Distrusting this stranger, Firekeeper retreated and considered the window. The drop to the ground below was considerable, but no worse than from some trees she had climbed. Still, the earth below was covered with stone, not soft leaves and forest duff.
Unwilling to risk a broken leg, Firekeeper rooted through the pack Derian had left in her room. Most of the contents were useless, but at the very bottom there was a coil of rope.
Over the past several days, Firekeeper had used rope to guide a mule, to help set up tents, and to tie packs onto their reluctant bearers. Now she anchored the rope to an iron loop on the windowsill and used it to slow her drop to the ground. She ended up with burns on her palms and a long scrape on her calf.
Well pleased, Firekeeper growled the barking dogs into submission and, with a running start and a light foot on the edge of a cart, scrabbled over the wall surrounding the castle.
On the other side, Blind Seer was waiting for her, blue eyes glowing in the darkness.
BOOK
TWO
VI
ELISE ARCHER, DAUGHTER of Baron Ivon Archer iff and Lady Aurella Wellward, great-niece of King TedIll ric, was not so much gathering flowers in the royal castle gardens as she was gathering rumors. However, if her activities were dismissed as such an innocent pursuit, she had no complaints.
Slight, almost fragile of form, peaches and cream of complexion, with pale golden hair the very shade of early-morning sunlight and sea-green eyes, seventeen-year-old Elise was just now becoming beautiful.
For the only daughter of King Tedric's nephew Ivon, son himself of the Grand Duchess Rosene, beauty was hardly the advantage it would be for a woman of lesser birth. Marriage for Elise was as inevitable as rain in springtime. Nevertheless, Elise found this new bloom of beauty a pleasant thing and smiled softly into her bouquet, feeling the admiring gazes of gardeners and grooms follow her graceful progress.
“Good morning, Lady.” “Good morning.” “Good morning.”
The murmurs followed Elise from damask dark roses to brilliant yellow daisies to honeysuckle vines awash with heavily scented flowers. She stopped by a bed of gladiolas in a mixture of colors from pure white to deepest violet with shades of pink and red between.
Shifting her nosegay of roses to her left hand, she fumbled for her gardening clippers and, as suddenly as the High Sorcerer's griffin in the tales of Elrox Beyond the Sea, the head gardener appeared at her side.
“Perhaps I might assist, Lady Elise?”
She smiled, a real smile, though it hid some guile. She had been aware of the spare, sunburned figure of Timin, the master gardener, anxiously tracking her progress for some time now. He had left her alone among the roses, settling for wringing his hands as she clipped a few blossoms, but the gladiolas had drawn him forth.
“Thank you, Master Gardener,” Elise replied. “I had in-tended to add a few pink gladiolas to my bouquet, but these look rather picked over.”
There was no reproof in her tone, only mild consternation, but the gardener colored scarlet, then white, as if he had been found guilty of treason.
“‘Twas the arrival of the Duchess and Earl Kestrel that done it, Lady,” he managed as explanation.
“You were asked to supply flowers for the banquet tables,” Elise helped him along. “I noticed the bouquets. I hadn't realized you'd been forced to raid your flower beds to make the arrangements.”
Her sympathetic tone—and the fact that she had admired these gardens since she was a toddler—opened the floodgate.
“I was, Lady,” Timin Gardener said. “Never has there been such a springtime and summer for the nobility visiting the king. It seems that as soon as the weather grew pleasant and the roads a bit dry that every niece and nephew of a noble house has seen fit to call. That many receptions taxes those beds I grow just for cutting flowers, it does, pushes me out into the gardens.”
Elise nodded sympathetically, but beneath her gentle, com-passionate expression she was willing the man to keep talking. Bending to cut her three magnificent pink glads with petals edged in sunny yellow, the gardener continued:
“I exhausted the best of my daffodils and tulips when Grand Duke Gadman brought Lord Rolfston Redbriar and his brood to pay their respects to their uncle early this spring. Boar be praised that Earl Kestrel didn't come calling then. Neither sky-blue nor scarlet are easy to find early in the season.”
