by Ellyn, Court
“B-bread. Please, Your Grace! A stall was overturned. Dogs were eating it.” His desperate plea quieted as he confessed his guilt. “And some coin off a body.”
Kethlyn waved at a soldier. “Get him out of here. Strike his name from the docket.”
While the boy left the Hall shouting gouts of gratitude, Kethlyn consulted the stack of papers and fished out three. These three thieves weren’t hungry beggars or casual looters. One had been caught inside the moneylenders’ house, armed with a club and lugging bags of coin from the safe. Another was found sifting through the purse of a woman he had beaten senseless. The third was apprehended while climbing over the iron gate of a villa, his pockets full of jewels. “Gefrey Glover, Sandon Emrick, and Errol of High Dock Street, step forward.”
The thieves presented themselves.
Kethlyn didn’t so much as look them over. “Left hands. Lop them off.”
The sentence was carried out immediately upon the steps of the Magistrate Hall. Their shrieks, raw and ragged, echoed under the dome. Among the tiered seating, several spectators broke into sobs at the sudden brutality of it. One fled, pale. Another didn’t have time and spewed breakfast on the marble floor.
Kethlyn laced his hands under his chin and let the screams inundate him. He deserved the same, and worse. Had he not stolen his mother’s throne? But that hearing was for another court and another day.
Once silence returned to the Hall, Kethlyn swept an arm, taking in all who remained. “The rest of you. Thieves, rioters, vandals.” He raised the stack of papers for them to see. “You have my apologies. I don’t know who you were before the riot, but I’d wager that most of you were honest citizens. You wouldn’t be here if the riot hadn’t happened, and the riot wouldn’t have happened if … if my mother were here. Responsibility falls on my head. Reparations will be made out of my own pocket.”
Astonishment sizzled from one side of the courtroom to the other, a great round of gasps and whispers and outbursts.
Kethlyn handed the case files to the soldier standing guard behind the bench. “Make these disappear.” To the prisoners he said, “You’re free to go.” He brought down the gavel one last time, ignored a shout from the Head Barrister, and made his own exit from the halls of justice.
The carriage jolted down the streets through the finer side of the city, whisking Kethlyn away from the districts where the worst of the rioting had occurred. Still, signs of unrest were everywhere. Glass glittered on the cobblestones. Planks boarded up windows of shops for discerning customers. Street cleaners shoveled piles of debris into carts. A family sifted through the burned husk of their house, searching for anything salvageable. Soldiers in red uniforms stood sentry on corners, while the city watch patrolled lanes and alleys.
A disgruntled serenity had settled over Windhaven.
Kethlyn drew the curtains over the carriage windows and for a moment lost himself to the darkness and the swaying and the rhythm of clopping hooves. But the day was warm with a moist gale blustering off the sea; soon the inside of the carriage sweltered.
Goddess, he couldn’t breathe! Kethlyn flung open the drapes and lowered the window. The carriage, the buildings lining the street, the sky itself closed in, pressing on his chest. He leaned toward the window, letting the summer wind stroke his cheek. Room! He needed room to breathe. And light. He was ravenous for it. A memory reared up. Memory of a dark cell and a child’s terror.
A pedestrian jeered. A head of cabbage exploded against the side of the carriage.
Kethlyn reeled back in his seat, pressed himself into the corner where no one might see him. He squeezed his eyes and his fists shut against mounting panic.
By the time the carriage rattled into the palace courtyard, his clothes were drenched with sweat, and not only from the summer heat.
The door opened, and Drael, captain of the palace guard, stood on hand to help his duke descend. But Kethlyn couldn’t move. He stared at the patch of sunlight falling through the door and across his knees, like a hand trying to lift him out of this stifling cage on wheels.
Drael peered in at him. “Your Grace?”
Kethlyn took a deep breath and propelled himself from the carriage.
“We did not expect you for some time.” Drael trailed his duke up the steps and into the palace. “Court is in recess?”
“Court is adjourned. Quick and painful, and knowing my luck, it will backfire. You’ll hear of it by nightfall. I offended every barrister and judge in the city—or they think I have. But it was my court, damn it! It only happened to take place in their precious building.”
