Alianor was six years old when her mother died, and for three days afterward she refused to speak to anyone but a horse.
The horse was a grey mare named Lark, too old for war and too sensible for sorrow. She belonged to Lady Maerisse’s riding stable, though the lady no longer rode her, nor anything else, because Lady Maerisse lay under cloth of gold in the chapel of Saint Merrow and all the candles in the palace could not persuade her to rise.
The palace at Tarsenne had filled with black wool, murmured prayers, boiled wine, wet cloaks, and noble relatives who moved softly until they reached corners, where they began to speak of dowers, wardships, household appointments, memorial offices, remarriage, and the health of Duke Rydric. Bells sounded until even the servants flinched when silence came.
Alianor escaped to the stable on the second morning and was found beneath Lark’s neck with both arms around the mare’s foreleg.
Father Aldemar, then younger and less lined, knelt in clean grief at a careful distance and told her that Lady Maerisse had gone into the fullness of the Revealed Light.
Alianor stared at him.
“Your mother is with Elyon,” he said gently.
“Then bring her back.”
“That is not given to us.”
“Then do not tell me where she is if you cannot fetch her.”
The groom near the stall door crossed himself in the Sign of the Revealed Star and looked ready to flee.
Rydric came himself after that.
He entered the stable in a dark mantle, bareheaded, hair uncombed, grief sharpened into impatience because he had never known what to do with a wound he could not ride against. The grooms bowed. The mare flicked one ear. Alianor tightened her grip on the horse’s leg.
“Daughter,” Rydric said.
She buried her face in Lark’s winter coat.
“Come out.”
No answer.
“Alianor.”
The mare shifted. Alianor shifted with her.
Rydric’s jaw hardened. Men had surrendered cities when he spoke their names in that tone. His daughter did not surrender the horse.
He stepped closer. “You will not spend your life in a stable.”
Alianor spoke into the mare. “I might.”
A groom made a strangled sound and turned it into a cough.
Rydric looked at him.
The groom remembered urgent business involving a bucket.
Rydric crouched, which made his sword knock against the straw. He seemed too large for the stall, too armed, too alive beside the child and the old mare and the smell of hay. For a moment his face changed. The anger loosened. Something helpless came near the surface and was refused entry.
“Your mother would not have wanted this,” he said.
Alianor lifted her head. Her eyes were dry. That had begun to worry people more than tears would have.
“Then ask her,” she said.
Rydric flinched as if the child had put a knife exactly where armor ended.
Later, people would say Duke Rydric bore his lady’s death with courage. They would remember the black mantle, the offices endowed, the alms ordered, the hard clean lines of his face beside the bier. They would not remember that in the stable he rose too quickly, as if height could save him from a six-year-old’s demand.
“She needs discipline,” he told Father Aldemar outside the stall. He did not whisper. Great men often forgot children heard best when adults pretended they were furniture. “Horses. Air. A small hawk. Something to make her look outward.”
“She needs mourning,” Aldemar said.
“She has it. The whole palace has it. We are drowning in it.”
“My lord—”
“She will not become a shrine candle.”
Alianor did not know then what a shrine candle was except something small, obedient, and consumed.
On the third day, Queen Aurélise of Aurenne arrived.
Her litter entered the outer court beneath a rain of pale winter sun, followed by twenty riders, three sumpter mules, two chaplains, four southern ladies, a physician, six clerks, a chest of mourning silk, a chest of household rolls, and one green parrot in a cage, which had learned to curse in a dialect no one admitted understanding. The palace, which had been grieving in circles, straightened at once.
Aurélise had been queen before Rydric had been anything but a furious red-haired boy. She had been wife, prisoner, regent, patron, mother, rival, judge, and song. Her freedom was never as simple as open doors; men had called her released when they meant watched, honoured when they meant contained, and consulted when they meant feared. Yet she carried age not as decline but as jurisdiction. Her veil was black. Her gown was black. Her rings were old gold and garnet. Her eyes were the grey of a river before flood.
Rydric met her in the hall beneath the antlered lamps.
He bowed. Not deeply enough for a subject. Too deeply for a son who wished to believe he had ceased being one.
“Mother.”
“My son.”
They kissed the air beside one another’s cheeks. Neither touched more than custom required.
“I would have come sooner,” Aurélise said, “had your roads improved since my last complaint.”
“My roads are excellent.”
“For goats, perhaps. One mule lost a shoe and my physician lost confidence in creation.”
Rydric’s mouth moved despite himself. Then the grief returned, and with it the old quarrel that lived between them like a third bloodline.
“She is in the stable,” he said.
“I was told.”
“She will not weep.”
“She is my blood. We breed tears into the liver and call it courage.”
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Aurélise removed her gloves and gave them to a lady. “Where is the child’s women’s household?”