“There are crocus for the blue,” Elise said, considering. ‘Too fragile for the banquet hall,” the gardener sniffed. “Besides, we had the word that the king wanted Kestrel given highest honors. That takes more than a few crocus wilting among apple blossoms and then me having to answer in the autumn when there's not fruit enough on the trees.”
“True,” Elise agreed. “House Kestrel calls for stronger colors. It's a good thing Duchess Kestrel waited to ask for audience until the summer.”
She stroked the petals of the gladiolas the gardener had handed to her before tucking them in with her roses. The man was mollified, seeing that she was not going to ask for more.
“I don't recall,” Elise said cautiously, “such a fuss being made when Earl Kestrel came to court over the winter. He was in and out so much that his sleigh had a permanent berth in the forecourt.”
'True enough,” Timin Gardener agreed, squatting to tug a weed from among the flowers, then straightening as he suddenly remembered her station.
He spoke more rapidly to make amends. ‘True enough, Lady, but the word that came down from Steward Silver when she ordered the decorations for the banquet hall was that Earl Kestrel had sent ahead a letter thrice sealed. Once with his personal seal, once with his mother's, and once with the great seal of their house.”
Elise nodded, hoping the glow of excitement didn't show in her eyes. Such a sequence of seals indicated a matter of the greatest secrecy.
“I wonder,” she said guilelessly, “what business could merit such? Earl Kestrel has been reigning beside his mother at her behest these five years since. His seal is as good as hers in matters of state.”
“They say,” the head gardener offered, strolling with her down a path bordered in stocks and snapdragons, “that Earl Kestrel journeyed west early this spring, leaving when the roads were still sure to be deep in mud—not the usual time for traveling at all. He only went with a small retinue and none of them are talking about where they went.”
“None?”
“None, Lady Elise. To my way of thinking, that's as interesting as if they were talking waterfalls.”
“I agree,” she said thoughtfully, and carefully turned the conversation to other matters.
LIKE HIS FATHER Purcel, Elise's sire, Ivon Archer, had made his mark by serving in the army of Hawk Haven. That had been a wise move. Although the Grand Duchess Rosene had granted her elder child the title of baron at his father's death twenty years before, Ivon was aware that not everyone in the kingdom appreciated King Chalmer's decision to permit his youngest daughter to marry the dashing war hero who had captured her heart.
Ivon knew that there were many among the six Great Houses for whom his descent from the grand duchess was far outweighed by his common blood—never mind that King Chalmer had made Purcel a baron, head of his own lesser noble house, complete with coat of arms, deed of land, and a name into perpetuity.
It hadn't been so long ago that Queen Zorana had created the Great Houses to reward her staunchest supporters—just over a hundred years. That was long enough for pride to emerge but not long enough for the entitlement to be invulnerable to challenge by upstart houses.
Elise had spent most of her young life in a manor in the capital belonging to House Archer. However, with the first of his war booty the then Lord Ivon had purchased property of his own, for he could not know that his father would die comparatively young, or that he himself would be blessed with only one child. Ivon's own property was held separately from the Archer grant, but, as the years passed and no sibling followed Elise into the world, it was likely that she w
ould inherit both.
Rather than being insulted by Ivon's building his estate, King Tedric seemed to have appreciated his nephew's gesture of independence. Repeatedly, Ivon had earned command of his own company and promotions based solely upon merit. In her turn, Ivon's wife, Lady Aurella Wellward, had made herself indispensable to her aunt, Queen Elexa. Therefore, although just a grandniece and heir to a lesser noble house, Elise had always been given free run of the palace and its grounds.
As a child, this privilege had gained her some mild envy from her cousins. These days, that envy had turned into something sharper.
King Tedric, rumor said, would name an heir to his throne come Lynx Moon this late autumn, for this year the Festival of the Eagle fell then by lot. The king's own children were dead, as was all the line of his older sister, Princess Marras. By the strictest interpretation of the laws of inheritance, the king's heir should be his next sibling or her children, but old King Chalmer had wed Princess Caryl to Prince Tavis Seagleam of Bright Bay in the hope that the marriage alliance would foster peace between the two rival countries.