Mother’s mercy, his head was splitting. The hammer of his heels reverberated under the vaults of the Grand Corridor. Silver lamps in the shape of breeching mermaids sent shards of light into his eyes. His chamberlain stood on hand to take his gloves and a long summer jacket of shimmering silk. Kethlyn sent him off with orders to draw a cold bath.
Captain Drael still followed, as persistent as the train of a cloak. “Sir, your war council is arrived. There has been news.”
Kethlyn swallowed a groan. Oh, for a bottle and a silent room. Maybe a visit from Briga.
“Though, I believe, the admiral and Commander Leng were informed that you wouldn’t be able to see them until this evening.”
Well, there was some reprieve. Kethlyn shed Drael’s presence with a brusque wave.
He soaked in a bath until he grew chill and savored a tumbler of Zhiani sintha. The stout green liquor settled his head. His appetite returned too. He devoured a roast duck and a wheel of sour bread with half a bottle of Doreli red before heading back into the fray.
His councilors were waiting for him in a small annex of the throne room. In the absence of the lords of Vonmora, Westport, and Brimlad, the war council consisted of a handful of tacticians.
Malkym Leng had performed so commendably during the incursion of Leania that Kethlyn had promoted him to Commander. He stood hastily upon his duke’s entrance and greeted him with a sharp salute. The plate armor on his shoulders and thighs was buffed to a mirror shine and still smelled of polish.
Admiral Gregorin tucked a boat-shaped hat under his arm and bowed with supreme dignity. His weather-beaten face was impassive, likely concealing his displeasure with his orders. Risking the tides during a feud of the moons was distasteful enough, but being ordered to turn around and sail home with little explanation might well have infuriated even the most calm-tempered of men, and Gregorin was not known for a calm temperament.
The rest of the tacticians bowed and murmured with all due obsequiousness, fluttering like butterflies about rotting fruit.
“Is His Grace well?” one of them asked.
Kethlyn brushed off their misplaced worship and shaped a sturdier mask. “No, he’s not. So let’s get down to business. First, Admiral, I extend an apology. Your orders must’ve seemed cruel.” The courier, racing across Westhead Peninsula, had been fortunate enough to intercept the ships at Westport. Kethlyn had praised the Mother-Father thrice over when he’d learned that Gregorin had not yet engaged the Leanian fleet. “Once the situation changed, I decided that stationing my battleships in Leanian waters wouldn’t help our relations with Queen Da’era.”
Gregorin shrugged; the silver tassels of an epaulet swayed. “The crew needed the practice.” His words were gracious; his tone was not. “Commander Leng was informing me of the situation. I find it hard to believe.”
Kethlyn snorted. “So do I. Yet I saw with my own eyes. The Black Falcon no longer rules in Bramoran. He is usurped. The orders we were following were based on lies and a stranger’s hopes of conquest. We were being used as puppets, but we will no longer comply.”
The admiral slapped his hat down on the round council table and leaned heavily on his hands, wrestling with the demise of his doubts.
“Leania is not our enemy, as we were told,” Kethlyn added, “but they may seek reprisals against us, regardless. We are the Black Falcon’s subjects, after all, and we did raid Lea
nian territory.” The facts spilling from his mouth tightened the knot of shame in his belly. “So it is your duty, Admiral, to patrol Windy Coves and continue drilling our sailors. Each vessel must be armed to the teeth.”
If Kethlyn sent missives to Queen Da’era explaining the reasons behind his invasion and his hasty withdrawal, would she heed him?
A wine service had been delivered and set amid the council table. Kethlyn’s face was still warm from the wine he’d had with lunch, but how else was he to ease this sickening fist of embarrassment strangling his insides? Pouring himself a goblet, he asked, “Before you left Leanian waters, did you catch sight of Graynor’s fleet?”
In his nightmares, ships flying banners that he should recognize, yet didn’t, appeared on a flame-red horizon and sailed toward Windhaven with torturous sluggishness and stunning swiftness. He shouted for someone to sound the klaxon, but no one heeded him. He raced through the streets, screaming the alarm himself, but the shopkeepers, dockworkers, and matrons with babes in arms looked at him with incomprehension and continued blithely on their way. The city burned all around him, and it was his fault, his fault.
