The Malicarn #4
Hannah was not permitted to train but enjoyed watching her knights do so.
Kreek, the old swordmaster, stood in his usual place in the castle courtyard atop a small wooden stool, arms crossed as he surveyed the yard.
He had been away for over a week, and there had been no fight training in his absence.
But as Hannah hobbled toward him, Kreek glared at her.
He never said good morning, and if anything seemed more angry than usual today.
Kreek was renowned as the greatest fighter who ever lived, and had trained her father and the rest of the Council of Heroes before Hannah was born.
Hannah knew these stories well. All the great victories of the Council in the years since were due, in part, to Kreek’s guidance.
And now he had to train young knights to protect a crippled queen. Hannah could sense his constant rage.
“Today you will practice with a two-handed sword,” Kreek bellowed to one of the pages, handing him a wooden sparring sword nearly four feet long. “Sir Kellington will spar with you.”
Kellington was the youngest member of the Queen’s Guard, only eighteen years old but already a knight, and a full head taller than Hannah. He approached from the stables, wielding an even longer sword, and smiled at his queen.
“Ready for some fun?” he asked Hannah.
“Give me a good show,” she said.
With her bad leg, Hannah could never move fast enough to effectively wield a sword, and her advisors would have balked at her requests to do so anyway.
“Young girls do not train to battle,” they insisted. “Certainly not young queens.”
“But kings ride into battle all the time.”
“That is different.”
“Why?”
“It just is.”
Hannah watched the page parry blows from Kellington, circling around as he needed to, attempting to keep up a strong defense. But he never attacked. Holding the large sword with two hands was extra tiring, and each of Kellington’s swings hit with more force, the wood vibrating in the page’s hands.
“Strike!” Kreek yelled at him.
The page dropped his sword and yielded. Kellington stood back, and Kreek stepped off his stool, grabbing the young page by the collar.
“Too slow, too stupid! You’ll be sliced in half the first time you ride out with the Council of Heroes. To think this is the quality of man I have to train.” He raised his palm and slapped the boy across the cheek.
“That’s enough, Sir Kreek,” Hannah shouted. “Let the boy have a rest.”
Kreek said nothing but glared at the queen. He let go of the page and walked away.
“Good effort,” Kellington said to the boy. “You impressed your queen.”
Hannah walked toward the center of the courtyard. “I will have to speak to my advisors about Sir Kreek,” Hannah said to Kellington. “That was not appropriate.”
“It was how I was trained, Your Majesty. The old man is tough, but he knows how to make warriors.”
“He is old. I should find my guard a younger swordmaster.”
“I doubt your advisors will approve.”
“Another year,” Hannah said, “and this queen will make her own decisions.”
“Well, I suppose Kreek may have been a bit rough today, but I don’t blame him, with the dragon and all.”
“What dragon?”
“Oh, your advisors did not tell you?”
“They forget to tell me a lot. But I have not seen them yet today.”
“Oh, well then I should let them tell you. It is not my place.”
“It is your place, if your queen orders it so.”
“Please, Hannah, come on. I do not want to get in trouble.”
“You will not. Tell me about this dragon.”
“Well, Kreek’s been away, on some hunting trip or something, up near the Morlon Kastaun ruins.
The day before last, there’s this dragon flies overhead, dies or is killed, and its body falls onto a field.
Fire spewing everywhere, quite dramatic.
Scared the monks up there something bad. Kreek saw the whole thing, so I heard.”
This explained Fennick’s digressions that morning. “A dragon? In the Malicarn? Why wasn’t I told immediately?”
“Don’t look at me, Hannah. I only heard about it from one of the squires this morning.”
Above them sat the tower keep; a small window on the north end was the Privy Council chamber. Hannah knew her advisors were in there, discussing these important things, without her.
“Well, Kellington, I think it is about time for my royal duties.”
There were two places in the castle where business was conducted.
One was the main hall, a large and light-filled room also used for meals and entertainment.
That was for the public, the hearing of queries from local landowners and the bestowing of titles on noble men and women.
The other place for royal business was the Privy Council chamber, a smaller space filled with bookcases, a large round conference table, and a plethora of chairs.
Not all the chairs would fit around the table, and many of them were stuck in various corners and nooks between piles of manuscripts.