Neither the marriage nor the alliance had been a success. Princess Caryl had produced one son, Allister Seagleam. Al-though he was reported to be a man grown with a family of his own, most residents of Hawk Haven felt he was not really a contender for the throne. Who would accept a foreigner when there were native-born possibilities readily available?
In addition to Marras, Tedric, and Caryl, King Chalmer and Queen Rose had produced two other children: Gadman and Rosene. Gadman and Rosene were both still alive, but no one really expected King Tedric to name either as his heir, for both were within a few years of his own advanced age. Hawk Haven deserved more than a temporary monarch after King Tedric's long reign.
Grand Duke Gadman offered in his place a son, Lord Rolfston Redbriar of the House of the Goshawk. Lord Rolfston had five children of his own, so the succession would be secure. Moreover, a Redbriar in his own right, he was married to a member of the influential Shield family.
For her part, Grand Duchess Rosene had two living children: Ivon and Zorana. Both these Archer scions were well married into Great House families; both had children of their own. Rosene's partisans, of whom the Houses of Wellward and Trueheart were not the least, argued that two possibilities from a line were better than one. However, even these partisans were split as to which provided the best choice: war-hero Ivon, with his staunch popular following, or Zorana, with her brood of four and experience with the domestic politics of the kingdom.
Personally Elise felt that, despite her frequenting the royal palace, she herself had little chance of being named heir, nor had her father and his sister, with their commoner father.
Grand Duke Gadman had married into a Great House, as had his son. Thus, Rolfston Redbriar's claim had the support of both his wife's and his mother's Great Houses, where her own father could only claim the sure support of his wife's.
However, Grand Duke Gadman and his elder brother the king had long quarreled over matters of state. Observers argued that given their past disagreements, King Tedric would pass over his brother's line out of spite. Then?
Then Lady Elise Archer could quite easily find herself heir apparent to the throne of Hawk Haven.
“AND QUICKLY NOW, Blysse, give me your hands.” Derian put out his own, grasping those the two-legged wolf awkwardly extended.
She did so, growling quietly to herself, displeased by her lack of grace. In most matters when she compared herself with humankind she was grace itself, but she had yet to learn the trick of this thing called dancing.
Derian pretended not to notice her pique.
“That's right,” he praised as she relaxed into his guidance. “Now, three steps to the side. Then when the music gets faster, we spin, so… “
One moon's turning and half of another had done great things for Firekeeper's ability to understand what Derian said to her. Hardly ever now did he use a word she didn't know or for which she could not deduce a meaning. Also now she understood the ways and means of clothing (though not why humans wore so much of it) and how to ride a horse without first threatening it with fear for its life.
Dancing, though, dancing had proven to be a source of constant puzzlement, a puzzlement that ran side by side with delight. In all other things physical Firekeeper felt herself a wind through the treetops when she compared the grace of her movements with those of Race and Derian. When dancing, though…
Firekeeper snorted in disgust when—distracted by her thoughts—she trod on Derian's toes. From one corner of the room, Race Forester heard her and chuckled. She forgave him for the sake of the flute he held in one hand.
Music, especially that of the flute, was a pleasure heretofore only suspected in birdsong and burbling brook. Firekeeper had been enchanted the first time she heard Race play, so long ago when they had crossed the mountains with Hawk Nose and his people.
As soon as Race had grown easier around her, Firekeeper had insisted that he show her how to draw the notes from the slender piece of carved wood. It had proven far more difficult than she had imagined. Together, dancing and music raised her opinion of the two-legs until for the first time she was not ashamed to have been born of them, rather than of wolves.
