Fire and Water

The Falcon's Children, Chapter 11

When morning came, the day before the festival, and Alsbet came down from her chambers with a mild headache to find a little drizzle falling on the river and the Water Towers, she discovered that many new parties had come in overnight and with the dawn, crowds of minor lords and ladies from all over the Heart who now thronged the courts and gardens or stood waiting with their horses for overworked grooms to attend to them.

Two of the waiting groups were Padrec’s friends — Paulus bar Merula and Elbert Freshett, come from their family estates with a few other lords she didn’t know, and from the west, from the Tessaer Pass and Brethony, Cat and Cad and their retainers, under a banner that quartered the falcon of Narsil with a sunburst, a star and the Montair stag.

Cat greeted Alsbet like a sister too long lost. “We rode hard!” she said gaily in Brethon as they met beside one the courtyard’s great fountains. “We were to meet your brother in the pass, to escort him into his kingdom — into Brethony — and then he sent us news that he would be on this, this pilgrimage, and it seemed like too fine a chance to be missed.”

“I’m sure my brother is very happy that you came …”

“I hope he is, with how we pushed to be here. It will be a fine thing! We were in this city in the summer for a day, but the chance to see the boats upon the water — well, we said it was a lovely thing. And here we are. And here you are. You must tell me of the intrigues of this place, since I only know how the plotting goes in my own land.”

Alsbet felt a vague annoyance with this tone, which she tried to conceal with formality. “I am as innocent of most of the plots as you, lady, but I can at least promise to help you make the acquaintance of the flower of the Heart.”

“Well, somewhere other than on the battlefield, at least,” said Cad, as he came up to Alsbet and, unlike his sister, at least offered a quick bow. “Several months is too long without your beauty, princess.”

She thanked him and then, a touch peremptorily, she gestured to the banner flapping above their horse. “May I ask, what is that flag?”

“Ah,” said Cat, “just a little fancy of your brother’s many Brethon friends. A symbol for our little circle. The empire, your house, our sunburst … We call it the banner of the prince’s men.”

Then the prince himself came down, clattering and eager, brushing past his sister to greet the newcomers … and from then till sundown Alsbet felt her annoyance condense and harden, as she watched him give over his duties and his courtesies to hover and laugh and roister with his friends. He had done so well on their travels, so well with the Heart lords, and here all it took was his comrades and Brethon admirers — and Cat, especially Cat — for him to let their purpose slip, to return to his wars and his Brethony without giving a thought for the actual empire, his actual family, what was needed here and now.

After he skipped the pilgrimage to the Cranholt temple for the harvest sacrifice, leaving his father to walk alone to place the wheat wreaths on the altars and watch the fire blaze up around the thong-bound sheep … after he talked barely at all to the Duncaster girl at dinner and kept his silence when the time came for the toasts … after he went out with his friends to walk the battlements drunkenly under the stars, absenting himself conspicuously from the larger gathering of nobles who watched the fireworks from the Duke’s portico … it was after all of this, and while the fireworks still burst above, that the iron duchess, who had not been seated near Alsbet at dinner this time, suddenly inserted herself beside the princess and said, in a voice that seemed honestly amused, “May I claim a little vindication, your highness?”

“Vindication, your grace?”

“Of course you have known your brother these many years, whereas this is only my third or fourth meeting with the crown prince — and the first since he came to manhood. But still I think my whisperers have told me more than is true about Prince Padrec than you were willing to tell me last night.”

A firework burst above them, purple and red. Cheers went up from the nobles, boyish in their glee; they were echoed by louder cheers from beyond the Water Towers, from the crowds on the riverbanks, in the boats and barges on the river.

“I said nothing false,” Alsbet said.

“Maybe not precisely,” Cresseda returned. “Nothing between them was what you said, and from watching I’d say that Brethon girl plays her cards without a flicker, so maybe the between was true. But as for what your brother wants of her, that Lady Caetryn, well, that much even a fool can see, and though you may be inexperienced in the ways of men and women I think you are wiser than a fool.”

The cheers had died back into conversation, and their voices dropped accordingly. “Even if he had such feelings,” the princess said, “what I said of my father’s will was the truth.”

“I’m sure it is. I had a lovely conversation with your father last night. I think he is baffled by the problem of his son, and wishes him to marry in the true empire, not to some ambitious lady from the lands of mists and fairies. But still ...”

