Tanis rose from his chair. “Of course, my lord. He’s—”
The rumble of galloping horses interrupted further conversation, and Ean moved quickly to the window. At least three dozen horsemen were cantering down the long drive toward the house. “It’s the King’s Own Guard.”
Tanis fast joined him at the window and peered out wearing a perplexed expression. “What would the king’s men be doing in Aracine?”
The prince gave him a rueful look full of apology. “Tanis…there’s something I must confess…”
***
At work in her laboratory since long before dawn, Alyneri was disturbed by the clatter of hooves along the quarter-mile of paved drive leading to the front of the manor house, a route nobody used save those who didn’t know any better—which usually meant some tiresome noble from Calgaryn.
This can wait. She set down the vial of peppermint oil she was extracting and dampened the little burner beneath it. She took off her work apron, hung it on a hook behind the door as she passed, and lifted her blue shantung skirts as she marched down the long hall.
“Tanis!” she called as she turned the corner on her way to the front hall. Now where is that boy? If I have to go searching for him…
Fersthaven’s front doors were carved from two massive pieces of solid oak. Normally her chamberlain and seneschal would attend visitors, but nothing at all was normal about her life just then. She thought she had a good idea who was approaching and why. Unfortunately, a meeting with Lord Captain Rhys val Kincaide never improved her mood.
Not that much was going to. She’d barely slept the night before, what with both mourning Farshideh and berating herself for not recognizing Ean when he lay in her own house. It wasn’t any solace to her that he’d been a thirteen-year-old boy when he’d left—tall and lanky, all bones and sinew and not a pinch to spare—while he’d returned as a man in his own right, with beard and calluses to prove his worth. The intervening years had broadened him, hardened his physique. Still…I should have known him!
Alyneri couldn’t decide what bothered her more: that she hadn’t recognized Ean after all they’d shared together, or that his identity had eluded her even while in rapport. Both facts were equally repulsive.
Suddenly grateful for the chance to be justifiably ill-humored, Alyneri threw open the doors and then stood square in the middle of the portal, squinting into the bright morning. She watched the king’s men trot their horses into the turnaround, and glanced down as a large tabby cat fled from underneath a shrubbery and darted up the steps to hide itself beneath her skirt. She shook her silks away from the creature. “Traitor,” she accused, giving it a hard look. “You destroyed my mint last night. No milk for you today!” The cat flattened an ear irritably and turned its tawny eyes to gaze out at the newcomers.
The men reined in their horses in the drive, giving Alyneri the opportunity to frown down at the captain. Rhys sat tall in the saddle of a great chestnut warhorse. As ever, he sported his chain of office in prominent view. No doubt he’s come for Ean at last, she thought, regarding him narrowly, and none too soon!
The man in question dismounted in one swift leap and ascended the steps toward Alyneri with long, determined strides, looking as if he meant to push right past her; but the cat began hissing at his approach—not to mention the affronted glare in Alyneri’s eyes—and one or the other kept him at bay. For a moment, the captain and Alyneri stood deadlocked in an impasse of contrary gazes that Her Grace seemed content to prolong indefinitely.
At last the captain gripped the hilt of his sword in aggravation. “Well?” he barked. “Where is he, woman?”
Alyneri regarded him imperially. She was in no mood to be trifled with, and especially not by the Lord Captain Rhys val Kincaide, who held permanent residence on her bad side.
“I'm afraid there are a few matters we must rectify here at the outset, my Lord Captain,” she began with supreme disregard for his obvious haste. “First, I never answer to the address of woman. I do have a name, but Your Grace or at least my lady are most appropriate, and you may address me as such any time. Second, you are standing on my land, bestowed upon my family by King Aaryn, First King of Calgaryn. I know you are aware that you’re speaking to a duchess. I will overlook your obvious disregard for my station because you seem distressed. Should you choose to apologize, I might have a powder that will help you with that temper.”
The captain’s eyes bulged, and he made to reply, but Alyneri pushed on. “Along those lines then, I am loath to imagine you had the intention of barging into my home—without even observing a shadow of the respect one bestows upon a peeress of the court—just because there’s no moat surrounding my front door,” and she crossed her arms and stared at him beneath a dangerously arched eyebrow.