Rydric said nothing.
Aurélise looked at him.
“She has nurses,” he finally said.
“She has servants. I asked after a household.”
“She is six.”
“All the more reason.”
“She needs hardening, not coddling.”
The old queen’s gaze did not sharpen. It did not need to.
“The woman you made my daughter-in-law lies three days dead,” she said. “Your child has taken refuge with a mare. Your court is already counting offices around the empty chair. And you speak to me of hardening.”
Rydric’s hand tightened on the arm of his chair. It was not a throne, only the high seat in the mourning hall, but men had died for less wood.
“She was my lawful wife. And I am her father.”
“Yes,” Aurélise said. “That is why I have come before you make another mistake.”
A little sound crossed the hall: silk shifting, breath caught, a clerk’s pen arrested above a tablet.
Rydric rose.
He was tall, broad, splendid in black, a lord whom men would one day follow into weather and blood. Aurélise remained where she stood, smaller, older, and so thoroughly unimpressed that the distance between them seemed to belong to her.
“You forget yourself,” he said.
“No,” she replied. “I remember you.”
That wounded him. Alianor, hidden behind the carved screen of the gallery above, saw it land though she did not yet understand why. She had crept there from the stable because the palace had begun to sound interesting.
Rydric looked up once, perhaps sensing movement. Alianor ducked. When she peered again through the vinework, Aurélise had turned slightly, as if she had known all along where the child hid.
“Bring her,” the old queen said.
No one moved.
Aurélise lifted one hand. A lady in dark blue slipped away.
Alianor fled before they could fetch her, but she had short legs and grief had made her clumsy. They caught her in the passage by the linen room, where she kicked a footman hard enough to make him yelp and tried to bite the blue lady’s wrist.
The lady did not scream. She twisted her sleeve between Alianor’s teeth and said, “Very good, Highness. Save the flesh for enemies.”
That was Sivelle of Tarsen.
She was eleven years old, narrow as a reed and solemn as a little abbess, with brown skin warmed by the southern sun, black hair braided tight, and eyes that seemed to count everything twice. She wore a dark gown too plain for vanity and too well cut for poverty. At her belt hung scissors, keys too small to open anything important, a needle case, and a little purse embroidered with a silver fox.
Alianor released the sleeve.
“You are not a lady,” she said.
Sivelle inspected the bite marks in the cloth. “My father says I am when it costs him money.”
“Who is your father?”
“Lord Arnaut of Tarsen. He owns three towers, two debts, and a temper that frightens hens.”
“I hate hens.”
“So do I.”
This seemed promising.
“Do you hate girls?” Alianor asked.
“When they are foolish.”
“I hate all of them.”
“Then you are broad-minded in your hatred.”
Alianor did not know whether she had been insulted. She decided not to like it, but kept walking beside Sivelle because the older girl did not hold her arm and because anyone with scissors might be useful.
In the hall, Rydric looked from the bite-marked sleeve to his daughter’s dry eyes.
“What is this?” he asked.
Aurélise answered before anyone else could. “This is Sivelle of Tarsen. She will enter Alianor’s household.”
“No,” Rydric said.
The word struck the hall cleanly.
Sivelle lowered her gaze. Alianor looked up.
Aurélise took the child’s chin in two fingers and turned her face toward the light. Alianor endured it because queens and horses were the only creatures she had met who did not ask permission from grief.
“She has your jaw,” Aurélise said.
“She has her mother’s eyes,” Rydric replied.
“And your habit of making a fortress of whatever hurts.”
“I said no.”
“You often do, when you mean ‘explain slowly.’”
Rydric’s face darkened. “I will not have one of your southern girls planted in my daughter’s chamber.”
“Planted? She is not a fig tree.”
“She is yours.”
“For the moment. That is a recommendation.”
“She will carry tales.”
“Of course. To me, if she has sense. To your enemies, if you leave her hungry. To your daughter, if you leave her alone.”
Rydric stepped nearer. “Alianor does not need another woman to teach her sighing.”
Aurélise’s eyes moved over him, and for a heartbeat the great hall seemed to shrink into some older room where he had once been a boy with mud on his boots and rage in his throat.
“No,” she said. “She needs one to teach her silence.”
Alianor did not like that. Silence was what adults wanted from children when they feared answers.
Rydric said, lower, “You mean to rule her through one of your girls.”
“I mean to keep her from being ruled by fools through grief.”
“You mean me. You mean to punish me.”
Aurélise did not soften. That was the cruelty of her love: it did not bother to disguise itself as comfort.
“I mean courts,” she said. “If you hear yourself named inside that word, improve.”
Rydric laughed once, without mirth. “You come to my house, three days after my wife is laid out, and instruct me in fatherhood.”