“Still?”

“Still I feel vindicated in my judgments, princess. And if you wish to play the real game, not just be a piece moved by a player who might not be long for the table, you should consider sharing mine.”

“Which judgments are those?” Alsbet said.

“That the empire needs to be bound together more tightly if it is to last. And that such binding is unlikely to be accomplished by a young man who lost his heart to Brethony.”

There was the whine of another firework, and in the boom and cheers that followed the princess gathered herself and met the duchess’s sparkling eyes with what she hoped was a fierce and forceful gaze.

“That is a perilous thing to say, your grace, and since our acquaintance so far has given me much pleasure, I think we should part company now — lest I think only of your effrontery toward my brother when I think of you.”

The best thing to do, she thought, after those firm and formal words, would be to bow and turn and go. But instead Alsbet allowed her curiosity to hold her there, allowed herself to see the duchess’s eyes sparkle more brightly, allowed Cresseda to take her hand again, gently, and bow slightly, and to say:

“Then I will go share my … effronteries with someone more accustomed to them, princess, and offer you an apology. But I hope you will notice that I have shared more honest thoughts than the polite men around you ever offer. And I hope you will think on what I have said, and perhaps even speak of it with your uncle … for there are those in your own house, not just outsiders like myself, who share my mind on this.”

Another whine, another boom, and as the lights sparkled above them the duchess turned and moved off through the crowd, clapping like everyone around her as she went.

There was more mist the next day, and then a haze as it burned off and they went down through the water gates to the flotilla of barges assembled for the day. Each vessel was specially carved and painted, some by craftsmen in the employ of noble families, but many more by simple artisans working on behalf of their neighborhood or village, whose signs and blessed faces and animals and colors now adorned the painted wood.

Every year the barges were renewed, some of them refurbished and others built afresh, and there were prizes given out by the Temple for the best and brightest efforts, and most years some carpenter or boatwright or painter from the Cranholt wharves or river villages found himself with a bag of coin and an invitation from a merchant or noble to build for him next year. The effect of seeing all of them on the river was remarkable — from the high towers they looked like a checkered multicolored quilt cast across the waters, and once afloat in the midst of them, it was like being in the middle of a naval fleet, a great rippling field of flowers, and a strange bestiary all at once.

At the center of the flotilla, once it began its progress south, were the ducal squadron and the Temple’s barges, and in the midst of them was the floating statue of Raguel, artfully constructed to loom high above the other barges without capsizing in a sudden wind.

The oarsmen at its base trained every year for the journey; on most of the barges, there was just a single poleman and he had a lazy sort of job on the way downriver, but to steer the statue was a special honor for a handpicked few, and they were supposed to be alert enough not only to keep the archangel balanced but to shove off any more casually-steered barges that drifted too close.

And there was a lot of lazy steering, a lot of accidental clunking of one barge against another, a lot of leaping from one deck to another, a lot of splashing and merriment and stupidity as the river bore the pilgrimage southward from Cranholt and the Water Towers fell away and the crowds along the riverbanks gave way to more occasional gapers, to village barges setting forth to join the fleet, to woods and fields and the odd watchtower.

The Mersana between Cranholt and Felcester was as placid as at any stretch along its length, but still there was usually at least one drowning during a River Festival, and any number of close calls, in which fools and drunkards were fished dripping from the watery spaces in between the barges.

It was not precisely this danger, though, that had made many dukes wary of the Festival. Rather it was the specific danger to their own person, because in a custom whose origins were lost to memory they did not just ride with the flotilla but placed themselves and their kin in the hands of the common people, who hoisted them on wicker seats and passed them from barge to barge around the statues when the two pilgrimages met.

This was the custom that Alsbet remembered from her visit as a girl, when Edmund and Bryghaida had been hoisted briefly, but for the lords of Felcester and Cranholt it was an obligation every year — no matter how things stood between them and their people, no matter what discontent might simmer with their rule.

Of course they had their men-at-arms on the barges too for their protection; of course it had been many generations since a duke or his family had suffered real harm during the hoisting, and the tales of lords “given to the river” belonged to misty legend, heathen times. But still there had been enough dunkings and enough disrespect over the years that after one barge’s oarsmen had taken certain liberties, a young duke of Wilfred’s line had declared the custom abolished.