The captain’s face went crimson, beard bristling. “Do you know what this means?” he barked. He shoved his chain of office toward her face.
“Of course, my Lord Captain,” she replied, meting his hostility with an equal amount of indignation. “I am prepared to offer the Captain of the King’s Own Guard all the hospitality at my disposal—that is, if you intend to stay,” and her tone implied that she hoped he did not. “I must warn you, however, that we observe the well-established rules of etiquette here in Gandrel Forest just as in Calgaryn Palace, and I expect no less of you here than His Majesty would expect in court. That includes dressing appropriately for meals—I will not have my dining room smelling like rusty mail and unwashed bodies, nor will I allow any of you to sleep between my linen without bathing first. If bathing is too much of a burden, of course, you can lodge in the stables with the other unwashed creatures.”
By this time the captain was making strangling noises.
“Third, and last of all,” Alyneri continued without pause, “and getting back to your original question, I’m afraid you will have to be more specific. I treat many an injured man, and I haven't the least idea of whom you refer.” This was a lie, of course, but it was quite edifying to watch the captain’s jugular vein bulging dangerously along the side of his neck.
Once Rhys’ countenance matched the color of his beard, he responded in a gruff, barely-controlled voice, “Your Grace, I search for His Highness, Ean val Lorian, Crown Prince of Dannym, and whose personal letter arrived by way of your courier just last night!” Then he shouted, “Now is he here or not!”
Alyneri nudged the cat away with the toe of her shoe and stepped aside, gesturing to the captain. “Why, yes, now that you mention it. I do believe he is.”
“My Prince!” one of the King’s Guard cried just then, and Alyneri looked over her shoulder to find Ean and Tanis approaching from behind her in the hall. Her heart skipped a beat, for he now appeared just as she remembered him. Why must you be so ridiculously handsome?
At once all the soldiers were dismounting and falling to one knee with a massive shuffling, chinking and clanking. To Alyneri, it sounded like a great clock had heaved one last, dying sigh and collapsed.
The captain bent the knee in the last. “Your Highness,” he said, looking up as Ean neared, “it is good to see you well and whole. You gave us all quite a fright.”
“It’s been a long time, Rhys,” Ean replied warmly. He waved the captain to his feet and included all the men with a welcome smile.
“’Tis a godsend that you came safely through it all,” the captain commented, though his gaze seemed to imply his own confusion over the matter.
“Yes, Fortune graced me,” the prince agreed, but there was deep sorrow in his tone.
At this reference, the king’s men kissed their thumbs for continued good luck. The captain seemed to want to do so, though he managed to restrain himself. “We need to return to Calgaryn at once, Your Highness,” Rhys said instead.
“Very good,” Ean replied. “Her Grace was kind enough to stable Caldar with her own mare, and I daresay he’ll be happy to ride again.”
Rhys waved one of his men to retrieve Ean’s steed from the stables
and looked to Alyneri. “Your Grace,” he began begrudgingly,” Their Majesties bid you return to Calgaryn with us that they might properly thank you for your service to their son.”
“I plan to return ere Festival is completed, Captain. I’m sure my role is small enough that—”
“Unfortunately, Your Grace,” and his tone reflected his opinion that he thought the matter quite unfortunate indeed, “Their Majesties require that you return with us.”
Alyneri frowned as she considered the order. In the end, she decided defiance would be too emotionally draining—however gratifying it might’ve been to annoy the captain. “Very well,” she replied with a sigh. “I suppose if that is Their Majesties’ desire, there is nothing to be done for it. We can leave for Calgaryn as soon as I am packed. My Lord Captain, please have your men help Tanis with my things.” She turned to the lad and counted off, “I’ll need all of my herbs, of course, my leather bag, Tanis, and also a few necessary personal things…pack my usual trunk.”
