“Our young prince is troubled these days,” he heard old Porto say as he passed near his friends’ table. Sir Astrian’s reply was lost in the noises of a drunken argument outside as Morgan pushed the door open, but he did hear the others laugh.
Morgan realized long before he reached the residence that the last thing he wanted to do was go to bed, but he had left himself with very little chance for company or diversion. Most of the Erkynguard were either at the Red Drake banquet or on duty. The keep’s several guardrooms were empty except for a few old veterans nursing their bones in front of the fire, and he already owed money to the participants of the one dice game he found going on at the Nearulagh Gate guardhouse.
As a strategist, I’m a complete failure, he thought to himself. Trying to avoid my grandparents, I have maneuvered myself into a night of boredom and loneliness.
Even as he crossed into the castle’s Middle Bailey he could hear the festivities down at the town hall in Erchester. From the shouts and laughter and off-key songs floating on the wind, Sir Zakiel’s comrades in arms were swiftly working their way through the claret. Most of the Hayholt must be with them, Morgan thought, because they certainly were not to be seen anywhere here. All around him the shops and houses were shuttered for the night.
Morgan was still in the grip of a prickly anger that even the cool evening had not soothed, and for some reason the silence of the nighttime castle was nettling him more than the sounds of distant merriment from Main Row. For the third or fourth time since entering the Hayholt he considered returning to Erchester, not to attend the banquet at the town hall but to go in search of some less public entertainments, but though he knew the gate guards would be perfectly happy to let him out again despite the late hour, he also knew word of it would eventually get back to his grandparents.
A memory from his childhood poked at him as he made his way through the quiet, narrow streets, of an evening like this when everybody seemed to be somewhere else, a night when Morgan had found himself all alone—a Midsummer’s Eve in the time just before his father had fallen ill and died. Young Morgan, seven years old, had been recovering from warmwater fever after spending more than a sennight in bed. His mother was ill with the same complaint, but where Morgan’s only bedside companion was an old nurse named Cloda, Princess Idela, in her own chambers, was surrounded by ladies-in-waiting and attended by frequent visitors.
On that night, with his health mostly returned, the prince had found himself bored and in a bad temper, so he waited until Cloda had fallen asleep in a chair beside the bed, then dressed and made his way to his mother’s rooms. She had been horrified to see him, certain that although he had just gone through the same fever, he would make himself ill all over again, and so Idela had made her ladies send him away. At a loss, Morgan wandered through the residence, desperate for distraction. Because he had been in bed so long, he did not remember it was Midsummer’s Eve, and was puzzled and even a little worried to find everybody gone.
At last, he had left the residence and made his way across the innermost keep to his father’s chambers in the Old Granary Tower—a bit less of a tower than the name indicated, really more of a roundhouse built against the wall of the Inner Keep and had turned out to be too damp to use as an actual granary. Prince John Josua kept the door firmly locked, and Morgan often had to bang on it over and over until his father finally heard him and came down, distracted and irritated. In truth, despite what he had told Porto, there had only been one time his father truly had not recognized him, and in his last year John Josua had always seemed so impatient to get back to his studies that Morgan had truly felt he might as well be some faceless servant.
But on that night, in that strange, seemingly uninhabited version of the Hayholt, his father never came, though Morgan thumped on the heavy timbers until his knuckles were sore. At last, more out of annoyance than anything else, he had yanked on the door and—to his astonishment—it swung open.
With no sign of guards and no response to any of his calls, Morgan was caught between excitement at what was suddenly being presented to him after so many years of curiosity and the knowledge that his father—who never let anyone into his private chambers in the tower—would certainly disapprove. But something about the oddness of the evening and his enforced and overlong bed rest had made him feel more adventurous than usual, and so he had climbed the tower stairs by the flickering light of the torches ensconced at each landing, all the way to his father’s chambers at the top.
That door was also unlocked, which somehow confirmed in Morgan’s mind the idea that he was meant by some superior power to keep exploring, so he slipped inside. A lantern was burning on one of the tables, as though his father had only just stepped out. After so many years of wondering what his father did up there, it had turned out to be a bit disappointing. Except for its great size, the chamber did not look much different than his father’s retiring room back in the residence. Several tables and benches stood around the room, and every surface was piled high with heavy old books and musty, ancient scrolls. And almost all of them seemed to be in use, propped open to a certain page or partly unrolled and then weighted by a smooth stone or another heavy book.
None of the volumes seemed to be the kind that interested Morgan, like tales of knightly adventure or histories of war and other exciting subjects, and very few were even in a language he could read, so after a certain amount of perfunctory exploration he went out again. If there was nothing worth looking at in his father’s chambers, it was clearly not in his best interest to be caught and punished for the incursion.
On the ground floor he had paused, distracted slightly by a certain clamminess to the air, unusual for summer, and also by the presence of an odor he could not identify but seemed quite unlike anything he had smelled outside or on the upper floors. To his surprise, he now saw another set of stairs that led down below the ground floor. He had missed them when he came in, because they were tucked behind the stone spiral of the stairs he had just descended. A kind of wooden frame had been set across them, not to keep people out, Morgan guessed, so much as to prevent someone’s stumbling into the dark stairwell by accident. He leaned over and breathed deeply. What came to him was not just damp, he realized, but something stranger, something that smelled . . . old. He did not know precisely what that meant, but his curiosity had been seized and he was just about to lift the wooden slats out of the way when the main tower door grated open, and he looked up in surprise to see his father’s tall, angular form looming in the doorway.
Prince John Josua had made a strange spectacle, swaying unsteadily, eyes wide with shock. “Morgan?” he had said, and his words were slurred. “By God, boy, is that you? What are you doing here?” A scattering of rose petals were strewen in John Josua’s disordered, dark hair and on his shoulders, and Morgan remembered that it was Midsummer’s Eve, that the castle was doubtless so quiet because most of the inhabitants were out celebrating at the bonfires along the Hayclif.
Before Morgan could say anything, John Josua saw that the boy was leaning with his hands on the wooden gateway laid over the descending stairs. Before Morgan could speak, John Josua’s eyes narrowed, and his expression changed. “What are you doing? You are never to come in here, and you are never, never to go anywhere near those stairs! You could fall and be killed!”
Morgan had tried to protest, but before he could say anything his father had grabbed him and yanked him away from the stairwell so forcefully that Morgan had lost his footing and tumbled to the floor. John Josua, all beard and hair and wild eyes like a madman in the street, had then yanked Morgan up onto to his feet.
“Never come in here again!” his father had shouted. He smelled of wine and bonfire smoke. “It is too perilous for a child! Where are the guards? I’ll have their heads for this. Is everybody around me a fool?”
Then, with no further words, he had carried Morgan to the front door of the roundhouse tower and set him down on the porch, then slammed the heavy door shut behind him.
The two of them never spoke of that night, and by the time Midsummer came again his father was gone and Morgan would never speak to him again about anything, at least not in this world.
? ? ?
He had almost forgotten where he was, wandering lost in memories toward the gate to the Inner Bailey, when someone spoke behind him.
“Look! Qina, it is our friend Morgan!”
He turned to see Little Snenneq and his betrothed hurrying after him across the commons. Snenneq had spread his arms wide. “We were about to go back to our beds, but here you are! Did Binabik, my father-in-law to-be, send you to find us?”
Morgan sighed. “No. I was just out walking.”