Sons of the Falcon (The Falcons Saga) (5 page)

“You, wielding a quill?” Those
green-rimmed eyes were skeptical as Thorn gripped his brother’s hand.

“I can’t tell you how good it is to
have you home.” Kelyn decided he even meant it. “What brings you?”

Thorn’s eyebrows jumped. “You know
what brings me. Where is it?” He backed out of the study and headed upstairs to
the family quarters.

Kelyn trailed him, feeling smug.
“My daughter is not an ‘it’.”

Thorn ignored the baiting, paused on
the landing, head tilted, as if listening. Quiet filled the house.

“That’s rare,” Kelyn began. “Usually
I can hear her squalling clear down in my study.”

“Shh,” Thorn said, cutting him off.
He listened to the silence, then added, “You moved the nursery.”

How could he tell from the
stairwell? “Yes, Mother took that room. Better morning light, she said.”

Thorn topped the stairs and strode
unerringly to the right door. As if examining a secret hidden in a box, he
nudged it open and peered inside. Grieva hummed in her rocking chair. Despite
her formal, crisp black silk gown, her feet were bare, and her toes kept the
crib moving to the rhythm of the song. When she noticed the door opening, her
humming stopped, and she raised a finger to her lips. Thorn echoed the gesture
and tip-toed to the crib.

Grieva looked him over, surged from
the rocker, and threw her arm across the crib. “M’ lord, who is this?”

Kelyn had to admire her willingness
to place herself between his daughter and danger. “What, you don’t see the
resemblance? It’s not my fault my twin paints himself.”

“It isn’t paint,” Thorn replied
with an indignant sniff. “It’s magic. Now stand aside.”

Affronted, Grieva shuffled away and
glared at Kelyn as if he was to blame for Thorn’s intrusion. He could only
shrug in his defense.

Thorn leaned over the crib, flipped
back the corner of a blanket and smiled at the round pink face crowned with
black curls. “Pretty little thing.”

“Hush, m’ lord, we only just got
her to sleep.”

“Did you?” Thorn reached down into
the crib and lifted the swaddled bundle.

“On your head be it,” Grieva
snapped, wagging a finger at Kelyn.

“
Mine
?”

“You may go now,” Thorn told the
nanny, cradling his niece at half an arm’s length so he could examine her.

Grieva huffed, about-faced, and
swished out the door.

“I wasn’t aware you’d ever held a
baby,” Kelyn said and, as Grieva had warned him a hundred times, made sure
those fire-wielding hands supported his daughter’s head properly.

“Worry, worry. It’s not so
difficult. Now, let us see what we have here.” Thorn blinked and his eyes
seemed to focus on the air itself. What could those avedra eyes see? His gaze
traveled up and up toward the fifteen-foot ceiling, and he gaped a little. “Ah.
You might not be happy about this.” He offered an uncertain half-smile.

It took Kelyn only an instant to
catch on. “Goddess, you’ve got to be joking.”

“I wish I were. Last week Saffron
told me she felt a nexus—”

“A what?”

“A convergence, gathering of
magical essence.”

“That’s no clearer.”

“Never mind. She abandoned me for a
day or so. When she returned and told me where she’d been, I had to come see
for myself.”

Feelings of disappointment seeped
in unbidden. Kelyn could accept his brother’s strangeness, but for that same
strangeness to be lurking inside his own little girl? He’d had no reason to
think her anything but perfectly normal.

Thorn turned away quickly, and
Kelyn realized he’d not been able to hide his feelings fast enough. “You don’t
have to worry. I remember how Da slighted you. I won’t be guilty of the same
thing. I’ll spoil her rotten.”

Offering a smile, Thorn said, “How
could you not? What did you name her?”

“Carah,” Kelyn said, rolling his
eyes. “Rhoslyn got creative, you see. It’s her father’s name spelled
backwards.”

Thorn chuckled. “Harac would be
pleased. It’s a pretty name anyway. And fortuitous. Means ‘healer’ in the old
language. If our names have any bearing on our paths, then Her Grace chose
well.” Gazing on his niece, he added, “All right, I know you’re not sleeping.
Open up, lemme see.”

As if she understood the request, Carah’s
swollen eyelids squinted open. A delicate frown developed between traces of
eyebrows as her eyes tried to focus on her uncle and examine him in return.

“Aye, they’ll be blue.” A trace of
giddiness flitted across Thorn’s face.