She turned back to the captain, who clearly was not used to being ordered around by the peerage and resultingly looked a trifle indignant, and continued, “You’ll have to send one of your men to saddle our horses as well. My groomsman is occupied with preparations for transporting my seneschal’s body—I doubt you could know that she passed over yesterday, but these things do happen and one must attend to them. Tanis and I came with the coach from Calgaryn, but we’ll return with you. I vow, the air of a morning ride will do me good.”
The captain turned from Alyneri to a smiling Ean and back to Alyneri as if battling to reconcile his orders to bring the duchess against the necessity of meeting all of her demands in order to do so. Finally, he heaved a ponderous sigh and grumbled, “As Your Grace wishes,” and dispatched his men appropriately.
Ean grinned even wider. “Fabulous!” He clapped hands together. “Why not make a real event of it? Perhaps tour around a little, I can show you the ins and outs of Calgaryn Palace—”
“I’m quite familiar enough with Calgaryn Palace, thank you, Your Highness,” Alyneri remarked tersely. She was still furious with him and certainly had no intention of spending extra time in his company. “I have, after all, spent the last five years in residence there during your notable absence. Well, move along then, Tanis,” and she waved the lad off to pack her things.
Within the hour, they were riding north.
***
It was afternoon when they came into view of Calgaryn city and its stately palace crowning the ocean cliffs. They were spotted immediately, and thirty or so of the palace guard soon came cantering to meet them upon the road—as if the thirty-plus soldiers of the King’s Own Guard that currently flanked the prince weren’t nearly enough.
The man leading the party, however, was as unlike a soldier as Ean was like a shepherd. The leading rider sported the velvet doublet and cape of the nobility, though in a foreign cut and of a rather garish violet-red. His wavy cinnamon hair fell unfashionably long to his shoulders and looked as if it hadn’t been brushed in a week, but he wore his manicured moustache and goatee with flair. “Welcome back, cousin!” the man called as he neared. He leveled Ean a wide smile somewhat reminiscent of a tomcat who’d just enjoyed a meal of the queen’s treasured doves.
Ean reined in with a grin splitting his face from ear to ear. “Shadow take me! What is Fynnlar val Lorian doing back at his ancestral home?”
“Licking wounds, cousin,” Fynn replied. He reined his horse to a halt before Ean. “I hear you have a few of your own that recently needed tending.” He lifted val Lorian grey eyes to view Alyneri and the others, who were just then joining them, and added lustily, “but I must admit, I much prefer your nurse to mine,” and he sent a sideways nod to a bull of a man mounted just behind him.
Ean turned his gaze to the latter. “Brody the Bull! Surely you must rival the gods for patience, to put up with this black sheep for so long.”
“I do as My Lord Prince Ryan requires,” the man named Brody replied in a voice that sounded like gravel grinding beneath a millstone.
Fynn gave the Bull a withering look. “Yes…well, we all have our gifts.” He looked around then, and noting that everyone had collected, he motioned to the others to follow. The men behind Fynnlar cleared way for the two princes, and the royal pair led on to the palace. “So what’s it like being poisoned?” Fynn asked as they set off.
“That’s a morbid question, my lord,” Alyneri observed, riding just behind them.
“Yes, death has always fascinated me, Your Grace.” Fynn turned her a grin over his shoulder. He made no secret of his gaze as it fell with appreciation upon her bosom and only lifted his eyes again as he suggested, “Mayhap such a respected Healer as thyself could have something to add to my studies?”
Alyneri arched a brow at him.
“And might I add,” Fynn went on, “it is such a pleasure to see you again after these many long years. I recall so fondly our childhood days of tormenting one another with vindictive aplomb.”
“They shall remain fondly in your memory alone, Lord Fynnlar.”
“I fear Alyneri has outgrown us, cousin,” Ean said with a chuckle. “She no longer has the time to engage with us in mundane banter.”
Alyneri shot him a vexed look. He winked at her.
Fynn put on another of his feline grins. “We’ll have to manage without her then. But what of my question? I am most curious.”
The Prince shook his head. “Cousin, I thought my uncle taught you better manners.”
“Ah yes, manners, the lubricants of society.” Fynn waved a hand airly. “But I rather like being the grindstone. You were about to say?”