The Cathelstans may not mind being groped by drunken cretins, he was supposed to have said, but the Duncasters prefer their dignity.

That preference, alas, was not respected: The riots that greeted the announcement forced legionnaires to occupy the harbor district to keep order, and from Rendale Edmund’s many-times-great-grandfather Cedrec sent the order that the custom must resume.

It did so amid much elaborate decorum and good behavior from the crowds — but two years later that same young duke drowned on the river when his boat somehow capsized on a calm day, and the lack of mourning was conspicuous.

The Duncasters may not mind being idiots, the duke of Felcester was supposed to have said when word came of his neighbor’s fate, but the Cathelstans prefer to die in their beds.

That was a hundred years ago; a hundred festivals; a hundred chairings. The last forty-two had hoisted Wilfred, from relative youth to deep old age. Emperors came occasionally — Edmund once and now twice, his father twice, his grandfather once — and the men who hoisted them still boasted of it in their taverns. There had been one famous accident, involving a niece of Wilfred’s who was dropped and nearly drowned, and that too was still talked about in taverns and groused about in the Water Towers — but she was married and middle-aged now and it had passed from remembered fact into mere story.

“They burned the statues once, you know.”

It was Amalis, the young archpriest, speaking close to Alsbet’s ear. The circulation from one ducal barge to another had brought them together again, sipping watered wine on a barge drifting close to Raguel’s wake, with a clutch of younger Duncasters aft of them and a couple of bored-looking Falconguardsmen in the stern, while a high bluff and an even higher tower slid by above them on the passing shore.

“In the days when they were heathen statues, you mean,” Alsbet said. “Heathen gods.”

“Indeed! And I must say — even in Felcester or Cranholt, not every noblewoman would know this custom is that old, that it began before the worship of the angels was given to these lands.”

“Shall I take that as a compliment, reverend, or a judgment on my sex?”

He smiled. “Not every nobleman, either, then! I’m sure my lady duchess knows the true history but I would not wish to speak for Duke Wilfred.”

“Surely he is old enough to remember when the customs here were heathen.” She smiled to show that it was a joke — it was always best to signal jests, she’d found; courtiers never knew how to handle deadpan — and his chuckle became a laugh that seemed unfeigned.

“Someone should ask him. It must have been quite a sight. But I’m told that nothing of that cult remains, save in this progress every year. Which impresses me. The archpriests of Bernned and Glamis are loath to admit it, but in my own land of Great Salma there are many places where heathen ways are still very much alive.”

“A testament to the good work of your fellow priests on this river, surely. And perhaps to the cleverness of whoever thought of simply replacing statues of gods — they were gods? — with archangels.”

“They were gods, yes — Erred and Megwa, if I remember right. The water and the earth. But there was little cleverness there; even the stupidest missioner knows that you only suppress the most demonic-seeming cults, and the rest you treat as gropings toward the truth of things, and turn to pious ends.”

“Then we are left to applaud the devotion and good work of the missioners who first came to the Heart.”

“I suppose so. Shall I tell you a slightly different theory, though?”

When folk said shall I tell you they usually weren’t really asking a question, but Alsbet found the archpriest engaging enough that she didn’t really mind.

“By all means,” she said.

“It’s a bit of a strange one, but it’s stayed with me. It’s from my studies, from an old lecturer, a fellow named Sigalin, who took it from a book by another fellow, long dead — Rodegil of Calaran.”

“Him I’ve heard of,” the princess said, thinking of Aeden and his books, his lists of names and ideas that she should know …

He bowed. “I continued to be impressed with an imperial education then, for I would guess there are not many archpriests in your empire who could say the same. Though in Calaran he is venerated as a blessed. Anyway — the idea he fastened on in that text, and that my teacher claimed to believe, is that there are really just two flavors of heathenism, not a hundred and not just one.”

“The sort that aims at the archangels and the sort that aims at the damned?” She made the flick that customarily accompanied a reference to the fallen angels, and the archpriest did as well, though a bit more casually than she expected from a priest.

“Yes, that’s the schematic of Blessed Livanis— I won’t even ask if you know that famous name — and it’s what you’d hear from the typical missioner or inquisitor at their work. But it’s not quite what Rodegil was driving at. He thought that the key question in a cult’s endurance was whether the gods it worshiped were, well, real. Meaning that some heathens just make up gods to put a name on the great things of the world — the sun and stars, the harvest and the tides. That kind of heathenism falls quickly when confronted with our angelic revelation. But the other kind has found something real to worship, and it’s a stubborn thing to uproot. It might be the damned, or one of them. Or it might be something else, some other power.”