“Turn right, Blysse,” Derian called, gently pushing her in that direction. “Then back to me and out again…”
Concentrating on where to place her feet, on the timing of the steps, Firekeeper saw Race nod approvingly. They'd made a great deal of progress since the day he tried to loop a rope around her and imprison her in the human world. That progress had all been Derian's doing, for Firekeeper had been content to have Race fear and respect her. Despite her lack of overt cooperation, Derian had coaxed the scout into helping with Firekeeper's education, asking Race to teach her the names for plants and animals, how to shape snares and traps, how to shoot a bow.
Race was pleased when Firekeeper proved to be an apt pupil, was flattered when she showed more interest in his lessons than in Derian's. Eventually, Race realized how little Firekeeper knew of human woodcraft and his envy of her began to fade. When he realized how ungrudgingly she shared her own knowledge, they became friends.
Firekeeper still thought of Race as a lesser pack member, far below Derian and farther below Earl Kestrel. She knew that if need arose she could make him cringe. However, now that Firekeeper had become acquainted with some of the residents of the keep, Race no longer rested quite so low in her estimation.
“Water,” she said to Derian when the dance ended. “Thirsty me.”
“I am thirsty,” he corrected patiently.
“You, too?” she asked, pouring them both full mugs from the pitcher set on the stand at the side of the room. She knew perfectly well what Derian wanted and decided to humor him.
“I know,” she said, before he could decide if she had been teasing him. “Say: I am thirsty. Why? Shorter other.”
“Shorter,” Derian said, “but not correct.”
“So?”
“So, would you eat hemlock?”
“No! Hemlock poison.”
“That's right. And believe me, Blysse, words used wrong are like poison.”
Derian sighed. The little line between his brows deepened as it did more and more frequently since Firekeeper had learned to ask why, instead of simply parroting whatever he said. After several swallows from his mug, Derian tried to explain further.
“Imagine we're hunting,” he said. “If you want to make the deer come to you, would you imitate the sound of a frightened deer?”
“No!”
“Would you make the sound of a sick deer?”
“No. But I say ‘Thirsty me’ not makes fear, not makes sick. Just makes faster.”
“Yes, but faster is not always better.” Derian waved his hand in dismissal. “Let's leave it for now.”
Firekeeper shrugged. “Dance more?”
“Not now. Dinner. Formal attire.”
She wrinkled up her nos
e. “No formal attire. Pinches. Skin no breathe.”
“Formal attire,” Derian repeated firmly.
Firekeeper knew that he was serious by how he made him-self swell up like a bullfrog. When she didn't obey, he simply refused to acknowledge her until she did. She was amazed how something so unlike wolf discipline could hurt as sharply.
“Formal attire,” she agreed, consoling herself with the thought that later she could shed almost everything but the leather breeches and vest and run with Blind Seer.
Still, as she permitted Steward Daisy to lace her into a formal gown, this consolation seemed far distant indeed.
EVEN FLIRTING WITH the pretty kitchen maid couldn't keep Derian from reviewing over and over again in his memory the text of Earl Kestrel's latest letter. Despite the grace notes that began a formal missive, the text had been blunt.
“Although I concede that six weeks is hardly enough time to break a colt to saddle, much less time to teach the Lady Blysse all she needs to know, the situation here in Eagle's Nest has become critical. Both Grand Duke Gadman and Grand Duchess Rosene are urging King Tedric to name as his heir one of their children or grandchildren. Failing that, they are demanding that he at least indicate which line has precedence over the other.
“Furthermore, the faction in favor of Duke Allister Seagleam of Bright Bay is gaining adherents. Among those who have most recently turned to his cause are those who have become weary of the king's siblings’ continued political maneuvering.
“If Lady Blysse is to be recognized to her greatest advantage, it must be before King Tedric names his heir. Afterwards, she could be accused of inciting civil war. Therefore, I command you to bring Lady Blysse to me at the Kestrel Manse in Eagle's Nest. In order that she arrive without notice, you will be met at the Westriver coach stop by one of your family's vehicles.”
A squeal from the kitchen maid as his fingers involuntarily tightened around hers brought Derian back to himself. In apology, he kissed her lightly on the injured members and she giggled and hurried off before the cook could see her blush.
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