Anne Kelleher - Silver's Edge

In the bright light, the moonstone shone a pale, milky green, its surface polished to a high shine. It sat upon its marble base, seemingly as pure and pristine as the night it had been placed there, bare and round and naked as the rump of a newborn child. The Silver Caul was gone.

The low moans of the wounded and the dying rose and fell from the floor of the great hall of Castle Gar, the sullen light of flickering fires and fretful rushlights glowing red on blood-crusted bandages and pain-ravaged faces. A small army of women roamed between the crowded rows, their skirts rustling over the blanketed forms, voices low, as they offered water, changed bandages, spooned gruel, and oversaw the removal of the dead to the stables, which had been hastily set up as a temporary morgue.

Donnor, Duke of Gar, standing on the balcony which in happier times served as a musicians’ gallery, folded his arms across his chest and his lips into a thin, tight line as he surveyed the scene below. Despite the unseasonable late-autumn heat, low fires burned in the great hearths along the walls, numerous iron pots steaming on tripods over the banked flames. The stench of mud and sweat, blood and fear, was thick in the heavy, humid air, but there was no escaping it. More wounded crowded the corridors leading into the hall, and even more of the less wretched, those who’d escaped the battle with only minor injuries, such as a severed finger, were being tended out in the courtyard. Thank the Great Mother that the blasted rain had ended at last. The carnage on the battlefield was far worse than this, if such a thing were possible, and the heavy rain made the retrieval of the dead impossible.

An image of his last glance at the battlefield as his captains had urged his retreat flashed before his eyes: the dead in contorted heaps of arms and legs and torsos; discarded spears and swords and broken arrows sticking up at crazy angles like twisted, tortured trees out of a nightmare forest; the red flare of fires; white smoke, which stung his arid eyes, drifting like ghosts above the corpses, even as lightning forked across the sky, thunder rolled down the valley, and the enemy poured across the hills like the sudden onslaught of rain that enabled his own escape.

Neither side could claim victory, but time was of the essence. If the warchiefs of the North did not respond to his call for assistance immediately, his cause could very quickly be crushed beneath the weight of the foreign army the Queen Consort was surely summoning from her homeland of Humbria across the Morhevnian Sea. He had sent a messenger north nearly three weeks ago, and so far, there had been no reply from any quarter. But the usual late-autumn storms in the higher mountain passes may have delayed both the messenger and any response, he tried to reassure himself.

Out of habit, he cursed the ill-fated day that he and the other members of the King’s Council had granted approval to Hoell’s marriage to Merle, the young princess of Humbria. He remembered the eager, earnest look on the younger man’s face as he pled with the Councilors to allow him to marry Merle. A match to seal an alliance, a friendship between the two nations forever, Hoell had argued. The princess was young, healthy, and being from a family of seven brothers and six sisters, surely fertile. And Hoell himself—approaching thirty and free of fits for nearly ten years—surely it was past time he married and produced his own heir? Not that he was in a hurry to disinherit his dear kinsman, Donnor. He’d added that last so charmingly, so disarmingly that Donnor and the other members of the Council—old men all—looked at each other and in the young King’s words felt the tug of their own faded vigor. How could they deny the King the chance to father his own legitimate heir, after all? And so, beguiled by their own deepest regrets, fears, and wishes, they failed to see the trap they’d fallen in. The shrugs and nods had gone around the table, from Councilor to Councilor, from old man to old man. We were seduced by our memories, not convinced by fact, Donnor thought bitterly.

But a seed of foreboding had been sown that day in the back of Donnor’s mind—a nameless fear he steadfastly, and in retrospect foolishly, ignored through all the days of Hoell’s official engagement. As the wedding approached, misgiving repeatedly raised its face and danced an ugly jig; each time a cousin, a younger sister, a nephew-by-marriage of the new Queen was granted some post or title at the Court. But for a year after the wedding, nothing of consequence happened; Hoell seemed content and the newlyweds held court in a style that reflected the new Queen’s Humbrian preferences. The new courtiers made no secret of the fact that they thought the customs of Brynhyvar rude and uncouth if not downright barbaric compared to their own, and Hoell, eager to please his bride, allowed their influence to grow to the point where even the chiefs of the Outermost March spoke openly at the Beltane Gathering that foreigners were taking over the Court.

Donnor retired to Gar and hoped the new King’s infatuation would run its natural course. Then, within a few months of the marriage’s first anniversary, three of the Council members either died or reached an age where it was impossible for them to continue in their duties. They were replaced, as was customary, by three members of the same clans, although of these, two were recently married to Humbrian wives, and held Humbrian titles, and the other was a cousin of the Queen’s, a member of the clan in question only by virtue of the fact that he had married into it.

Cadwyr, Duke of Allovale, Donnor’s nephew and heir, demanded that they raise their standards then. But Donnor insisted on waiting, torn by loyalty to the oaths he had sworn both to Hoell and to his father.

And then, on the second anniversary of the marriage, just as it was announced that the Queen was pregnant, the youngest brother of the Queen, Renvahr, the sixth in line to the throne of Humbria, was named the Duke of Longborth, one of a series of titles normally reserved for the heir to the throne of Brynhyvar, a title that should have been bestowed on Donnor himself long before this.

Almost immediately it was clear that Donnor’s reluctance may have cost them the rebellion. For in the same year that Hoell’s baby son died of a lung infection, Hoell’s fits returned, leaving him docile, innocent as a child, and utterly unfit to rule.

Too late Donnor recognized the strategy of the King of Humbria—overburdened with children, he ranged far and wide, brazenly gobbling as many thrones and titles as possible through strategic marriages and their resulting alliances. The Duke of Longborth’s appointment as Protector of the Realm in his own stead was the final slap to his honor. For he, Donnor, both by blood and marriage, was the rightful heir to the throne of Brynhyvar—not the foreign upstart Renvahr, whose only claim was his relationship to the Queen Consort and a title he had no business receiving. It should have been Donnor’s place to rule the country while the King was incapacitated, rampant rumor blaming the fit on a chance encounter with one of the Shining Ones.

Privately Donnor disbelieved the theory. There was madness in Hoell’s family—but dynastic necessity demanded his brother marry the lovely Elissade. Lovely she was, but dangerous, too, a woman given to fits of anger so fierce she was finally locked away in a tower for her own good. She died by leaping out the window in the midst of a fit, dashing her brains on the paving below. Fortunately Hoell had not inherited his mother’s rages. Instead he became meek as a newborn lamb, easy to care for, but wholly unable to deal with the fractious, brawling chiefs and lords who comprised the nobility of Brynhyvar, let alone the insinuations of his foreign bride and her relatives.