Through Wolf's Eyes (16 page)

Derian made introductions, pointing first to Firekeeper, then to the stranger and back again.

"Blysse, Steward Daisy. Steward Daisy, Blysse."

Obediently, Firekeeper repeated the lesson, wondering
why so small a person should have so long a name. Her words released
another spate of birdsong from the little person, sounds that held a
distinctly cooing note along with the word "Blysse."

Being called Blysse always made Firekeeper feel
vaguely uncomfortable, though she had no idea why it should. The words
by which the two-legs named themselves meant nothing to her. It was
quite reasonable that they employed an equally meaningless sound to
name her. But the name Blysse
did make Firekeeper
uncomfortable, so much so that she longed for the day when she would
speak enough human tongue to teach them her wolf-given name.

Steward Daisy departed after making more cooing
sounds, and Firekeeper and Derian shared the food on the tray. One of
the almost familiar smells proved to belong to something called
"bread," a soft, warm substance like nothing else that Firekeeper had
ever eaten. She liked it best spread with the salty fat called
"butter." Jam, with its taste of overripe berries, was good, but almost
too rich.

Satiated, Firekeeper removed a blanket from one of
the packs and spread it in front of the fire. A few hours' sleep, and
then she would decide how to get out to Blind Seer.

S
HE AWAKENED
to find the fire burned down to red and white coals and Fox Hair gone, doubtless to his own chamber.

Stretching, she located an oddly shaped container
full of water, its neck so tight that she could barely get her hand
inside to cup out water with which to appease her thirst.

As soon as Steward Daisy had departed, Derian had
shown Firekeeper how the door into the room worked. Now the wolf tested
her memory and was pleased to discover that she could open it without
help. When she scouted outside, she found a two-legs drowsing on a
stool at the end of the hall.

Distrusting this stranger, Firekeeper retreated and
considered the window. The drop to the ground below was considerable,
but no worse than from some trees she had climbed. Still, the earth
below was covered with stone, not soft leaves and forest duff.

Unwilling to risk a broken leg, Firekeeper rooted
through the pack Derian had left in her room. Most of the contents were
useless, but at the very bottom there was a coil of rope.

Over the past several days, Firekeeper had used rope
to guide a mule, to help set up tents, and to tie packs onto their
reluctant bearers. Now she anchored the rope to an iron loop on the
windowsill and used it to slow her drop to the ground.
She ended up with burns on her palms and a long scrape on her calf.

Well pleased, Firekeeper growled the barking dogs
into submission and, with a running start and a light foot on the edge
of a cart, scrabbled over the wall surrounding the castle.

On the other side, Blind Seer was waiting for her, blue eyes glowing in the darkness.

E
LISE
A
RCHER, DAUGHTER
of Baron Ivon Archer and Lady Aurella Wellward, great-niece of King
Tedric, was not so much gathering flowers in the royal castle gardens
as she was gathering rumors. However, if her activities were dismissed
as such an innocent pursuit, she had no complaints.

Slight, almost fragile of form, peaches and cream of
complexion, with pale golden hair the very shade of early-morning
sunlight and sea-green eyes, seventeen-year-old Elise was just now
becoming beautiful.

For the only daughter of King Tedric's nephew Ivon,
son himself of the Grand Duchess Rosene, beauty was hardly the
advantage it would be for a woman of lesser birth. Marriage for Elise
was as inevitable as rain in springtime. Nevertheless, Elise found this
new bloom of beauty a pleasant thing and smiled softly into her
bouquet, feeling the admiring gazes of gardeners and grooms follow her
graceful progress.

"Good morning, Lady." "Good morning." "Good morning."

The murmurs followed Elise from damask dark roses to
brilliant yellow daisies to honeysuckle vines awash with heavily
scented flowers. She stopped by a bed of gladiolas in a mixture of
colors from pure white to deepest violet with shades of pink and red
between.

Shifting her nosegay of roses to her left hand, she fumbled for her gardening clippers and, as suddenly as the High Sorcerer's
griffin in the tales of Elrox Beyond the Sea, the head gardener appeared at her side.

"Perhaps I might assist, Lady Elise?"

She smiled, a real smile, though it hid some guile.
She had been aware of the spare, sunburned figure of Timin, the master
gardener, anxiously tracking her progress for some time now. He had
left her alone among the roses, settling for wringing his hands as she
clipped a few blossoms, but the gladiolas had drawn him forth.

"Thank you, Master Gardener," Elise replied. "I had
intended to add a few pink gladiolas to my bouquet, but these look
rather picked over."

There was no reproof in her tone, only mild
consternation, but the gardener colored scarlet, then white, as if he
had been found guilty of treason.

" 'Twas the arrival of the Duchess and Earl Kestrel that done it, Lady," he managed as explanation.

"You were asked to supply flowers for the banquet
tables," Elise helped him along. "I noticed the bouquets. I hadn't
realized you'd been forced to raid your flower beds to make the
arrangements."

Her sympathetic tone—and the fact that she had admired these gardens since she was a toddler—opened the floodgate.

"I was, Lady," Timin Gardener said. "Never has there
been such a springtime and summer for the nobility visiting the king.
It seems that as soon as the weather grew pleasant and the roads a bit
dry that every niece and nephew of a noble house has seen fit to call.
That many receptions taxes those beds I grow just for cutting flowers,
it does, pushes me out into the gardens."