“I come because your wife is laid out. I did not bless the match, and I will not pretend grief has made me a liar. I instruct you because no one else dares.”
“I am her father.”
“You were my son first.”
His eyes flashed. “And your prisoner long enough?”
There it was: something old, older than Alianor, older than the dead woman under chapel candles. The word prisoner did not belong in the mourning hall, but once spoken it seemed to find chairs waiting.
Aurélise’s face changed very little.
“You mistake memory for accusation,” she said.
“No. I learned that from you.”
For the first time, Alianor saw the old queen wounded. Not much. Only enough that one ringed hand closed over the other.
Then Aurélise looked down at Alianor.
“A motherless princess must never be alone among men who call themselves loyal,” she said.
Rydric’s mouth tightened. “You will make her suspicious of every hand.”
“I will help her notice which hands are empty.”
“She needs courage.”
“She has courage. See? She has not wept because all of you are waiting to decide what her tears mean.”
Alianor stared at her.
No one had said that. No one had come close.
Aurélise crouched, slowly, because age made ceremony of the body’s negotiations. Her jewels clicked softly. Her eyes were level with Alianor’s.
“Child,” she said, “do you want to cry?”
Alianor looked at Rydric. He was watching too closely.
“No.”
“Good. Do not, then.”
Father Aldemar made a faint distressed movement.
Aurélise ignored him. “But eat. Sleep. Learn who enters your room. Learn which women have keys. Learn what men say when they think a girl is counting stitches. Grief is a country. You may not remain there unarmed.”
Alianor swallowed.
“Will she teach me swords?” she asked, nodding toward Sivelle.
Rydric made a sound.
Sivelle answered before wisdom advised silence. “No, Highness. I am not allowed to hold one.”
Alianor considered her.
“What can you teach?”
“To hide letters in hems. To tell silk from dyed linen and lies from courtesy. To hear conversations while pouring wine. To keep pins in my sleeve. To make a priest think a question was his own. To bleed on dark cloth rather than pale. Some Tarseni songs. Bad ones, if you prefer.”
Alianor’s interest sharpened despite her determination not to show it.
“Can you keep secrets?”
Sivelle’s gaze flicked to Aurélise, then to Rydric, then back to the child. She seemed to understand that the hall itself was a mouth.
“No,” she said.
Alianor stepped back, betrayed at once.
Sivelle continued, “Secrets rot if kept for their own sake. They make people foolish. I can keep people.”
Aurélise smiled triumphantly.
Rydric saw the smile and knew himself outmaneuvered. He looked at Sivelle as though she were a small gate left open in a wall he had not known he was defending.
“You will serve my daughter,” he said.
Sivelle curtsied. “Yes, Your Grace.”
“You will obey her.”
“When obedience does not endanger her.”
Alianor’s eyes widened. Rydric’s did not, but the hall seemed to lean closer.
“That is a bold condition,” he said.
Sivelle kept her head bowed. “My father says Tarseni women are born with too many conditions and not enough land.”
Aurélise made no effort to hide her amusement.
Rydric looked at his mother. “You chose this one for her tongue.”
“I chose this one because she did not flatter me when I asked whether my veil made me look old.”
“What did she say?”
Sivelle answered, still bowed. “That the veil had taken no vow to lie.”
This time Baudren, standing near the hall pillars and younger by many scars than he would be at Durnstain, barked a laugh before smothering it.
Rydric stared at Sivelle.
Then, despite grief, despite fury, despite whatever old chain still ran between him and Aurélise, he laughed too.
When it ended, he looked at Alianor. For one brief moment he seemed as lost as she was. Then he became lord again.
“Very well,” he said. “Let her stay.”
Aurélise rose with care. “How generous of you to permit what is already arranged.”
“Mother.”
“My son.”
Their eyes held.
Alianor reached for Sivelle’s sleeve without thinking. Not the bitten one. The other. Sivelle did not look down at the small fingers gripping the cloth.
“Will you come to the stable?” Alianor asked her.
“If the horse does not object.”
“Lark only bites priests.”
“Then she is discerning.”
Father Aldemar sighed.
Aurélise watched the two girls go: the younger with her chin high and grief hidden under command, the elder already matching her pace to the child’s without appearing to do so. Alianor glanced back once and saw Rydric’s face unguarded.
He looked afraid.
She did not understand then that love could make prisoners of kings before any enemy touched them.
Sivelle tugged lightly at her sleeve.
Alianor looked at her.
Then she slowed.
Behind them, in the mourning hall, Queen Aurélise of Aurenne began speaking to Rydric about household rolls, dowry rights, chapel endowments, and the dangerous emptiness of women’s rooms after death. Her voice followed them down the passage, calm as winter water over stones.