Sons of the Falcon (The Falcons Saga) (38 page)

His advisers had howled, but what
could they do? He chose the two most outspoken old men, and again following
Laral’s advice, sent them to Zhian and Dorél as permanent ambassadors. The
howling stopped.

After Istra’s death, Arryk ordered
a wall built around the estate. None were permitted there now but the
groundskeepers and the game wardens. They kept the pond stocked with fish and
the woods with the elusive snow elk that Laral enjoyed stalking. But Arryk
rarely came with hunting parties anymore; he mostly came to be alone and to
think.

Master Fairwyn, Keeper of the
Trees, was on hand to greet the White Falcon as soon as he climbed from the
carriage. “I won’t be long,” Arryk said, as the man unlocked the great iron
gate. “Did I interrupt your breakfast?”

“Never, Your Majesty.” Fairwyn
lived with his family in the gatehouse. It was good to hear the laughter of
children bouncing through the open windows.

“Have the swans returned?”

“They have, indeed, sire.”

“Splendid.” Inside the gate, raked
gravel paths meandered through flowerbeds humming with bees. Two old men
trimmed the hedges while their wives knelt on cushions, pulling weeds from
among roses and wildflowers that had yet to bloom. Only the grounds nearest the
gate had been tamed in this way; the rest of the estate remained wild. The
keepers bowed an exit as Arryk passed. They did not need to be reminded of
their orders:  when the king visited, he was not to be disturbed.

Arryk followed the path to the
pond. A dock stretched out past the reeds toward a thundering fountain. Two
swans circled the splashing waters. The pair had made the pond their home for
three years now. The garden felt less lonely with them reigning over it. The
ducks had returned as well. They paddled away, griping noisily as Arryk
approached the end of the dock. He reached inside the feed box, which was kept
full of corn and seed and bread crusts from the gatehouse, and tossed a handful
into the water. The ducks forgave him quickly enough.

He wandered on toward the cupola.
Under the marble dome, Istra waited for him. Carved from the finest alabaster,
the statue stood high on a plinth. She was only slightly larger than life-size.
Skirts swirled about her legs, as if she had turned suddenly. A falcon perched
on her wrist and her eyes gazed over the pond and the flocks of waterfowl.
Despite the dress, she wore a sword on her hip. Everyone they knew had joked
that the queen ought to be named Captain of the White Mantles, so dedicated was
she to Arryk’s wellbeing.

Pigeons liked to take shelter under
the dome. Droppings dripped down Istra’s shoulder, in her curling hair. Arryk
stepped onto the plinth and dusted off the mess with his kerchief.

Five years. Five years was all they
had before spoiled, scheming men destroyed everything. Arryk never suspected
they would carry their resentment so far.

By the third miscarriage, all the
fun of getting an heir was gone. Fear replaced hope. Arryk’s advisers blamed it
on Istra’s training as a knight. She’d never be able to have children, they
said, though that was a lie. Plenty of female knights had children, Istra’s own
grandmother among them. When Arryk refused to put her aside, those old foxes
took matters into their wizened paws.

“I’m so sorry,” Istra had whispered,
too weak with fever and pain to raise her hand to his face. Her bright golden
hair had grown dull and clung to her cheeks in sweaty tendrils. Black bruises
circled her eyes, and she’d become so small lying there for days while the physicians
looked on, prescribing more of that tainted tea.

“Sorry for what?” he asked. For
losing another baby? For not detecting the truth before it was too late? For
leaving him alone? He never found out why she felt the need to apologize. The
White Falcon was a widower at twenty-one.

In reparation, he had unleashed the
full fury of the throne. He hoped he never needed to instigate that kind of
terror and bloodshed again. No one in Brynduvh had been safe. Houses were
turned inside out. Entire families were rounded up and tossed into cells.
Inquisitors were given full rein to pry the truth from proud, obstinate mouths.
Screams rose up through the floor of the throne room. Later, Arryk was amazed
by how little the sound had troubled him.

Nathryk would have been proud.

