Sons of the Falcon (The Falcons Saga)

by Ellyn, Court

  Carah twisted side to side, cheeks flaring. “Yes.”

  Rhoslyn lowered her finger. “Go put your new dress on. Your Uncle Thorn just rode through the gate.”

  Carah sucked in a mouthful of air, and her blue eyes lit in a manner more celestial than human. She darted past her mother, crying for all to hear, “Uncle Thorn’s coming!”

  Rhoslyn called after her, “Walk! ‘Lady,’ hnh. And no more shouting, for the Mother’s sake.”

  Carah squirmed in excitement, and her measured walk soon turned into a hopscotching of the tiles. “It’s my birth-day. It’s my birth-day.”

  After Thorn embraced his brother, kissed his mother, and bowed to the duchess, he finally acknowledged the strident little burden tugging on his sleeve.

  “Uncle Thorn, what did you bring me? Do you like my new dress? What’d you bring me?”

  His niece looked like a doll come to life in layers of lace and blue silk. Black curls tumbled down her back, and that porcelain complexion had to be brushed with a careful finger to be believed. Thorn dropped to a knee, fished inside his satchel, frowned, and sat back on his heels. “Now, what did I do with it?”

  “With what?” Carah pleaded. “What is it? Where? Where?”

  Thorn shook his head, the four gold stripes in his dark hair catching the light of the stained-glass lamps. “No, I must’ve left it somewhere.”

  Carah pulled on his arm. “No, you didn’t. Look again.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Oh, that’s right. I left it in someone else’s care. Saffron?” Without appearing to anyone, the fairy handed over the gift. A delicate silver chain seemed to descend from thin air and coiled in Thorn’s palm. A silver pendent in the graceful shape of a fairy glittered on the chain; in the fairy’s tiny hands lay a blue seed pearl, as if the silhouette held a drop of dew.

  Carah’s mouth rounded in an oval of wonderment, and she reached an eager hand for the necklace, but Thorn drew it back, closing his fist. He cautioned her, “This silver was shaped by Elaran artisans, and the necklace was blessed by the Lady of the Elarion herself. It’s meant to protect you when Saffron can’t be with you. Now, I think you’re old enough to take care of a gift this precious. Am I right?”

  Carah gasped, “Oh, I’ll never take it off, Uncle Thorn. I promise and double promise.” Only then did he secure the necklace around her throat.

  While Carah showed her gift to her mother and grandmother, Thorn nudged his twin. “A word?” Following Kelyn to the lord’s study, he remarked, “Mother’s looking a bit pale. Has she been ill?”

  “Does she?” Kelyn glanced back along the corridor. Alovi laughed in delight as Carah demonstrated her skill at spinning around on one foot to make her new dress bloom out around her. “You know Mother. She never complains and avoids a fuss. She hasn’t been out in her garden as much this season. Maybe that’s the cause.” He closed the study door behind them. “So?”

  “It’s nothing much,” Thorn said, “but I found out what bogginai means.”

  “What what means?” Recognition dawned in Kelyn’s face. “Oh, of course. How long ago did I ask about that?”

  “Six years ago, on the day I came home to meet Carah. Apologies, I forgot till now. Then something came up, reminded me. Anyway, it’s the dwarven word for ‘ogres’.”

  “Do they mean that literally?”

  Thorn unsheathed a dagger he wore on his belt. The handle was yellow ivory, pitted with black runnels and carved with delicate floral patterns. It was the dagger he used to extract tusks. He handed it to his brother, hilt first. “That’s not a boar’s tusk.”

  “I should hope not.” Boar’s tusks were no wider than his pinkie, triangular, razor sharp on two sides; the one he held was round, smooth, and big enough to provide an ample grip for a man’s hand. “Then what?”

  “I don’t earn stripes on my arms for killing boar. Remember? I told you all this. You didn’t believe me.” Thorn tried to sound wounded, but the suppressed chuckle ruined the effect.

  Kelyn examined the dagger and his twin in turns. The truth of the matter drove any good humor out of him. “The clans have been at war with ogres all these years, and Brugge told me nothing?” He handed the dagger back and sank onto the edge of his desk. “Figured it was something like this, though. The Thyrvael dwarves have been entrusted with a portion of the gold cache in exchange for iron. All Brugge told me was that his Drakhan cousins were using the iron to forge weapons.”

