Post by devilinthedetails on May 13, 2018 10:14:29 GMT 10
Title: Broken Crown
Rating: R for references to assisted suicide and other dark topics.
Prompt: Chase the Crown
Summary: Roger's whole life is spent chasing the crown, and the realm bleeds for it.
Broken Crown
A crown was an ephemeral thing—slipping out of reach whenever Roger’s fingers seemed about to grasp it—but it was all the more seductive for forever hovering on the cusp of attainability, and Roger spent his whole life chasing the elusive broken dream of a crown on his head.
His ambition, his unquenchable desire for dominion, could be credited to or blamed upon King Jasson. When he was five, King Jasson led him up the stone stairwell to the ramparts enclosing the inner keep of fief Conte’s castle. Prowling like Roger’s Mithran priest tutors described a Carthaki lion pacing when stalking claimed territory, King Jasson surveyed the wheat field filled with peasants and the tall tops of the Royal Forest swaying in a distant breeze.
“This”—King Jasson waved a palm at the land below him, and his golden ring embedded with onyx bewitched Roger with its brightness in the summer sunlight—“is our family’s dominion, and we must hold onto it with a firm hand, or it will be snatched from our lax grip.”
“Father says fief Conte is my inheritance.” Roger drew himself up with pride at not stumbling over the big word. He didn’t understand exactly what an inheritance was though his father, the king’s younger and some said favored son, had explained to him most strictly that it meant he had to attend without wiggling the manor courts his mother, the Duchess Alyson, presided over when Roger’s father, Prince Jonathan, was winning battles for the king against the eternal enemies Tusaine and Galla. Roger was rather jealous of his father in that regard. Battles sounded much more exciting than listening to his mother resolve manorial disputes. “When he’s gone, he says it will be mine to rule well, Your Majesty.”
“Rule well you must.” King Jasson’s hand squeezed the nape of Roger’s neck as tightly as a noose knotted around a criminal’s before a hanging. “This castle will one day be yours to maintain, and it is more our family’s stronghold than the palace.”
“It is, Your Majesty?” Roger tried and failed not to gape at his grandfather the king.
The palace was an elegant maze of ballrooms, state rooms, banquet halls, and living quarters surrounded by stables and practice courts in which Roger always lost himself. It was the ever awake center of power in the realm. At least that was how Roger imagined it. It shocked him that the king might dismiss the palace as superfluous compared to Conte castle.
In contrast to the palace’s grand sprawl, Conte castle was a compact fortress of solid stone walls and cold iron gates. Two baileys with guardhouses, slits in the ramparts for soldiers to fire arrows, and holes above the gates where defenders could pour buckets of blazebalm over any invaders, shielded the inner keep, itself a tower with a winding staircase angled so protectors could attack any assailants with their right hand.
As if he could sense the rabbit hole down which Roger’s thoughts had hopped, King Jasson grunted. “The palace isn’t built to be defended. This castle is. Our family would need to retreat and regroup here if the palace was threatened. We rule from the palace but this is where we must be strong enough to hold onto our power. You must become a mighty warrior like your father to keep this castle impenetrable.”
As the king ordered, Roger wanted to be a mighty warrior like his father, and to him that meant his father was the best—perhaps the only—man to teach him how to fight. He trained under the vigilant eye of the captain of Conte castle’s guard in the hope of impressing his absent father. When his father next returned from the conflict along the Gallan border, Roger, who had just celebrated his sixth birthday, saw him nod with enough approval as he watched Roger practicing that Roger dared to seize his father’s saddle in the courtyard as he prepared to ride out at the front of a company, begging, “Take me with you, Father. Teach me to be a warrior like you.”
“You’ll stay here, son.” Father’s hands, calloused from a lifetime of wielding a sword in service of his king, removed Roger’s clutching fingers from his saddle. Roger would have sobbed at the rejection if it wouldn’t have robbed him of what scant dignity he had left. He would not weep and open himself up to the scorn of a courtyard teeming with battle-hardened men. “Protect and obey your mother. That is your duty until I return.”
“Yes, sir.” Roger bowed to hide the resentment burning in him at being abandoned and shamed by the father he admired yet barely knew.
“I’ll be back from the war soon, Roger.” Father’s gaze and tone softened for a beat of Roger’s raging heart before he marched his stallion our of the castle with his men arrayed behind him, his face once again sharp as a spear.
Even as he heard the promise, Roger had a shiver in his bones that told him his father wouldn’t be back from the war soon because he never returned from the battlefield quickly, but he only discovered how deeply his father had lied to him when his mother summoned him to her solar months later.
“Your father is dead.” Mother’s eyes were crimson from crying, and tears blotted the ink of the letter she thrust before Roger’s nose.
Her hand was shaking too much for Roger to read the note, and, anyway, he didn’t understand the meaning of this mysterious word dead at least as applied to the absent giant of his childhood. “What do you mean by dead, Mother?”