In the end, more than two dozen
heads had adorned the city gates. Every one of the councilors he’d inherited
from his father, three physicians, and one midwife had gone to the block. Arryk
himself promised the midwife amnesty if she told the truth about the babies.
Yes, Lord Quelstorn had paid her to ensure the queen lost every one of them,
because the White Falcon had spurned his granddaughter in favor of someone else.
Arryk broke his promise to the woman, and Lord Quelstorn was dragged out of his
castle and made to walk all the way to Brynduvh tied behind his horse. He
arrived on bleeding feet and dared shout that he didn’t deserve this treatment.
Arryk ordered him tied to a spit and turned slowly over a low fire in Sanguine
Square until he confessed publically. His head joined the others, and his sons
and daughters and grandchildren were shipped to Ixaka and their lands granted
to someone else. Ravens circled the gates for weeks. New faces, younger faces now
lined the council tables, with Laral often among them.

In the years since, Arryk was given
to long periods of silence. The spells came and went in their own seasons; he
couldn’t predict when they would come or when they would lift. He locked
himself in his suite, thinking of nothing, feeling nothing, relishing a dim
kind of half-light and resenting the bright light of day. It was usually Laral
or Rance who dragged him back to the land of the living. They caused him to
care about his duty again, his people, his legacy.

This was the reason he found it
difficult to believe Laral capable of betrayal. Cruel things happened in war,
he’d read. Families split over ideals, houses torn, friendships sundered. If
the convention ended in bloodshed, Laral would have to choose. His greatest
fear. He and Arryk had discussed it on occasion, but never at length. Neither
liked thinking about it when the hunt was going so well.

Folding the kerchief and putting it
away, Arryk realized Istra’s statue faced north. Today that seemed significant.
Beyond the pond and the forest rose the Shadow Mounds, misty green swells like
whales breaching. Beyond them lay Aralorr and the road to uncertainty. “Yes,
I’m leaving,” he told the statue. “I wish you were, too. Would you have talked
me out of it or insist I go? It’s an opportunity, you know. We could mend a
thousand years of hostility. Wouldn’t that be something?”

A duck responded with an indignant
quack. The two swans glided past. One tilted its head and peered up at him,
then drifted on.

He would like to delay longer,
watch the deer come bounding out of the trees at dusk, but he was already later
getting started than he’d intended. If Arryk failed to arrive at Brengarra at
the appointed time, Laral would worry that highwaymen had fallen upon him and
send out a search party. It wouldn’t be the first time.

At the gate, Arryk thanked the
gardeners for keeping things tidy. “But do tend to my lady’s statue. The
pigeons, you know.”

The White Mantles came to
attention, and Rance glanced back for his orders.