  “Aye, it’s no wonder the Drakhan dwarves have sealed their gates. They could wage war for years underground and we’d never know.”

  “Why haven’t they asked for aid from us?”

  “Pride, mostly. Secondly, humans can’t see ogres.”

  “I remember. But the dwarves can?”

  “They have their methods.”

  “Could the fighting spill over, above ground?”

  “It has, in spots, but nothing aimed at humans, not since Lord Zeldanor’s death.”

  “And how do you know all this?”

  “The Elarion keep an eye on things. Sometimes they let me into their confidence. But don’t mention that in your correspondence.”

  Kelyn snorted. “Who would believe me?”

  After a family feast that featured several helpings of sweetberry custard, sickeningly rich sugarcakes, and sweet-tart lemon cider, the birthday girl fairly spun off the walls. She squealed in an unladylike tumbling match with her Uncle Thorn on the parlor rug, diving under chairs and tables to escape him, then scrambling out the other side to pounce him with all the wild determination of a monkey on choice fruit. The hem of her new dress already needed mending. Grieva herded Carah upstairs to change, and as soon as she returned wearing her hand-me-down play clothes, the match resumed. A pillow flew. A chair overturned. Lemon cider spilled.

  Alovi watched from a rocking chair, swaying leisurely and smiling in contentment. Having all her family under the same roof again was plenty of reason to neglect the embroidery laying in her lap.

  Kethlyn sat on a footstool near his grandmother and dug into his box of tiny pewter soldiers. They were painted in exquisite detail, uniforms bright blue with black falcons across their chests. He made a point to occupy himself with his back turned to the wrestling match.

  From a safe perch on the lounging couch, Rhoslyn shook her head at her daughter’s oh-so-feminine attempts to wrap Thorn in a headlock. “Next year, remind me to warn Nelda to go easy on the sweets. She’ll never get to sleep.”

  Even after her exertions, Carah laid wide-eyed among her pink pillows. Her mother tucked her in, then admitted Thorn for storytelling. In the nursery’s vestibule, Rhoslyn whispered, “If the stories don’t work, feel free to use a little fairy magic to put her to sleep.”

  Thorn choked on laughter. “Who told you about that?”

  “Isn’t that what fairies do?”

  “You’ve forgotten the tales, then. Fairy sleep lasts for a hundred years. Carah would be terribly disappointed if she missed that many birthdays.” An unexpected ache rose into his chest as Rhoslyn laughed and touched his arm in farewell. Balance, keep the balance, he told himself.

  A small voice from inside the nursery steadied him. “Uncle Thorn? Are you there?”

  He settled into the storyteller’s armchair beside the bed, and as soon as Rhoslyn’s footsteps faded, Carah kicked aside the blankets and crawled into his lap.

  “Don’t worry, I won’t get in trouble. It’s still my birthday.” She snuggled into the crook of his arm and said, “Tell me another story about Laniel Falconeye. And make it a story with dragons.”

  “Are you sure that’s a story that will put you to sleep?”

  “Make it a sleepy dragon.”

  Thorn did his best to fulfill the request, but Carah showed little sign of getting sleepy. She rarely stayed awake long enough to hear the end of one of his stories, so Thorn had to stretch his imagination to invent a satisfactory conclusion. Somewhere along the line, the sleepy dragon became a rampaging
dragon who was cranky because he hadn’t slept in a thousand-million years. He growled and complained atop his hoard of stolen gold and had a fiery breath that scared little girls away. “But Falconeye hefted his spear and braved the fires behind his enchanted shield. The greatest marksman of the Elarion, he drove the spear into the dragon’s heart and won all the gold for the lovely Princess Carah. The end. Are you asleep?”

  Carah lifted troubled eyes. “He killed it?”

  “You wanted a dragon.”

  “It was supposed to be a sleepy dragon, Uncle Thorn. Laniel wasn’t supposed to kill it.”

  “Heroes kill dragons, what can I say?”

  She glowered, unconvinced. “Is Laniel real?”

  “Of course he is. He’s my oath-brother.”

  “What’s an oath-brother?”

  “Someone who promises to be like a brother for all your days.”

  “Is an oath-brother better than a real brother?”