“I mean he was cut with a poisoned sword, and no healer could save him.” Mother’s lip trembled along with her voice.
“Why couldn’t the army healers save him?” Roger’s forehead furrowed as he frowned at Cait, the castle healer who had taught him simple healing spells and remedies since he had manifested his first signs of magic.
“Healers can’t save everyone no matter how hard they try, I’m afraid.” Cait’s answer was addressed to Roger but it was Duchess Alyson’s wrist she clutched in comfort.
“What does that mean?” Roger’s throat was dry as the desert his grandfather had conquered because he had dreadful suspicion of what Cait meant.
“It means your father is gone.” Mother tore at the letter that had ripped her heart apart and hurled the pieces onto the cackling fire to be consumed in a merciless orange blaze. “It means he’s never coming home again.”
“What your honored mother means”—a cowled priest of the Black God Roger hadn’t noticed lurking in a corner outside the flickering firelight suddenly spoke—“is that your father has departed to his true home in the Peaceful Realms where you may pray to be reunited with his when your mortal days are done. Your father was a valiant warrior, and you may take blessed assurance in the certainty that Mithors whom he worshipped with his bravery will intercede on his behalf in the Black God’s court.”
Roger might have ducked his head and offered a rote—meaningless since it hadn’t saved his father—“so mote it be” if Cait hadn’t spat like a boiling kettle in fury, “You’re a vulture preying on the dead though you call yourself a priest. Do you think a widow who lost her husband to violence wants to hear war praised? Go and ruffle feathers elsewhere.”
Mother didn’t speak in defense of the priest or in support of Cait. Instead she only stared into the roaring fire as if urging the flames to devour her as they had the letter bearing the shattering news that Father was dead as the Old Ones. Roger didn’t speak either. He was not yet seven, his father was never coming home again, and he was too baffled by the magnitude of that to comprehend the meaning enough to cry.
After the note that told them Father would never return, Roger lost his mother too. She drifted away from him, becoming as insubstantial as a ghost, though she rarely left his side as if fearing he would be taken from her as well. Eating, drinking, sleeping, and speaking little, she faded to a hollow husk of herself, but she wasn’t the only one diminished by Father’s death for King Jasson, whom servants with brothers or husbands who had never come back from battle whispered when they believed Roger wasn’t listening hadn’t shed a tear when the realm lost thousands of sons, was devastated by the loss of his own child.
At the elaborate court ceremony where King Jasson and his queen Daneline abdicated the throne so the crown might pass to his oldest son Roald and Roald’s wife Lianne, Roger thought that King Jasson did appear crippled as a hunchback with grief while Queen Daneline reminded him of a wilted flower in a decaying garden as winter approached.
Roger didn’t understand how a king could surrender while he had breath in his body a golden crown that gleamed with too many gems to count. The crown imbued a king with an aura of authority. Without it, a king was no more than a peasant. It was the ultimate weakness to give a crown to another, Roger’s instincts screamed inside him as he watched with a hundred other courtiers as King Jasson and Queen Daneline performed an action that struck him as utterly unnatural and contrary to human nature especially from a man who had once lectured Roger on the importance of strength.
That night as he sat with his mother on their opulent balcony with its marble pillars and statues of mythical beasts, he asked over the noise of the partying on the streets of Corus to celebrate King Roald and Queen Lianne’s coronation wafting along the twisting serpent of the Olorun, “How can a king bear to surrender his throne, Mother? Wouldn’t he prefer to die than give it up without a fight?”
“Your grandfather was tired of fighting, my dear.” Mother’s tone sounded as exhausted as she described his grandfather as being. “When you lose someone you love, sometimes you don’t see the point of holding onto anything any longer because you realize everything is empty symbolism.”
The next morning when King Roald showed him into a secret chamber where the shimmering Crown Jewels were kept, the last thing Roger would have associated with kingship was empty symbolism. He drank in the jewels as a man might fine wine at a banquet and smiled when King Roald, laying a gentle palm on his shoulder, bent to murmur in his ear, “You are now my heir as I was my father’s, Roger. Until my lady bears me a son of my own, you are slated to inherit the realm and the riches around you. You must pledge to me that you’ll rule well if you inherit my crown.”
“I swear I’ll be a good heir, Your Majesty.” The promise flowed smoothly as a river from Roger’s lips. It was easy enough to play the part of the good nephew. Now he would add the role of good heir to his performance. He had become one of the Players he laughed and clapped to watch at feasts.
He learned the meaning of emptiness when he and his mother returned to Conte castle, and, within a week, he awoke to the news that the world as he knew it had altered irreversibly while he was abed. Duchess Alyson, he was told by the Black God’s priest, had perished in her sleep, her lungs and heart failing her. When Roger demanded how Cait could have let his mother die, the priest’s lips thinned to a knife’s blade as he informed Roger that she had fled from the castle overnight and no patrol had managed to bring her back to the castle for questioning.
