Crownhaven. The morning of the name day.
The wooden sword caught Lucian on the shoulder, in exactly the same spot where it had caught him three days ago.
“Ow.”
“Too slow,” said Desmond.
“I wasn’t too slow. You were too fast.”
“That’s the same thing, seen from the other side.” The Captain of the Guard lowered his own practice sword and waited until Lucian had finished rubbing his shoulder. “Again.”
Lucian sighed so loudly that it must have been audible all the way to the gate of the inner courtyard, and raised his weapon.
It was early. Over the rooftops of Crownhaven still hung the grey haze the city breathed out of its thousand chimneys every morning, and the cobbles in the courtyard of the town residence were damp with dew. Somewhere beyond the wall a cart rumbled past. A dog barked. The smell of fresh bread drifted over from the kitchen, and Lucian’s stomach reminded him that he had eaten nothing since he woke.
Of course. First the beating, then the feeding. Like hunting dogs.
He attacked.
High, then low, then a quick thrust to the middle, the way Desmond had shown him a hundred times over the past weeks. His feet found the rhythm on their own, and for one glorious moment Lucian believed he would get through this time. Desmond’s blade gave way, once, twice …
Then it was suddenly no longer in front of him but beside him. A light tap against the back of his knee, and Lucian was sitting on the seat of his trousers.
“Ow,” he said again, with less conviction.
Desmond crouched in front of him. He was not a particularly tall man, but he had broad shoulders and hands that looked as if they could straighten horseshoes. His hair was cropped short and already grey at the temples, and a pale scar ran across his left eyebrow, about which Lucian had heard a dozen different stories. Depending on whom you asked, it came from a bear, a jealous husband, or a fall down the stairs while Desmond was drunk. Desmond himself only said it came from a question he would have done better not to ask.
“Do you know what you did wrong?”
“I fell over.”
“Before that.”
Lucian thought about it. “I thought I was going to win.”
The captain nodded slowly, and something twitched at the corners of his mouth that on anyone else would have been a smile. “Exactly that. You were only looking ahead. At my blade, at the gap you wanted to see. You forgot that I have two legs and that the world keeps turning beside you.” He tapped Lucian on the chest with the wooden sword. “Whoever only looks ahead, lad, dies from the side.”
“Or falls on his backside.”
“In here you fall on your backside. Out there you don’t.” Desmond stood and held out his hand. “Again. With your eyes open this time.”
Lucian let himself be pulled up. “My eyes were open.”
“Then with your head open this time.”
They practised until the sun climbed over the wall and the bells of the great cathedral rang the first hour. Lucian did not hit Desmond a single time. But he only fell twice more, and in the last round he dodged the tap against the back of his knee before it came, because he had seen out of the corner of his eye how Desmond’s weight shifted.
The captain said nothing about it. He only nodded once, short and curt, and Lucian felt that nod all the way down to his toes.
Desmond took the practice sword from him. “Enough for today. Go and wash. Your mother will skin me if you come to breakfast sweaty.”
“She doesn’t skin anybody. She’s the nicest person in all of Arvendal.”
“That’s exactly why I’m afraid of her.”
Lucian laughed and ran off.
At the well in the corner of the courtyard he stopped, scooped up water with both hands and splashed it on his face. It was ice-cold. He gasped, and then, because no one was looking, he held his wet hands out in front of him and concentrated.
Warmth. Deep in his chest, where Mother said the mana slept.
He pulled at it, the way you pull at a thread.
Above his right palm a flame flickered up. Small, hardly bigger than a candle’s, orange at the edges and pale yellow in the middle. The water on his skin hissed and steamed away in little white puffs.
Fire. Like Father.
He held it for five breaths, then six, then it began to tremble and he let it go before it could die on its own. He felt a little dizzy. That was the price, the magic tutor in Ravenhold had said: every flame cost something, and whoever took more than he had fell over. In time the reserve would grow. With training. With patience.
Lucian did not have a great deal of patience. But yesterday he had only counted to four.
The breakfast room of the residence was on the first floor, with tall windows facing the street, and this morning so much sun fell in that the silver on the table was dazzling. There was bread, still warm, butter, honey, cheese from Ravenhold, and a bowl of apples that Agnes, the cook, had fetched from the residence garden and that were so sour Lucian’s teeth ached just to look at them.
His mother was already at the table.
Evelyn Ravenmoor was not a woman you noticed at first glance. She was not as tall as the ladies at court, not as splendidly dressed, and she usually wore her fair hair in a simple braid rather than in the towering mountains of curls that were the fashion just then. But when she smiled, Lucian had once heard a stable hand say, every room became a little warmer.
She was smiling now.
“There he is. The fearless warrior.” She looked him up and down. “How many times?”
“How many times what?”
