The Falcon Throne (The Tarnished Crown Series) (6 page)

Balfre
.

Aimery felt his breathing hitch. When would his son realise he must be a better man than the man who’d knocked Black Hughe from saddle to coffin? Than the man who blamed Jancis for their sorrows and looked with sour envy upon Grefin and his thriving son?

He must know he disappoints himself. He must know he breaks my heart
.

Even so, there was courage in him, and the capacity for love. If he was spoiled a little, if he wasn’t Malcolm, surely he wasn’t yet rotten. Surely he could still be saved.

For Harcia’s sake he must be.

Staring over his battlements, seeing in his mind’s eye every village and creek and manor that by birthright he owned yet only held in trust, Aimery felt a sting of tears. As much as he’d loved Malcolm, did love Grefin, tried to love Balfre, did he love his harsh, rugged duchy.

Blinking away the sting, he turned from the battlements. He could hide up here no longer. Hard tasks did not soften with the passing of time.

Grefin was waiting in the Great Hall, in company with the council. In company with Herewart, returned to the Croft after Hughe’s funeral, still dressed head to toe in mourning black. The old man’s sharp grief was blunted, the pain instead settled deep in his bones and moulding his face into a portrait of permanent loss. Herewart had no place on the council, but he was owed this public apology.

“My lords,” Aimery said, raising a hand to acknowledge their sober greetings. “Be seated. I’d not keep you longer than necessary. Grefin, stand with me.”

As they obeyed he took his own chair, the hugely carved ducal seat with its bearskin covering and bear-claw decorations. Let the bear’s strength suffuse him, let its courage rouse his blood. Bears were mighty and ferocious. Bears did not weep.

He could feel Grefin at his right hand, high-strung beneath the outward calm. As always, dressed more like sober, self-effacing Curteis than a duke’s son, in dark blue velvet lacking jewels and gold thread. That would have to change. Clothes proclaimed the man… or, in his case, the Steward. But Mazelina would see to that. His youngest son’s wife was a lively woman of unbounded tact and common sense.

“My lords,” he said again, once his barons were settled, “your summons to council arises from our dear brother Herewart’s grievous loss. He knows my privy heart in this, but I’ll share it now so none here might wonder. A son’s untimely death is a sorrow no father should suffer. And I tell you
my
sorrow is doubled, for the part my heir played in Hughe’s death.”

“Your Grace, we all grieve,” said Reimond of Parsle Fountain. Time-grizzled, with thinning hair and two fingers lost from his left hand. He turned to Herewart. “Hughe was a fine man, boon friend to my own Geffrei. That he should die—”

“By mischance,” Joben said quickly, not caring if he gave offence. Only two years parted him and Balfre, and as boys they’d been peapod close. “There was no malice.”

Reimond glowered, while the other barons tapped fingers and muttered. “But there was temper, Joben. Temper and poor judgement. Your Grace—”

“Peace,” said Aimery sharply. “This is not a debate upon the character of my eldest son. I know him, heart and soul, better than anyone. Balfre is—”

“Here,” said his son, unwelcome and gallingly disobedient, as he
entered the Great Hall. “Come to plead my case before Harcia’s duke and his council.”

“Balfre, you
noddle
,” said Grefin under his breath, dismayed. “What are you doing?”

The council, and Herewart, stared at Balfre as he approached. Not a popinjay this afternoon, but a sparrow, he wore an undyed linen shirt and mud-brown woollen hose. He came barefoot and bareheaded, not an ear or finger-ring to be seen. Plain Grefin by comparison was turned gaudy bright.

Searching his barons’ faces, Aimery fought to keep his own face still. Balfre’s brazen defiance of established protocol was a barbed blade twisting in his guts. And he could see Reimond felt the same, his forehead knitted in disapproval. Indeed, only Joben showed any favour. Deness of Heems and the lords Keeton and Ferran echoed Reimond’s unmasked disgust.

Heedless of their hostile stares, Balfre halted and folded into a bow. “Your Grace,” he said, straightening, his steady gaze supremely confident. “I come to you humbled, seeking forgiveness. When I blinked at your disapproval of rowdy sporting I acted out of youthful bravado, discarding your wise judgement for my own. Your Grace, you deserve much better. And before these great lords, whom I have also offended, I swear on my life I will never again fail you or Harcia–and I ask that you let me prove it by granting me all my rights as your heir.”

Breathing out softly, Balfre pressed a hand to his heart, making his words a solemn vow. Then, letting his gaze lower to the flagstoned floor, he folded first to his knees and then to utter prostration, arms outstretched before him in an extravagance of entreaty.

From a great, cold distance, Aimery heard the hall’s air whistle in and out of his chest. There was rage… and there was, he now discovered, a place beyond rage. He stared at the stunned faces before him.