Roger stayed in his bedchamber and listening with numb ears to the servants who brought his meals and cleaned his quarters while speculating that the late Duchess Alyson, mad with grief for her loved and lost husband, had swallowed wine laced with hemlock given to her by Cait. They said, after covert glances at Roger, who continued to stare blankly out his window at the mackerel gray sky as if hoping that his mother would materialize amidst the clouds, that was why Cait had vanished. It was, after all, a hanging offense for a healer to poison a patient even if the patient begged for the mercy of death.
He wondered if Cait had poisoned his mother, if his mother had pleaded for the release of death, and where Cait was now. He wanted to cry into his pillow but his soul was too drained for tears so he sat in his room until King Roald, Queen Lianne, Duke Gareth of Naxen, and Duke Baird of Queenscove rode in with a squad of the King’s Own the next morning.
They came to escort Roger to be raised in the palace as a ward of the king and to collect his mother’s body so she might be buried in the Conte crypts. Roger didn’t understand why Duke Baird was present unless it was to investigate if his mother had indeed been poisoned. His suspicions were aroused still further when he watched Duke Baird touch with his emerald magic the wine glass that remained on the nightstand beside the bed where his mother lay behind embroidered curtains.
“You’re the chief of the palace healers, Your Grace.” Roger wouldn’t have dared to say anything if he hadn’t remembered a moment before that with his mother dead he now had a title to rival Duke Baird’s. He was a duke. He could ask questions and demand answers even from those of equal rank. It was a tantalizing power like his Gift.
“I am.” Duke Baird arched an eyebrow as he continued to probe the wine glass with his magic. “The Old King appointed me to the post near the end of his reign, and His Majesty honored me by keeping me in the position.”
“You heal people, but my mother is already dead.” Roger jerked his chin at the bed it sickened his stomach to see. “Why are you here?”
“It is important that we understand what killed your mother.” Duke Baird’s tone was ginger as if he feared Roger might burst into tears without warning.
“I could help you with that.” Pressing his advantage, Roger stepped forward. “I’ve the Gift and some training in healing.”
“It’s not appropriate for a young boy to take an interest in such matters, Roger.” King Roald’s clouding face reminded Roger that one of the few traits the current king shared with the Old King was an aversion to the magical arts. “Hush and allow His Grace to conduct his investigation without disruption.”
Roger subsided into an obedient if sulky silence.
Perhaps observing his petulant scowl, Queen Lianne stepped forward to tuck his hand into her silk-gloved one. “Come, let’s explore the gardens together, dear. Fresh air would do us both good.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Roger hoped that his mother would be proud of him for recalling his etiquette lessons enough to kiss the queen’s fingers. Mother had always insisted that habits such as that made him charming, and Roger loved being called charming, especially by his mother.
He followed Queen Lianne out of his mother’s bedroom and down the inner keep’s steep, spiraling staircase to a door that entered into the castle gardens. Once they were in the gardens, Queen Lianne indicated with a smile sweet and white as lilies that he should guide her. If she expected him to take her on a tour of the rose garden with its trellises or the pine garden with its bubbling fountains, she must have been disappointed when he steered her into the herbal garden where plants for the kitchens and for healing grew.
As he walked with her through the fragrant plants, he recited each herb and its purpose. When he arrived at the hemlock, he eyed Queen Lianne for a hint that she knew whether Cait had poisoned Mother, but her face remained politely attentive, revealing nothing.
He uncovered the truth behind Queen Lianne’s pleasant mask that night when he crept out of his bed down the corridor to a parlor where Duke Gareth, King Roald, and Queen Lianne were engaged in an intense but hushed conversation. As Roger inclined his ear to better hear, it was Duke Gareth who was speaking soberly, “Duke Baird confirmed that hemlock was indeed in the late Duchess Alyson’s wine glass. The Black God’s priests have agreed that the Duchess Alyson may be buried in sacred ground as long as the healer who slipped poison into her cup is charged with murder.”
Roger gasped at this revelation but his sharp inhalation was covered by King Roald rumbling, “Where is the healer who murdered my brother’s widow?”
“She has likely fled to Carthak, Your Majesty.” That was Duke Gareth again. “In Carthak, mages with flexible scruples about murder are always in fashion.”
Roger started to ponder whether he should try to run away and find Cait in Carthak but was distracted when King Roald ordered, “Have a warrant issued for her arrest if she ever returns to Tortall. If captured, she will be tried for murder and hanged.”
“As you command, Your Majesty.” Duke Gareth’s response made Roger howl as if he were the one sentenced to the gallows.
Roger’s howl brought the king into the hallway. King Roald pressed Roger against his chest as if to offer consolation, but Roger twisted out of his grasp, protesting, “You can’t have Cait hanged, Your Majesty. She never did anything unless my mother ordered it so she didn’t kill my mother, not truly.”