  “Nothing is better than a real brother. Laniel comes close, but your da is my very best friend.” There were times, in the dark of night, when this wasn’t true, but morning faithfully dispelled old resentment as the sun dispelled the shadows.

  “Kethlyn isn’t my best friend.”

  “He might be one day, you’ll see.”

  Carah mulled this over in silence, and after a while Thorn thought she’d finally drifted off, but she sighed and asked, “Does Laniel really hunt dragons for princesses?”

  “Sure he does.” Thorn hoped the lie would appease her curiosity so she’d agree to go to sleep. Besides, what was the harm? When was Falconeye likely to find out? “He rescues princesses, too, from ogres and giants and all sorts of nasty things.”

  “From rágazeths, too?”

  Thorn flinched, then leaned away so he could look her in the eye. “Where did you hear about the rágazeth?”

  Catching the change in his tone, Carah shrank deeper into the hollow of the chair. “Da said you saved him from somebody called a rágazeth.”

  Thorn’s hackles prickled at the sound of the word rolling off his niece’s tongue. “The rágazeth isn’t a somebody, Carah. It’s a something. A very bad something. Your da shouldn’t have told you about it. It’s not a story for little girls.”

  “I’m not little anymore,” she insisted. “It’s my birthday.”

  “You’re still young enough to be frightened by that story. So am I.”

  “When I’m as old as you will you tell me?”

  “Not at bedtime.” He smoothed a dark curl from her eyes and tried to a smile. “Think about Laniel instead. And dragons. They’re safer.” Even though Thorn had destroyed the Soul Snatcher, saving Kelyn and earning his four gold stripes in the struggle, he still had nightmares of it pursuing him through dark woods and empty, derelict castles. Always he saw its eyes. Eyes as soulless as the Abyss, devoid of life and mercy, that sucked into their black emptiness the light of his own soul.

  Carah climbed onto her knees and faced him, bringing him back to the nursery. When he smiled at her, she asked, “Will you marry me, Uncle Thorn?”

  The question made him happy again. He laughed. “I’m afraid I’m too old for you, love.”

  “Is Laniel too old?”

  “Yes, Laniel is even older than I.”

  Carah drooped with disappointment, but she didn’t fuss when Thorn transferred her back to her pillow and tucked her in again. She yawned, revealing the first gaps of missing baby teeth, and Thorn felt he might soon be very old, indeed.

  Leaving the birthday girl in the storyteller’s spell, Rhoslyn went next door to say goodnight to her son. Though Kethlyn had scolded her a couple of years before that he was too grown up to tuck in, she still stopped by to turn down his lamps. Tonight she was surprised to see him sitting at a desk, instead of squeezing in a few more moments of drilling his pewter soldiers. Riveted to the pages of a thick volume, he failed to notice her entrance.

  “I thought you might come to the nursery.”

  Kethlyn jumped, slammed the book shut.

  Rhoslyn pretended not to notice as she drew near. “You usually like to hear Thorn’s stories. Too grown up for that now, I guess.”

  “It’s not that,” he admitted. “I don’t like him.”

  The statement brought a bark of laughter from Rhoslyn’s mouth. “That’s absurd. Why ever not?”

  “He never comes on my birthday.”

  Ah. “But your birthday is only a couple of weeks away, and he uses this time to see you both.”

  “He never brings me anything, does he?” Kethlyn’s lips pressed tight when his mother couldn’t think of an answer fast enough. “He doesn’t like me, so I don’t like him.”

  “Now, son, that’s not a very grown-up attitude.” She was aware that her voice lacked heart; her face bloomed with anger, and not at her son.

  “You can’t make me like him.”

  “I can speak to your father—”

  “He can’t make me either!”

  “I was going to say that I can ask him to talk to Thorn about it.”

  “Don’t bother. I don’t care.”

  “You care or you wouldn’t have mentioned it.”

  Kethlyn retreated into sullen silence, so Rhoslyn changed the subject. Her fingers tapped the frayed cover of the book on his desk. “What in all Lethryn are you reading?”

  He shrugged, pretending he wasn’t embarrassed. “A book of law.” As if daring her to laugh, he opened it to the page 531.

  Rhoslyn bent closer to read the printed header. “Law of inheritance?”