“Balfre is my heir,” he said, as though no time had passed, as though his other son had never entered the hall. “And when I die he will be your duke. But the tragedy of Hughe’s death makes plain that he yet has much to learn. Therefore I declare that for the span of a year and a day my younger son Grefin, here standing beside me, shall be hailed Steward of the Green Isle, my voice and my authority in that place.”

Reimond of Parsle Fountain cleared his throat. “And if Balfre proves himself a slow learner?”

“For his sake, Reimond…” Aimery bared his teeth in a smile. “I hope he proves otherwise.” He stood. “My lords of the council, my lord Herewart, I invite you to withdraw with me and my well-loved son Grefin, that we might spill wine in memory of Black Hughe and then celebrate our new Steward!”

With every man watching, with Grefin breath-caught and torn, to his sorrow, he took a step forward… and stepped over his other son. Stepped again and kept walking, leaving Balfre prostrate and speechless in his wake. And as Grefin followed, and the other lords followed Grefin, he did not look back.

^“
Y
our Grace! Your Grace, please, another measure,” cried Lord Gerbod’s wife, pouting. “The hour is not so late and no man here prances a
roundelay
to rival you!”

Harald, Duke of Clemen, waved his hand in refusal then collapsed breathless into his high-backed, intricately carved wooden chair. Sweat trickled down his face, his spine, soaked the hair in his armpits and slithered over his ribs. But none here would notice, surely, and if they did–what matter? Though the night was cold he didn’t sweat alone. Dancing was a sweaty business. No reason for any man here to glance at his sweating duke and wonder.

In his iron-banded chest, his heart beat hard and too fast.

“Wine!” he said, snapping his fingers, and wine came in a jewelled silver goblet. Scarwid playing servant this time, bowing and scraping. A tiresome tick, he was, his welcome worn out. The petty lordling would’ve been dismissed from this dull northern court long since, had his wife not been such a good fuck.

Harald drank deep, thinking of Gisla. He’d grown weary of her, too.
There was nothing new there, he’d ridden all the tricks out of her. And of late he’d spied a possessive glint in her fine brown eyes. Her fingers, taking his arm, clutched him tight as though she owned him. Like all women she was a fool, thinking she held more worth than a pair of honey tits and the hot, wet hole between her legs.

But there was no need to worry. Roric would rid him of Gisla and cuckolded Scarwid when he returned from his errands. Neatly, discreetly, with a sweet smile and a gentle touch to belie the sting of dismissal. Good at that, was dependable cousin Roric. Harald smothered sly pleasure, thinking of it.

Perhaps I’ll make him a baron, one of these days.

Or perhaps he wouldn’t. Bastard-born, barred from ducal inheritance and lawful marriage, Roric relied on his duke for the clothes on his back–and everything else. As a baron he’d be granted property, have the means to provide for himself, and therein lay the key. Dangled prizes kept a man keen. A promise unfulfilled was a promise fat with power to guarantee loyalty.

Still sweating, Harald willed his thumping heart to ease. Tucked safely out of sight in his chamber was a cordial to aid him, and a thrice-incanted charm on a thin gold chain. But he could dare neither, not even in this lightly lorded court’s glare. No stink of weakness could taint Harald of Clemen, with his two dead wives and five dead sons and the future of his bloodline yet in whispered doubt.

Tipping the goblet of wine to his lips once more, he stared over its beaten rim at his duchess, Argante. She claimed she was breeding again. She should be, the times he’d had her on her back since Liam’s birth. Relief at the news of a second pregnancy hollowed him. For Liam was not enough. One ill breath and his infant heir was meat for maggots. Though this son was strong, not a sickly babe like the others, he wouldn’t be at ease until the succession was made doubly safe. Fate was a fickle bitch. She’d toyed with him all his life.

She toyed with him now, her cruellest trick yet.

The leech he’d summoned in secret from distant Lepetto, trained in ordinary medicine–and certain arts more arcane–had left him the foul cordial and the charm and a stern-faced warning against every manner of gluttony.

“
Duke, not even you with your sharp sword can defeat death
,” he’d said, a thick foreign accent mangling his seldom-spoken Cassinian. “
It comes. You must accept it. But if it comes creeping or flying, that is your choice
.”

A fortune in furs and precious stones, the leech had cost him. That meant another tax. Clemen’s lords would groan at it, but let them. He was Harald, their duke. Their lives belonged to him, and their treasure chests. That was the order of things. Dukes ruled. Lords asked what they could give and then gave it, smiling.

Well. If they knew what was good for them, they did.

