The Dark Remains - Mark Anthony [11]
The queen went visibly rigid. “It is not blame that matters to nobility, Lord Teravian. It is responsibility. Your actions gave cause to this injury. Will you not accept fault?”
The young man did not reply.
“Then I have no choice but to take the fault upon myself,” Ivalaine said, “for you are my responsibility. This is what it means to be a ruler. Lady Tressa, see to it that the stableboy and his family are duly compensated from my treasury.”
Tressa nodded, then bent to make a note on a parchment resting on a small table.
Ivalaine shook her head. “What shall I tell your father of this?”
Now the young man looked up, his hair falling back from the pale oval of his face. His features were fine, almost pretty, his eyes like emeralds beneath raven brows.
“And why tell King Boreas anything?” he said, a sneer twisting the soft line of his mouth. “I know he sent me here so he could forget about me.”
“You know nothing,” the queen said, her visage so icy that the young man took a step back, as if rethinking his insolence.
“May I go now, Your Majesty?” he said finally.
“I think you had best.”
The young man gave a curt bow, then turned and—with the litheness of a dancer—moved to the door. He did not even glance at Aryn and Lirith as he departed.
Aryn watched him go. She remembered Teravian well from her first years in Calavere. Back then, King Boreas’s only son had been a sullen, ill-tempered boy four years her younger. He had little to do with Aryn aside from occasionally tormenting her with pranks, such as the time he filled one of her bed pillows with wriggling mice.
Then, two years ago, Boreas had sent Teravian to Artolor. It was the custom for royal children to be fostered at a foreign court; this was one way alliances between Dominions were forged and maintained. Aryn remembered that Teravian had thrown fits the day he learned he was to be sent away, but she had heard little of him since that time.
A few days after their arrival in Ar-tolor, she had sought Teravian out, to greet him as a cousin. However, when she came upon him in the castle’s orchard, he had not come down from the top of a wall where he sat, and he had said nothing to her, save to laugh when she slipped on a rotten apple. It seemed Teravian had changed little during his years in Ar-tolor save to grow a bit taller and more cruel. Sometimes Aryn wondered how he could truly be the son of a man as good and brave as King Boreas.
The queen lifted a slender hand. “Where have I gone amiss, Tressa?”
The red-haired woman smiled, although it was a mournful expression. “He is a boy fighting a hard battle to become a man. One need not look for other reasons.”
“And yet there is another reason, is there not?”
Tressa said nothing, and Aryn wondered what the queen meant. However, Ivalaine spoke before she could.
“Come closer, sisters. Do not think I have not seen you standing there.”
The two woman hurried forward and curtsied.
It was often said that Ivalaine was the most beautiful woman in all of Falengarth. Her hair was like flax, her form slender and proud, her eyes the color of violets touched by frost. Yet Aryn knew there was one even more beautiful than the queen, someone who was a world away.
I miss you so much, Grace.
Once again she hoped Grace and the others were well.
“It is good of you to come, sisters.”
“We hastened here as soon as we received your message, Your Majesty,” Lirith said.
Ivalaine’s eyes glittered as she studied the dark-skinned witch. “So you did.”
Silence filled the chamber, and a mad urge to start babbling about all they had done that day rose inside Aryn. Fortunately, Tressa spoke before she could give voice to her compulsion.
“Would you like some wine, my child?”
Aryn nodded, then had to force herself not to snatch the cup from the witch’s hand and gulp it down in one draught. The wine was cool and clear as rain. Aryn took small sips and felt her nerves grow steadier.
“It is late,” the queen said, “and I have much yet to do before sleep, so I will be direct. I have called