The Privy Council was where the real work happened.
Charters were consulted, levies debated, and secret handshakes made between disputing factions about how to best proceed with running the realm.
Sanderson and Quentin, the royal advisors, were arguing with one another in the Privy Council chamber when Hannah walked in.
“Good morning, Your Majesty,” Sanderson said, standing and bowing toward her. Sanderson had a long, poorly trimmed beard. His eyes were always bleary and he got out of breath easily.
Quentin merely nodded. He was sterner, clean-shaven, more focused, and despised Sanderson despite spending almost every waking minute with him, hashing out the minutiae of running the kingdom.
The two old men had been the queen’s regents since her birth and would remain so until her seventeenth birthday.
Whether or not they would stay in the queen’s service after that, Hannah had not decided.
Hannah sat down on a cushioned chair in front of the small table where the men were arguing.
The stone walls were icy cold, the air in the chamber so chilled they could see their breath when talking.
There was no fire lit because of all the documents surrounding the hearth and Sanderson’s fears of records accidentally lost in the flames.
The table in the center of the room was piled with scrolls, maps, and papers of various sizes.
Quentin held a quill and scratched some notes on a parchment, while Sanderson paced with his hands clasped behind him.
Hannah had walked in and interrupted them in the middle of an argument, and they quickly went silent.
They did not like to yell in front of the young queen.
“Are you discussing the dragon?” Hannah asked.
“Ah, yes, Your Highness,” Sanderson said. “So you have heard about that.”
“Not from you, unfortunately.”
“Well, we were going to discuss it with you, whenever you chose to arrive at council. But there is no need for concern. The creature is dead.”
“There is much need for concern!” bellowed Quentin.
“Do not try to present your queen with a false picture, Sanderson. Your Majesty, the creature is dead, that is true, but there is much more we do not yet know. Are there others? If there was a dragon rider, what became of him? Why was there a dragon in the Malicarn in the first place? The monks at the Dollories Monastery are hard at work searching for solutions to these questions, but this is a grave threat to the Malicarn. There hasn’t been a dragon seen in the Malicarn since your father’s, um—”
“Since his death,” Hannah said. “Yes, thank you.”
Quentin looked back at Sanderson. “You see? You think she is still a child and will not think such things! She knows how dangerous this situation is!”
“It is not dangerous!” Sanderson replied. “The dragon is dead. There is nothing we need to fear and nothing we need to do, save wait for the monks to finish their research.”
“What about Gregorian?” Hannah asked. Both men stopped and looked at her. Sanderson sighed, and Quentin dropped his head into his hands.
“What?” she asked. “Why not speak with him? He’s a wizard, he’ll know more about the dragon than any of us.”
“Your Majesty,” Sanderson said, “whatever power Gregorian once held, it is long in the past.”
“But Gregorian has knowledge no one else has. Maybe he understands—”
“He knows nothing,” Quentin snapped. “It is best to not engage with him and his old ways.”
“The Councilors trust him.”
“The Council of Heroes are warriors and do a fine job protecting us from dangers. But they work in the borderlands and do not interact with Gregorian regularly. They do not see that Gregorian is … old.”
Sanderson and Quentin had always disliked Gregorian, but Hannah could never figure why.
Gregorian was not an official regent and did not sit on the Council of Heroes—in fact, he did not have an official position at all—but he was always free with advice.
Especially with Hannah. Gregorian would visit court and sneak Hannah books when Sanderson and Quentin were not looking.
Gregorian’s books were illustrated and colorful, full of daring heroes in distant worlds of magic, about fantastical people who had the powers of animals, and tales of great wizards who could fly.
“You have to keep these hidden,” Gregorian would tell her, sliding the small books inside the pages of a long historical chronicle. “Only read them alone at night. You never know who may be watching and wish to take them from you.”
“Are they banned, like magic?” Hannah asked.
“Yes, but they are not dangerous. They are fun. I enjoyed them when I was young and I want you to enjoy them too.”
Sanderson and Quentin thought Gregorian sinister, and if they knew of his secret gifts to the queen their suspicions would be confirmed. But Hannah believed there was much more to the wizard, and the world, than what concerned her two advisors.
“Well, I still think Gregorian should be consulted,” Hannah said. “I order you to do so.”