The Free Kingdoms (Book 2) Read online

  Chantmer the Tall strode through the crowd, his face barely visible from his dark hood. “Throw down your sword, my prince. There is no sense fighting any longer.”

  Whelan threw down his sword. “You are a traitor.”

  “No,” Daniel said behind him. Several men stood at his side, a mixture of king’s guard and Knights Temperate. He stood taller than Whelan remembered and the look on his face was much older than his twenty years. “Father was the traitor. He took vows of peace, and promised to follow the crooked path.”

  Whelan staggered back. “You!”

  Daniel said, “The Brotherhood and the Order held a council. This was not my choice. But neither did I try to stop it. Now, brother, in the morning we return to the Citadel to mend the damage caused by Father and his minister.”

  Three men dragged this “minister” into the light. Nathaliey Liltige and Narud followed behind, chanting spells that kept the wizard bound.

  “Bring him here,” Chantmer commanded.

  “What is the meaning of this?” Cragyn demanded, face paling even as he surveyed the wizards arrayed against him. “The Order will hear about this. I will call a full assembly and you will—”

  “We are the Order,” Chantmer the Tall snapped. “And we have learned all about your dark arts and the poisonous advice you gave the king.”

  He reached out his hands and seized Cragyn’s robe. He tore free the amulet around his neck, throwing it to the ground, then ripped open the robe from Cragyn’s neck to his breast. Cragyn fell to the ground with a cry.

  “Cragyn, I hereby rename you Cragyn the Fallen. By the Thorne and the Wounded Hand, we rebuke you and cast you from the Order. You are hereby banished from Eriscoba! Be gone!”

  It was a powerful spell and stripped Cragyn of much of his power. His face drained of color, then he rose to his feet and pulled away from the hands that held him.

  “This is not the end,” Cragyn promised, looking over his shoulder as he strode from the light of the fire. “No, you fools, it is only the beginning.”

  #

  “The Eorl doesn’t want war,” Chantmer the Tall had advised Daniel as the young king and his brother Whelan hunted in the hilly fields just west of Arvada. “He only wants the respect of the king, and the assurance that his lands remain free.”

  Daniel swung a lure around his head to attract his falcon, which had missed its quarry and now sat perched in a tree, confused. “So what do you suggest? Should I bring him to Arvada and make him my adviser?”

  Whelan shook his head. “Thirty heads rotted on poles outside Brach castle when Father’s army approached the gates. It’s rumored that as a child, the eorl pushed his sister into the swamp and drowned her. The man doesn’t belong anywhere near the Citadel. Any more than Father did,” he added.

  The wizard followed the two young men as they searched along the hedge for the missing rabbit. “I don’t mean to bring the eorl himself, just his daughter.”

  “A hostage, you mean?” Daniel asked. “I don’t like it.”

  Whelan laughed. Daniel could be so obtuse sometimes. Chantmer’s beard twitched and Whelan saw that the old wizard was trying hard not to smile. “Not a hostage,” the wizard said. “Unless you mean to keep your wife in the dungeon.”

  Daniel frowned. “My wife? You want me to marry her?”

  Chantmer said, “It would turn the eorl from an enemy into an ally. He would like nothing more than to see his grandson rule the Citadel some day. Indeed, I must confess that this idea only occurred to me because the eorl himself hinted broadly of such an alliance at your father’s burial.”

  “It sounds like foolishness to me,” Whelan said. “You should have nothing to do with the eorl or his daughter. Let him stay free if he wishes. He is no concern of ours.”

  But Daniel nodded slowly. “If we leave him be, he will cause trouble on the Marches for years. I haven’t yet earned enough trust from the other Free Kingdoms that they will join me to force a peace. Yes, if it will bring peace, a marriage alliance.”

  “Markal was right,” Chantmer said, a grudging admiration in his voice. The two wizards didn’t care for each other. “You are already wiser than your father. Now, the only question is, which daughter?”

  “Tell me what you know of the girls,” Daniel said.

