This is Chapter 14 of The Falcon’s Children, a fantasy novel being published serially on this Substack. For an explanation of the project, click here. For the table of contents, click here. For an archive of world building, click here.
“I suppose,” Alsbet said briskly, “that I shall have to perfect my Brethon.”
“Oh, I think there will be plenty of time for that, Highness,” Gavian said dryly, propping a booted foot up on one of the chairs that littered his princess’ chamber. “Years, even.”
It was almost evening, and the reddening sunlight flowed in through the windows to pool on the floorboards and the carpet. Alsbet sat facing Gavian and Aeden with her features tinted scarlet and her arms folded. She looked serious, like a young woman facing a particularly knotty problem — but one that she was perfectly capable of solving.
“… nothing unusual,” she was saying. “Mother was married around my age, of course, and she had to leave Allasyr just as I’ll be leaving Narsil. And Padrec will have a wife of his own soon enough, I expect. Then I would just be the spinster sister, knitting away in some forgotten corner of my brother’s castle.”
Despite the awful tension in his body, Aeden had to laugh at that image. “Knitting?”
Alsbet pursed her lips. “Are you suggesting that I am not capable of doing lovely needlework, Aed?”
Aeden had been in love with his princess for so many years now that it was impossible to imagine the two of them carrying on even a casual conversation without an overwhelming bittersweet feeling swelling in his breast: an urge to reach out and run his hand through her fair hair, or cup her chin in his hand and kiss her — and a certain knowledge that not only were these things denied to him, but that the very thought was pathetic and absurd.
Some days this combination was tolerable, even pleasant, an old friend whose company he welcomed. But on bleaker occasions it was a vise gripping his ribs, a cold despair at the knowledge that with every day she was slipping further away, toward her inevitable marriage.
And now that the marriage was suddenly more than a dreaded possibility, the vise felt too punishing to bear.
“In any case, you’ll have to tutor me a bit, Aed,” she was saying. “Since my brother’s friends’ decamped for the west I haven’t had opportunities to practice. And I’m afraid we have to go even deeper into the books. Perhaps we can send to other libraries — to Ysan, to start, and maybe Erona — since what Brother Medwen and his assistants have on Bryghala still seems insufficient. Really, I need to know everything there is to know, or everything that you can can find.”
“The tongue will come easily enough, Princess,” Gavian said. “You’ve been speaking it off and on since you were a girl. Just need to shave the rust off. As for the books, well, read what you can but know that it will all seem like a pack of fables a month after you get there. I read some scraps on your father’s empire when I was a young blade in Antiala and all I really learned was that there’s no substitute for experience.”
Sometimes Aeden wondered about the design of the woman who had chosen him, from the coterie of young men training as scribes and stewards in the Castle, to serve her daughter in this way. He wished he remembered more about the interview, but it had been all his eleven-year-old self could do to survive it — first to master the anxiety at being summoned, and then to tame the emotions that surged inside him when Bryghaida suddenly switched from Narsil to the language that his parents had spoken at home in Erona, in the apartment above the market where his father worked, above the streets where he had played, speaking Narsil below but Brethon above, with his mother while she cooked and sewed and sang …
Varae-vyr sys’raer Brethonae, edaem.
“They say you speak Brethon, lad.”
He did, but not near as well as the queen, and that was part of the storm of feeling — the shame of answering her highborn accent with his own child’s patter, in the tongue that he sometimes read and translated for the older stewards, but that he had really spoken only in his mind for the last four years, since that last day on the moors.
The rest of the storm was the memories he had sealed away, which the sound of Brethon brought rushing back.
Yr-alba aem’raera Brethonae. Yr-vala sys’a taelva?
“I want my daughter to speak Brethon. Can you help?”
Had Bryghaida known then, or merely hoped or guessed, that he would come to adore her daughter as he did — not as a loyal servant, or even a devoted friend, but as a would-be lover? Had she expected that any feelings he developed toward a girl four years his junior would be purely filial? Or had it all somehow been foreseen, as a necessary part of the relationship — this pathetic adoration and readiness to die for the sake of Alsbet Montair?
Filial . . . He supposed that he might have been seen as another brother to the princess of Narsil, albeit one bound to obedience. After all, there was no reason for an eleven-year-old boy to fall in love with the pudgy-cheeked seven-year-old that Alsbet had been at the time of their first acquaintance.
