A visitor at Oakenyard

It took some time to get to this, but below is the fifth in my series of reports to Emperor Vesper Zuilkaarme on the strange happenings that occurred throughout Lucardia around the time of Prince Koen the Gray’s disappearance. You can read more about that disappearance here.

To His Radiance, Emperor Vesper, Uniter of the Twelve,

From your humble servant and Eye in the House of Oakenyard,

I set these words down by the light of the eleventh moon, with the winter wind pressing through the bows of Oakenyard’s great oaks as if to overhear. Forgive the haste of my hand; I judge it better Your Imperial Majesty has a crooked line swiftly than a gilded one too late.

Last month, we celebrated the Day of Unification, during which we all gave thanks for Your Imperial Majesty’s heroic deeds. In this, your son did well in paying tribute to your triumphant victories. His Royal Highness handed out bread in your great name to his people. He also commanded a feast with the proper prayers, hymns, and a litany of Your Imperial Majesty’s victories, that the realm might remember it was once twelve heathen kingdoms and is now one glorious empire. Oakenyard swooned in your glory. Garlands of copper beech were hung from the rafters. The oakfire was banked high enough to drive the damp from even the oldest stones. Eadred himself came to the table washed, combed, and near sober, wrapped in the blue and gold you graciously sent last winter. For a moment, even the prince looked like a true drop of royal blood and not a forest-touched hermit hiding in a crumbling keep.

We had reached the third course—a boar from the eastern woods, roasted whole and stuffed with apples from the river orchards—when the messenger came.

He did not enter by the great doors with the other latecomers, but through the side postern that opens onto the old well-court. It is where the servants congregate, and for one of these groundsmen to deliver a message to His Royal Highness during a feast was unbecoming.

Luckily, the man never reached the hall with his manure-caked boots. The prince’s yeoman, Sulwyn, saw him in the passage, listened to a few hurried words, and bent close enough that I could see the color leave his face. He went straight to the high table and murmured in Eadred’s ear.

Our young lord froze with a knife halfway to his mouth. For once, the twitch in his hands had nothing to do with theriac. His eyes were not on the messenger but fixed on the middle distance, as if he suddenly saw a figure standing where none of us did.

His Royal Highness set the knife down very carefully, pushed his plate away, and said—in a voice clear enough to carry over the music—“You will enjoy yourselves without me. The woods are calling.”

The hall laughed. Eadred the Strange, we all thought, back to his Forest People and his whispers in the oaks. But his face did not match the joke. There was something like terror there, and something like hope.

He left without making the sign of Caspia over the bread. You and I both know he never forgets the rituals. They are the one thread that still binds him to the court’s habits.

I rose as if to follow—only a loyal steward, concerned for his lord’s health—but one of the guards blocked my path with the flat of his hand and the empty smile men wear when they have orders not to speak.

“His Highness desires privacy,” he said.

“Even from his father’s Eye?” I asked, just lightly enough to make it a jest.

“Especially from eyes,” he replied.

Your Radiance, I have grown practiced at measuring danger in throwaway words. That one rang like steel.

Your son did not return to the feast. The cupbearers poured his wine into the fire as the night wore on, and the musicians, uncertain, played more loudly to cover the unease. The cellars were emptied of drink. When the last guests stumbled to their beds, there was still no sign of the prince.

I slept little.

At dawn, the castle woke to a new inhabitant.

She came not with trumpets nor with the standard of any house, but walking beside Eadred down from the north gate, as if they had merely stepped out for a morning stroll. The guards parted for them at a word. The village folk in the outer bailey stopped to stare at this new gem.

Her hair was the first thing any man saw: a mane the color of banked coals, not the washed-out rust often found among the Forest People, but a true, living fire that caught every scrap of morning light. She wore a dress that did not fit her—a servant’s gown in the Oakenyard green, let out at the seams and hastily hemmed over a plain wool shift. Mud stained the hem. Her boots had been made for a bigger foot and stuffed with rags. This has all changed, and she now wears the finest Oakenyard can produce, but at first, her ensemble was haste in cloth.

She looked, in sum, like something he had found in the woods and dragged home before anyone could stop him, albeit a beautiful creature akin to a wild doe.

Not a child, Your Radiance. Not yet a woman, either. Eighteen summers perhaps, though hunger and hard road may have carved years into her that are not truly there. Her eyes were too old by half and full of a wisdom beyond her years. Some might even say a temptress.