  Disgusted, Whelan forged ahead along the hedge, leaving the wizard and Daniel to hammer out the details of the marriage alliance to the Brachs. A flash of brown fur burst from the hedge ahead of him, racing down the hill. Everything forgotten for the moment, Whelan pulled the hood from his falcon and threw it into the air. The bird spotted the fleeing rabbit immediately and set off in pursuit. The rabbit screamed as the falcon sank its claws into the creature’s back.

  Whelan whistled and waved his lure to recall the bird. It stayed on the rabbit for a moment, looked uncertainly at the dead animal, then lifted in the air and returned to Whelan’s fist. He fed it a scrap of dried meat, hooded the falcon and went to retrieve the rabbit.

  Thank the Brothers that Whelan wasn’t the king. He would never marry for political reasons. He imagined the eorl’s daughter. A shrewd, foul-tempered woman, her temperament exactly like her father’s. And ugly, like the eorl’s son Lanchman, with perpetually bloodshot eyes and a nose the shape and color of a fat radish.

  He picked the rabbit up by his legs and waved it to Daniel. His brother left Chantmer’s side, striding ahead to see. Chantmer remained on the hillside, hands clasped together and covered by his sleeves. Scheming, no doubt.

  Whelan shook his head. Wizards.

  #

  Whelan had been wrong about Serena na Brach. So very wrong.

  She arrived at the Citadel during the fall harvest, a few weeks after Chantmer first suggested the idea. She came with a handful of armed men, two serving girls, and strangely, Whelan thought, a harp. The weather still held and so Daniel kept court in the yard between Sanctuary Tower and the Golden Tower. As the setting sun cast the Golden Tower in a reddish gold hue, Serena played the harp with deft fingers and sang.

  Her voice was as clear as the icicles that already hung from the trees in her northern home. Her face was as achingly beautiful as her voice, Whelan thought, both delicate and full of life at the same time. But neither of these things made him love her. He’d seen beautiful singers before. No, it was the vulnerable look in her eyes, the aching in her voice, and finally, the loneliness.

  Yes, loneliness. Whelan was sure of it. This girl, who couldn’t be more than sixteen years old, was completely alone in the world with no friend or confidant. He envied his brother for the first time.

  She would make a perfect match for Daniel. Whelan’s kind and gentle brother would treat her so differently from what the girl knew of King Richard and would no doubt expect of his son. But when Whelan looked to his brother, he was shifting uncomfortably in his seat. A look of dismay passed through the young man’s eyes, as if he understood at last that he would be married to a woman he didn’t know. His brother felt nothing for this girl, Whelan noted with surprise.

  Serena finished. The last note hung on the air, replaced only by the shrill cries from hundreds of birds lifting from nests on the towers to hunt insects at twilight. And then Whelan began a great shout and applause that rippled through the gathered lords, knights, and wizards.

  When the applause died and Serena began anew, a soft voice said over Whelan’s shoulder, “A good match, don’t you think, young prince?” Whelan turned, startled, to see Markal Talebearer watching him with a shrewd look on his face.

  “She has a beautiful voice,” Whelan said with a shrug, unwilling to commit his opinions further. He knew little of the man, but guessed there was a reason some called him the Meddler. Still, he admired the man for no other reason than his well-known disagreements with Chantmer the Tall, a man Whelan found impossible to trust.

  “It must be difficult as the younger brother of the king, to watch him grow into his power, instead of the boy and brother you remember.”

/>   “I don’t envy Daniel. The burdens of a king are too great for my shoulders.”

  “Yes, I imagine you might think so. For now. But there are those who will whisper treason in the ear of a bored prince.”

  Whelan frowned, wondering whether Markal hoped to trick him into some sort of confession of crimes. “And if they do, I will kill them like the dogs they are.”

  Markal said, “Brave words for a young man with little training in the sword.”

  “I’ve been trained,” Whelan said hotly. Indeed, he could beat his brothers soundly, and did well when sparring with the king’s guard. He tried to turn his attention back to the girl’s singing and masterful work with the harp.

  “Training by the king’s guard has value, yes,” Markal agreed, stroking his beard as if a thought had just occurred to him, and not been calculated days in advance, as Whelan suspected. “But not all training is physical.”