“Meaning some heathen gods are really … gods?”

“Sounds like peasant superstition, doesn’t it? But Rodegil was no heretic. And even if we accept that holy magic went out of the world with the last of the magi, there is nothing in the holy books that says that angels and damned are the only invisible powers of this earth. We know from the Histories that the archangels fashioned this world, but we don’t know what they fashioned it from — there are schoolmen who say it was from nothing, but others who say they brought order to some pre-existing chaos, and who knows what might have lived within that primeval waste? And we know they made us and the beasts and birds and great creatures of the deep — who can say what else they made? There are strange passages in the Histories — to say nothing of the Prophecies …”

“Is it permitted for archpriests to speak of the Prophecies now,” Alsbet said, “and to a mere woman, at that?”

He smiled. “I think there is nothing mere about you, highness, and the rule does not forbid their mention, just their transmission. I don’t intend to start quoting them here on the river, though I am worldly enough to know that when we teach anyone how to read, even pious ladies, sooner or later they will come across some garbled version of the mysteries.”

“And quickly avert their eyes, if they are indeed pious.”

“Of course! As perhaps you should close your ears to my speculations. But the truth is that speculation is all we have, where these matters are concerned: There is no rule of faith, only cryptic texts and speculation. And we have lost much knowledge, too, since the days before the Histories ended, when magi as well as priests counseled the high kings …”

He talked more like Aeden than like the other priests she’d known, and it was interesting to be carried along by speculation. As she listened her eyes roamed the field of barges around her, lighting on a newly-painted one, somehow acquired by Padrec’s friends, above which flapped that strange banner, the banner of the prince’s men. She couldn’t see Caetryn through the press of boats and bodies, she didn’t know if her brother was with her, with them. But she could see the banner, and she said —

“Then should we fear our conquests in Brethony, in the event their gods are real?”

He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Well … I suppose that conquerors should always fear the conquered, just a bit. Safer that way. But the Brethon gods seem like the old river gods in these parts, from what I’ve heard — a sun god, a moon consort. Perhaps they’ll fade like shadows at dawn.”

“They have other gods, though. Older ones come back to life, they say.”

“Yes, we’ve heard the same stories in Argosa.” The barge rocked a little in a swell, and she put her hand on his to steady herself. There was shouting somewhere downriver, from the vanguard of the fleet — cheerful, unimportant. He held her hand briefly, smiling easily, and let her pull away.

“Yes, the same stories,” he went on, “and they made me think of my own family’s estate, and the farmers who always left milk out in the woods of a spring night — for the kindly ones, they called them, or sometimes the whisperers or whispies. There was a priest at a nearby shrine when I was a boy, a learned man but rather young — much like myself now I suppose. He thought himself clever, or maybe he wanted to be an inquisitor someday, and tested the farmers and asked them whether they thought the archangels made their kindly ones, or whether they had been fashioned by the damned.”

“And did they answer?”

“They said that some of the first angels did not choose sides in the great war in the heavens, when the world began. They said they were exiled to their woods and waters, where they lived free of any rule, far from heavens above or hells below alike, and kept their immortality and power. But they had bound their fate to the world, and would perish when it did. They said that you could hear them whispering at night, as they had murmured to each other when the time came for them to choose their side.”

“Sounds like a story for your teacher,” she said.

“Oh, I told it to old Sigalin, you can be sure of that.” Reverend Father Amalis drained his glass. “And do you know what he said to me, that learned schoolman? He said: Why not?”

They spent a night on the water, long and cool and mostly sleepless, though Alsbet managed to doze beneath a blanket on the largest ducal barge, and then they went on southward under a clouded sky all morning and afternoon. The flotilla divided to pass a few islands where local boys were in the trees and shouting, converged again as they passed a larger town, Freyholt, to the cheers from the wharves, and then came at dusk to the widest place in this span of the river, where the barges at last halted and bobbed and lit lanterns and torches and waited … but not for long.

They appeared first as a distant swarm of stars or fireflies against the darkening horizon, and then resolved soon enough into another firelit flotilla to match their own, with a different array of colors but the same roistering sounds, the same banners, and a statue of Uriel in the midst of it.