Masking temper with a smile, he drained the goblet of wine and held it out, upside down.
Enough
. Obedient hands took it from him. He sat back, breathing more easily, the iron bands clamping his ribs loosened now to mere discomfort. Because he was always watched, he rested a benevolent gaze upon Lord Udo, taking his turn at dancing with Argante. Ah, but she was a hot little bitch. His cock stirred in his hose at the sight of her tits swelling above her low-cut velvet gown. He could fuck her now, before his court in this Great Hall, creeping death be cursed, and not a man would gainsay him. Even had one of the Exarch’s sour grey celibates attended him here, he could fuck her. Rulers did that, if they wished to. Rulers were not ruled. The Potent of Khafur, he had as many concubines as shone stars in the night sky and he fucked them where and when he liked and any man who raised his right eyebrow lost his head before ever he could raise his left to comment more.

Harald and the Potent of Khafur, rulers and cock-brothers
.

The thought made him laugh.

“Your Grace? Might I trouble you?”

And here was Lord Bartrem. Amusement fading, Harald looked at the man, an unimportant local noble recently widowed of a rich Eaglerock merchant’s only daughter. He knew already what Bartrem was after. Some four desperate letters had paved the man’s road to Heartsong Castle. He’d been tempted to deny the nagging fool an audience, but prudence outweighed irritation. Bartrem’s cause was lost when his wife drew her last breath, but there was no need to needlessly inflame the man, or his fellow northern lords. Not when the court must soon return to Eaglerock, at the other end of the duchy.

“Be brief, my lord,” he said, courteously enough. “We dance and make merry tonight. Serious matters belong to the morning.”

“Yes, Your Grace,” said Bartrem, spindle-shanked and chinless, with watering eyes and bulbous nose. Lucky for him he had a proper bloodline. Without it he’d never have caught the merchant’s daughter. “Your Grace, I must speak on the question of Thania’s wardship.”

“It’s not yet decided into whose care your child will be placed.”

“Your Grace—” Bartrem took an impetuous step closer to the ducal dais, then stopped himself. He was trembling. “She is too young for wardship. My child is not yet three.”

“Infant wardships are commonplace, Bartrem.”

“Your Grace, they are cruel!”

Harald stared until the man took a step back. “Not as cruel as a household in want of a wife. Or do you tell me you’ve wed again? Strange. I don’t recall granting you permission.”

“No, Your Grace,” said Bartrem, losing colour. “Of course not. I know what’s right and proper.”

“So you say.” He inspected the emerald ring on his thumb. “And yet you’d leave your precious daughter without womanly guidance?”

“No, Your Grace. My late wife’s mother dotes on the child. With my parents dead, she would gladly—”

“You expect I’d allow a child of noble birth to be raised by common hands?”

Bartrem swallowed. “Your Grace, after me my goodmother is Thania’s closest kin.”

“And common.” He let his voice chill. “As Clemen’s duke I have a duty to protect noble blood. I would no more hand your child to a trinket-trader for raising than I would gift a staghound puppy in my kennel to a passing peddler.”

“Perhaps Your Grace is misinformed,” said Bartrem, fingers clenched nearly to fists. “My late wife’s father, Master Blane, is a merchant of high standing. His purse could buy half the lords beneath your roof this night and scarce show its loss of coin.”

That was true. Harald looked again to his ring. The question to be answered was this: did Bartrem’s goodfather Blane hanker after the girl because she was his dead daughter’s child, or did he see her as a thing of value to be traded? It was possible. The man was a wealthy merchant, after all.

If his care is genuine and I gift the girl’s wardship to a lord other than Bartrem, then I might well be strewing stones in my own path. But if I gift the girl to myself…

It was a tempting thought. Liam would need a wife one day. Or if not Liam, then the next son Argante gave him. Surely Master Blane wouldn’t cry foul to see his daughter’s daughter in the care of Clemen’s duke. Such an alliance would sate any crude ambition–or deafen him to Bartrem’s cries, if family matters were his only care.

And a rich merchant made family by advantageous marriage would surely be most convenient.

“Your Grace.” Bartrem’s voice was dropped to a pleading whisper, almost lost in the minstrels’ music and the dancers’ merriment. “Thania is all I have left of my dear Mathilde. I beg you, be merciful.”

The man was a fool. Harald flicked his fingers. “Very good, Bartrem. I shall think on what you’ve said. For now you should forget your sorrows and join us in a dance.”

Defeated, Bartrem bowed. “Alas, Your Grace, my heart is too heavy for dancing.”

“Then find a more smiling face in a cup of wine. We are merry here. Would you spoil that?”

“Never, Your Grace.”

As Bartrem withdrew, Harald looked for his wife. Tired of Udo, and who wouldn’t be, Argante was dancing with Scarwid. Feeling his gaze upon her, she dropped Scarwid’s hand. Smiled and trod the minstrels’ spritely music towards her husband.

