“We won’t forget, Uncle,” said Miriamele. “We will never forget.”

“Good.” He closed his eyes again. “Good. All is good . . .”

When they could see he was sleeping they left him, with Grimbrand still sitting at his father’s bedside. The two priests had reappeared as if by magic, and were again kneeling at the foot of the bed, murmuring the words of the Exsequis.

•   •   •

Simon did not know what time it was, only that the midnight bells had rung long ago, drawing him up from sleep for a moment. He thought he had been having the dream of burning that had troubled him so many nights in the last months, but all he could remember for certain was a face made of smoke, a face that alternately wept and laughed and spoke to him in a tongue he had never heard.

“Who’s there?” He sat up, feeling for the dagger he kept at his bedside, but then remembered he was not in his own bed, not even in his own country. “Who is it?”

“Only me, Majesty. Tiamak.” The little man came farther into the room. “You heard me speaking to the guards. Is the queen asleep?”

Simon looked at Miriamele, who lay sprawled in the covers like an exhausted swimmer. “She is. Should I wake her?”

“I leave it to you, Majesty. Simon. But I have news.”

For the first time, Simon realized there was something strange about Tiamak’s voice. “What news?” But Tiamak had been crying again, and Simon thought he knew.

“Duke Isgrimnur. That good old man . . . he died an hour ago. His son has just told me. Forgive me for disturbing you, but I thought you would want to know. I thank She Who Waits to Take All Back that we were in time to see him once more.”

Tiamak went out. Simon looked at his sleeping wife. Suddenly the weight of the great old castle around him, of Rimmersgard itself, foreign and yet a part of him, as well as the expectations and fears of all their subjects in all the lands, seemed like a weight too heavy to bear. Even with Miriamele only inches away, Simon felt more lonely than he had felt in many years.

He wondered if he would ever sleep well again this side of the grave. Perhaps those who had gone on, like Isgrimnur, were to be envied after all.

9 Heart of the Kynswood

Lord Chancellor Pasevalles had spent most of his morning listening to a group of fat, wealthy merchants complaining about Countess Yissola of Perdruin and her attempts to wrest control of shipping in Erkynlandish waters back from the Northern Alliance. To hear the merchants speak, the lady was part demon, part pirate, and the worst parts of both. He had done everything he could to mollify these men, but what they really seemed to want was to complain, as they had been doing for a long time, and clearly intended to continue doing. Pasevalles was trying to look interested, whatever mayhem he might have been privately contemplating, when the messenger from the Nearulagh Gate guardhouse found him. The merchants didn’t stop talking even when Pasevalles leaned aside to listen to the guardsman, and might not have noticed his divided attention if he had not loudly interrupted them.

“I’m sorry, my lords, but something very important has come up. I must leave you, but I promise that your concerns will all be relayed to the king and queen.”

“We do not merely want our concerns relayed, Lord Chancellor,” said the fattest merchant of all, Baron Tostig, who had bought his title from a distressed landowner with the profits of a lucrative trade in wool and hides. “We want the High Throne to do something!”

“And so the High Throne shall, I’m sure—but not before the king and queen return to Erkynland.” It was hard to keep patience with men like these, creatures intent only on their own ledger books and never on any larger issues. But Pasevalles had been well schooled in patience long before he had agreed to act as Hand of the Throne while Count Eolair traveled with the king and queen. “But I told you the truth, my lords—I am needed. Father Wibert, will you show the gentlemen out?”

As his secretary rounded up the herd of merchants—most of them still bitterly advertising their grievances—Pasevalles hurried to find his cloak. He made his way across the Inner Keep to the stables and borrowed one of the post-horses, fresh and already saddled. Only moments later he was riding out through the Nearulagh Gate, where the Erkynguard all gave him vigorous salutes. The chancellor was well-liked by the guardsmen, who knew he had taken their side when Duke Osric, the Lord Constable, would have reduced their numbers.

He cantered down Main Row, through the city, and out into the warren of streets that had sprung up there with the growth of Erchester. He could not help being impressed by the way the place had changed just during his time at the Hayholt. Twenty years earlier, Erchester had ended at the city walls, but today it sprawled far beyond them, with buildings both ramshackle and surprisingly well-made standing shoulder to shoulder all across Swertclif, although most of the roads were little more than well-worn tracks still muddy from the winter rains. When Pasevalles had arrived, some years after the Storm King’s War, no more than ten thousand people had lived in the castle and town, despite it being the capital of all Osten Ard. He felt sure that today there must be at least five times that many. Someday in the not too distant future the new residents outside the city proper would demand the protection of their own wall.

The only place in the outer city where houses were not squeezed higgledy-piggledy along the walls like mushrooms was on the western side, where the royal forest called the Kynswood lay stretched like a sleeping beast. It was becoming harder every year to keep the forest safe from Erchester’s growing population, not just to keep a few deer for the king’s and queen’s table, but to prevent the wholesale cutting of trees for timber, since the Kynswood was a great deal closer than the mighty Aldheorte. Only the previous Autumn the king and queen had been compelled to double the number of royal foresters, and even so King Simon hadn’t liked it much: “But what if a man is starving?” he had asked. “Should he be hung for trapping a hare?”

“If starving men know they can find a meal in the royal forest,” the queen had told him, “then there will soon be no hare in the forest, or deer, or boar, or anything.”

The king and queen made an interesting pair, Pasevalles thought, seemingly as different as husband and wife could be. Simon was proud of his lowly birth and upbringing, and if given his way would have spent most of his time in the stables or the kitchens, gossiping with the servants. But the queen had been born to the old royal house, and was comfortable with most of the privileges of wealth and noble blood. She was also very fierce about protecting what she felt was right: When she sat in judgment she was fair-minded, but in no way the soft touch for a sad story that her husband was.

Once he was beyond the outermost neighborhoods of Erchester, Pasevalles guided his mount off the Kynswood Road and down into the trees. He knew his secretary Wibert would be furious when he learned that the Lord Chancellor had gone outside the city without guards, but there were times when Pasevalles did not want to wait and this was one of them.

It was not easy to find the spot, but at last he saw a flash of red and white through the trees below him—the two rampant dragons, emblem of the royal house. He tied his horse to a branch and made his way down the slope. A pair of Erkynguards and a royal forester with a feather in his cap were waiting with a fourth man, a thin fellow in a ragged jerkin who looked as though he had been sleeping rough for some time.