“Thank you, Gerald,” she replied, the words partially muffled by the fabric of her husband’s shirt. She nodded in the general direction of the nobles crowding the buttery doorway. “Gentlemen.” “M’lady,” returned an awkward chorus of voices.
The lady whispered something into the lord’s ear that made him chuckle, then patted him and slid out of his arms. Lord Gwydion turned to his councilors.
“Thank you, gentlemen. Good night.”
“No, no, please don’t abbreviate your meeting because of me,” the lady objected. “Actually I’d like to sit in; I have a few matters of state I need to discuss with some of these good nobles.” She looked back up at the lord, who stood a head taller than she. “Are Melisande and Gwydion Navarne to bed?”
Lord Gwydion shook his head as the chamberlain crossed to the fireplace and took her cloak down from its peg, still radiating its aura of mist. “Melly is, of course, but Gwydion is keeping council with us. Has made many good suggestions, in fact.”
The lady’s smile grew brighter and she opened her arms as her husband’s namesake, the tall, thin lad who would one day be the Duke of Navarne, made his way through the convocation at the doorway and came into her embrace. As they conferred quietly, the lord turned back to his councilors.
“Give us a few moments, please,” he said. “We’ll resume our conversations—briefly—at half the hour.” The nobles withdrew, closing the buttery door behind them.
Berthe eyed the chamberlain, gesturing nervously toward the back door to her chambers; Gerald Owen nodded pointedly. The scullery woman bowed clumsily and made a hasty retreat to her room, wondering if the Lady Dronsdale would consider taking her back.
The Lord Cymrian watched as Gerald Owen walked slowly over to his wife, who was unbelting her scabbard without breaking her conversation with their ward. Owen had been the chamberlain of Haguefort for many years, serving both Gwydion Navarne’s father, Stephen, and Stephen’s own father before him. Even in his later years, his staunch loyalty and service to Stephen’s children, and their guardians, was unfailing. He carefully took Rhapsody’s sword and cloak, and left the buttery without causing so much as a pause in her conversation.
“Twenty center shots in the same round?” she was saying to Gwydion Navarne. “Excellent! I’ve brought you more of those long Lirin arrows you liked from Tyrian; they’ve fletched them in your colors.”
Gwydion’s normally somber face was shining. “Thank you.”
The Lord Cymrian tapped his wife on the shoulder, gesturing toward the door through which Gerald Owen had left.
“I made a loan of my cloak of mist to you so that you might travel unseen by highwaymen and thieves,” he scowled with mock severity. “Not so that you could return without my notice.”
“Trust me, my return will garner your notice later,” she said teasingly. “But I really must speak to Ihrman Karsrick before he returns to Yarim; did I see him among the councilors in the doorway?”
“Yes.”
“Good.” She slipped her hand inside the crook of her husband’s arm. “Now, let’s go attend to affairs of state—so that we can retire to our chambers and discuss the—er—state of affairs.”
She walked arm-in-arm with both Gwydions through the towering hallways of Haguefort, past ancient statuary and carefully preserved tapestries from the First Cymrian Age, Rhapsody found herself suddenly battling a wave of conflicting emotions, some warm, some bitterly painful, all deeply held, none changed in any way by the passage of time.
The loss she and Ashe, as her husband was known to his intimates, still felt at the death three years ago of Lord Stephen, Gwydion Navarne’s father and Ashe’s dearest friend, was still acute. It was impossible to traverse the corridors of Haguefort, the keep that Stephen had lovingly restored and filled with priceless artifacts, or tend to his historic exhibits in the Cymrian museum on the castle’s grounds without being overwhelmed with the memory of the young duke and the great joy he had held for life. Each time she left Haguefort, she returned to find his son resembling him more.
The thought caught in her heart; Rhapsody blinked. Gwydion Navarne was staring down at her from the first step of the grand staircase, offering her his hand on their way up to the keep’s library, where Ashe had been meeting with his councilors, looking for all the world like his father. Beside her Ashe squeezed her hand; he understood. Rhapsody squeezed back, then took their young ward’s hand, allowing him to lead her up the stairs.
Colored light splashed the steps from the stained glass in the chandeliers above them, illuminated by scores of tallow candles. Rhapsody thought of how carefully Stephen had chosen that beautiful glass, and everything else in the keep and the museum. The musing made the next breath she drew heavier than the one before.
They had chosen to stay in Haguefort after Stephen’s death, keeping it exactly as it had been, for the sake of Gwydion and his young sister, Melisande. Stephen, himself widowed when the children were very young, had endeavored to make certain that life went on for them after their mother died. In their love for him, Rhapsody and Ashe had tried to do the same. Nonetheless, the time was coming when Gwydion Navarne would be of age to assume his father’s title. Now, watching him ascend the grand staircase, Rhapsody couldn’t help but acknowledge that that day was coming sooner than she wished.
As she stepped in a pool of blue light, a chill whispered over Rhapsody’s hair and the skin on the back of her neck. She stopped quickly and turned; in the flickering light of the chandeliers she thought she saw the tiniest of movements. But when she looked more closely, nothing was there but dancing shadows.
Ashe’s hand closed gently on her elbow.
“Aria? Are you all right?”
An old dread, stale from the crypt of memory in which it had been long locked, rose like bile; the acid burned the back of her throat. Then, with a flicker of candlelight, it was gone.
Numbly Rhapsody put her hand to her throat; the burning fear had subsided completely. She smoothed the gold locket at the hollow of her neck and the collar of her cambric shirt, then shook her head, as if shaking off a bad dream. Sometimes visions of the past or the future came to her, unbidden, and had since childhood, but there was no more to the fleeting chill; it had vanished.
The Lady Cymrian looked up at her husband and smiled to soothe the worry she saw in the lines of his face and his eyes, cerulean blue scored with vertical pupils, a subtle vestige of the dragon blood that ran in his veins.
“Yes,” she said simply. “Come; let us not keep your councilors waiting.”
2nd Thread
The Weft
Just as rivers flowed inevitably to the sea, in Yarim Paar all knowledge, public and hidden, all secrets, made their way, sooner or later, to the ear of Esten.
And Slith knew it.
Whether the secret was uncovered in the bright, unyielding sun of Yarim Paar that baked the red-brown clay of the crumbling northern city to steaming in summer, or in the dark, cool alleyways of the Market of Thieves, the opulently decadent bazaar in which trade, both exotic and sinister, flourished at all hours of the night and day, Esten would eventually hear of it.
It was as unavoidable as death.
And since death could come from standing in the way of such information, it was usually better to be the bearer of the secret to Esten than the one who might be perceived as trying to hide it from her.
Though not always.
Slith glanced up nervously. The journeyman who was overseeing his work and that of the other apprentices was stretching out in the shadows of the large, open kilns, seeking relief from the blasting heat, paying the boys no mind. Bonnard was a corpulent man, a skilled ceramicist whose touch with tile nippers and mosaic tesserae was unrivaled, but he was not much of an overseer. Slith exhaled, and cautiously reached into the greenware jar on the lower shelf again.