The prince took her arm as he led her through the courtyard. Many saw this, and all whispered. He bent his head to speak to her, and for a heartbeat, his face smoothed, all the twitch and the strain washed away. He smiled—not the thin, ironic smirk he wears at court but something smaller and more dangerous: a private smile.

I watched from the gallery as he brought her into the hall.

“This is my guest,” he said. “She will have chambers on the river side. See that she is clothed, fed, and that no one troubles her. She is my guest and shall be treated with all honors of my court.”

No name. No title. No more explanation than this.

When the castellan, red-faced and puffing, dared ask from what house she hailed and what message she bore, the girl answered herself in a voice quiet but clean:

“I belong to no house,” she said. “I bring no message. I was left here in the care of the prince.”

“By whom?” the castellan pressed.

She turned her head, slow as if listening to something only she could hear, then glanced toward the southern window where the sea mist lay thick over the docks.

“By the wind,” she said. “Upon the mane of a lion and in the company of a gray wolf.”

Eadred laughed too loudly at this. “Pay her no mind,” he said. “She is a little fanciful. But she is here under my protection. That should be enough for all of you.”

Your Radiance, you taught your sons that nothing is ever “enough” without a pedigree, a patron, or a purpose. Eadred knows this. For him to fling such words at his own people about a girl who is beautiful, yes, but obviously of humble blood, is either madness or defiance. In his case, I suspect some rich mixture of both.

In the two days since, they have been near inseparable.

They walk the inner gardens together at hours when most of the court still sleeps. They spend long stretches in the old chapel, speaking in low tones before the cracked statue of Caspia. Just this morning, I saw them in the old crypt of the Musgrave kings. Eadred had no candle. The only light was the filtered beams from the stone grating overhead. He spoke in the most unusual tone, one of an infatuated boy. She listened with her head tilted, as if catching some faint sound beneath his words. He reached for her hand, and she did not pull away.

Since her appearance, the prince has been cleaner. That will please Your Imperial Majesty, at least. The stink of smoke and theriac is less about him. He has taken to washing in the river each morning, even when the mist scums it with ice. His hands tremble less. At supper, he eats what is set before him without pushing it into patterns or counting his bites. She is there, too, putting him in a jovial mood.

One might say she is good for him.

One might also say she is here to bring ruin.

Where once he spent his solitary hours in the grove beyond the walls, murmuring to trunks and stones, he now spends them in her company. He asks her questions in court that he used to pose to his appointed counsel.

“What do you think, Erikini?” I heard him say yesterday, in the presence of at least five knights and three minor lords. That was the first time I caught her name.

“About the timber tithe,” he added quickly, as if he realized too late what he had done. “Should we bleed the forest or the villages first?”

Her answer, delivered without hesitation: “Timber grows back faster than men. Cut the trees.”

The council laughed, but the looks of concern, disdain, and jealousy were difficult for them to hide.

I have made quiet inquiries, Your Imperial Majesty. No one saw her arrive at any gate. No rider bore her. No ship came up the river that night—it was too fog-choked to risk the rocks, and the harbor-master swears on his mother’s bones that only one ship passed his beacon, a royal galleass with a broken rudder, but none disembarked while it was repaired. The only travelers noted on the logs were two cloaked figures who approached the northern causeway near midnight, gave the correct countersign, and were admitted at once in the same courtyard I mentioned above.

Your Imperial Majesty asked me, when first you set me here, to watch for signs that Eadred’s oddities might flower into treason. I do not yet call what I see treason. But I see influence from an unexplained source. I see a prince who has been long alone finding, at last, someone who answers the same voices he hears in the dark.

If she is what she seems—a stray taken from the road, raw and grateful—then you have little to fear, and perhaps something to gain. Men who feel loved are more easily led, so long as it remains a secret love in keeping with the decorum of court.

If she is what my instincts whisper—a witchling, a listening-post for powers that dislike the Caspian throne—then you will want to act before her roots go too deep into your son’s heart, or worse, a royal seed sprouts in wild earth.

I await Your Imperial Majesty’s command.

Shall I press further, risking that Eadred turns his suspicions on me? Shall I attempt to draw the girl out, learn where she was “left” before she came to Oakenyard, and by whom? Or shall I merely watch, and record, and send you each small deviation from the order you built?

For now, I will tell Your Imperial Majesty only this: your strangest son has a new star to orbit, and her hair burns like a warning above the gray sea.

Your most obedient servant,
who remains unseen in Oakenyard

Part 1: The mysterious disappearance of Sir Lodin

Part 2: The Phantom and the Citadel

Part 3: The mystery of Dagon Light

Part 4: Bombardment of Restol