  “What do you suggest? The Brotherhood?”

  “Your grandfather was captain of the Knight’s Temperate,” Markal said. “A great man. Your mother would be proud to see you follow in her father’s footprints.”

  Ah, so that was it. The Order of the Wounded Hand worried about Daniel’s brothers and hoped to turn them away from the king’s side where they might work mischief. For Whelan and Roderick, the Brotherhood, perhaps the Order for Ethan. His younger brother had always had a certain bookish way about him and might prove adept with the magical arts.

  The idea held no small appeal to Whelan and he wasn’t so proud to argue with the wizard for pointing him in one direction or another. Indeed, the strongest of the voices that whispered to him from Soultrup urged much the same thing. “Thank you, Talebearer. I will consider your advice.”

  The wizard nodded and turned his attention back to the music.

  King Daniel married Serena na Brach two days later. The following morning Daniel rode south with Roderick, Chantmer the Tall, and several knights to resolve a dispute between the tiny kingdom of Estmor and Rathlek, a powerful neighbor on its southern border.

  The young queen remained behind.

  The only claim to honor Whelan had over the following weeks is that he never intended to seduce the king’s wife.

  #

  “Whelan, may I speak with you for a moment?” Serena asked.

  He’d spotted her approaching across the courtyard, but he’d known she would come. How did he know? Someone whispered to him as he polished Soultrup next to the well.

  She is afraid and lonely, the voice told him. She hopes to make you her friend.

  The voice was the second of the two voices that struggled for control over the souls trapped in his sword, the voice Whelan trusted the least. He didn’t trust it partly for the chancy nature of its advice, but also because of how often it lost its temper with the second, more reasonable voice. The second voice claimed to be Memnet the Great, a wizard from the Tothian Wars. He didn’t know if this was true, but had no reason to doubt.

  Why do you think that? Whelan thought as he watched Serena approach, leading a horse.

  She walked across the courtyard, avoiding the two knights sparring in the shade cast by the Golden Tower. Glittering topaz beads braided her hair, and the mane of her horse alike, belying the simplicity of the rest of her clothes, a white tunic with simple brown pants and riding gloves. At the last minute, she glanced over to the well as if spotting Whelan for the first time and veered in his direction.

  She is only lonely, Memnet said. All of that will change when Daniel returns.

  Nonsense, the first voice said. Your brother hates the girl. She will always be neglected. If someone doesn’t save her from her loneliness, she is doomed to misery.

  It wouldn’t hurt to be her friend, Whelan said, expecting a rebuttal from Memnet, but he said nothing. And so it began. By the time the king returned three months later, the damage had been done.

  #

  Ah, memories. How they haunted him!

  It was dusk when Whelan rode his horse into Eriscoba for the first time since King Daniel had banished him. Nearly sixteen hours had passed since he’d awakened from his sleep, but his dreams of the night before still troubled him. They were too real to be merely dreams, but fixed in his memory like the disturbing visions he’d seen in the Desolation.

  Cruel fate had led Whelan to discover Serena’s body broken from the rocks, rather than Daniel, who rode wildly along the beach, calling out her name, or better still, one of the dozens of men who scoured the beaches for ten miles, looking for the queen’s body among the detritus left by the storm. Would the cursed memory never leave his dreams?

  He’d passed Cragyn’s vanguard during the night, and just an hour earlier, a griffin rider had spotted him and brought him news that Daria had returned to the aerie and Darik was with Markal, thus removing a major worry from his mind.

  The Teeth had proved harder for Cragyn to break than Montcrag. Lord Garydon had held the castle against the might of the dark wizard’s army for three days. Wizard fire had blackened the castle and torn a breach in one of the outer walls, but still the castle held. If it could withstand a few more days of fighting, the Free Kingdoms might yet send aid.

  He passed nobody on the Tothian Way as he rode into Estmor. It was a small kingdom, and the swamp lands that marked the Way’s entry into Eriscoba were less populated than others, and, some said, haunted with ungathered souls.