Nor was there reason to expect that a boy of thirteen, just beginning to consider the existence of the opposite sex, would focus his romantic energy on an awkward girl of nine. Indeed, in those far-off days of childhood, Aeden himself probably would have scoffed at the suggestion. In love with Alsbet? Why, she was nothing more than a child . . .
“How long do we have?” he said softly. “Five months?”
"Five months until my intended — angels, it sounds odd to say intended — until he comes, then the festivities here, Winter’s Eve to Mithriel’s Day, and then at least a month's journey to Bryghala. So eight. And Gavian’s right — I know Brethon, Aed. It's just a question of remembering."
Eight months, then, until the wedding in the Bryghalan capital of Aelsendar, whose ancient beauties he had always hoped to see. “You’ll do fine, Highness," he said, and his pride — as always — concealed the bitterness. "You'll speak better Brethon than the man you marry.”
The man you marry . . .
On a summer evening a few months after her eighth birthday, Alsbet had listened in glum silence to a story that her young steward was reading in the musty shadows of High House’s library. It was a good tale, and maybe even a true one, about the High King Manzilion’s march to save Maverovy and the great work of magecraft that brought his army there in time . . . but the princess’ usually eager thoughts were elsewhere. When Aeden pressed her, she recounted what her mother had explained to her that afternoon: that her husband would be chosen by her father and his council, that she herself had no say in the matter. The necessities of state were lost on an eight-year-old; the nightmare of an ugly, evil husband was not.
Aeden told her not to worry, that Edmund her father loved her very much, that he was sure she would love her husband just as much as her mother loved her father, that she would marry a prince and have a palace and her own throne and more fine things than she could possibly imagine. But Alsbet balled her small hands into smaller fists and sniffled.
“No!” she said. “I don't want to marry a prince! I want to marry you, Aed!”
Her tutor looked at his charge and smiled, because it was a touching thing for her to say. “Well, Your Highness, if you still want to marry me in ten years, I'll get your father to make me a prince? How about that?” And she was satisfied.
Ten years had passed since that evening, and Alsbet had doubtless forgotten her words and his reply. But Aeden – the fool, the idiot — remembered.
He remembered how it came over him, too – slowly and then suddenly, with feelings that were mild enough to brush away, impulses that he dismissed as eddies in the current of his rising manhood, and then all at once the surrender to something irresistible, inevitable and terrible.
He recalled above all a day she returned from riding with Gavian, when she was thirteen and changed, both taller and softer than in girlhood, with a swell under her riding shirt that he had been trying not to notice and a flush in her face that always held his gaze. He remembered the moment not just for the romance of the sunset behind his princess, her hair caught by the mountain breeze, but because he had spent the afternoon in a hayloft with Anja, Alsbet’s maid, who at fifteen had real breasts that were soft beneath her dress and lips that gave way to his insistent pressure.
And yet when he strode out into the late-afternoon brightness with the chapel bell tolling and saw Alsbet, his princess, come across the field, his unsatisfied ache faded into a different kind of yearning, and he suddenly knew that Anja’s breasts and lips and the promise of much more were as dust on the wind before his love for Alsbet of Montair. And in the radiance of this unhappy illumination, a first taste of bile rose in his sixteen-year-old throat.
Real life was never so sudden as a remembered revelation, and there were more afternoons in the hayloft, more efforts to be content with what he could have, moments when he made himself believe that his foolishness could be set aside, that he could heed the combination of cool reason and what his body wanted when he was alone with Anja and become a happily married functionary in the Montair court.
But in the end the maid was no fool — she married Berlef, an older soldier in Gavian's Queensguard, and they left the service of the crown together for a farm west of Cranholt. While Aeden stayed where he was, wedded in his heart to a girl he could not have.
The girl was a young woman now, and she pursed her lips in the late afternoon light and said: “So what do we really know about this Prince Maibhygon? Aeden? Gavian?”
They mostly told her things that she had heard before or knew already. That Maibhygon was reputed to be handsome — although all foreign princes are reputed to possess great beauty. That he had black hair and loved to hunt; that he was nearly thirty and had been married once already; that his first wife had died of a wasting sickness seven years before; that she had produced no heir. That his family had ruled Bryghala for more than two centuries, and that his mother was a cautious woman who kept her kingdom out of war; that the prince had supposedly desired to fight against the Narsils alongside Capaelya but that Queen Crenhuinn had forbidden it.