“How can you tell already?”

“Elvish blue,” Thorn assured. “Just
like her Uncle Thorn’s.”

Not quite sure she liked the
comparison, Carah’s pink face crumpled up, and she inhaled for a wail.

“No, no,” Thorn said. “None of
that.” He tucked his niece into the crook of his arm, lowered his face close to
her own, and their eyes locked. Kelyn listened in vain for the message passing
between them. Carah didn’t cry.

“Can you stay around and do that
every hour or so?”

Thorn grinned and strolled the room
with her, whispering sweet nothings.

“Is
anything
difficult for
you?”

“Not for us,” Thorn answered, still
talking to the tiny ears. “We’re a genius, aren’t we?”

Carah cooed.

“She agrees with me.”

Kelyn scrubbed a hand over his
face. “Ach, don’t fill her head with that great pile of dragon shit.”

Thorn’s hand shot over Carah’s ear
and he folded himself into the rocker. “Da has a dirty mouth, yes. You just
listen to Uncle Thorn …”

Head spinning with his brother’s return
and the news he’d brought, Kelyn needed a moment to think, to breathe. He turned
to leave the two of them alone and nearly collided with Rhoslyn in the doorway.
She might have been gaping at a tiger who’d stalked into the nursery. That’s
right, Kelyn thought. She hadn’t seen Thorn since that day almost three years
ago when he’d stormed from Windhaven. Cold blue fire. Shattered glass raining
from the sky. Even now it pained Kelyn to remember.

“Grieva told me,” she whispered. “I
couldn’t believe it. How long has he been here?”

“Only just.”

“He looks so … is this how he
looked when he helped you in Fiera?”

Kelyn nodded. The four golden
stripes in Thorn’s dark hair gleamed bright in the afternoon sunlight.

“Does your mother know?”

The question comforted Kelyn somehow.
“I don’t think so.” Understandably, Alovi held a grudge against her absent son.
Every time his name came up in conversation, her eyes saddened.

Thorn overheard the whispering; his
glance lifted from Carah’s ten perfect toes and fell upon Rhoslyn. The rocking
chair broke its rhythm. It soon resumed, however, and the toes became the
object of interest again.

Kelyn had expected a bigger
reaction. A flustered, blushing reaction, a headlong flight from the house,
something
.
But Thorn’s serene expression changed not at all. He tucked Carah’s perfumed
little head under his chin, laid his head on the backrest, and appeared to doze
off.

