Элейн Каннингем - Thornhold

“Sir Gareth was a great knight and a good friend,” Hronulf stated. His eyes suddenly went bleak. “It was he who found you, or so he thought—a child slain when goblins overran a southbound caravan. Perhaps his affection blinded him, then and now. He was afraid for me, so great was my grief. Although beholding your dead child is a terrible thing, not knowing what has become of her is much worse. Having settled my mind and his that you were dead, he was not looking for Bronwyn Caradoon when he beheld your face .”

“That’s possible,” she admitted, though she was disturbed at the possibility that she might have been found, had not Sir Gareth been so quick to pronounce her dead. Something else occurred to her. “Did Gareth know my mother?”

“Oh, yes. Gwenidale was a woman of good family, and her brother was a paladin, Gareth’s comrade and mine. He fell before his twenty-third year, but he was a great knight. But it has been many years since any living man has gazed upon fair Gwenidale’s face. Do not fault Gareth in this matter.” Hronulf smiled faintly. “He and I are aged men. The eyes fail, and even the fondest memories do not always come to our command.”

As they talked, they continued their tour of the fortress. Hronulf led her through the chapel, and pointed to the stairs that led up on either side of the back wall. They climbed the stairs on the right and emerged on the walkway that encircled the wall. Her father’s pride in his domain, his obvious concern for all those under his care, made one thing perfectly clear to Bronwyn. Thornhold was truly his home, not the village she could barely remember. This place, these men, had always been first with him.

That made her curious and angrier than she liked to admit. She decided to prod a bit. “There are no women here,” she observed.

“A traveler, from time to time,” Hronulf said. “I believe that there is a female hire-sword with the caravan currently under hospitality.”

“So the knights don’t bring their families here.” That bothered her deeply, especially in light of her own history.

“Few knights have families,” the paladin said, then hesitated. “It is a hard life, and full of danger. There are often matters of fealty—sworn service to god or king—that must be discharged. Some men who live to their thirtieth year and beyond marry. Most do not.”

“You did,” she pressed. “You had a family and left us in a small forest village.” The words came out like a challenge. Bronwyn wished she could have been more diplomatic, but her need was too great. She needed to hear some word of explanation, some reason for the horror that had destroyed her family and shaped her life.

Hronulf did not answer right away. He paused before the door of a long stone building that spanned the distance between the two towers, the roof rising up steeply to meet in the center in a soaring arch. Through the open door, Bronwyn could see the raised altar with the scales of justice above. Light filtered in through windows set high on the stone walls, falling in thin, golden slants on the knights who knelt or prostrated themselves in prayer.

“It was my duty to marry,” Hronulf said simply. “The bloodline of Samular must be carried on. Which reminds me, there are family matters of which we must speak. Come.”

That was no answer at all. Hoping that he would offer better, Bronwyn followed him back up to the tower. He closed the door and bolted it. This struck Bronwyn as a strange precaution, given their secure surroundings. She was even more puzzled when he took an ancient sheet of parchment from a small, locked wooden chest. “Can you read?” he asked.

“In several languages, both modern and ancient.”

The response seemed natural enough to her, but it seemed to displease her father. “Such pride is not seemly.”

“Not pride,” she said with complete honesty. “Necessity. I’m a merchant. And, I suppose, a scholar of sorts. I find lost artifacts, which means I have to study a wide variety of materials and speak to many sorts of people to find what I’m looking for.”

“A merchant.”

He spoke the words in a tone that could have served just as well if he’d said, “a hobgoblin.” Bronwyn suddenly knew how a cat felt when its back went up. She swallowed the tart response that came quickly to her tongue and reached for the parchment.

The style of the script was old, the ink faded and blurred, but Bronwyn got the gist of it well enough. The fortress of Thornhold, and most of the mountain upon which it stood, did not belong to the Holy Order of the Knights of Samular. It was the property of the Caradoon family.

“There is a copy of this writ of succession in the Herald’s Holdfast,” Hronulf said. “Upon my death, you must make provision for the fortress and see that it is used as it has been for these many centuries.” He looked keenly at her. “Are you wed?”

“Not even close,” she said dryly.

“Chaste?”

Under any other circumstances, she would have answered that question with derisive laughter. Now she merely felt puzzlement, edged with the beginnings of anger. “I don’t see what that has to do with this discussion,” she said stiffly.

Hronulf apparently heard in this his answer, and not the one he’d been hoping for. An expression of grave disappointment crossed his face. He sighed, then his jaw firmed with apparent resolve. He rose and went to his writing table. Seating himself, he took up a quill. “I will write you a letter of introduction,” he said, dipping the quill into an inkwell. “Take it to Summit Hall and give it to Laharin Goldbeard of Tyr. He commands this place and will find a suitable match for you.”

Bronwyn’s jaw dropped. She dug one hand into her hair and shook her head as if to clear it. “I don’t believe this.”

“The line of Samular must continue,” Hronulf said earnestly. He blew on the writing to dry it, then set the parchment aside. “You are the last of my five children, so the responsibility falls to you. You seem well suited to it. You are young, comely, and in apparent health.”

This was more than Bronwyn could take. “Next I suppose you’ll be telling me that children are my duty and destiny.”

“And so they are.”

Bronwyn had a sudden, sharp feeling of empathy for a brood mare. She rose abruptly. “I am tired, father. Are there guest quarters in this fortress that will not be too sullied by a woman’s presence?”

He rose with her, and his visage softened somewhat as he studied her. “You are overwrought. Forgive me. I gave you too much to think about too soon.”

“I’m adaptable,” she assured him, wondering even as she spoke if perhaps she had finally come up against the edges of her flexibility.

“We will talk more in the morning. There are secrets known only to the descendants of Samular that you must hear. You must understand your family responsibilities.”

This time, Bronwyn could not hold back a small, grim smile. Until this moment, she had always been fond of irony. To Hronulf of Tyr, family responsibility apparently meant the continuation of the bloodline of Samular. Yet in doing his duty, he had left his family vulnerable.

She was not even the slightest bit tempted to point this out to her father. So vast was the gulf between them that Hronulf was unlikely to ever see this matter as she did. If she married well and produced sons to follow Tyr, he would be content. Nothing else she could do, nothing else she was , could possibly matter. In any way that truly counted, she was as alone now as she had been before she’d entered Thornhold.

Bronwyn reminded herself that she had never really expected to have a family. She had merely sought to learn about her past. If she could think of this meeting with her father as a means to that end, then maybe the ache in her chest would subside.