Chapter 27
Mother and Son
A world defined by transaction and competition corrupts even those bonds most sacred and central to life itself.
‘Do you understand now, Owyn?’ Medrith said.
She stood across the table from him, leaning on her withered staff, her face a poor mask over frustration and fear.
‘We are beset on all sides. The sorceress. The churchmen. Two counts, now, plotting their separate coups. Perhaps conspiring! Leading you into a trap against the walls of Glascoed! They arrived late together. Who knows what passed between them on the road?’
The prince’s hands tightened on the arms of his chair.
No one knew—she wanted him to admit this, but did not see how it was as strong an argument against her as for her.
All of this, the anakriarch’s accusations against the Count of Afondir, Afondir’s against Glascoed—even the report of Fola’s meeting with these fae acrobats, or whatever they were—was but hearsay.
There was no true evidence to speak of. Owyn had seen nothing with his own eyes, heard nothing with his own ears.
And yet these stories—for that was all they were—threatened to drag his kingdom into war.
It was enough to drive a man mad.
It may have done so already.
A dark thought. One echoed by a thin peal of laughter. A voice his mother seemed not to hear.
‘They are able to scheme against us because we are weak,’ his mother pressed on, like a tongue pushing at an aching tooth.
‘Because your father and his father could not shoulder the inheritance of Abal’s line.
They let fear cripple them, and died afraid.
A truth your father made final proof of in death.
’ Her voice hitched at those words—genuine grief, or a ploy?
‘But in you, Abal’s line is refreshed with the hard, enduring blood of Cilbran.
My father’s blood. The blood of men who stand against frigid, flesh-killing winds.
Who fight beasts of the winter fog. Who fear neither man, nor fae, nor any other power in this world. ’
The queen lowered herself until their eyes stood level.
She would never kneel deeper than that, Owyn knew.
Everyone around him—the anakriarch, the Count of Afondir, his mother—pushed and pulled, manhandling him.
He was only a means to their ends. A path towards securing their own ambitions, whether by leading him into some trap or error, or by twisting him into a useful tool.
He thought of Ifan, standing where his mother now stood, swearing to bring an end to the rebellion. That, too, had been a lie, and from the one mouth Owyn had thought he could trust.
Were kings permitted friendship? Or would the rest of his life be this constant fencing, the whispering paranoia, a second meaning sought in every word spoken in his presence?
Again, that thin, distant laughter. Followed, now, by a muted sob. A howl that might have been buried in his own throat.
‘The magic of the land is weak, as your father was weak,’ his mother told him.
‘That is why this haunting has boiled up. Old ghosts long buried, unearthed by the crumbling of ancient power. You can seal them away again. You can heal the kingdom. Put things right. Cow these rebellious counts. Cast the Church and this sorceress and any other interloper from our lands. You need only go to the altar of the Old Stones and take what is yours by right.’
He heard the echo of thunder. Could almost see the flash of lightning. The crane bursting apart in a cloud of flame. His father, burned and bloodied, falling into the dark.
He blinked, and the vision faded.
Elbrech had been weak. Had chosen death over this burden, and left Owyn to bear it in his stead long before his shoulders were broad and strong enough. His mother was right. Vultures circled him—circled the kingdom—as they circled a weak and sickly foal.
He would not fall into the dark. The dead would not have him, yet. If he must be either his father’s son or his mother’s, he would choose his mother’s. Choose strength. Choose a future, even if one bathed in his own pain and blood.
‘I will go to Bryngodre on the way,’ Owyn said. ‘I will show them Abal’s Hammer, and Abal’s Scar.’ Confidence built with every word. Some of the fear bled away. ‘Let them all remember how this kingdom was made, and see in the Beast-King’s fate their own.’
His mother smiled and touched his face with an uncommon tenderness. But the warmth of it was muted beneath a sudden chill and a voice—laughing, weeping and howling in turns—in a language he could not speak.