The sun had just disappeared, the horizon was red and ragged, and the sky above was deepening its blue, when the ducal barges of Cranholt cleared the crowd of boats around them and moved forward to meet the ducal barges of Felcester, with the cities’ respective statues rowed forward in their wake.

On the first barge Alsbet stood with her father and Padrec, just beside Wilfred and his sister; Modred Cathelstan and the iron duchess and Benfred were behind them with a few others, and behind them was a gathering of Cranholt’s priests, robed and ready. The first barge of Felcester was almost upon them, the torchlit outlines condensing into men — fat Duke Jonthen first, under the boar banner of his house, with his wife Elspeth beside him and his court around, and men-at-arms and priests clustered in the rear.

The barges slowed and came to an uneasy, shifting rest. There were ceremonial bows from the Felcester barge to Edmund and Padrec and Alsbet, ceremonial greetings between the dukes, and then the priests came forward for their prayers, carrying with them the tall lengths of smooth and rounded wood that became the harvest pole.

Piece upon piece it was assembled, and span upon span it rose, garlanded as in town squares and shrineyards throughout the Heart, but not with plants and leaves and branches. Instead there were ropes, painted with some potion whose formula was known only in the temples, that went around and around the pieces as they were fitted and secured — and then at last the whole thing was lifted and set firmly into its bobbing stand, a strange wooden bowl made by temple artisans to keep the pole aloft.

It was a dark finger against the deep blue sky when the last prayer rolled from the lips of Felcester’s archpriest. They were singing hymns back in the flotillas, the common folk raising their voices together in refrains Alsbet first remembered hearing fluting from sisters in the mountain chapel of her youth. The torchlight bronzed her father’s face, gleamed on the gilded paint of the barges, and cast a net of gold across the water. She smelled the river, the mud, the smoke; heard the crackle of flame, the murmuring of the priests at their task. She murmured her own prayer, for all of them.

Then the two ducal barges were pushed backward, leaving the harvest pole to bob and rear alone. With another crackle the ropes were lit, and the fire raced across them — fire on the water, it looked like, a crackling orange against the lapping dark — and then the line of fire leaped, leaped, up the ropes and up the pole, catching the potion as it did so and turning colors, red and blue and green and purple, until the entire pole was ablaze, a beacon, a pillar of fire, a coruscating spire of light.

Now the hymns became a roaring chorus that didn’t ebb but built and built, and Alsbet looking to left and right and then ahead saw all the other barges moving toward them, sweeping in a great arc around them, encircling the harvest pole and the nobles’ barges and the great statues, whose painted faces glowed and glinted with reflected light. The priests had melted away somehow and in their places there were suddenly soldiers, lightly armored, steering up in smaller boats alongside, carrying with them the wicker seats, gesturing and clambering while the roar became something more discernible, not just a wave of sound but a chant —

chair them chair them chair them

— and then she was being pulled away from her father, his arm was in the hands of a Falconguardsman and hers was being taken by —

“Princess! Step up, just so, carefully …”

It was Gavian, his weathered face transfigured in the torchlight, wild and reassuring all at once, and she stepped across a span of water, into his barge and then up, up, on hands cupped for her and then his arms lifted her up and she was seated, balanced, bobbing on the shoulders of the soldiers like the barges bobbed on the Mersana, and they were hoisting her across to another barge, while Gavian leaped to stay with her, and different hands were below her, noble faces that she half-recognized, young Aldred and a Gyldenfold, maybe even Amalis in his robes … and then another surge and she was across to the next barge, and the next, and something was handed up, a flagon, and she drank and it was fire down her throat as she looked down and saw that it was her brother’s friends, their faces half-masked with shadow, Caetryn’s eyes gleaming, Merula, Freshett, Brethon faces …

Then another hoist, another surge, and she recognized the people hoisting her no longer. They were merchants by their garb, and the chanting had become singing again. She looked around, across what looked like a wild seething field of flame and shadow, to find the others who were carried like her on this sea. In the distance she thought she saw — yes, it was Wilfred’s sister, her gray hair undone and wild, singing along to words that Alsbet could barely follow as they chaired her, something about boatmen on the river, and then she was gone into the blur of fire and dark, and another flask was handed up. Now the hands holding her were rough and she looked down into faces like the judgment painting in the Castle chapel, contorted faces, fishwives and their stubbled men, some of them grinning madly through their songs, a few of them who weren’t doing the hoisting groping at her ankles (you must know that they take liberties below the knee a Duncaster lady had whispered to her during the fireworks), others waving flagons of their own …

So it went for a time that seemed outside of time, with more drinking than she had expected, more dizziness and laughter, the faces changing and changing, sometimes a glimpse of Gavian or another guardsman following her below, and the blue above her turned to black with studded stars.