“How many times did you fall over?”
Lucian sat down and reached for the bread. “That’s a very rude question for a duchess.”
“I’m a very rude duchess. How many times?”
“Seven.”
“Yesterday it was nine.”
“Desmond told you that?”
“Desmond tells me everything.” She pushed the honey towards him. “He only pretends to be the silent type. In truth he’s the greatest gossip in all Crownhaven.”
Lucian doubted that very much, but he took the honey anyway. For a while they ate in silence. Out on the street it was growing louder: merchants crying their wares, carriages rattling over the cobbles, and somewhere someone was playing a tune on a flute that seemed vaguely familiar to Lucian. All of Crownhaven had been in a fever for days. The king’s name day was the greatest festival of the year. Families had travelled in from every duchy, the inns were full, and on the great square before the palace they had built stands, raised banners and hung so many lanterns that at night the city looked as if someone had taken the stars from the sky and strung them between the houses.
Lucian thought the whole thing was dreadful.
“Do I really have to come?”
“Yes.”
“It’ll take hours. Everyone will make speeches. Old men will pinch my cheeks and say how big I’ve grown, as if they’d expected me to shrink.”
His mother set down her cup, and her eyes glittered. “And the ladies will say what a handsome boy you are, and push their daughters in your direction.”
“That’s even worse.”
“I know.” She laughed softly. “Which is why you’ll behave, smile politely and only be sarcastic when your father isn’t looking. Agreed?”
“And when he is looking?”
“Then you’ll be charming.”
“I’m always charming.”
“You’re sometimes charming. The rest of the time you’re a cheeky little raven.” She stood, came around the table and stopped behind him. Lucian felt her fingers tug at his collar, smooth it down, pull it a little higher. “And your collar looks as though you slept in it.”
“I trained in it.”
“That’s worse.”
He wanted to answer, but at that moment a gust of wind shot across the table, so sudden and so precise that it snatched the piece of bread out of his hand. The bread sailed through the air in an elegant arc and landed on his mother’s plate. By then she was back in her seat, innocently sipping from her cup.
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Lucian stared at his empty hand. “That was mine.”
“Not any more.”
“That’s theft. With magic. That must be forbidden.”
“Then report me.” She bit into the bread. “To the Captain of the Guard. I’m sure he’ll be very strict with me.”
Lucian tried to look indignant. He managed it for about three heartbeats, then he had to laugh, and she laughed with him, and for a moment the king’s name day was very far away.
Wind, he thought, as he took a new piece of bread, holding it with both hands this time. His mother could blow out candles without moving. She could whirl leaves up from the ground so that they danced like butterflies around her feet. And once, when Lucian was six and had fallen out of the apple tree in Ravenhold, she had caught him in mid-air, on a cushion of wind that had felt like warm water.
He no longer remembered the fall. Only the feeling of being caught.
His father found him half an hour later in the library.
The library of the town residence was small compared with the one in Ravenhold, but Lucian liked it all the same. It smelled of old paper and leather, and from the window you could see over the rooftops to the towers of the palace, gleaming white in the sun. He was sitting on the window ledge with a book about the campaigns of the old kings on his knees, reading the same page for the fourth time because his thoughts were elsewhere.
“You should get changed.”
Lucian looked up. Aldwyn Ravenmoor stood in the doorway, already in his festival robes: black and silver, the colours of the house, with the raven spreading its wings across his chest. He was tall, taller than Desmond, with the same black hair as Lucian, only threaded at the temples with the first grey strands. His eyes were dark grey, calm and attentive, and Lucian had never known them to miss anything.
“I have changed.”
His father regarded him. “You’re still wearing the same boots as for training.”
“No one can see them under the table.”
“They can see them when you bow before the king.” Aldwyn came in and sat on the edge of the reading table, a little way from Lucian. For a moment he said nothing, only looked out of the window at the white towers. Then: “Your mother says you don’t want to come.”
“I never said I didn’t want to.”
“You said it was the most dreadful occasion anyone ever invented.”
“That’s not the same as not wanting to.” Lucian shut the book. “I just have an opinion about it.”
His father laughed quietly. It was a rare sound. The Duke of Ravenmoor did not often laugh, at least not in company, and when he did it was so brief that you could believe you had imagined it.
“Do you know why we go?”
“Because the king commands it.”
“That too. But not only that.” Aldwyn pointed out of the window, not at the palace but down at the street, where people were crowding. Merchants, craftsmen, maids with baskets, children darting between the legs of the grown-ups. “Tonight, up there in the palace, every duke of Arvendal will sit at one table. All of them together, the only time in the year. And not one of the people standing down there in the street will be present.”
Lucian followed his gaze. “And?”