“Quiet yourself, Roger.” King Roald patted Roger’s cheek before Roger could pull away. “Your mother is at peace, and you must be as well while I seek justice for her.”
Roger wanted to stamp his feet and shout that the king was a coward who didn’t care about the truth or justice but even as a child he recognized that would be treason, so he clenched his jaw shut, shaking from top to toe with the excruciating effort of biting his tongue until blood welled in his mouth.
“Her Majesty and I will raise you as if you were our own son.” King Roald hugged Roger, who remained stiff as a plank, thinking with a bitterness that choked him that his uncle was unfit to rule, and that he, Roger, should be king. Roger had the courage to seek justice and the truth where the king avoided it like the Sweating Sickness.
“Your Majesty is most kind to me.” Roger wished he could kick the king instead of thanking him. “I thank you.”
“You may call us Uncle Roald and Aunt Lianne when we aren’t in public.” King Roald was trying to massage the tension from Roger’s taut shoulders, which only made Roger bristle all the more.
“Yes, Uncle Roald.” Roger forced out the dutiful reply even as he wanted to scream out the anguish in his lungs again. “Thank you.”
He was taken back to the royal palace, where his mother was buried with great fanfare in the Conte crypts, and raised as a ward of the kind, who appointed a seneschal to preside over the fief in Roger’s name until Roger came of age. Mithran priests educated him in academics and Duke Gareth trained him in the fighting arts.
“You must learn to keep your guard up, Roger,” Duke Gareth advised him for what seemed the thousandth time as they sat on a courtyard bench after a bout with practice swords that had left Roger with bruises he sensed would be plump and purple as plums in the morning.
“Is that how you lost your finger, Your Grace?” Roger’s gaze dropped to Duke Gareth’s missing finger, hoping to provoke a story of a battle that would take his mind off his pain, but Duke Gareth didn’t oblige him with a war tale.
“I lost it in the Chamber of the Ordeal.” Duke Gareth’s brisk tone and severe face closed the conversation before it could open. “You might lose your tongue during your Ordeal if you don’t learn some manners, boy.”
Roger turned ten, enrolled in page training as was required of the heir to the Tortallan throne, and was subjected to Master Oakbridge’s daily endeavors to teach him manners. Not long after he began page training, Queen Lianne suffered another one of her miscarriages. Waiting outside the bedchamber where Queen Lianne was being attended for news with King Roald and Duke Gareth, Roger hid his head in his hands to conceal the fact that there wasn’t a tear in his eyes when a healer emerged to announce that Queen Lianne had lost the child. He rejoiced in his status as heir—basking in the knowledge that the crown would one day be his—as he rubbed his eyes until they would appear as red-rimmed as if he had wept over his aunt’s miscarriage.
Another miscarriage later, Roger was thirteen and regularly attending council meetings. It was at the council meetings that he saw for the first time that it was the Naxens who were the power behind the throne. Petitioners might approach the king, whose ears were filled with Queen Lianne’s discreet whispers, but it was Duke Gareth who weighed the merits of each case and reached a verdict on how to proceed. King Roald might have worn the crown, but it was Duke Gareth who made the most important decisions for the realm.
After a council meeting where Duke Gareth’s influence was once again on display to anyone who wasn’t blind as a rat, Roger remarked to him, “Some say you’re the power behind the throne, Your Grace.”
“I only offer advice.” Duke Gareth’s denial didn’t disappoint Roger because he had expected nothing less. “I serve my kingdom and its true king in what capacity I can as must we all.”
It wasn’t until Roger was fourteen, and, as heir to the king (though the queen was swollen with another pregnancy) serving as his squire that Roger ventured to ask his uncle, “Doesn’t it bother you, Uncle Roald, when people refer to your brother-in-law as the real ruler of the realm?”
“No.” King Roald’s blue eyes pierced into Roger’s like a lance cutting through armor at a tournament. “It is idle talk, and a king must not be goaded by idle talk. My brother-in-law has ever been faithful to me, Roger. To reward loyalty with distrust is to breed paranoia and resentment.”
Roger thought perhaps he was prone to paranoia and resentment but when Queen Lianne gave birth to a healthy baby—called Prince Jonathan as if to add insult to the injury his birth had done Roger by using the name of Roger’s father—a fifteen-year-old Roger realized that he had never known paranoia and resentment until he was demoted from heir to spare. He wasn’t merely resentful or paranoid, however. He was determined to claim his throne, and his wrath against all who opposed him in his quest for power would be that of a king’s.
The first time he tried to take his crown—because a crown taken by force was as legitimate as one inherited, all the history books proved—he had to feign death in order to survive. The second time, he planned to destroy himself along with the realm so that his cursed cousin could never be crowned. After all, if he could never be king, the least he could do was ensure that Prince Jonathan never got to be king either. They would all die in rubble for his broken dream of a crown.