“A handsome man who knows how to be a husband, shows great bravery but also listens to his mother — how could I be more fortunate?” Alsbet laughed. “At the very least I can hope that he will be an improvement on Modred Cathelstan.”
“He fought well on the river,” Aeden said. Somehow the betrothal had given him a new sympathy for his princess’s prior suitors, as though they had all been inducted into the same fellowship. “Modred, I mean. I saw him afterward, all bloodied. I wish I had been close enough to fight.”
“Fight with what, Aed?” Her fond smile was innocent and cutting at once. “Which books would you have hurled at our assassins?”
“I can hold a sword,” he said stiffly. “I’ve practiced in the yard with Ralf and Odo. ”
Gavian nodded in confirmation. “I’ve seen it with my own two eyes. A steward with a blade …”
“I would have fought for you, if I had been close enough to see.”
The princess shook her head. “I know you would, but that is not how you serve me. Any man can carry a sword. I need you for everything else.”
Not everything, he thought.
Afterward, in the long hallway where words were muffled by tapestries, Gavian struck Aeden a gentle blow.
“A lucky man, you are, lad.”
“How’s that?” he asked in bemusement.
“She won't keep her Queensguard with her in Aelsendar for more than a year, mark my words. His Highness Prince Maibhygon may be a friendly fellow, but he'll want his bride guarded by his men. I'll be sent packing back to Rendale — drummed into Edmund's Falconguard, maybe, because I'm a good officer, or finally pensioned off because I’m old whether I want my house and land or not."
“And …”
"And you’ll stay, Aeden. I’ll have to leave her, but you'll be allowed to love her for as long as your heart desires — the good Prince Maibhygon can't object to a loyal steward, eh? Especially one who speaks his tongue, who has your Brethon eyes.”
Aeden made no reply. He had spent years beside Gavian now, and always assumed the older man understood the secret that he otherwise kept close. But this kind of frank acknowledgment was rare.
“Before I came north to the empire, enlisted in the legions and everything else, when I was a guardsman in Antiala there was a queen there too — though I wasn't part of any ‘Queensguard’ – and she was the damned ugliest woman of high birth I've ever seen. There was no danger of any unhappy guardsman falling in love with her. I thought, after serving in her palace, that every high-born lady would be like her, dear old Queen Tertellia. But when I came to this empire, to Rendale itself . . . well, it’s my own misfortune that Her Majesty chose me to lead her soldiery, because I think any captain would have fallen in love with Bryghaida mar’ap Paegara Montair.”
He grinned, then, and clapped Aeden’s back with a scarred palm. “Did you worry that I was about to confess that I’m in love with our princess too? No, lad, that's your misfortune. But still, I’ll be damned if I can stand being parted from her — damned if I can leave her in Bryghala and ride back to this city, this castle — without thinking that she's the closest tie I have to the queen I loved.”
The tapestries whispered in the drafty hall, and the two men walked on.
“I’m sorry, Gavian,” Aeden said at length, trying to sound philosophical to cover his embarrassment. “It’s … it’s a hard world.”
"Aye, boy. If you know that now, you’ll be ready for whatever waits in Brethony.”
In his dreams, Padrec was at Craharyga again. It was a small town, and dusty, just south of the main highway that ran through the eastern marches of Capaelya. The buildings were shells, burnt out a few weeks earlier by one army or another, and what few people remained watched the soldiers pass with hungry, frightened eyes. The summer sun beat mercilessly on the armor of the legionnaires, the blackened boards of the ruined buildings, while the white dust of the town’s main street stirred like smoke between the horses’ hooves.
Then the boy appeared, climbing from beneath an overturned wagon and stumbling down the street toward the advancing Narsils. Padrec reined up as the small figure approached, knowing what was about to happen, yet unable to stop himself from swinging down from his saddle as the boy gave a soft sigh and collapsed in the middle of the street.
“Adjutant,” someone said sharply, the command of a superior, but the prince barely heard him. He crossed the short space between his mount and the prone figure quickly, and bent, intending to scoop the child up in his arms.
As Padrec knelt, the boy’s eyes snapped open
He looks like me. Like me a lifetime ago.
and his little hands dipped into the folds of the rags he wore, dipped and produced a dagger, and drove it toward Padrec’s throat where his breastplate ended and the skin of his neck was exposed.
