Did you hate her? I didn’t specify who I was referring to, but Tiras knew.
“No,” he said, and truth rang from his voice. “I wanted to. It would have been so much simpler to blame her.” He looked at me. “I blamed my father.”
“Come,” he said, giving Shindoh a brisk pat. “The mews await.”
I followed him eagerly. My father, like every lord, had falcons, though it was more a status symbol for him. He didn’t enjoy the hunts or the birds themselves, saying the falcons were vicious. I had been forbidden to go anywhere near the mews in Corvyn.
Where the stables had been full of light and warm animals, the mews were shadowed and cool, the quiet interspersed by cooing, fluttering, and the occasional shriek. The main level housed the falcons and hawks and was so spacious and lofty, the birds, perched and leashed on stands that looked like inverted pyramids on posts, could fly around the interior.
Tiras explained that an upper level—accessible by steep stairs near the entrance—was for the pigeons, trained to carry messages all over the kingdom.
A man hurried forward, removing a falconer’s glove as he walked. He was small and neat with a pointy grey beard that matched the color of his sharp eyes, eyes that made him look like the birds he trained. When he reached us, he bowed so low his forehead nearly touched his knees.
“This is Hashim. He is Master of the Mews,” Tiras introduced. “Hashim, this is Lady Lark of Corvyn.”
“Our future queen,” Hashim marveled, rising and beaming.
The title made my neck hot, and without looking down, I knew a flush was climbing up my chest and pinking my cheeks. I breathed deeply, commanding it to cease, and extended a hand to the man.
He bowed again, kissing my hand with great flourish. “The birds are molting, my king. As you know, it makes them irritable. I’ve hooded many of the falcons, but I would keep a good distance,” he warned, and Tiras nodded agreeably. Genuflecting, Hashim retreated down the long aisle and through a tall door, leaving us to do what we wished.
We moved through the rows of captive birds, but my eyes kept moving to the heavy beams that supported the upper floor, to the drafty corners where an eagle, who was really a frightened boy, could huddle and hide.
“I still come here sometimes, when I change,” Tiras said quietly. “Hashim is a good man. Gentle. He is always glad to see me. He believes he has tamed an eagle, and even gave me a name.” We stopped near the stairs to the loft where the pigeons were kept and turned to retrace our steps.
Mikiya? The name was simply a nod to our earlier conversation, but the burning sensation rose in my throat again, and I wondered if I was growing ill. I touched it gingerly, but the discomfort was already beginning to ease.
“Mikiya,” Tiras repeated, his voice a whisper. Then he shook his head. “No. Hashim calls me Stranger. More and more, that is what I’m becoming.”
The day of the nuptials dawned crisp and clear, and the city came awake with a rush. For most of the day, I was prepped and buffed and smoothed and tweaked, and finally, wrapped in a dress of the most luxurious, pale blue silk I’d ever seen. When the preparations were complete, the women stood back and nodded gravely, like arrogant artisans. Their work was done. They retreated with instructions that I “not touch anything” until the guard arrived to escort me to the castle gates to begin my procession.
But no one came.
The bells began to chime, a signal for the start of the ceremonial march, and I debated leaving my room and descending the stairs on my own, impatient that I must always wait for men. I imagined myself beginning the slow walk to the cathedral through the gathering crowd without following the proper protocols. But ceremony was everything to Jeruvians, and I dismissed the thought immediately. Something was amiss.
Then the whispers began, floating up from the streets below through my balcony doors. I cursed the ability that drew the conversations to my consciousness, as if the words belonged to me. They swarmed my tower room and stung me like angry hornets.
There is not going to be a wedding.
The king has changed his mind.
Her father objects.
Lady Ariel from Firi should be queen. She is the most beautiful woman in all of Jeru.
The Lady from Corvyn doesn’t even speak.
She’s a mute, poor thing.
The king is missing . . . again.
Buzzing, buzzing, buzzing. The talk was incessant and painful. I shut the balcony doors and opened a book, replacing the gossip that whirred in my brain with something of my choosing, but I couldn’t concentrate, and I was suddenly afraid. I heard boots in the hallway, and Kjell rapped on the door before entering alone.
He was decked out in his finest, his boots gleaming, his hair slicked back from his handsome face, but he looked especially grim.
“I can’t find Tiras, Lady Corvyn.”
I set my book aside and rose with as much calm as I could muster, and I stated the obvious.
He couldn’t change.
He grimaced. He didn’t like that I knew the truth, yet his relief warred with his fear. He’d borne the brunt of the king’s secret for a very long time.
“I believe that is what has happened,” he agreed softly.
Have you seen him?
His gaze lifted, and I knew he understood. I was asking if he’d seen the eagle.
“No.”
It is not against Jeruvian law to kill such a bird. What if something happened to him?
Kjell swore and stomped to the balcony, flinging the doors wide as if begging Tiras to fly through.
“Can you call to him? The way you did to the Volgar?”
I was stunned that he knew and wondered how many of Tiras’s warriors had heard me beckon the enemy in Kilmorda.
He is more man than an animal. The Volgar are simple. Tiras is not.
“He is not simple. But he is a bird as often as he is a man. Maybe more often,” he murmured, and my heart grew heavier in my chest.
I walked to the open doors and raised my face to the sky. Then I closed my eyes and thought of the white-capped bird with the sooty black feathers. I saw the span of his wings with the fiery red tips, unlike any bird I’d ever seen, and I asked those wings to bring him to me.
I concentrated on the word he’d given me when I’d followed him from branch to branch, wall to wall, as we walked through the night to the cottage in the woods. Home, he’d said. Home.
Come home, Tiras, I urged. Come home.
But I felt nothing. No tendrils of connection, no whisper in the wind, no heartbeat. No warmth. The sun was beginning to sink toward the western hills, and wherever Tiras was, he was not within my reach.
I cannot feel him. If he is close by, he is not a bird.
Kjell swore, stepping back from the balcony doors and drawing me with him.
“The lords are insisting that the procession begin.”
They know the king is unaccounted for?
“Yes. And they want to publicly humiliate him.”
And me.
“They don’t care about you, Milady.”
Of course not.
“Their goal is to take down the king, by whatever means necessary, and tradition dictates that you must walk in order to be queen.”
I don’t understand.
“The bans have been read. The date set. The bells have tolled, the hour has come. You are to walk, before sunset, through the crowds and kneel at the altar in the cathedral and wait. If the king does not arrive, you will not be queen. Ever. It is a public statement that the king has . . . changed his mind.”
And if I don’t walk?
“It is an open declaration that you are refusing the king and his kingdom. The result is the same. You will never be queen.”
But I will have some dignity.
“Yes.” His mouth tightened. “And the king will be publicly rejected. This is what the council is hoping you will do.”
My father will retain his position.
“Tiras will be shamed. You will never be queen, and therefore, your father is still next in line for the throne. Brilliant, really.”
Frustration and futility beaded on his skin. The room was warm, and Kjell’s tension made it warmer.