Rating: R for references to assisted suicide and other dark topics.
Prompt: Chase the Crown
Summary: Roger's whole life is spent chasing the crown, and the realm bleeds for it.
Broken Crown
A crown was an ephemeral thing—slipping out of reach whenever Roger’s fingers seemed about to grasp it—but it was all the more seductive for forever hovering on the cusp of attainability, and Roger spent his whole life chasing the elusive broken dream of a crown on his head.
His ambition, his unquenchable desire for dominion, could be credited to or blamed upon King Jasson. When he was five, King Jasson led him up the stone stairwell to the ramparts enclosing the inner keep of fief Conte’s castle. Prowling like Roger’s Mithran priest tutors described a Carthaki lion pacing when stalking claimed territory, King Jasson surveyed the wheat field filled with peasants and the tall tops of the Royal Forest swaying in a distant breeze.
“This”—King Jasson waved a palm at the land below him, and his golden ring embedded with onyx bewitched Roger with its brightness in the summer sunlight—“is our family’s dominion, and we must hold onto it with a firm hand, or it will be snatched from our lax grip.”
“Father says fief Conte is my inheritance.” Roger drew himself up with pride at not stumbling over the big word. He didn’t understand exactly what an inheritance was though his father, the king’s younger and some said favored son, had explained to him most strictly that it meant he had to attend without wiggling the manor courts his mother, the Duchess Alyson, presided over when Roger’s father, Prince Jonathan, was winning battles for the king against the eternal enemies Tusaine and Galla. Roger was rather jealous of his father in that regard. Battles sounded much more exciting than listening to his mother resolve manorial disputes. “When he’s gone, he says it will be mine to rule well, Your Majesty.”
“Rule well you must.” King Jasson’s hand squeezed the nape of Roger’s neck as tightly as a noose knotted around a criminal’s before a hanging. “This castle will one day be yours to maintain, and it is more our family’s stronghold than the palace.”
“It is, Your Majesty?” Roger tried and failed not to gape at his grandfather the king.
The palace was an elegant maze of ballrooms, state rooms, banquet halls, and living quarters surrounded by stables and practice courts in which Roger always lost himself. It was the ever awake center of power in the realm. At least that was how Roger imagined it. It shocked him that the king might dismiss the palace as superfluous compared to Conte castle.
In contrast to the palace’s grand sprawl, Conte castle was a compact fortress of solid stone walls and cold iron gates. Two baileys with guardhouses, slits in the ramparts for soldiers to fire arrows, and holes above the gates where defenders could pour buckets of blazebalm over any invaders, shielded the inner keep, itself a tower with a winding staircase angled so protectors could attack any assailants with their right hand.
As if he could sense the rabbit hole down which Roger’s thoughts had hopped, King Jasson grunted. “The palace isn’t built to be defended. This castle is. Our family would need to retreat and regroup here if the palace was threatened. We rule from the palace but this is where we must be strong enough to hold onto our power. You must become a mighty warrior like your father to keep this castle impenetrable.”
As the king ordered, Roger wanted to be a mighty warrior like his father, and to him that meant his father was the best—perhaps the only—man to teach him how to fight. He trained under the vigilant eye of the captain of Conte castle’s guard in the hope of impressing his absent father. When his father next returned from the conflict along the Gallan border, Roger, who had just celebrated his sixth birthday, saw him nod with enough approval as he watched Roger practicing that Roger dared to seize his father’s saddle in the courtyard as he prepared to ride out at the front of a company, begging, “Take me with you, Father. Teach me to be a warrior like you.”
“You’ll stay here, son.” Father’s hands, calloused from a lifetime of wielding a sword in service of his king, removed Roger’s clutching fingers from his saddle. Roger would have sobbed at the rejection if it wouldn’t have robbed him of what scant dignity he had left. He would not weep and open himself up to the scorn of a courtyard teeming with battle-hardened men. “Protect and obey your mother. That is your duty until I return.”
“Yes, sir.” Roger bowed to hide the resentment burning in him at being abandoned and shamed by the father he admired yet barely knew.
“I’ll be back from the war soon, Roger.” Father’s gaze and tone softened for a beat of Roger’s raging heart before he marched his stallion our of the castle with his men arrayed behind him, his face once again sharp as a spear.
Even as he heard the promise, Roger had a shiver in his bones that told him his father wouldn’t be back from the war soon because he never returned from the battlefield quickly, but he only discovered how deeply his father had lied to him when his mother summoned him to her solar months later.
“Your father is dead.” Mother’s eyes were crimson from crying, and tears blotted the ink of the letter she thrust before Roger’s nose.
Her hand was shaking too much for Roger to read the note, and, anyway, he didn’t understand the meaning of this mysterious word dead at least as applied to the absent giant of his childhood. “What do you mean by dead, Mother?”