Ean laughingly answered, “In all truth, the entire episode seems but a blur to me now.”
“See, I knew it so!” Fynn banged his fist upon one knee. “I told that fool of a Veneisean, Lord Aigelmort, that he ought to use arsenic in his wife’s tea, but he insisted an overdose of laudanum was better. The awful woman was sick for days before the end.”
Alyneri turned Fynn a reproachful glare. “You are a horrid man, Lord Fynnlar.”
“Ah, but such a necessary component of society, Your Grace,” Fynn pointed out.
“And what society would that be, exactly?”
“So what brings you home, Fynn?” Ean interposed.
Fynn tore his eyes from Alyneri’s. “Oh trifling things, really. Some loose ends—of course, I really wanted to be here for your parade.”
“You ran out of money, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” Brody answered before Fynn could lie about it.
“I did not run out of money,” Fynn declared indignantly, shooting the Bull a fiery look. “I need more capital for my latest business venture, that’s all. I thought dear Uncle Gydryn might want to invest.”
Ean laughed. “I doubt it.”
“More likely His Majesty would pay you just to leave again,” Alyneri observed.
Fynn broke into a wide grin and replied with a wink, “I’m counting on it, Your Grace.”
A blaze of trumpets sounded their arrival as the party headed into the tunnel that led beneath the palace’s outer wall. The trumpeters raised their silver horns again as Ean’s group exited the tunnel on the other side, and they continued their bursts of revelry long after Ean’s ears had tired of them.
Thanks to the trumpeters’ valiant efforts to rouse the entire kingdom into awareness of the prince’s return, by the time Ean and his companions reached the First Circle, half the nobility on hand had collected to welcome the Crown Prince home—most notably the female half. When Ean turned Caldar through a row of arched columns crowned with a flying eagle to begin that final leg across the parade yard to the palace entrance, a cheer rose up from the assembled masses, many of which threw flowers in his path.
“I didn’t know you were so well loved,” Alyneri observed blandly as she rode along to Ean’s left.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Your Grace,” Fynn interposed from Ean’s right. “T
hey’re cheering for me, of course.” He puffed out his chest like a strutting rooster.
She gave him a withering look.
“In all honesty, Alyneri,” Ean admitted while being bombarded with flowers, “this far exceeds my expectations.”
The assault of cheering grew louder the closer they came to the palace. As they passed a group of teenage girls, five of them broke away from their matronly chaperones and rushed up to take turns kissing Ean’s boot. One auburn-haired girl, who showed promise of becoming a great beauty, pulled an embroidered lace kerchief from within her décolletage and shoved it off into Ean’s hand. Even Tanis understood the significance of that gesture.
“Subtle, aren’t they?” Alyneri noted.
Ean’s reply was a stoic look only slightly marred by the half-grin twitching at the corner of his mouth.
And then they were halting before the palace’s towering doors amid welcoming hands and open arms of family friends, his father’s ministers and council members, the highest ranking nobility in a rainbow display of velvet and silks, all the palace staff lined up in neat rows, and then, suddenly, the king and queen.
A hush spread like wildfire through the assembled crowd, broken only by the rustling of silk as hundreds curtsied or bowed. So it was in silence that Ean dismounted and turned to look up at his father for the first time in five years.
The king stood atop the stairs framed by the immense marble portal, black-clad and statuesque beneath the gleaming silver crest over the doors. With his dark hair greying at the temples and his hand on his silver-hilted sword, he seemed the subject of an impressive painting.
On first seeing him again, Ean was returned to the little boy whose eyes always filled with pride and even awe when he looked upon his father. Gydryn val Lorian was a powerful presence, a presence that ever remained more indelible in memory than even the handsome face of the man who possessed it. Ean had not expected to feel so honored by his welcoming—he half feared the years away would’ve changed their relationship. But it seemed his father was as eager to renew their bond as Ean was. Ean climbed the stairs and walked into his father’s open arms, and a cheer rose up from the crowd, the loudest yet.
Cephrael's Hand: A Pattern of Shadow & Light Book One Page 35