  He fidgeted with the corners of the pages. “There’s lots of big words I have to skip over, but I understand good enough.” When he glanced up at her, his blue eyes welled.

  Rhoslyn touched his cheek. “What is this?”

  “It says … it says you have to die before I inherit.”

  “Oh.” She thought she had already explained this to him; perhaps she had been too vague in her word choice, to avoid scaring him. She tried to sound casual: “That’s how inheritance works, son. My father died, then I became Duchess of Liraness. And when I die, you’ll be duke.”

  He leapt from the desk chair and flung his arms around her waist. “But, Mum, I don’t want you to die!”

  “My precious boy.” How tall he had grown already; barely stooping, she could press her cheek to the crown of his golden head. “Goddess willing, I’m not going anywhere for a long time. Enough of this. It’s nothing to be afraid of. You’ll feel better in the morning, and if you need, we can talk about it then.”

  Kethlyn backed away, sniffing and cloaking his sorrow behind a mask of man-sized courage. He climbed into bed and said, “Mum? You can tuck me in if you want. I don’t mind.”

  Rhoslyn accepted the invitation, not knowing if she would ever receive it again. When the blankets trapped Kethlyn toe to shoulder, his mother kissed his forehead and both cheeks before he shook her off, groaning in mock disgust. “Be civil to your uncle tomorrow, eh?” she said, going for the lamp. “You might win him over. That’s called ‘diplomacy’.”

  Kethlyn glared at the ceiling and freed his arms, just so he could cross them over his chest. Rhoslyn blew out the lamp and closed the door, certain her son would soon grow out of his jealousy and his bitterness.

  But he didn’t.

  ~~~~

  8

  Secrets of the heart are laid bare by the actions of the hand.

  —Elaran proverb

  Look your peers in the eye and don’t pace, Laral told himself. He had trouble doing both. The long, broad Gallery that led to Brynduvh’s throne room was packed with milling Fieran courtiers, merchants, and envoys from foreign ports. They had all come for an audience with secretaries and ministers who would present their requests to the White Falcon. In Laral’s vest pocket, however, was a summons from the king himself.

  For two years he had dreaded this day. Once the excitement of the White Falcon’s enthronement faded, he began to wonder if the summons wou
ld come at all. He dared to feel relieved that he had avoided the king’s gaze, but the White Falcon’s head had turned at last and spotted him ducking in a distant, dark corner. Perhaps it would’ve been better if he’d come to Brynduvh sooner. Every highborn of Fiera had come, even Wren, but Laral had hidden, happy to be ignored. Only now, at this belated date, he could not hide the truth: not only was he reluctant to show his face at the Fieran court, he was also reluctant to bend the knee to the Fieran king.

  All morning he waited in the Gallery, ears open to the whispers, eyes clinging to the passing of fine beaded slippers and brightly dyed kid-leather boots. The courtiers knew who he was. Oh, yes, he heard that much of their conversation. The only person who approached him was a Dovnyan trader with beads on the side of his nose and his white-gold hair powdered lavender to match his velvet robe. “You are Aralorri, they say.” His false obsequiousness glittered like rhinestones. “How fortunate for me to find an Aralorri here.”

  Laral breathed out his disgust on a slow exhale. “Fortunate?”

  “You must know the state of Aralorr’s ports, its trade.”

  “Evaronna’s ports, you mean? Aralorr has no ports.”

  “Yes, yes, of course! Are the ladies there coveting seal or fox this year? And the gentlemen? A bit of steel, perhaps?”

  Hidden meaning lurked behind that question. More likely, a Fieran had paid the Dovnyan to ask. “I’ve never been to Evaronna. I can’t help you.”

  No one troubled him further, leaving him to his dread. Wren had voiced her fear the night before he rode out from Brengarra. “Unless the boy has been corrupted already, it’s not the king you have to worry about.”

  “No? He’s Nathryk’s brother, and I’m the enemy.” He shoved his fancy court velvets into his trunk without folding them properly, which told of his unease. More, Lesha was there, crawling into everything, asking a thousand questions. The pink ribbon slipped out of her golden hair. Laral found it last night when he opened his trunk. He tucked it into his pocket for good luck, along with the little ragdoll that Ruthan had given him when he rode south to claim a foreign bride.