  Estmor had once been drier and forested and small shrines to the Forest Brother dotted the land, their ruins strangled by climbing vines or half submerged in water. The Forest Brother was long-dead, as was the strength of this land.

  Night came and still Whelan rode. He stopped for a few hours to let his exhausted mount rest, but Whelan couldn’t sleep, so he walked through the darkness, listening to the bellow of frogs.

  Lights bobbed up and down in the distance; at first Whelan thought them wights. As he approached, however, he saw lamps floating on a small lake. About two dozen men sat on boats in the darkness, lamps held on poles over the water.

  Each man had a cormorant in his boat, with a metal ring about its neck. When a fish came to investigate the lamp light, the bird would dive into the water and grab the fish, returning a moment later with its catch, which it couldn’t swallow with a metal ring about its neck. The man would throw the fish into a bucket, feeding the cormorant scraps as reward, then return to his lamp.

  They’d leave their fishing soon enough, Whelan guessed as he stood in the shadows and watched. Not even the deep moors would be safe from Cragyn’s army.

  He returned to his horse and roused the poor beast, ready to ride again. He’d hoped to reach the western edge of Estmor by daybreak, but ten foot water reeds still choked the edges of the Way and the thick smell of water and rotting vegetation still filled the air. At last the road began to climb out of the lowlands and the fog cleared. He crested a hill.

  Whelan’s first full view of the Free Kingdoms took his breath away. The bloom of summer swathed the land in green while the sky stretched blue and clear as far as he could see to the west. Farmhouses sprinkled the land, separated by stone fences, while sheep grazed on hillsides. He’d reached Meadow Down.

  Several men rode hard from the west on war horses. They rode three abreast on the road with sharp, glittering armor and a white, unadorned banner. Each man had a shield painted with an outstretched hand that dripped blood.

  Knights Temperate. Whelan rode to meet them, heart pounding. He didn’t recognize any of the men. They were young knights, some only a year or two older than Whelan had been when he joined the Brotherhood.

  “You there!” the lead man shouted.

  Whelan pulled his horse to a stop. Its tongue rolled from its mouth and it drooped its head. He rubbed its neck in gratitude. He had ridden the poor beast hard and it had borne up admirably.

  “Yes, good knight?” Whelan asked.

  “Who are you and what business have you in Eriscoba?”

  Whelan lifted his hand,
palm facing outward. “I am a brother and knight. I ride with news of the enemy’s forces in the mountains. Will you come with me?”

  The man rode forward and took Whelan’s outstretched hand. “Welcome back, friend. I am Hob. These are my men.”

  Whelan recognized the man now. Hob was a friend of Ethan’s, and had ridden with Whelan’s brother against brigands troubling the Old Road. It was no wonder Hob didn’t recognize him. The Balsalomian sun had darkened his skin and he had shaved his beard when the Brotherhood banished him from the Citadel.

  “The Way isn’t safe to ride, Hob, not with the dark wizard marching. Where are you riding?” Whelan asked him.

  “We ride to Estmor, but perhaps your news is more important. Come with us to Sleptstock where we can get you a fresh mount. What is your name, friend.”

  Whelan hesitated.

  Kill them, Malik’s voice whispered. You can take them all. They are young and foolish and have no idea of your strength or of your sword. You can kill their captain before he even draws his sword.

  No, Memnet said, pushing Malik’s voice back where it belonged. You are not their enemy, Whelan. Prove your worth to them and they will follow you again.

  Hah! The wizard’s advice made Whelan want to laugh. Prove his worth to them? What nonsense was that? And if he fought as Malik urged, what hope did he have against these men, heavily armored and riding fresh mounts? No, he would not follow the pasha’s advice either. Indeed, he made it a point to never follow the pasha’s advice.

  “My name is Whelan. I’ve come to beg my brother’s forgiveness and pledge my sword in his defense.”

  Hob let out a hiss of air. Two of the men shouted and drew their swords, while the others looked to each other in amazement. Whelan made no move to defend himself, although his hand itched to reach for Soultrup. He felt the whispers of souls waking in the depths of the sword.

  “It is you,” Hob said at last. He shook his head. “But you swore never to return.”