“To Brengarra,” Arryk announced and
climbed into the carriage. Through the window, he watched Master Fairwyn close the
iron gate. Rance gave a shout, and the carriage lurched forward. Arryk lowered
the window and peered back. Why was he filled with the foreboding that he had
visited Istra’s garden for the last time?

~~~~

L
aral felt as if someone had
stuffed scratchy wool socks up his nose then whacked him in the head with a
mallet while jumping up and down on his chest. Fever boiled in his face, turned
his cheeks shiny red, made his skin hurt. He hunkered lower into his armchair
before the great fire in the Lord’s Hall. This grim, drafty, high-vaulted room
had been the heart of the original castle, a thousand years ago. The thatched
roof had since been replaced with gray slate and the earthen floor laid over
with heartpine. Dusty heads of red stags and giant boars peered down from the wattle-and-daub
walls. Long oaken tables ran the length of the floor, though rousing feasts
were rarely held here anymore. Bethyn’s father had preferred the Hall for his
private getaway; here, his fire roared as loudly and hot as he wanted it to, and
his wolfhounds lounged at his feet and no one cared if they drooled on the
floor. Some years passed before Laral felt comfortable coming here. Invading
hallowed space, it was. By the time his second child was born, however, he’d
adopted Lord Jaeron’s chair for his own.

Bethyn tucked a blanket around his
legs and clucked her tongue. “You really ought to stay in bed.”

“No!” he bellowed and broke into a
cough. Each spasm sent jabs of pain through his skull. “He’ll be here soon and
I have to be ready to go.”

“The elixir has made you
delusional, love.”

“Aye, Da, you sound worse than me.”
Andryn plunked down on the footstool. The boy was small for his twelve years.
He was allergic to everything he touched and all too easily developed a rasping
cough. Laral had informed the doctors that he himself hadn’t gotten any height
under him until he was fourteen or so, and he pointed out that Bethyn was built
like a bird, but after poking and prodding on the boy long enough, the doctors
confirmed that Andryn’s heart wasn’t a healthy one. He tired quickly, his
cheeks were often pale, and he had trouble catching his breath. “Fuss, fuss,
fuss, Mum is very good at fussing. One little cough and it’s off to bed with
you.”

Bethyn straightened, doubled a fist
on her hip, and glared indignantly at her son.

“Who taught you to be such an ingrate?”
asked Lesha. She sat at the nearest corner of the long table, tuning her lute. At
sixteen she was a budding beauty, three inches taller than her mother with
Bethyn’s delicate bones. The roaring fire turned her pale hair into veils of yellow
gold. Of course, Laral preferred to pretend that his eldest was barely out of
the nursery.

Andryn giggled at his sister’s
remark. One of his chief pleasures was getting a rise out of his mother and
sister.

“You have my sympathies, Andy,”
said Laral. The coughing had turned his voice to gravel. “Remind me of this in
a couple of weeks when I start coddling you again.”

“Deal.” He’d inherited his mother’s
large brown eyes and Laral’s lazy brown curls, and when they traveled to
Drenéleth last autumn, Kelyn and Eliad both remarked how much Andy looked like
his father. That made the boy’s chest puff out. “I’m going to be a knight like
him, too,” he’d said, but it was his younger brother who got to stay behind as
a squire.

Bethyn popped him on the rear. “Get
up. Your da needs to elevate his feet.”

Andryn scurried off the footstool
and dropped onto the bench across the table from his sister. A wicked grin
crept across his face. He reached out and gave one of the lute’s pegs a full
turn.

Lesha squealed. “You little rat! I
was almost finished.”

Laral groaned at the irate pitch of
her voice and Andy’s laughter; both reverberated in his ears. Their mother
rounded on them, but before the scolding leapt from her tongue, the head
steward bustled in and cleared his throat. Master Arvold was a rail-thin,
balding man, whose gray livery was never soiled by a wrinkle or a speck of
dust. When Bethyn acknowledged him, he announced, “His Majesty is arrived, my
lady.”

Bethyn hurried out to receive the
king.

“Oh, damn,” Laral muttered and
tossed the blankets aside.

“Don’t get up, Da,” said Lesha,
setting aside her lute to bundle him under the blankets again.

He let her fuss; he was terribly dizzy
all of a sudden. Had to be the concoction they made him drink. Voices, urgent
and concerned, rose over the roar of the fire and Lesha’s orders for her
brother to behave like a gentleman.

“…practically had to strap him down
to keep him here, sire.” Bethyn’s explanation grew louder as she led the king
into the Lord’s Hall. “The doctors say he’s flirting with pneumonia.”

Lesha dropped into a deep curtsy,
and Andryn bowed clumsily. It was a relief to see that a king looked crinkled
and mussed from a journey like any other man. Holding back a cough, Laral
started to push himself to his feet.

“Stay put,” Arryk ordered. “Andryn,
you’re looking well. You avoided your father’s folly, then?”

The boy scowled. “Of course. I
wasn’t invited to go.”

Arryk took up Lesha’s hand and
kissed it. “As fair as always.” She blushed and giggled, and Laral grunted.
Coming into the firelight, Arryk leaned close to inspect his friend. “You look
like you’ve been swallowed by a sea serpent and shat out the other end.”

Andryn laughed so hard that he
doubled over, gasping.

“I’m not
that
sick,” Laral
insisted.

“Hunting in the rain? Your lady
wife tells me correctly?”

“It was only misting, and it’s a
good time to go hawking. The birds aren’t expecting it. The falcons…” His
version of the story ended with a violent sneeze. The fever flared in his
cheeks, but he felt so damnably cold.

“You only prove Bethyn’s point, my
friend.”

Laral wheezed a sigh. “Andy, put
more wood on the fire. Sire, I will be well enough by morning to ride with you.”

“Your things were unpacked hours
ago,” Bethyn said.

“They can be packed again, Wren.
There’s still time.” He managed less of a growl when he addressed the king, “You
mean to stay the night, don’t you?”

“The men and horses are tired,”
Arryk admitted. “We traveled through the night to be here on time.”