“Bra’ana vedyr,” he heard the boy hiss — “for my father” — and he waited for the twang of a bow behind him and the flight of the arrow, the arrow that had saved his life and left the boy with to die in his blood in the middle of Craharyga under a hot Brethon sun . . .
. . . but this was a dream, not the real village of that summer day, and the dagger drove hard into his windpipe, and when the child spoke again, it was in the voice of Padrec’s father:
“I was with your mother, boy.”
And Padrec gurgled through the crimson streaming from his throat and mouth and choked his way into wakefulness.
The spring sun was bright at the edges of the drapes. The room smelled too much of wine, and for a moment he imagined rolling out from underneath his blankets and stalking naked out into the halls of the inn, out into the sunlight, just to see how long it took before someone realized that it was the prince of Narsil and not some drunk or moon-touched madman running through the streets of Erona.
But it was easier to lie still for a while; there were unpleasant thoughts choking the close air of the chamber, and to rise would mean a struggle through their vapor. He did manage to prop his head up and look around the room — the biggest in the inn, with cots set up on the sides where his friends sprawled, still asleep. Or at least Dunkan did, and Elbert — but he was not surprised that Paulus’s cot was empty, because drink didn’t seem to touch Paulus, he liked to rise early and go out into the morning air to do angels-knew-what before the rest of the them were roused.
But Dunkan was still snoring, gently, under a sheet much too small for his long frame, and Elbert was sprawled facedown, having drunk too much and passed out before they even left the whorehouse, so that they ended up half-carrying him through the torchlit streets between the brothel and the inn. And then finding Padrec’s serjeant and two other soldiers waiting disapprovingly in the common room — next time come with us, Dunk had bellowed — they had propped Elbert up while they made the innkeeper deliver them one more round of drinks, so that the serjeant and his men hadn’t waited up for nothing … and then somehow they all went up the stairs to bed, though that part remained distinctly hazy.
The light had moved a little while he was remembering, a shaft had almost reached Dunkan’s golden head, and the Ysani stirred and suddenly Padrec didn’t want to exchange hungover pleasantries with his friends.
So he forced himself out from under the blankets, staggered a little as he fumbled for his clothes, and then gained enough balance to dress himself, push the hair backward from his face, and slip past the stirring sleepers to the door, into the hall, and down the stairs to a common room where the night’s winestink was buried under roasting smells of breakfast.
Two of his legionnaires were at the board, with emptied porridge bowls and heavy mugs. No doubt they had been stationed there by Leftenant Gered, his unhappy chaperone. They acknowledged him without a formal salute, as per his request; probably the innkeeper and some of the other patrons suspected his identity, but it pleased him to travel as a spoiled young lordling from somewhere in the Heart, not least because it spared him any obligation to make an imperial visit to the Rock, the ducal fortress here in Erona, and all the other castles along the Great North Road. He was just Lord Cedrec of Something-Or-Other, traveling with his other noble friends, and the legionnaires accompanying them were just mercenaries hired for the journey. It was so much simpler that way — and not only because of Dunk’s insistence on dragging them to brothels.
The other custom in the common room was quiet, the peak of breakfast having passed, and Padrec sat at the bar and asked for porridge and the sausage that he smelled cooking, and the boy, the innkeeper’s son he thought, bowed and disappeared into the kitchens after it. Then the prince turned and glanced about the room again, watching the dust motes catch the sunbeams, hearing the murmur of wagoneers delaying their departure with a last taste of the lake city’s hospitality, then turned back as the boy reappeared balancing a platter and a bowl and asked for water with the food.
He was lifting the water to his lips, anticipating it washing some of thickness off his tongue, when someone slid onto the stool beside him and said, “Does it cure the hangover?”
Padrec swallowed, turned, preparing an unfriendly reply that would let him eat in peace — and found himself facing a hawk’s face, a shaved head, a cocked eyebrow: Aengiss mac Cullolen.
He only just prevented the water from coming straight back up. “Lord General,” he managed, his eyes flickering to either side, taking in the table where the legionnaires no longer sat …
“Your Highness,” Aengiss returned. “Or perhaps I should say Lord Cedrec? Of some earldom outside Meringholt, with distant ties of blood to the House of Montair? A tie that you dishonor with roistering and whoring?”