Elise nodded sympathetically, but beneath her gentle,
compassionate expression she was willing the man to keep talking.
Bending to cut her three magnificent pink glads with petals edged in
sunny yellow, the gardener continued:

"I exhausted the best of my daffodils and tulips when
Grand Duke Gadman brought Lord Rolfston Redbriar and his brood to pay
their respects to their uncle early this spring. Boar be praised that
Earl Kestrel didn't come calling then.
Neither sky-blue nor scarlet are easy to find early in the season."

"There are crocus for the blue," Elise said, considering.

"Too fragile for the banquet hall," the gardener
sniffed. "Besides, we had the word that the king wanted Kestrel given
highest honors. That takes more than a few crocus wilting among apple
blossoms and then me having to answer in the autumn when there's not
fruit enough on the trees."

"True," Elise agreed. "House Kestrel calls for
stronger colors. It's a good thing Duchess Kestrel waited to ask for
audience until the summer."

She stroked the petals of the gladiolas the gardener
had handed to her before tucking them in with her roses. The man was
mollified, seeing that she was not going to ask for more.

"I don't recall," Elise said cautiously, "such a fuss
being made when Earl Kestrel came to court over the winter. He was in
and out so much that his sleigh had a permanent berth in the forecourt."

"True enough," Timin Gardener agreed, squatting to
tug a weed from among the flowers, then straightening as he suddenly
remembered her station.

He spoke more rapidly to make amends. "True enough,
Lady, but the word that came down from Steward Silver when she ordered
the decorations for the banquet hall was that Earl Kestrel had sent
ahead a letter thrice sealed. Once with his personal seal, once with
his mother's, and once with the great seal of their house."

Elise nodded, hoping the glow of excitement didn't
show in her eyes. Such a sequence of seals indicated a matter of the
greatest secrecy.

"I wonder," she said guilelessly, "what business
could merit such? Earl Kestrel has been reigning beside his mother at
her behest these five years since. His seal is as good as hers in
matters of state."

"They say," the head gardener offered, strolling with
her down a path bordered in stocks and snapdragons, "that Earl Kestrel
journeyed west early this spring, leaving when the roads were still
sure to be deep in mud—not the usual time
for traveling at all. He only went with a small retinue and none of them are talking about where they went."

"None?"

"None, Lady Elise. To my way of thinking, that's as interesting as if they were talking waterfalls."

"I agree," she said thoughtfully, and carefully turned the conversation to other matters.

L
IKE HIS FATHER
Purcel, Elise's sire, Ivon Archer, had made his mark by serving in the
army of Hawk Haven. That had been a wise move. Although the Grand
Duchess Rosene had granted her elder child the title of baron at his
father's death twenty years before, Ivon was aware that not everyone in
the kingdom appreciated King Chalmer's decision to permit his youngest
daughter to marry the dashing war hero who had captured her heart.

Ivon knew that there were many among the six Great
Houses for whom his descent from the grand duchess was far outweighed
by his common blood—never mind that King Chalmer had made Purcel a
baron, head of his own lesser noble house, complete with coat of arms,
deed of land, and a name into perpetuity.

It hadn't been so long ago that Queen Zorana had
created the Great Houses to reward her staunchest supporters—just over
a hundred years. That was long enough for pride to emerge but not long
enough for the entitlement to be invulnerable to challenge by upstart
houses.

Elise had spent most of her young life in a manor in
the capital belonging to House Archer. However, with the first of his
war booty the then Lord Ivon had purchased property of his own, for he
could not know that his father would die comparatively young, or that
he himself would be blessed with only one child. Ivon's own property
was held separately from the Archer grant, but, as the years passed and
no sibling followed Elise into the world, it was likely that she would
inherit both.

Rather than being insulted by Ivon's building his estate, King Tedric seemed to have appreciated his nephew's gesture
of
independence. Repeatedly, Ivon had earned command of his own company
and promotions based solely upon merit. In her turn, Ivon's wife, Lady
Aurella Wellward, had made herself indispensable to her aunt, Queen
Elexa. Therefore, although just a grandniece and heir to a lesser noble
house, Elise had always been given free run of the palace and its
grounds.

As a child, this privilege had gained her some mild
envy from her cousins. These days, that envy had turned into something
sharper.

King Tedric, rumor said, would name an heir to his
throne come Lynx Moon this late autumn, for this year the Festival of
the Eagle fell then by lot. The king's own children were dead, as was
all the line of his older sister, Princess Marras. By the strictest
interpretation of the laws of inheritance, the king's heir should be
his next sibling or her children, but old King Chalmer had wed Princess
Caryl to Prince Tavis Seagleam of Bright Bay in the hope that the
marriage alliance would foster peace between the two rival countries.

Neither the marriage nor the alliance had been a
success. Princess Caryl had produced one son, Allister Seagleam.
Although he was reported to be a man grown with a family of his own,
most residents of Hawk Haven felt he was not really a contender for the
throne. Who would accept a foreigner when there were native-born
possibilities readily available?

In addition to Marras, Tedric, and Caryl, King
Chalmer and Queen Rose had produced two other children: Gadman and
Rosene. Gadman and Rosene were both still alive, but no one really
expected King Tedric to name either as his heir, for both were within a
few years of his own advanced age. Hawk Haven deserved more than a
temporary monarch after King Tedric's long reign.