Always he woke then, gasping for air, his bedding damp with his own sweat, his stomach knotted like wet rope. He had never spoken of the dream with anyone. He hardly needed to. No one who knew the recent history of the house of Galdasten could have any doubt as to whence this vision had come. It had been but eight years since the madman brought the pestilence to Kell’s Feast, killing the old duke and his family, and so many other men and women of the dukedom that it almost defied comprehension.
Before that growing season, Renald had long lamented the cruelty of his fate. He was far more clever than his older cousin. Indeed, he thought himself the most intelligent and most capable among all the grandchildren of Wistel the Eleventh. But while Kell, as the eldest son of Wistel the Twelfth, could lay claim to the house and its lofty position in the Order of Ascension, Renald, the eldest son of the second brother, was relegated to the small castle in Lynde and a thaneship that led nowhere. In the wake of the tragedy, however, if it could be called that, he began to see that the gods had far greater plans for him and his line than he had ever imagined. It was almost enough to turn him from Ean’s Path, back to the Old Faith.
Yet the vision continued to haunt his dreams, as if warning him against taking too much pleasure in his good fortune. This was the fourth night in Osya’s waxing alone that he had been tormented by the dream, and he had begun to suffer for lack of sleep.
For several years he had just accepted the dream as a burden he had to bear as leader of his house, the cost of his dukedom, as it were. It had never occurred to him to question it beyond that. But as word of the Qirsi conspiracy spread through the Forelands, and, in particular, after the murder of Lady Brienne of Kentigern and the subsequent defection of Aindreas’s first minister, Renald had started to consider the dream anew. The commoner who brought the pestilence to Galdasten had been Eandi, not Qirsi. No one in Eibithar had ever suggested that the incident had been anything more than an act of insanity and grief-the man in question, it seemed, had lost his child to the pestilence five years before, and his wife to some other illness a few years after that. This was no mask for an assassination plot; it was not an attempt to disrupt the Order of Ascension, as Brienne’s murder might have been. It was just what it seemed: the desperate, foolish act of a crazed man.
So why was the diseased man in his vision a white-hair? Was this some strange trick of his mind born of his fears of the conspiracy, fears he was certain he shared with every Eandi noble in the land? He would have liked to think so, but the vision hadn’t changed at all since he first dreamed it during the harvest of 872, and he had known nothing of the conspiracy in his first years as duke. For all he knew, it hadn’t even existed then.
Once more, he found himself wondering if the dream might be a warning. But of what? He had ambitions for the throne-were the gods telling him to abandon them? Or were they merely telling him that only the conspiracy could keep him from Audun’s Castle, that the real threat to his desires came not from Javan and Kearney, but from the Qirsi?
In recent turns, he had settled on this interpretation, only to see the frequency of the visions increase. Again he found himself lying awake nights, questioning the meaning of this. He briefly considered making his way to the Sanctuary of Amon at the eastern end of the city to ask the priestess there what it might mean. But a duke in Eibithar didn’t reveal to anyone the terrors preying on his mind, nor did he turn to the sanctuaries in times of trouble. If the prelate couldn’t help him-and dreams were hardly the province of the cloisters-no man or woman of the gods could.
Instead, Renald endured his visions alone. Elspeth would have thought him a weak fool for allowing mere dreams to unman him, and there was no other person in the castle in whom the duke placed enough trust to confide such a thing. On this night, as on so many that had come before, the duke rose from his bed and threw on his clothes, though the eastern sky had yet to brighten. He knew that there was no sleeping after the vision came, and he thought it better to occupy his mind with other things rather than lie in bed seeing the Qirsi’s face time and again.
Two soldiers stood just outside his bedchamber, two who were often there when the duke emerged from the room in the darkness of night. They had the good sense not to comment on his inability to sleep, silently bowing to him instead, and falling in step behind him as he led them to his ducal chambers.
The room was cold when he stepped inside, and one of the guards hurried to the hearth to light a fire.
“Leave it,” the duke said.
“But, my lord-”
“Bring me some tea. That will be warmth enough.”
The man bowed again. “Yes, my lord.”
In a moment he was alone. The guards had left one of their torches, which cast great, shifting shadows on the chamber walls. Renald lit a lamp on his writing table and a second on the mantle above the hearth. Then he retrieved the missive from Kearney that had arrived two days before, and sat at the table.
The message was quite typical of the Glyndwr king-forthright but courteous, intelligently written and free of pretense. It seemed he had proof of Lord Tavis’s innocence in the murder of Aindreas’s daughter, and, perhaps more to the point, evidence as well of Qirsi involvement in the killing, which he now referred to as an assassination. Renald could only imagine how these tidings would be received in Kentigern.
The king went on to request that Renald make the journey to the City of Kings as soon as weather in the north permitted. With the snows giving way to the milder days and warmer winds of the planting, that time had already come. Still, the duke had made no plans to ride southward, nor did he expect to anytime soon.
He actually liked Kearney, and had been impressed with the king’s father the one time they had occasion to meet. Galdasten and Glyndwr had long been on good terms, and why shouldn’t they be? Renald’s house was ranked second among the five majors in the Order of Ascension; Glyndwr was fifth. They had never truly been rivals and with one on the north shore, buffeted by winds from Amon’s Ocean, and the other perched in the highlands, they had never had cause for any sort of land dispute. Renald even believed that Kearney might make a good king, given the chance to rule for several more years.
His opposition to the king had nothing to do with the man himself and everything to do with the future of his own house. Under the rules governing the Eibitharian throne, the death of Kell and his entire line in 872 removed Galdasten from the Order of Ascension for four generations. Renald had inherited the dukedom, but his house could not claim the throne until his grandson’s grandson had come of age. And even then, there was no guarantee that the crown would fall to Galdasten. If Kearney’s line continued to produce male heirs, Glyndrwr might still hold power, and if it did not, the crown would revert first to Thorald. Indeed, by the time a duke of Galdasten could ascend once more to the throne, any of the other four major houses might have established itself as the royal house.
Renald had sent letters to Aindreas lamenting the injustices Kentigern had suffered at the hands of Javan of Curgh and the king. He had written similar messages to Kearney, warning the king that Galdasten and its allies among the other houses of the realm would not allow Brienne’s killer and those who harbored him to go unpunished. And though he had thought Tavis guilty of the crime, he wouldn’t have done anything different had he not. Aindreas’s opposition to the king threatened not only to topple Glyndwr from the throne but also to put an end to the Rules of Ascension themselves. And that was just what the duke wanted.