“We travel inconspicuously,” Padrec began — feeling himself a soldier again, quailing before his superior …
“Inconspicuously?” The general’s tone was soft, his sneer immense. “So inconspicuously that I came to Erona yesterday and heard rumors of your presence somewhere in the harbor district within an hour at my inn, and heard the same rumors — laced with resentment at your absence, naturally — in the Rock when I paid my respects to the noble house of Rilias last evening. So inconspicuous that when I set out early this morning to find you, it took me all of two hours to encounter Adjutant Merula — excuse me, your bosom friend Lord Paulus — smoking in one of the lake balconies, which in turn got me here, it appears, at about the same time you rolled yourself out of your bed. Oh, yes, you travel inconspicuously indeed.”
Padrec felt himself reddening, and said words that felt stupid even as he uttered them. “Why should anyone care how I travel between my two capitals? It’s not as if anyone cares what I do when I’m in them.”
“I had thought this self-pity might be temporary when we were last together. I’m sorry to see it taking root.”
“When we were last together my father was apparently plotting to make a mock of all my plans for Brethony, all your military goals, our empire’s very honor. And now I go to spend a summer as a meaningless player in his court! I think I am allowed a touch, a touch, of resentment with how matters are unfolding.”
“So you answer your father’s misjudgments with follies of your own? With drinking and whoring and rudeness to your own dukes?”
“Why should I appear in Baldwen’s hall just to be laughed at behind everyone’s hands? Just to be treated as the weakling prince who doesn’t get the crown he fought for, who sits by and watches as his father trades away his sister, his only sister, for a peace we neither need nor want?”
“Are you such a fool?” Aengiss’s voice was a perfectly controlled hiss. “I thought that you had learned much with me, my prince — that I was educating you, that Brethony was educating you, that you would enter manhood more prepared than other emperors. I have been acting on that assumption in all things these last few years — in the campaigns in Brethony and the courts of this realm. Indeed I am riding back from an attempt to act on your behalf, to forestall your father’s folly. Have I misjudged you? Have I misjudged all?”
“I thought you had gone to the wild north, to prepare some spring campaign.” Padrec tried not to sound as sullen as he felt.
“No, I went to a different north, because I have little birds to tell me secrets that a general needs to know.”
“But you did not stop my father’s folly.”
“No, I did not.” Aengiss shook his head. “You father believes in what he does, but I fear there is some deep malady, stemming from his grief, doubtless . . .”
“Malady? Are you making excuses for him, too? You of all people know what he has done to us . . . to me.”
“To you? He has done nothing to you. Except, apparently, to reveal the limits of your knowledge of what it means to be a prince.”
“He found that damn treaty with Bryghala in the bottom of an ale cask, Aengiss! He’s drinking his way into the grave, and he’s taking me with him!”
The Ysani soldier cursed softly. “Taking you, highness? Are those the words of the stripling I trained to be a warrior? Taking you . . . Archangels! If you follow him down it will be your own choice. You scorn your father’s drinking while you hide in taverns and brothels and pretend to be some minor rake from the Heart. You scorn his use of power, but waste your own like you waste your seed with whores.”
“What power do I have? He has denied me a crown, denied me …”
“What power? You are the heir to the Falcon Throne, Padrec, and the son to a father whose decline is plain for all to see. You carry all the power of the future with you, and not some distant future, either — and men everywhere look to see what you do with it. You think they would laugh at you in the Rock if you went to visit Erona’s duke? No: They would cluster around you, bend your ear, hover near you to hear your plans and make themselves a part of them. If you showed yourself there in strength. But not showing yourself at all tells them something very different. It tells them that the son might be much like the father, and that the house of Montair’s decline might have only just begun.”
“So you are saying that while my father squanders my inheritance, I should play the courtier? That after he took war away from me, I should pretend …”
“Took your war – listen, Padrec, if it’s a battle you want, a chance to use a sword against something other than a practice dummy, then go south as a freesword. There’s always a war somewhere, and lordlings looking to hire. But your inheritance is an empire, and the wars you wage must be for its very life — because that is what war truly is, for peoples and thrones. Life itself. And for an emperor there can be no selfishness, no stupid brawling, no love of battle for how it makes you feel. Your feelings don’t matter. What matters is that you find the wars your empire needs.”
The general liked to talk like this, and sometimes Padrec liked to listen. But the philosophizing was more powerful coming from a commander riding on horseback against a Brethon sunset than spoken softly across a trencher in a dockside inn. He shook his head irritably.
“But I don’t rule, Aengiss. And currying favor with Baldwen Rilias isn’t going to win me the power that my father keeps from me.”