Well, one way or another, Kelyn would
get a row out of somebody. He took Rhoslyn by the elbow to escort her out. “I need
to tell you something.”

~~~~

T
horn dreamed of the Light
again. For the first time, he didn’t drift in it alone. A beautiful little girl
drifted alongside him, laughing in delight. Wings the size of castles, seen and
then gone again, stroked with the soft sound of thunder, stirring the bright
clouds. The little girl reached for the wings, but she was so small and they so
far away. “They are not ours to touch,” Thorn told her, and the girl’s eyes
welled with disappointed tears.

He woke with a jolt. Kelyn stood
over him, a hand jostling his shoulder. Bundled on his chest, Carah had started
to fuss.

“How did Her Grace take the news?”
he asked.

“Better than I thought she would,
but that doesn’t mean she’s feeling friendly. Anyway, Mother found out you’re here.
She’s on her way. I don’t want her yelling at you in the nursery. Out.”

“Yelling?” Thorn handed off the
baby and climbed from the rocking chair. “Oh. Yes, I suppose she would.” He
wasn’t two steps into the corridor when he saw Alovi barreling down the
corridor, loam-dusted hands balled into fists, head lowered between her shoulders,
mouth a tight white line.

“You!” she shouted. “Get in here.”
She flung open a sitting room door and marched inside.

Thorn remembered the time he and
Kelyn had gotten too rambunctious in the solar on a rainy day and knocked over her
table of beloved herbs. Her reaction had looked much the same, and the
resulting sting on his rear had lasted all afternoon. With a glance, he
appealed to his brother for help.

“I can’t go into battle, I’ve got a
baby.”

“Some father you are, using her as
a shield.”

“Good luck.”

Thorn slinked into the parlor.
Alovi whipped off her weeding apron, balled it up, and tossed it into his face
the moment he rounded the door. “Three years and not a word from you! I lose
your father, then you disappear like a word tossed to the winds, and what am I
to think? I might have lost you, too. Mighty avedra, brokenhearted little boy,
you didn’t consider anyone but yourself, did you?”

His hands fidgeted with the apron. Pink
primroses were embroidered along the hem. “No, Mother, I didn’t.”

His honesty, his lack of an
argument, appeared to surprise her. She raised her chin. “And you wouldn’t have
come today if it weren’t for that child. Am I right?”

He sighed and sank onto a settee so
old and well-loved that the velvet had long vanished from the arms. “I wanted
to come home, Mother. But it was too awkward, too painful.”

Alovi crossed her arms, determined
to continue glaring and failing. “And now?”

“I’ve accepted it all.
Them
,
I mean. Are they happy?” He hadn’t wanted to ask, warned himself not to look
too closely and not to care. “I never thought they would be.”

Alovi’s green eyes narrowed
dangerously. “Yet you encouraged their marriage. Yes, Kelyn told me how you
showed up and urged him to see to his responsibility. Did you secretly hope to
see them miserable? Maybe
that
would have satisfied your sense of
vengeance.”

Thorn surged from the settee.
“Mother!”

“Well, I’m not sorry to see you
disappointed. There is a measure of peace in this house again, and if you mean
to turn that upside down, you can take yourself back to wherever you came
from.” Her chin trembled.

The sight of it broke his heart. He
cupped her earth-smeared and sweaty face in his hands. “That is not why I’ve
come. Carah is avedra.”

She went as still as stone between
his hands. “Oh, Mother’s mercy, I knew it.” She grasped his fingers, kissed
them, squeezed them with more strength than he thought she possessed. Perhaps
it was fear. Perhaps forgiveness. “From the first time I held her, I knew.
Maybe it was her eyes. They seemed to focus on things almost immediately. She seemed
to understand what she saw. It reminded me of you. Well, because of you, Kelyn
will be more understanding than your father was.”

“He said as much.”

She dropped his hands, inhaled
deeply, and seemed to grow several imposing inches. “Good. Does this mean
you’re staying?”

“For supper, at least.”

That was not the answer she wanted,
but it was all he could give. “So what am I to call you? Must I use the name
you chose for yourself?”

“Whatever you prefer, Mother.”

“How about Truant?”

~~~~

S
upper was an uneasy affair.
When Thorn showed up in Fiera to help Kelyn’s armies, the commanders had
behaved nervously around him, and he thought it vastly entertaining, even
humorous. Not so the tension at his brother’s dinner table. The reasons for it
were far more personal and painful.

The small dining room off the Great
Hall sat twelve. Kelyn occupied the head with his mother on his left and his brother
on his right. At the foot, Rhoslyn’s every gesture, every click of her fork,
every clink of her glass carried one curse or another. Feeling the storm clouds
swirling, Grieva urged little Kethlyn to eat and stop squirming and be quiet. He
was about to turn two, so food and quiet didn’t interest him. He was an
exceptionally beautiful child. The golden hair and blue eyes were a striking
and rare combination for a human. One day, he would draw girls like nectar drew
butterflies, and if he turned out to be anything like his parents, they would
have their share of scandal on their hands. Though nothing short of fire and
flood could have kept Thorn from snatching up his niece, he felt an unbidden
aversion toward his nephew. Watching Kethlyn over the rim of his goblet, Thorn
told himself,
It isn’t the boy’s fault
, but it didn’t help.

On Thorn’s right, Etivva paid the
uneasiness no mind. The shaddra’s shaven head reflected the colors of the
stained-glass lamps. Her undyed linen robes crinkled crisply as she reached for
the decanter of Doreli red and refilled Thorn’s goblet.

“You’re trying to get me drunk, so
I’ll tell you what you want to know,” he said, noting that halfway through the
meal his brother’s goblet still stood on its rim. So, Kelyn still abstained,
did he?

Etivva’s brown cheeks filled with a
grin; the crescent-shaped scar puckered up. “Well, it does not hurt to try. You
are very vague, my lord.” How he had missed the sharp notes of her Harenian
accent. “I ask, where are you living. You say, in the trees. Are you a monkey
now?”

“I’m not at liberty.”

“Is it in Avidan Wood?” Etivva
pressed. “Your mother thinks so.”

“Do not venture into that place,”
he warned them. “It’s more dangerous than you know.”

“That is not an answer. You think
you are so clever. But you forget. I know you.”