The blazing pole was her constant; she seemed to be circling outward from it for a long time, and then something changed — she thought she heard a voice, maybe Gavian’s, shout back now back now turn her back now — and she was weaving closer, up and down and up and down, hands on her feet and ankles, singing below her and fire around her and the stars above …

Then at last the blazing pole was close again and she looked to her right and there was, yes, her father, bobbing like her on a sea of hands and arms and faces. In that instant of recognition she remembered seeing him carried together with her mother so many years before, on a bench fashioned for the two of them, and herself a girl hoisted on someone’s shoulders to watch her imperial parents being chaired. He was the same man as then, the same face: The shadows hid the graying hair and the firelight burned away the wrinkles and there was only her father, his hand raised and his mouth open to sing or maybe to call out, because he had seen her, their eyes were locked, and over the singing she called out to him …

Then she looked down, expecting another crowd of merchants’ hats, but instead the faces looking up at her were hidden, masked not with firelight but with paint and pasteboard, animal faces, foxes and birds and stranger things.

Was this part of the festival, a tradition no one had mentioned?

She looked back to her father, bobbing toward her, and saw that he was surrounded by the animal faces as well, a torchlit zoo, and though the singing was still loud in the distance in the crowd around her it seemed to have fallen off, and on other barges around them there was a strange hush broken by garbled shouts. Beneath her there was something else, a chant, at first alien but then almost understandable, because it was, yes, it was Brethon, the masked beasts were chanting in Brethon, and the exhilaration she had felt since the chairing began became something else, a tightness, an anxiety, a sense that this was suddenly a darker dream from which she might not be able to awake …

Then everything happened too suddenly for fear. There was a crash below her, a shouting collision, in which she heard her name and looking down saw Falconguard surcoats among the masked revelers, wrestling with them — and at almost the same moment her father, just a barge away, a few spans, was suddenly pulled down, his hands flying up as he vanished with his chair into the press.

Then there was a terrible crash (we hit another barge) and it was Alsbet who fell, slid, pitched forward into one of the figures holding her chair up, and he fell under her and cushioned her as they hit the wooden boards, the wind going out of her as his mask, a bluejay’s beak, was pushed aside and she saw a youthful beardless face beneath.

It was a Brethon face, and it spat at her in words she almost understood, something about a king and water, before something, someone pulled her up, into a wild chaos of robes and faces, many masked, some bare, one of which she knew.

It was Cadfael, and as she saw him she also saw that he had a blade out — and then he pulled her to him, spinning her back against his chest, and for a moment she was sure he meant to stab her and she screamed, she screamed and tried to bite at him, but as she did there was a cat mask leaping toward them and she felt his blade arm come up beside and thrust, thrust — and there was blood on her, a knife in the cat’s hand, it caught the firelight as it fell one way and the cat fell another …

Then Cadfael spun her again, back around him, sending her stumbling against the barge’s side, and she was being pushed and pulled over it into another barge (the one that crashed) and there were more men in surcoats, with beasts and birds on their breasts instead of their faces, pulling her and shouting, this way princess now quickly this way move her damn you, and as they pulled her some of them were leaping past her into the scrum of masks and torches, into the screams and clangs, into the maelstrom where her father had fallen, and people were thrashing in the water, there were bodies in the water and blood down her dress, and this was surely the moment in stories where you simply fainted, where everything went black.

Except it didn’t. Instead it was with a perfectly lucid gaze that Alsbet, falling back against the poleman’s seat in the barge, with soldiers holding her arms and men with drawn swords leaping past her toward the fray, saw her father being dragged across the barges toward her, dragged clear of the chaos and the masks, dragged toward safety.

His eyes were alive but his face was bruised and bloodied and his right arm hung limp, and dragging him with blood on her face and a bare sword and the wildest look that Alsbet had ever seen a woman wear was Caetryn of House Rhedryon.