“No, but it will make it more likely that you get a chance to take power from your father when he passes or … declines. As opposed to having it taken from you.”
“Taken? Taken by this city? You prophesy another Erona Rebellion?”
“Don’t be callow. I’m not talking just about this city or its rulers. I’m talking about Cresseda in Argosa, Jonthen Cathelsten, Eldred Gerdwell, and even my own liege lord in Ysan. Which of the dukes do you know well, Padrec? Which ones think that you are ready to become what your father was, a great and domineering emperor – and which ones will be coming to the betrothal this winter not to see your sister and Prince Maib, but to see if you are as feckless as your father has become, and if the Montair dynasty is ripe to fall?”
“You think they are planning treason?”
“The great dukes are always planning treason; the only question is whether those plans exist outside their fond imaginings.” Aengiss sighed. “I am to blame here, perhaps. I thought you understood this in Brethony, that you were tutoring yourself in statecraft and didn’t need my wisdom. I’ve watched you, Padrec, with those strange twins and their friends, and I thought that you knew what you were doing – that you were building what the Montairs will need if they are to rule in our new western lands for long, a large base of young nobles loyal to the new order rather than the old. With war against Bryghala as the seal on the compact …”
Did Padrec actually understand Cat and Caed and all their friends that way? He wanted to defend himself, so he thought, yes, sometimes, and maybe it was true.
“I don’t know if I always saw things this clearly, Aengiss. But I was trying to be ready to rule in the west, before my father …”
“No!” The Ysani smacked the board, though his voice still didn’t rise loud enough for anyone more than a yard away to hear. “I want to hear no more of your father and how he wronged you. Listen to me: Your coterie in Brethony must be matched by something like it here, in Narsil, in the empire as it was before the wars your father fought. I was trying to give you the beginnings of one, when I steered these friends your way. Yes, steered — you think I simply picked Dunkan and Paulus and Elbert as my adjutants without regard to their suitedness, without thinking that they might be your council someday, as loyal to you as Arellwen is to your father? No – I steered, and even sitting here with the stink of carousing on you I still think I chose well. Dunkan your faithful hound, Elbert your administrator, and Paulus for anything that needs doing ruthlessly and swiftly. Yes. They will serve. But you need more. You need to use your father’s follies — if he has not married you wisely, let several of the dukes think their daughters might be your choice when you ascend the throne. If he is making diplomatic blunders, let them know that you will not be bound by them. If he seems weak, show them that you are strong. Otherwise it will all come to dust.”
“Are you saying that you think that I cannot hold the crown? I am the heir . . ."
"You are —"
" . . . the rightful heir!"
"And the Emperor Arviragis was the rightful emperor, and your eight-times great-grandsire had his weasend slit with a jailer’s dirk in the lowest cell of Rendale’s Castle. Do you want to have a jailer slide a knife along your throat so that some other lord can rule your empire?”
He paused. Padrec was silent. When Aengiss went on his tone was gentler.
“No, I am certain that you can hold it. Otherwise I would not have come looking for you in this fishmonger’s corner of Erona — because I serve the empire, and I will not waste myself on an unworthy prince. No, I know your worth, I’ve seen it — but to hold the crown, you need to have it first. And that makes this moment dangerous. Your sister is engaged to seal a foolish treaty. Your brother does not return from his comfortable southern exile. Your uncles are not men of strength. In certain ways you are alone.”
“Alone except for you.” Did he still sound too sullen? Maybe not, because Aengiss laughed.
“Well, princes have faced worse odds! I’m not the worst ally to have on your side, I admit. And if your father’s treaty really brings a temporary peace to our western provinces, perhaps there is a bit more than I can do on your behalf. But only if you do more for yourself.”
“Meaning —”
“Meaning clean yourself up, have your soldiers dress like legionnaires instead of sellswords, and go pay a call on Baldwen Rilias and his clever thirteen-year-old daughter. For a start. And I will consider paying some visits of my own.”
The inn door swung open, letting in the noise of the streets and a waft from the fishmarkets. Paulus came in, and hesitated as he saw them, his pale beauty briefly backlit by the morning sun.
“Some others are already at work,” Aengiss said softly.
Then Dunkan came clattering down the stairs singing and the boy came out of the kitchen and Paulus crossed the floor and joined them and in the clamor of voices and salutes and handshakes Padrec forgot to ask the old soldier what his final comment meant.