“I mean he was cut with a poisoned sword, and no healer could save him.” Mother’s lip trembled along with her voice.
“Why couldn’t the army healers save him?” Roger’s forehead furrowed as he frowned at Cait, the castle healer who had taught him simple healing spells and remedies since he had manifested his first signs of magic.
“Healers can’t save everyone no matter how hard they try, I’m afraid.” Cait’s answer was addressed to Roger but it was Duchess Alyson’s wrist she clutched in comfort.
“What does that mean?” Roger’s throat was dry as the desert his grandfather had conquered because he had dreadful suspicion of what Cait meant.
“It means your father is gone.” Mother tore at the letter that had ripped her heart apart and hurled the pieces onto the cackling fire to be consumed in a merciless orange blaze. “It means he’s never coming home again.”
“What your honored mother means”—a cowled priest of the Black God Roger hadn’t noticed lurking in a corner outside the flickering firelight suddenly spoke—“is that your father has departed to his true home in the Peaceful Realms where you may pray to be reunited with his when your mortal days are done. Your father was a valiant warrior, and you may take blessed assurance in the certainty that Mithors whom he worshipped with his bravery will intercede on his behalf in the Black God’s court.”
Roger might have ducked his head and offered a rote—meaningless since it hadn’t saved his father—“so mote it be” if Cait hadn’t spat like a boiling kettle in fury, “You’re a vulture preying on the dead though you call yourself a priest. Do you think a widow who lost her husband to violence wants to hear war praised? Go and ruffle feathers elsewhere.”
Mother didn’t speak in defense of the priest or in support of Cait. Instead she only stared into the roaring fire as if urging the flames to devour her as they had the letter bearing the shattering news that Father was dead as the Old Ones. Roger didn’t speak either. He was not yet seven, his father was never coming home again, and he was too baffled by the magnitude of that to comprehend the meaning enough to cry.
After the note that told them Father would never return, Roger lost his mother too. She drifted away from him, becoming as insubstantial as a ghost, though she rarely left his side as if fearing he would be taken from her as well. Eating, drinking, sleeping, and speaking little, she faded to a hollow husk of herself, but she wasn’t the only one diminished by Father’s death for King Jasson, whom servants with brothers or husbands who had never come back from battle whispered when they believed Roger wasn’t listening hadn’t shed a tear when the realm lost thousands of sons, was devastated by the loss of his own child.
At the elaborate court ceremony where King Jasson and his queen Daneline abdicated the throne so the crown might pass to his oldest son Roald and Roald’s wife Lianne, Roger thought that King Jasson did appear crippled as a hunchback with grief while Queen Daneline reminded him of a wilted flower in a decaying garden as winter approached.
Roger didn’t understand how a king could surrender while he had breath in his body a golden crown that gleamed with too many gems to count. The crown imbued a king with an aura of authority. Without it, a king was no more than a peasant. It was the ultimate weakness to give a crown to another, Roger’s instincts screamed inside him as he watched with a hundred other courtiers as King Jasson and Queen Daneline performed an action that struck him as utterly unnatural and contrary to human nature especially from a man who had once lectured Roger on the importance of strength.
That night as he sat with his mother on their opulent balcony with its marble pillars and statues of mythical beasts, he asked over the noise of the partying on the streets of Corus to celebrate King Roald and Queen Lianne’s coronation wafting along the twisting serpent of the Olorun, “How can a king bear to surrender his throne, Mother? Wouldn’t he prefer to die than give it up without a fight?”
“Your grandfather was tired of fighting, my dear.” Mother’s tone sounded as exhausted as she described his grandfather as being. “When you lose someone you love, sometimes you don’t see the point of holding onto anything any longer because you realize everything is empty symbolism.”
The next morning when King Roald showed him into a secret chamber where the shimmering Crown Jewels were kept, the last thing Roger would have associated with kingship was empty symbolism. He drank in the jewels as a man might fine wine at a banquet and smiled when King Roald, laying a gentle palm on his shoulder, bent to murmur in his ear, “You are now my heir as I was my father’s, Roger. Until my lady bears me a son of my own, you are slated to inherit the realm and the riches around you. You must pledge to me that you’ll rule well if you inherit my crown.”
“I swear I’ll be a good heir, Your Majesty.” The promise flowed smoothly as a river from Roger’s lips. It was easy enough to play the part of the good nephew. Now he would add the role of good heir to his performance. He had become one of the Players he laughed and clapped to watch at feasts.
He learned the meaning of emptiness when he and his mother returned to Conte castle, and, within a week, he awoke to the news that the world as he knew it had altered irreversibly while he was abed. Duchess Alyson, he was told by the Black God’s priest, had perished in her sleep, her lungs and heart failing her. When Roger demanded how Cait could have let his mother die, the priest’s lips thinned to a knife’s blade as he informed Roger that she had fled from the castle overnight and no patrol had managed to bring her back to the castle for questioning.
