“Grandfather said if you wanted something to eat before your journey, you should have come down to eat when everyone else was having theirs.”
“Grandfather would say that, yes.” He scowled, then saw Lillia’s offended expression. “But I’m sure he didn’t mean nobody could go to the kitchen and see if anything was . . . lying about. Just going to waste, if you see what I mean.”
She gave him another disapproving look. “That would be stealing.”
Morgan sighed. “Someday, I am going to be the ruler of this place, and you will be a most important lady. All this will belong to us.”
She stared, sensing a trick of some kind. “So?”
“So if you find some food for me in the kitchen, it won’t be stealing. I’ll just be borrowing it from myself. You see that, don’t you?”
Her brow wrinkled, but at last she got up. “You won’t lock the door like you always do while I’m gone, will you?”
“No, but if you take too long, I’ll be downstairs having an audience with Grandfather and Grandmother. So hurry!”
Lillia looked at him carefully, not quite sure he was telling the truth, but at last she turned and headed for the door. “You promise, remember. Don’t lock the door.”
“I won’t. But hurry yourself, Pigling. I’m famished!”
For long moments after she had gone out, Morgan just sat on the edge of the bed enjoying the quiet, but something was tugging at his heart. He was going to miss his sister, he realized, and the thought gave his heart a painful squeeze. He hadn’t thought about it until now, but it was true. He was going to miss the castle and the city too, of course, miss his friends and his favorite haunts, and even his mother and his grandparents, no matter what they thought of him. But most of all, he was going to miss that small and difficult girl.
? ? ?
His mother Princess Idela was in her chambers with her circle of ladies, sewing and gossiping. Even before noon it was another hot day, and one of the younger chambermaids walked around them with a large fan, cooling them.
Morgan kneeled and took Idela’s cool hand, pressed it to his lips. “I give you good morning, Mother.”
“I am devastated,” she announced, although she did not truly sound as if it were so. “I do not know what to say, except that I will not rest until you’ve returned again, my dearest son.”
“It should not be too long. At least I hope not. Count Eolair said we should be back before the end of summer.”
“Oh, and what a terrible thing that was! To think someone would try to harm him. That poor old man! How is the dear count this morning?”
Morgan clenched his teeth, but smiled. “I don’t know, Mother. I have not been downstairs yet. I came to say goodbye to you first.”
“What a good son.” She turned, smiling to her circle. “Can anyone wonder I will miss him so?”
The ladies all nodded and murmured and smiled back at him. Some of the noblewomen who surrounded his mother were scarcely older than Morgan himself, but although many of them were pretty, they seemed oddly beyond his reach or even his understanding, as though they belonged to an alien race, like the Sitha woman he and Eolair were taking home.
“I am as you have raised me, Mother.”
“Ah, ah!” she said. “I cannot take the blame for everything. Some of your adventures have more to do with the rough company you keep than anything I taught you.”
He tried to smile. “Perhaps. In any case, the others will be waiting for me downstairs—we are to leave soon if we are to make Woodsall by dark.”
His mother shook her head. “Oh, I hate to think of you traveling in the Aldheorte, or even near it. That is a place of evil repute. Promise to say your prayers at morning and nightfall, no matter what happens, and keep the Holy Tree around your neck always. Promise!”
“I promise.”
“Good. Because even in these days of peace, the Devil is at work in the world. Here, I have a gift for you to take with you.” She bent and felt carefully through the items in her sewing basket until she found it. It was a Book of the Aedon, small but beautifully bound. “This was my own mother’s,” she said. “She gave it to me when she knew I would go away to Erchester to be married. She thought the city was a hive of sin, with robbers in every alley.”
“She wasn’t far wrong.”
His mother let out a most surprising giggle. “I was never allowed to find out. You don’t suppose a young bride-to-be like myself was permitted to roam the city, do you? Especially a duke’s daughter. Not without guards and chaperones, at least.” She sounded almost wistful. “It might have been exciting . . .” She recovered the thread of her thought. “In any case, you must keep this with you at all times. It was made by the monks of St. Yistrin’s and it will keep you safe. And you must promise me to read a little from it each day, when you have finished your riding. Promise!”
Morgan was beginning to lose track of all the things he was promising the women of his family. “Of course, Mother.” He took the book, then leaned forward. When she lifted her cheek to him, he kissed it. “Thank you. I will think of you whenever I see it.”
“Don’t just look at it! Read it!” She said it with a curiously powerful emphasis that he did not understand.
“As I said, of course. I will.” He straightened up. “I really must go.”
“Tell Count Eolair he must take good care of you. You are precious, and not just because you are the heir. You are precious to me.”
Morgan nodded, but he knew there was no threat in the world, not even a fire-breathing dragon or a company of Norns, that could ever make him tell Count Eolair to take good care of him because he was precious to his mother.
He bowed to the ladies, who smiled and said quiet, gracious things, then he kissed his mother’s hand once more and went out.
“Every morning, every night!” she called after him.
“I will!” he called back. When he finally reached the sanctuary of the hall he tucked the Book of Aedon into his shirt, under his jerkin. His grandmother’s holy book. Was there some kind of a conspiracy among the women to make him a proper man? Or to keep him from becoming one? Morgan couldn’t guess.
? ? ?
He found his grandfather in the throne hall, seated in his chair instead of on the royal throne, something Morgan always found confusing and irritating. What point was there to having a throne in the first place, let alone a legendary one made from the bones of an actual dragon, if you never used it?
When I am king, I will never sit in anything else. A dark thought flitted across Morgan’s mind. If it comes to be, that is. If the troll’s fortune-telling was mistaken.
Thinking of Snenneq brought back the night atop Hjeldin’s Tower. A part of him wanted to confess everything to his grandparents, the open hatch, the hairless specter in red, but it was all beginning to seem unreal, like a bad dream. Had he seen the phantom before he hit his head, or after he had stunned himself? And if he told the tale, he knew his grandfather would be even angrier. He would send men up the tower to open it up, and when they found nothing the Hayholt would be full of laughing tales of “Prince Morgan’s ghost.” In the light of day, he now felt more and more certain that the specter must only have been bad air from the long-sealed tower and the disorder of his own rattled brains. Still, a part of him wondered whether he should tell someone.
His grandfather was talking to Eolair, who sat beside him in the queen’s seat, a dispensation obviously given him because of the bandaged wound just beneath his collarbone. The great hall was otherwise empty except for a few guards in the shadows, a strange emptiness for a room that was usually as active as a small city.
“Ah, good, you’re here,” said the king when he saw him. “No, don’t kneel, lad, come here and join us.” He turned back to the count. “And Tiamak and his lady are certain?”
Eolair smiled wearily. He was a bit wan, but looked otherwise hale. “Yes, they are certain. No one of the blows was more than a cut. Bloody, but mostly harmless.”
“Harmless? Not from that puddle of blood I saw in the forehall. A child could swim in it. You are lucky it happened here, where your wounds could be tended.”
“Beg pardon, Majesty, Count Eolair,” said Morgan, “but I have heard only a little of what happened. I’m glad to see you well, though, my lord. Are you truly well enough to ride?”
“It was only a shallow wound, praise the gods. It startled me more than anything, and the struggling had already made me light-headed. Today’s and tomorrow’s travel will be on good royal roads. I will be well.”
“What madman did this to you?”
Eolair carefully shook his head. “A Hernystirman who had been working for some time in the castle bake house. He was quiet and kept to himself. Nobody heard him say anything against me or anyone else. He was in distress, and I tried to help him. I do not even know if it was only me he wished to harm—he could not have known when I would be coming.”