Harald felt his body stir anew. Young enough to be his daughter, Argante, but what did that matter? It was her youth that gave him Liam, and would give him Liam’s brothers. Youth gave her firm tits and silken skin and lust enough to ride him to a bull’s roar. His heart, which yet beat too fast, beat faster still as her youth and her tits and her lust danced her to him, hands reaching, eyes dark with sweaty promise.

“Your Grace,” she said sweetly. “You’ve not yet danced with me. For shame. What will the court say? That I am wilted, and you are tiring?”

He cursed his heart, unreliable, and the stern-faced Lepetto leech. He wouldn’t fuck her now, but he would dance with her… and in the dancing every man and woman here would see the fucking to come later. They’d see their duke virile, the father of many living sons. The whispers would fall silent, the wondering gazes shift to someone else. Abandoning his chair, Harald caught Argante in his arms, held her in the proper way of the jaunty
craka
, away from his chest so she couldn’t feel his cursed, stuttering heart.

She was laughing, her long honey-brown hair beneath the gold wire-and-pearl headdress bound tight to the fine bones of her skull, shimmering in the light of one hundred burning candles. Her almond eyes, tip-tilted and dappled hazel, shone brilliant in her fashionably pale face.

“Come!” she cried, dropped-pearl earrings swaying as her be-ringed fingers beckoned to the near-score unimportant northern lords and their
ladies who ate his food and drank his wine, who owed him whatever he decided to take. “We haven’t yet danced our joy for the duke’s son, and we must, else we anger whatever mischievous spirits yet dwell here. Those who’ve not been chased away!”

Their obedient laughter answered her, and soon after the soft sound of heels kissing the Great Hall’s red-and-white tiled floor. Harald laughed too, because he was watched, because–despite the cordial and the dangerous charm–his chest pounded with a dull pain that never quite ceased. He danced for his heir and wished that Roric danced with them. He could pass Argante to his scrupulous, agreeable cousin and not a man in the hall would blink.

High above them in his nursery, in his charm-covered cradle, little Liam slept. Heart thudding with pain, with love as keen and sharp as a curved Sassanine dagger, Harald danced and dreamed days of glory for his son.

Night. Star-pricked, meagrely moonlit, and crackling with frost. Hiding in a copse of saplings and shadows, Roric pulled his rabbit-lined cloak closer about his ribs and listened to the distant, derisive barking of foxes. Winter might be on the turn but there was life still in the stubborn old man, one cold, miserly fist clutching fast to Harald’s duchy. Waiting for the arranged signal from the castle, shivering, he breathed in ice and breathed out smoke.

It’ll come. It must. Belden’s with us. Save a handful, everyone in Clemen will stand with us. Love for Harald is dried up like a sun-scorched puddle
.

Where he stood, at the copse’s fringe, the deer-rutted, rain-pooled ground before him ran away in a long, lazy slope towards the castle’s bright green lawns. Harald owned twelve such strongholds, scattered across Clemen like thrown knucklebones. This one, fancied Heartsong by some long-dead duke’s lady, curtsied prettily to the surrounding countryside. No raised hackles here, no growling threats uttered in counterpoint to the singing of a naked sword. Heartsong was a fretworked white stone jewel. A woman’s castle, more manor house than fortress, lacking high, wide curtain walls and treacherous moat and impassable drawbridge. Argante’s castle, where she held court over wellborn ladies twice her age and older, and in triumph wielded Harald’s infant son as though the babe were a blade made of soft, swaddled flesh.

And so he was, in a way. Poor noble brat. Poor Liam.

Thinking himself safe here, safe everywhere, his monstrous arrogance a helm with its visor hammered shut, Harald debauched himself within Heartsong and without, never noticing, never
dreaming
, that—

The damp crack of a twig breaking underfoot heralded someone’s approach. A familiar tread. A trusted friend, who’d taken a trembling, owl-eyed boy of seven as a page and guided his journey from childish tears to knighted manhood.

“My lord Humbert,” Roric said, not turning, his voice pitched low. “You should remind Vidar that patience is an admirable virtue.”

For all Humbert possessed his own castle and a wealth of land, and armour scratched and dented in scores of confrontations since the day he won his spurs, Harald’s most leaned-upon councillor had of late become yawn by yawn more fond of a close ceiling than an open sky. Not weak, never weak, but attached to his comforts, there was no denying. Padded beneath his heavy mail with fat these days; more than a linen-stuffed jambon. Even so, despite his changes, he still boiled with courage. Offended, as most were, by Harald’s greedy, vindictive ravagings, he was prepared to be called traitor, to risk his life that those ravagings might be ended for good and the duchy’s happiness restored.