“And so someone at that table has to think of them.” His father looked at him. “A duke is not there to be bowed to, Lucian. He is there to listen. To the farmers when the harvest was bad. To the merchants when the roads aren’t safe. To the soldiers on the border when there are too few of them. He listens, and then he carries what he has heard into places like that palace, where no one else would hear it.”
“And if they still don’t listen?”
“Then you say it louder.”
Lucian thought about that. “Is that why you always listen to the people standing at the gate in Ravenhold? Even the old man with the goats who comes every month and complains about his neighbour’s goats?”
“Even him.”
“He talks about goats.”
“To him the goats are the most important thing in the world.” His father shrugged. “Who am I to tell him they’re not?”
Lucian opened his mouth to say that goats were, objectively, not the most important thing in the world, and closed it again. There were moments when you could not win against his father. This was one of them.
Aldwyn stood. He went to the door, glanced out into the corridor, then closed it quietly. When he turned round there was something in his face that Lucian did not know. An almost boyish sparkle.
“I want to show you something. But it stays between us. Not even your mother finds out. Promise?”
Lucian sat bolt upright. “Promise.”
His father raised his right hand, palm upwards, the way Lucian had done at the well earlier. Lucian expected a flame. His father was a fire mage; everyone in Arvendal knew that.
No flame came.
Instead, something flickered between his fingers. A spark, but not an orange one like a spark from a fire. It was white and bluish, so bright that Lucian had to blink. It jumped from fingertip to fingertip, crackling, hissing, and suddenly the air smelled sharp, as if after a thunderstorm.
Then it was gone.
Lucian stared at his father’s empty hand. The fine hairs on his arms were standing on end.
“What was that?” he whispered.
“Lightning.” Aldwyn closed his hand. “The inheritance of our house. Every Ravenmoor is born with fire. But if he works hard enough and learns long enough, the fire can become something else. Something faster.”
“Can I do that too?”
“One day.”
“When?”
“When you’ve learned not to look only ahead.” His father gave a crooked smile, and Lucian understood that Desmond had told him that as well. “And when you can hold your flame for longer than a count of four.”
“Six!” Lucian protested. “It was six today!”
“Then you’re on the right path.”
There was a knock at the door before Lucian could ask any more questions, and there were a great many questions crowding his head. Agnes put her head round the door.
“Forgive me, Your Grace. Duke Westbrook is downstairs.”
Aldwyn’s face became calm and smooth again; the sparkle had vanished as if it had never existed. “I’m coming.”
Lucian followed him without being asked. No one sent him back.
Duke Lionel Westbrook was standing in the entrance hall with a wet cloak over his arm, looking as if he had not slept all night. He was older than Lucian’s father, round and red-faced, with a beard that had once been red and was now the colour of faded rust. Lucian knew him from his visits to Ravenhold. He always brought candied nuts and told stories that Lucian’s mother thought unsuitable.
Today he had brought no nuts.
“Aldwyn.” Westbrook seized his father’s hand in both of his. “Forgive me for coming so early.”
“You’re always welcome, Lionel. What’s happened?”
Westbrook’s eyes slid to Lucian, then to Desmond, who had appeared silently in the doorway to the courtyard, and back again. He lowered his voice. “Rumours from the east. My people on the border say you can hear the dwarves fighting. Not a skirmish here and there, the way it usually is. More. And that a messenger from Orvundar is supposed to be on his way to Crownhaven.”
“To the king?”
“Where else.”
Lucian’s father was silent for a moment. “Then he’ll come tonight. When all the dukes are sitting in the hall.”
“Alaric won’t like that.”
“No. He won’t.”
The two men looked at each other, and Lucian had the strange feeling that an entire conversation was passing between them without either of them saying a word.
“Who’s on our side?” his father asked at last.
“Me. Harrow, probably. Ellery, maybe, if he’s sober.” Westbrook rubbed his eyes. “The others will wait and see what the king says. And Winterhall …”
He said the name as if he had bitten into something sour.
Aldwyn’s voice stayed calm. “Winterhall will do whatever serves Winterhall. As always.”
“That’s exactly what worries me.”
Westbrook did not stay long. He drank a cup of hot wine standing up, squeezed Lucian’s shoulder and promised to bring twice as many nuts next time. Then he was gone again, and the entrance hall was quiet.
Lucian looked up at his father. “Who’s Winterhall?”
“A duke. Like me.”
“Don’t you like him?”
Aldwyn considered the question, for longer than Lucian had expected. “Duke Winterhall and I disagree about most things. But he has a daughter your age. She’ll be there tonight as well.” A hint of the sparkle returned to his eyes. “Perhaps her mother will push her in your direction.”
“Please don’t.”
“Be polite.”
“I’m always polite.”