Roger stayed in his bedchamber and listening with numb ears to the servants who brought his meals and cleaned his quarters while speculating that the late Duchess Alyson, mad with grief for her loved and lost husband, had swallowed wine laced with hemlock given to her by Cait. They said, after covert glances at Roger, who continued to stare blankly out his window at the mackerel gray sky as if hoping that his mother would materialize amidst the clouds, that was why Cait had vanished. It was, after all, a hanging offense for a healer to poison a patient even if the patient begged for the mercy of death.
He wondered if Cait had poisoned his mother, if his mother had pleaded for the release of death, and where Cait was now. He wanted to cry into his pillow but his soul was too drained for tears so he sat in his room until King Roald, Queen Lianne, Duke Gareth of Naxen, and Duke Baird of Queenscove rode in with a squad of the King’s Own the next morning.
They came to escort Roger to be raised in the palace as a ward of the king and to collect his mother’s body so she might be buried in the Conte crypts. Roger didn’t understand why Duke Baird was present unless it was to investigate if his mother had indeed been poisoned. His suspicions were aroused still further when he watched Duke Baird touch with his emerald magic the wine glass that remained on the nightstand beside the bed where his mother lay behind embroidered curtains.
“You’re the chief of the palace healers, Your Grace.” Roger wouldn’t have dared to say anything if he hadn’t remembered a moment before that with his mother dead he now had a title to rival Duke Baird’s. He was a duke. He could ask questions and demand answers even from those of equal rank. It was a tantalizing power like his Gift.
“I am.” Duke Baird arched an eyebrow as he continued to probe the wine glass with his magic. “The Old King appointed me to the post near the end of his reign, and His Majesty honored me by keeping me in the position.”
“You heal people, but my mother is already dead.” Roger jerked his chin at the bed it sickened his stomach to see. “Why are you here?”
“It is important that we understand what killed your mother.” Duke Baird’s tone was ginger as if he feared Roger might burst into tears without warning.
“I could help you with that.” Pressing his advantage, Roger stepped forward. “I’ve the Gift and some training in healing.”
“It’s not appropriate for a young boy to take an interest in such matters, Roger.” King Roald’s clouding face reminded Roger that one of the few traits the current king shared with the Old King was an aversion to the magical arts. “Hush and allow His Grace to conduct his investigation without disruption.”
Roger subsided into an obedient if sulky silence.
Perhaps observing his petulant scowl, Queen Lianne stepped forward to tuck his hand into her silk-gloved one. “Come, let’s explore the gardens together, dear. Fresh air would do us both good.”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” Roger hoped that his mother would be proud of him for recalling his etiquette lessons enough to kiss the queen’s fingers. Mother had always insisted that habits such as that made him charming, and Roger loved being called charming, especially by his mother.
He followed Queen Lianne out of his mother’s bedroom and down the inner keep’s steep, spiraling staircase to a door that entered into the castle gardens. Once they were in the gardens, Queen Lianne indicated with a smile sweet and white as lilies that he should guide her. If she expected him to take her on a tour of the rose garden with its trellises or the pine garden with its bubbling fountains, she must have been disappointed when he steered her into the herbal garden where plants for the kitchens and for healing grew.
As he walked with her through the fragrant plants, he recited each herb and its purpose. When he arrived at the hemlock, he eyed Queen Lianne for a hint that she knew whether Cait had poisoned Mother, but her face remained politely attentive, revealing nothing.
He uncovered the truth behind Queen Lianne’s pleasant mask that night when he crept out of his bed down the corridor to a parlor where Duke Gareth, King Roald, and Queen Lianne were engaged in an intense but hushed conversation. As Roger inclined his ear to better hear, it was Duke Gareth who was speaking soberly, “Duke Baird confirmed that hemlock was indeed in the late Duchess Alyson’s wine glass. The Black God’s priests have agreed that the Duchess Alyson may be buried in sacred ground as long as the healer who slipped poison into her cup is charged with murder.”
Roger gasped at this revelation but his sharp inhalation was covered by King Roald rumbling, “Where is the healer who murdered my brother’s widow?”
“She has likely fled to Carthak, Your Majesty.” That was Duke Gareth again. “In Carthak, mages with flexible scruples about murder are always in fashion.”
Roger started to ponder whether he should try to run away and find Cait in Carthak but was distracted when King Roald ordered, “Have a warrant issued for her arrest if she ever returns to Tortall. If captured, she will be tried for murder and hanged.”
“As you command, Your Majesty.” Duke Gareth’s response made Roger howl as if he were the one sentenced to the gallows.
Roger’s howl brought the king into the hallway. King Roald pressed Roger against his chest as if to offer consolation, but Roger twisted out of his grasp, protesting, “You can’t have Cait hanged, Your Majesty. She never did anything unless my mother ordered it so she didn’t kill my mother, not truly.”
