the faintest tremor in the exposed eyelid. His heart jumped a little in his chest. “Merciful Aedon, I apologize. You are right.”
There was only one thing to do. Pasevalles began to dig away the mulch that covered her. After a moment, the Erkynguards got down beside him to help, although the forester stayed a careful distance away.
When they had uncovered her completely, one of the guardsmen made the sign of the Tree on his breast. The other stared for a moment, then did the same.
“Is it . . . is it a fairy, my lord?” the second guard asked.
“A Sitha, you mean? Or a Norn?” Pasevalles sighed. He had half-anticipated something like this ever since the king and queen had set out for Rimmersgard, some major crisis that would push aside the things he had planned to do during their absence. “I guess that she is Sithi, although I have never met one myself.” He took the soiled cloth of her sleeve in his fingers and felt its smooth weave, slippery as southern island silk. Now that she was uncovered, he could see a shallow movement of her chest. “God save us, she still breathes. Help me.” He rolled her onto her side and sucked in his breath at the sight of three broken arrows that had pierced her, as well as all the dried blood they had let out of her slender body. “Quick,” he told the forester. “Run to the city and find someone with sailcloth or a heavy blanket—something we can use to carry her. And have a cart ready when we get her up to the top.”
“Carry her where, my lord?” asked one of the guards as the forester scrambled away up the slope.
“Back to the Hayholt. It’s our misfortune that Master Tiamak is with the king and queen, but I will find someone to take care of her. Did she say anything, make any sound that you heard?”
“No! We thought she was dead, my lord.”
“And so she should be. Any mortal would have died from those wounds long ago.”
• • •
Princess Lillia was waiting for him in the outer throne hall when he pushed through the doors from the Garden Court.
“I heard the noon bell a very long time ago,” the girl said. “You didn’t tell the truth. You said you would tell me a story when noon came, and I’ve been waiting and waiting—”
“I am so very sorry, Highness.” Pasevalles held the door for the guards and their burden. “But we found this woman sick in the forest, and I must help her. Do you know where Lady Thelía might be?”
“She went to the market today,” said Lillia. “I wanted to go but Auntie Rhoner said I couldn’t.”
“Ah. Well, I have a bit of a problem and need some help, Highness. Would you please go and ask Countess Rhona to come to me?”
“I don’t have to do that! I’m a princess!”
Pasevalles took a long breath. “No, you don’t, you’re right,” he said. “My apologies, Princess.” He turned to the guards as they staggered up carrying the blanket with the wounded Sitha. “Put her down there, men,” he told them. “We’ll be taking her somewhere else when we find a clean room.”
“Who’s that?” asked Lillia, eyes wide. “Is she dead?”
“No, but she’s badly hurt.” He turned back to the men. “One of you go find the Mistress of Chambermaids, and the other go fetch Brother Etan, the apothecary. Look for him in the herb garden behind the mews.” He turned back to the princess. “And I promise I’ll tell you that story soon. But you want me to help this poor lady, don’t you?”
Lillia frowned, but kept staring at the indistinct figure in the blanket-sling. “Suppose. Maybe I could go tell Auntie Rhoner for you.” The princess was clearly of two minds, but at last she tucked her hands behind her back and skipped slowly off to find her more-or-less nursemaid, the countess.
• • •
“Here you are! What are you doing hiding in one of the guest chambers? I have been searching and searching!” said Rhona. “You are a popular man today, Lord Chancellor—both princesses, mother and daughter, desire your company.” She took a step into the room and stopped, eyes wide, when she saw the figure stretched on the bed. “By the Black Hare, what is this?”
“A Sitha-woman, found nearly dead in the Kynswood,” said Pasevalles. He needed a moment before what she said sank in. “Both princesses? I know Lillia wants a story, but what does her mother want?”
“What Princess Idela wants is a mystery to me, as always.” Countess Rhona was the one who began the joking custom of calling Idela “the Widow,” because she still wore black so many years after Prince John Josua’s death, despite few other signs of actually being in mourning. “But what of this poor woman here?”
“She has arrow wounds—several—and she lay among the trees for days, but still lives. Now you know as much as I
do.”
“She still lives?” The countess bent over the motionless body, seeming caught between fascination and pity. “And you are certain she is a Sitha?”
“Look at her. What else could she be?”
“One of the White Foxes, just as easily. By the good gods, are you sure it is wise to bring her into the Hayholt?”
“There is nowhere else we could keep her alive—and safe, too, if she lives. Someone tried to kill her, Countess! And no, she is not one of the White Foxes—no Norn has golden skin like that. She is only paler than usual.”
The countess had a faraway look in her eyes. “I was a young girl when the Sithi came to Hernystir. Their tents filled the fields as far as the eye could see, and the cloth was every color on the gods’ Earth. My mother said it was like the olden days come back.”
“Did your mother also tell you how to keep one of them alive?” Pasevalles immediately regretted his surly tone: Rhona was a valuable ally, the queen’s best friend and a member of the Inner Council. “I’m sorry, Countess. I beg your pardon. I seem to have left my manners out in the Kynswood.”
She smiled. “No need to apologize, Lord Chancellor. I can imagine this day has tested you, and it is scarcely past noon. But what did you want with me? I am not much use as a healer or bedside nurse. Did you send for Lady Thelía?”
“I am here, my lord, I am here!” Brother Etan, his youthful face red and shiny with sweat, staggered through the doorway. “I am sorry it took me so long—I had to run back to my room for my things.” He quickly examined the woman on the bed. “Goodness! The guard was right! A Sitha!”
“She has three bad wounds. The arrowheads are still in them,” Pasevalles said. “And she has been exposed in the forest for several days. Oh, and Lady Thelía is gone to the market. Can you do anything for this poor creature, Brother?”
The monk mopped his face with the sleeve of his robe. “I cannot answer until I see what I can see.”
Pasevalles pointed to the two chambermaids who had been waiting discreetly in the corner of the room since they had finished preparing the sickbed. “For now, these good women will help you to nurse her, Brother. If she wakes or tries to talk, please send one of them for me immediately, no matter the time of day or night. The victim herself may be the only one who can help us unpick this crime. Because make no mistake, this was no accident. Whoever shot her intended murder.”