“Fortunately, no,” said Gregorin. “We encountered only one war galleon. We crossed paths just south of the Pearl Water Strait. Since the Strait isn’t Leanian water, we followed her closely, but she didn’t turn to engage. Ran up flags of friendship, even. Then she anchored alongside a merchanter out of the Pearl Islands and off-loaded a hundred or so passengers. Refugees, we assumed.” With a grin, Gregorin added, “The Pirate’s Bane Two, she was.”
Cousin Athna’s ship? Transferring people? Aye, how many Leanian villages had been razed by Lothiar’s unseen armies? People everywhere were on the run. Someone had to do something, and apparently Athna was doing a good deal more than Kethlyn was.
He resolved to send Da’era that letter, to initiate friendly relations. Yes, by the Mother, he must. But was it too little too late?
“Your Grace?” Leng asked, interrupting Kethlyn’s strategizing. “There is dire news of your land army as well.”
“Has Brimlad fallen?” Shortly after Kethlyn departed the port-city with his regiment, he had received word that the walls were surrounded by shadows and snarls. Thick plumes of smoke rose from villages along the coast, stretching north toward Westport. How did Lothiar’s armies move so rapidly? Had they been lurking, hidden, all along?
“Brimlad holds out,” Leng said, a wry grin punctuating his black thicket of a beard. “And we left the city enough foodstuffs to last them several weeks. No, the news concerns the militias stationed along the Avidan.”
Valryk—or Lothiar through Valryk’s mouth—had ordered Evaronna’s militias to form a barricade along the river, in case Leania sent her armies north. Learning the truth of the matter had changed little. The murder of Leanian nobles at Bramoran had made Valryk an enemy to Queen Da’era, and so Kethlyn decided that the threat of Leanian invasion was still very real. He had left the militias in position.
Leng offered his duke a dispatch, hastily written and mud-spattered. “The troops encamped outside the town of Ensvale, some thirty miles east of Brimlad, have been wiped out. This … unseen enemy … pushes our lines west.”
“If the militias try to seek refuge in Brimlad…”
“Yes, Your Grace, they’ll be annihilated within sight of the walls. They’re in disarray, many companies fleeing north toward the mountains.”
“What do you advise?”
“Rounding them up and stationing them at Westport. Maybe we can stop the northern advance of this enemy.”
They didn’t even know what to call the foes marching against them. Kethlyn had contemplated Lothiar many times over the past weeks. The sheen of his skin inside the deep hood, the grace in his gestures, the silken quality of his voice, the cold, merciless cast to his eyes, his casual use of magic. Kethlyn was cautious not to speak it aloud, but he had become certain that Lothiar was no human from foreign shores. He wished he had listened more closely to Uncle Thorn’s tall tales over the years.
“How does one fight an army one cannot see?” he asked anyone and no one. “How is my father fighting it…? He has Uncle Thorn, that’s how.” Oh, to write a letter to Da, asking him what to do. Writing to Queen Da’era, abasing himself with apologies for invading her lands, seemed far easier and more palatable than writing to his father. It was not pride that kept him from it, but dread.
Leng cleared his throat. “There’s something else, too, Your Grace. Travelers seem to be unable to cross Windgate Pass.” The road through the high mountains was the primary artery between Evaronna and Aralorr. “It’s not that the road is blocked by a rockslide or something. Travelers who go up don’t come down again. Something is up there killing them.”
“Helwende lies on the other side,” Gregorin proposed. “Could be Aralorris.”
Hopeful, Kethlyn thought, but you haven’t seen what Leng and I have seen. No, it was these phantom monsters, he was sure of it. “So our lands south of the mountains are taken, and Windgate is being held against us. We’re cut off.” Caged. He reached through the bars, but there was no one reaching back.
Drink cast the illusion that there were no bars. As soon as his war councilors were satisfied with their orders, Kethlyn beat a retreat upstairs and poured himself another tumbler of sintha. Irritating that it took more and more liquor to get the job done, to bring on the delight of weightlessness, then the sweetness of oblivion.
He was well into his third tumbler when he found himself in the corridor staring at the door to Aunt Halayn’s apartment. What had brought him here? He hated drinking alone. It felt like a dirty secret.