“You’re sometimes polite,” said his father, and it sounded so much like Mother that Lucian had to grin against his will.
In the afternoon Lucian found the two of them in the armoury.
He had only meant to look for his practice sword, which Desmond had taken that morning, but when he pushed the heavy door open a crack he heard voices and stopped. His father was sitting on a chest, his festival robe carelessly crumpled over his knees, which Mother would never have allowed. Desmond stood at the weapon rack polishing the blade of his sword, slowly, in even strokes, the way he did every evening.
They were laughing.
Lucian had seen the two of them together often. The duke and his captain, on the training ground, out riding, on the long evenings in Ravenhold when there was wine on the table and Mother sat reading by the fire. But he had seldom heard them laugh like this. Like two boys who had just hatched some mischief.
“… and then old Hollis was standing in the doorway,” his father was saying, “with the bucket in his hand, soaked from head to foot …”
“That was your idea.”
“You hung up the bucket.”
“Because you said he’d never be back before midnight.” Desmond shook his head, but his mouth twisted. “We mucked out the stables for three weeks.”
“Four.”
“You had three. I had four, because I told him I wasn’t sorry.”
His father laughed so hard he had to steady himself against the wall. “Gods above, I’d forgotten how stubborn you were.”
“I’m still stubborn.”
“Yes. That’s why I trust you.”
Suddenly it was quiet in the armoury. Desmond stopped polishing. He did not look up, but Lucian saw his hand close around the cloth.
“Aldwyn.” His voice had gone quieter. “About tonight. If the dwarf messenger really comes …”
“Then I’ll say what I think.”
“I know. That’s exactly what worries me. The king doesn’t like it when someone says what he thinks in front of everyone else. Least of all you. You know how the people in the street call your name. He knows it too.”
His father did not answer at once. Then he said something Lucian did not understand, and so quietly that he only caught half of it: “… if we keep silent, who will speak?”
Desmond set the sword down. “Then let me post double guards tonight.”
“We’re in the capital, Des. Under the protection of the crown.”
“That’s exactly why.”
Lucian did not understand what Desmond meant by that. He did not want to understand it either, not really, not on a day when the whole city was singing and the lanterns were glowing. He pushed the door a little further open, deliberately loudly, so that it creaked on its hinges.
Both men turned.
“I’m looking for my sword.”
His father looked at him for a long moment, as if weighing how much his son had heard. Then he smiled, and the smile was the one from earlier again, calm and a little tired. “Your sword is hanging where it belongs. On the rack, third hook from the left.”
Lucian fetched it. As he passed Desmond, the captain bent down to him.
“How much did you hear?”
“That you poured water over a teacher.”
Desmond snorted. “Never tell your mother that.”
“What do I get for it?”
“Two mistakes fewer at the next training. I’ll overlook them.”
“Three.”
“Two, and I’ll tell you what old Hollis did to your father afterwards.”
Lucian thought briefly. “Deal.”
He never got to hear the story. But that afternoon he did not know it yet.
In the evening the carriage stood in the courtyard.
It was lacquered black, with silver fittings and the raven of Ravenmoor on the doors, and the four horses in front of it pawed impatiently at the cobbles, as if they knew that today was a special day. Desmond stood beside the coach box in full armour, his sword at his side, the cloak with the crest over his shoulders. He looked like someone ready to walk through a wall if he had to.
Lucian was wearing the new boots. His mother had straightened his collar twice more, once in his room and once on the stairs, and when she had tried to touch it a third time he had dodged and hidden behind his father.
“Coward,” she had said.
“Tactician,” he had replied.
Now he sat on the cushioned bench in the carriage, across from his parents, and looked out of the window as they rolled through the gate. The streets of Crownhaven were glowing. A candle burned in every window, garlands of coloured pennants hung over the lanes, and the people stood packed along the edges and cheered every carriage that went by, no matter whose crest was on the door.
When they recognised the raven, the cheering grew louder.
“Ravenmoor!” someone shouted. Then others. “Ravenmoor! Ravenmoor!”
Lucian saw his father raise his hand in greeting, calmly, without smiling, but with a nod for every single cry. He saw his mother wave to a little girl at the roadside who was sitting on her own father’s shoulders and nearly fell off with excitement.
And he saw, very briefly, in the reflection of the carriage window, Desmond’s face outside on the coach box. The captain was not smiling. He was not looking at the cheering people.
He was looking at the rooftops.
Lucian did not know why he noticed it at that moment. He only knew that he remembered it, the way you sometimes remember things without knowing why: the smell of fresh bread in the morning, the spark between his father’s fingers, the feeling of being caught on a cushion of wind.
And Desmond’s gaze, travelling over the rooftops of Crownhaven while the Ravenmoor carriage rolled towards the king’s palace amid the cheering of the crowd.