“Quiet yourself, Roger.” King Roald patted Roger’s cheek before Roger could pull away. “Your mother is at peace, and you must be as well while I seek justice for her.”
Roger wanted to stamp his feet and shout that the king was a coward who didn’t care about the truth or justice but even as a child he recognized that would be treason, so he clenched his jaw shut, shaking from top to toe with the excruciating effort of biting his tongue until blood welled in his mouth.
“Her Majesty and I will raise you as if you were our own son.” King Roald hugged Roger, who remained stiff as a plank, thinking with a bitterness that choked him that his uncle was unfit to rule, and that he, Roger, should be king. Roger had the courage to seek justice and the truth where the king avoided it like the Sweating Sickness.
“Your Majesty is most kind to me.” Roger wished he could kick the king instead of thanking him. “I thank you.”
“You may call us Uncle Roald and Aunt Lianne when we aren’t in public.” King Roald was trying to massage the tension from Roger’s taut shoulders, which only made Roger bristle all the more.
“Yes, Uncle Roald.” Roger forced out the dutiful reply even as he wanted to scream out the anguish in his lungs again. “Thank you.”
He was taken back to the royal palace, where his mother was buried with great fanfare in the Conte crypts, and raised as a ward of the kind, who appointed a seneschal to preside over the fief in Roger’s name until Roger came of age. Mithran priests educated him in academics and Duke Gareth trained him in the fighting arts.
“You must learn to keep your guard up, Roger,” Duke Gareth advised him for what seemed the thousandth time as they sat on a courtyard bench after a bout with practice swords that had left Roger with bruises he sensed would be plump and purple as plums in the morning.
“Is that how you lost your finger, Your Grace?” Roger’s gaze dropped to Duke Gareth’s missing finger, hoping to provoke a story of a battle that would take his mind off his pain, but Duke Gareth didn’t oblige him with a war tale.
“I lost it in the Chamber of the Ordeal.” Duke Gareth’s brisk tone and severe face closed the conversation before it could open. “You might lose your tongue during your Ordeal if you don’t learn some manners, boy.”
Roger turned ten, enrolled in page training as was required of the heir to the Tortallan throne, and was subjected to Master Oakbridge’s daily endeavors to teach him manners. Not long after he began page training, Queen Lianne suffered another one of her miscarriages. Waiting outside the bedchamber where Queen Lianne was being attended for news with King Roald and Duke Gareth, Roger hid his head in his hands to conceal the fact that there wasn’t a tear in his eyes when a healer emerged to announce that Queen Lianne had lost the child. He rejoiced in his status as heir—basking in the knowledge that the crown would one day be his—as he rubbed his eyes until they would appear as red-rimmed as if he had wept over his aunt’s miscarriage.
Another miscarriage later, Roger was thirteen and regularly attending council meetings. It was at the council meetings that he saw for the first time that it was the Naxens who were the power behind the throne. Petitioners might approach the king, whose ears were filled with Queen Lianne’s discreet whispers, but it was Duke Gareth who weighed the merits of each case and reached a verdict on how to proceed. King Roald might have worn the crown, but it was Duke Gareth who made the most important decisions for the realm.
After a council meeting where Duke Gareth’s influence was once again on display to anyone who wasn’t blind as a rat, Roger remarked to him, “Some say you’re the power behind the throne, Your Grace.”
“I only offer advice.” Duke Gareth’s denial didn’t disappoint Roger because he had expected nothing less. “I serve my kingdom and its true king in what capacity I can as must we all.”
It wasn’t until Roger was fourteen, and, as heir to the king (though the queen was swollen with another pregnancy) serving as his squire that Roger ventured to ask his uncle, “Doesn’t it bother you, Uncle Roald, when people refer to your brother-in-law as the real ruler of the realm?”
“No.” King Roald’s blue eyes pierced into Roger’s like a lance cutting through armor at a tournament. “It is idle talk, and a king must not be goaded by idle talk. My brother-in-law has ever been faithful to me, Roger. To reward loyalty with distrust is to breed paranoia and resentment.”
Roger thought perhaps he was prone to paranoia and resentment but when Queen Lianne gave birth to a healthy baby—called Prince Jonathan as if to add insult to the injury his birth had done Roger by using the name of Roger’s father—a fifteen-year-old Roger realized that he had never known paranoia and resentment until he was demoted from heir to spare. He wasn’t merely resentful or paranoid, however. He was determined to claim his throne, and his wrath against all who opposed him in his quest for power would be that of a king’s.
The first time he tried to take his crown—because a crown taken by force was as legitimate as one inherited, all the history books proved—he had to feign death in order to survive. The second time, he planned to destroy himself along with the realm so that his cursed cousin could never be crowned. After all, if he could never be king, the least he could do was ensure that Prince Jonathan never got to be king either. They would all die in rubble for his broken dream of a crown.
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Maybe once we'd have seen it during Smackdown!