How many weeks since his aunt had stepped foot from her rooms? She had kept her word and shunned the world outside her door, a world that might carry her across Kethlyn’s path. She blamed him for Valryk’s lies, as he blamed himself for believing them. If he and his aunt were in accord about that, why did she not emerge and forgive him? If not forgive, at least shriek at him.
Her silence hurt worse than enraged denouncements. For Halayn, Kethlyn had ceased to exist. I rue the day you were born…
He had tried once before to persuade her. Shortly after he’d returned from Brimlad he had knocked on her door, knocked and knocked, and finally shouted through the thick andyr planks, “You were right! It was all lies. Everything Valryk told me. Won’t you please come out?”
The silence had been so complete that Kethlyn wondered if the room was empty altogether, but he’d tried the knob and found it locked. Halayn was in there, and she cared nothing for his revelations.
So why had he returned? He knocked, tentatively. “Aunt? I did something good today. I tried the rioters and let most of them go free. It’s my fault they were on the docket to begin with. I told them so. I told them I’m sorry. I’m sorry! Aunt?” He leaned his forehead against the door to steady the spinning of the sintha and pounded the planks with a fist. “Aunt! I’m trying to make it right! Do you hear me?”
Silence replied.
Kethlyn slid down the door and sat with his back to it, the tumbler balanced on his knee. Alone. Locked in a dark cell, and the cell was with him wherever he went.
Memory surged. This time he let it come.
Another cell. One beneath Ilswythe’s gatehouse. He was just a boy scared of ghosts, but he told himself he was brave and ventured into the dark. He wasn’t alone. Valryk, a little prince in court velvet, descended into the dark with him. They chased rats that scurried from the dwindling light of their lantern. One rat raced into a cell and tried to hide behind the great iron door. Kethlyn shut the door and caught his rat, but at the same time he had locked them in. He and Valryk, stuck in a cell together.
Had it always been this way?
Hours later, Da had found them and pulled them into the light. Kethlyn remembered fearing repercussions, but the relief in Da’s voice assured him there wouldn’t be any...
His heart leapt at the sound of the key turning in Halayn�
�s door. He scrambled unsteadily to his feet, ready to gush with apology if only his aunt would forgive him and come out and talk with him. But it was Halayn’s handmaid who frowned at him. She was a squat, round matron, wrinkled as a prune and as timid as her mistress was intrepid. “Lady Halayn is already abed,” she hissed. “If you wake her, I’ll take a fireiron to you. Shoo!” Her hand flapped at him like a tiny white wing, then she moved to shut the door in his face.
Kethlyn shoved a foot into the crack. “Please, I must make her understand.”
“She understands plenty.”
“But she doesn’t!”
“She heard you. We both heard you. Now go.”
Damned if he’d be dismissed by a handmaid. “This is my house!”
“This is your mother’s house!”
Kethlyn’s palm cracked down upon the door.
The woman squeaked. “Leave us in peace, or I’ll scream and call the guard.”
Goddess’ mercy, there was genuine fear in the woman’s eyes. Did she really think Kethlyn would harm his aunt? If his own family thought him so vile, what did the rest of his people think of him?
It’s not intention that shapes a man’s reputation, but his action. How long ago had Da told him that? How had things gotten so turned upside down?
Kethlyn slid his foot free, and the door shut with a sharp note of finality. The lock turned. How it turned.
Aye, rescue was for children. Da wouldn’t come with a key and pull him out of the dark, not anymore. Nor Mum, nor Aunt Halayn. Kethlyn was alone. And there was no way out.
He shuffled back to his rooms. The silence he’d craved earlier in the day beat on his ears, as endless and redundant as the tide. Don’t think, don’t think anymore. Just drink and pass out.
The sintha bottle was empty. He dug around in his sideboard for another and didn’t hear the first soft knock at his door. Another, bolder, followed it, and a mouse’s whisper, “Your Grace? Your Grace, it’s me.”
Starved for friendly company, Kethlyn staggered for the door and flung it open. Briga stood in the vestibule in her plain white nightgown and a blanket wrapped tight about her shoulders. Several days before, the chambermaid had arrived to change Kethlyn’s bedding and glimpsed him mourning the shattering of illusions. Pity had moved her to the edge of tears. Kethlyn’s initial reaction was to throw her out, but she was flush and pretty, and so new to service that her hands were still supple.