“Are you asking if I spend time with him because I find him handsome?”
Moina blushed and looked down. Briony’s other attendant was also having trouble meeting her eyes. “I don’t like him either,” Rose confessed.
“I’m not planning to marry him, if that’s what you’re wondering.” “Highness!” Her ladies-in-waiting were shocked. “Of course not!”
“Yes, he is handsome. But he is almost my father’s age, don’t forget I’m interested in what he has to say about the many places he has seen, the southern continent where he was born and its deserts, or old Hierosol with all its ruins. I have not had much chance to see other places, you know.” Her maids looked at her with the expressions of young women who associated journeying in foreign lands with little beside hardship and possible ravishment. She knew they would never understand her longing to learn of things beyond this damp, dark old castle. “But I am even more interested in what Dawet has to say about Shaso, of course. Who, you may remember, is in chains because he seems to have killed my brother. Is it acceptable to the two of you, that I should try to understand the reasons why Prince Kendrick was murdered?”
Rose and Moina were both caught up in sputtering apologies, but Briony knew she had not been entirely honest: there was more to her feelings about Dawet than simply admiration for his wide experience, although she was not exactly sure what those feelings were. She was no mere girl, she told herself, to fawn over a lovesome face, but something about the man truly had caught her attention and she considered him more than she should, wondered what he thought both of her and her court.
He would have earned me off to Ludis without a second thought, she reminded herself. That is the kind of man he is. If Kendrick had announced it a day earlier, I would be halfway to Hierosol by now, on my way to meet my new husband, the Lord Protector.
It suddenly occurred to her that since she felt certain Kendrick had in the end decided to give her to Ludis for the greater good of Southmarch, the prince regent’s death had occurred at the last possible moment to prevent that from happening. The idea was so obvious and so surprising that she stopped in the middle of the hallway and her two ladies bumped into her from behind. It took a moment before they were all sorted out and moving again, but now Briony wished she did not have to go to the council chamber. This strange new thought made everything look different, as a cloud passing in front of the sun turned a bright day into sudden twilight.
But who would be so anxious to stop Kendrick sending me away? And where would Shaso fit into such a conspiracy? Or had it been arranged not to keep Briony herself in Southmarch, but by someone who wished to take the throne? But even if it was someone in the family with a blood-claim, someone like Gailon Tolly or Rorick, there are still two better claims ahead of any of them — Barrick’s and mine. They would have to kill us, too.
No, there are more than two claims ahead of both Gailon and Rorick, Briony remembered. There are three. There is also the child in Anissa’s belly.
And, of course, that infant would be the heir to the throne if he or she was born brotherless and sisterless into the world.
Anissa? Briony suddenly did not want to think about such things anymore. She had never much cared for her stepmother, but surely no woman would murder an entire innocent family for the sake of an unborn child— a child who might not even live? Surely not. But it was disturbingly hard to clear away such suspicions once they had begun to take root. Wasn’t Anissa’s family in Devonis related in some way to King Hesper of Jellon, the one who sold Briony s father to Hierosol in the first place?
Gailon, Rorick Longarren, her father’s wife—she could not think of any of them now without suspicion This is what murder does, she realized. She had reached the door of the council chamber and now waited to be announced. Barrick was slouched in one of the two tall chairs at the head of the table, arms folded tightly across his chest as though he were cold, the face framed in the collar of black fur even more pale than usual. It does not make one phantom only —it makes hundreds.
Once these halls were full of people I knew, even though I might not have liked them all. Now the house is crowded with demons and ghosts.
Wait and I will call for you, the message from Avin Brone commanded. Even without the Eddon wolf and stars and Brone’s own sigil both stamped in wax at the bottom, the lord constable’s thick, black pen strokes would have been unmistakable.
Ferras Vansen waited in his dress cloak just inside the doorway to the council chamber between two of his guardsmen Two more guards waited out in the hall with the man they would present to the councillors. The council room, known as the Oak Chamber for the massive wooden table at its center, was an old room that had once been the castle treasury in the dangerous days of the marauding Gray Companies, a large but windowless space with only two doors, nested in the maze of corridors behind the throne hall. The captain of the royal guard had never much liked the stark, stony room: it was the kind of place built for last stands, for the dreadful heroics of defeat and disaster.
The guard captain had been furious at first that Lord Brone should treat their news so offhandedly, ordering it held until the end of a long council session full of far more trivial matters, but as first one hour passed, then another, Vansen had come to believe he understood Brone’s thinking. Many days had passed since Prince Kendrick’s death—a killing still unexplained as far as most of the people of Southmarch were concerned, even if the murderer himself had been captured. The business of the land had been almost uniformly ignored since then, and many things had already waited in pressing need of answer before the prince regent died. If Vansen had been allowed to present his own news first, it was possible that none of this other business would have had its audience.
So he waited—but it was not easy.
He let his eye rove across the dozen noblemen who made up today’s council, playing a game of anticipating an attack on the royal twins first by this one, then by that, and trying to decide how he would counter it. The nobles looked bored,Vansen thought. They didn’t seem to realize that after the recent events boredom was a privilege, perhaps even a luxury no one could afford.
Ferras also thought young Prince Barrick still appeared very ill, although perhaps the boy was just careworn. Whatever the cause, Barrick was certainly not paying the closest attention to the business of the kingdom. As case after case came up before them—the rents on royal lands in need of attention, official embassies of grief and support fromTalleno, Ses-sio, and Perikal to be heard, important property disputes that had come up from the assize courts or the temple courts needing a final decision—the young prince barely seemed to attend the speakers. In most cases he simply waited for Briony to speak, then nodded his head in agreement, all the while rubbing the crippled arm that he held in his lap like a pet dog. Only a question from Lord Nynor the castellan seemed to awaken the boy from his lethargy at last and kindle a light in his eye: Nynor wanted to know how much longer the Hierosoline envoy Dawet dan-Faar would be with them, since the household purse had made allotment for only a fortnight’s stay. But although he was clearly interested, Barrick became, if anything, even more silent and unmoving as Briony answered the question. The princess said that they could not of course hurry a reply to the man who held her father’s safety in his hands, especially at so troubled a time. She seemed almost as distracted as her brother. Ferras Vansen thought that Barrick did not seem to like her answer much, but the prince made no spoken objection and Nynor was left to go grumbling off to rearrange the household finances.